skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The War on Poverty was launched in the 1930s, and before that it was the mission of various religious organizations.

The increase in the "Real Poverty" is due to economic factors like giving all the jobs to China, dumbing down education, and civil rights/feminist revolutions which led to social destabilization and people falling through cracks.

Sweden and Norway and France and Holland are not having issues with "Real Poverty." And they all have big welfare states.

The welfare state concept is sound. It lifts segments of the population in Real Poverty out of poverty. The problem in the USA is that for every social program helping a family out of poverty, there are 10 programs putting them back in their place.
What is the difference between capistrano, Chef, and Puppet?
Do you mean you cannot accept payments from your mobile application?
Placebos Work Even if You Know They’re Fake: But How?
In fact, many things about modern Japanese society - including scientific management and high-stakes testing - were originally copied from Europe. In that sense, it's not really accurate to say we copied Japan; much of the world currently has high stakes testing. For example, the Japanese educational system was actually based on the Prussian model.
Strongly disagree. There are many many companies (including Google itself) that use Google Docs for basically all their..well documents. What are these needed requirements you're referring to?

50 minutes of downtime is certainly an annoyance, but there are very few companies where this happening once a year or so is a deal breaker.
Later in the document they say that only a subset of Dash code can be cross-compiled into ordinary JS.
Distributed Programming With Dijkstra's Token Based Self-stabilization
Sites can definitely be blacklisted (Valleywag, for ex). There's nothing in the HN FAQ about how to go about submitting a site for blacklisting though.

For the record, I'm all for blacklisting daringfireball.
Nobody said Gruber wasn't biased, but he forms cogent arguments. The same can not be said for Apple's consistent detractors who seem to have a real chip on their shoulder and thus end up grasping at straws.

Granted there is a lot of valid Apple criticism that you won't get from Daring Fireball, but everyone has their viewpoint. Gruber is far from the worst stuff that shows up on HN.
LifeCell As An All-In-One Anti-Aging Cream – What’s Behind?
In the FAQ section, they mention a "Cloud IDE" named Brightly, which frankly seems more interesting than the language itself:

"How does this affect our cloud IDE (Brightly)? Brightly will enable building any web application in V1 using today’s Javascript plus the additions in Harmony. As soon as it is ready, Brightly will support Dash as well. We expect that the more prescriptive development aspects of Brightly that will come on line in the future will be more Dash focused."
Are you sure that X220 is similar enough to an Air, it doesn't look like an air and the design specs are quite bulkier:

MacBook Air 11 inch:
Height: .68
Weight: 2.38

MacBook Air 13 inch:
Height: .68
Weight: 2.96

X220 12 inch:
Height: 1.25
Weight: 3.6

I don't think it matters that you spec'ed it out to be slightly faster, I bet many of the people who want an Air-like notebook want the thinnest, cleanest, lightest notebook that can still perform very close to a traditional fat notebook, the X220 probably isn't what they're looking for.
Ah, thanks :) I didn't wade through the whole thing. There didn't seem to be a whole lot about the language itself.
2011's Best Under 30 Entrepreneurs (from Inc.)
Probably he's not, because nobody translates him. What a shame.

There are some excerpts translated by fans:
http://dukaj.pl/English/ReadingRoom/BlackOceans
Strictly and ecological move, only need to flush once.
You can say whatever you want until you've squandered the public good will, and then the public will skeptically peruse even the most innocuous of words coming from your mouth.

People's skepticism of Microsoft is based on what they (MS) have done in the past.
>Could we possibly, as a community, just agree that a blacklist of Gruber posts is good for us? How would we begin such a discussion?

This submittal is #1 on the front page with 110 net points. I think the community has spoken.
We are evaluating Cloud foundry (Java GWT App) and so far changes seem doable to port. The reason cloud foundry is viable is that there is no lock in and if one provider flips another one is just round the corner.
Philographics
Latest WikiLeaks: Microsoft aided dictator
What's so infuriating about the options though is that they're meaningless even to geeks. Choosing a WiFi chipset at least means something to someone. Among "Everyday Computing," "Design & Performance," and "Thin & Powerful," I think the only word that gives any information about how one category is different from the others is "Thin."

Their desktops are worse. Here are the choices (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/desktops-n-workstations.as...):

OptiPlex

Business-class performance and control

Scalable and durable design

Designed specifically for networked environments

Vostro

Power for today and scalability for tomorrow

Easy to configure

Budget-friendly

Dell Precision

On-the-go or in-the office graphics & analysis powerhouse

ISV-certified reliability

Built on a scalable IT platform

The only information-carrying word I see here is "Budget-friendly." It's hard for me to see how Dell benefits from being unclear like this, but it's equally hard to believe that they think this copy is clear.

Apple's categories are not just few, they are clear. They are specs. I choose between the 128GB model or the 256GB model, not between the "analysis powerhouse" and the model with "business-class performance."
I guess that's the difference we're talking about here:

PC makers' diverse offerings force them to buy components that are cheap while Apple buys whatever components they want but get them even cheaper due to scale.

The kicker is that at the same time Apple makes that component it's buying even more expensive for everyone else and they know everyone else is copying them.
My dilemmas aren't false they just contain assumptions. Challenging assumptions is reasonable but don't assume that the presenter is unaware of their own assumptions.

There are ALWAYS more assumptions available to be challenged. Plenty in your post for instance. Turtles (assumptions) all the way down.

For instance, if the goal is to reduce poverty, you assume that it is mathematically possibly to take money from teachers. But if teachers are already on the brink of poverty, that won't work to reduce poverty. You're creating new poverty cases as you solve old ones.

Politically connected insiders are less relevant than those who actually have the majority of the money. It's not teachers, and it's not unions. It's software entrepreneurs, MBAs, and oligopolists. They have the far majority.
I've never seen the x220 not on sale. Lenovo has these inflated prices that last for about 2 months when the system comes out. Then every week is a sale. Talk with a salesperson and you can usually even get a lower price.

I don't like the business model, but Lenovo thinks it works for them.

(FWIW: Thinkpad T420 owner, and I love it much more than my 13 inch MBP.)
Most hamburgers are more profitable than McDonalds. The hard part is selling a billion of them.
Lots of great suggestions have already been made (I'm particularly intrigued by The Quantum Thief), but I believe that Startide Rising has gone unmentioned so far, and that's a shame. The rest of the Uplift Trilogy is also great fun.
I ranted about this too recently here - Apple's biggest business advantage is the trust/faith people have in the brand to remain consistent, probably even moreso than innovative. People will always come up with new stuff - other pc manufacturers do it all the time. However, there's not a long term vision of consistency to the other manufacturers, possibly because they are, in fact manufacturers, not end to end designers, developers, manufacturers and retailers.

Buying something from Apple, you have a strong case that it'll be supported for at least a few years, the model likely won't go away entirely, and you'll be able to get good support from them via phone, mail or in-store. Other brands may offer some or all of those aspects, sometime, for some models, but few have a multi-year history of providing all of those consistently.

Apple's advantage is the decade of experience they have in building trust with consumers.
Pizza Hut Coupons
I saw recently someone comparing ongoing development of an application to working as a chef in a restaurant - there's always demand to keep preparing the food, but the longer you put off cleaning your work area, getting rid of rubbish etc the harder and harder it becomes to work.

I maintain a moderately complex application that's had features added left, right and centre over the last 5 years or so. This analogy helped me to explain to the client why we really needed to factor in some time for refactoring/cleaning up the code. I've been doing that anyway, for quite a while now (code base was a nightmare) but it was all in my own time. This was a (successful) attempt at getting the client to understand and pay for that time.
Why are we so concerned whether a company is good or evil? These words are irrelevant when used to describe companies like google/bing. Companies are to obey the laws of the land, and if they break them and are caught, then appropriate action should be taken. Google/Bing being good/evil is a dumb metric. Who knows what the future holds. Celebrate the good when these companies are being good, but they are groups of people who wants your money, it's on a matter of time before some bad seeds take the controls on the top, and the reign of terror begins. At that point it is the customers job to vote with their wallets and attention.

Save the good/evil debate for Sunday morning at the religious services. Lets focus more on the self correcting system we have to keep tyrants from ruling with an iron fist, and prevents people from getting relaxed into inactivity.
You seem to have missed an earlier part of my comment. Because HN requires very high karma thresholds before enabling downvotes, net points are an extremely asymmetric measure.

However, one possible solution would be to enable downvotes, but only on controversial posts such as Gruber's. That would enable both sides of the community to speak.

How would you feel about such a measure?

EDIT: Controversial might be defined objectively as the ratio of upvotes to flags, or similar. People regularly comment on the fact that they have flagged Gruber's posts, but I presume that moderators currently just ignore such flags because the content isn't offensive, against the rules, and so on. For that matter, it would be interesting to know how many flags are currently on this post.
First time I've laughed from a Python mailing list in a while.
Woolrich hamburg
I'm sad that this is what it is. We could use a real Hadoop alternative.
SEO With Social Bookmarking
The first answer that comes to mind is that our products are open source, and nothing gets our attention like fixing real bugs in our products. You can start with easy ones and learn at your own pace, with the help of other Mozilla developers as you need it. That also gives you a chance to evaluate the work you'd be doing as well as our community before you apply.
if you search HN you will find that Namecheap has good reputation.

NFS is good too, but is a reseller of Public Domain Registry http://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/section/domainregistration/a...
I don't understand your swipe at Ruby. What's so terrible about:

foo = object.method(:method_name)

foo.call
I understand why it wasn't addressed in Gruber's post, but the customer-facing points he made about online sites and how they compare to the Apple site could just as well have been extended to the retail presence of the various companies. The same design aspects which take place online are also present at the retail level.

Step into an Apple Store, and the product differentiation is clear and accessible. Step into a retailer of Windows computers (in the US), and it's just rows and rows of barely distinguishable machines. Yes, Apple does include a small display card of the basic specs near each machine, but their overall setup is one that encourages visitors to use the machines and evaluate them on-site to determine if a model is a fit. These design decisions extend to other aspects of the retail experiences, from the setting, the available staff, the sales experience, etc.

It's relatively easy to see how Apple uses vertical integration in things like its product lines and manufacturing. But they've managed to combine that with vertical design in nearly every place people interact with the company. That's hard to do but always impressive to experience.
I don't doubt he's harsh, but berating employees privately is very different from swearing at an interviewer about past wrongs done to you. One makes you a harsh boss; the other makes you seem a little unstable. I don't have anything against swearing, personally. I also don't have anything against drinking wine in a bathrobe with your hair all messed up. But if somebody who wants to be the CEO of a major corporation showed up showed up at a restaurant for an interview in a bathrobe with messy hair chugging Prosecco straight from the bottle, I would find that questionable as well.

(Throwing chairs raises the "probably has issues" flag in any context that is not an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.)
Introducing the Personality Identifier Report
Doing What You Love
As a Googler I found this pretty funny myself. Most people won't even understand it without explanation, and those that do are likely the right sort to also find the decade old event it's a play off. I doubt too many people are going to take the wrong message away from this.

It's nice to see people are still allowed to have fun with their products.
Converging in what sense?
It's entirely plausible to be evil without breaking any laws.

Good or evil, as words themselves are just descriptions for a companies motivations and plans. If a companies plans involve harming society whilst in search of profit, then they're "evil".

Acting as a monopoly, and abusing your power until you're caught and censured is evil. Then trying to toe the line of monopoly abuse, so you're not censured again---is evil. It's profitable, but its clearly not to the benefit of society.

--

> Lets focus more on the self correcting system we have to keep tyrants from ruling with an iron fist, and prevents people from getting relaxed into inactivity.

Right, but then you'll have to ask the question: who is a tyrant? The short form of that is "who is evil?".
If only I could convince the wife
Semi-working build of Android 2.3.5 on the HP TouchPad
“Hey, I have no arguments but this fella obviously makes no sense so let’s just all agree and censor him, pretty please?”

Maybe that is a good idea. Contentless comments that only attack and are always too lazy to actually argue make submissions like these so damn frustrating. If he is so wrong it should be simple to destroy his arguments.
"The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR
"

BTW, what's with E-mailing me about this? I consider it spam, especially since it ends with "Please do not reply to this email."

If people want to write to me person-to-person, fine. I don't really want impersonal ads (the E-mail made no mention of my name, another spam tip-off) about people's products.
It uses an AGPL license. This will keep many companies from using it unless they do what MongoDB did and provide commercial friendly drivers.
So, you really wanna claim that Apple has an equally confusing product lineup compared to other manufactures? That’s a quite daring claim (and also some impressive misleading quoting you are doing there).

Apple doesn’t ask you to decide based on non-sensical marketing blabber like that. They use it, sure, but it isn’t central in the decision process of the buyer.

One other point: all three Macs I've owned were ready to use out of the box. No stickers, no crapware, no nothing. Contrast this with a recent Anandtech review of a recent Sony Vaio that, hardware-wise, is quite nice, but:

Because of that initial bloat I have a hard time recommending the VAIO S to any end user that can't fix it (including but not limited to just plain physically upgrading the hard drive) or doesn't know someone who can. This is an otherwise fantastic notebook with a lot of potential just looking for the right user, but if you're not comfortable getting elbow deep in cleaning it out (or preferably doing a clean Windows 7 installation), it's not going to be the notebook for you. For those of you who are willing and able to put in the time, though, you'll likely be very well served by the Sony VAIO S.

(http://www.anandtech.com/show/4748/sony-vaio-sb-all-day-cons...)

I read something like that and think, "Where's the MacBook Air link again..."
And also: ”Developers using Dash tooling will be able to use a cross-compiler to target Javascript for browsers that do not support Dash natively.”

Not very different to having native support for e.g. CoffeScript in browser X and supporting other browsers via JS.

Of course the main issue is that this is yet another language. Since all browsers are essentially becoming poor man’s virtual machines, why not drop the pretense and adapt some kind of bytecode instead. There’s JVM/CLR/LLVM/NaCL — just pick one already! Alas, politics (Oracle/Microsoft/Apple/Google).

Well anyway, Dash is a very positive news nevertheless. The biggest issue with current cross-compilers (GWT, Pyjamas, Haxe etc.) is that they lack good tools to develop and debug. Having support for those natively, there’s hardly any reason to target JS directly anymore. And once Chromium has the infrastructure to support more than one language, it’s possible that the abstractions will be general enough to add support for other languages as well.

“Our approach is to make an absolutely fantastic VM/Language and development environment and build great apps that fully leverage it in order to help other browsers see the wisdom in following. Once Dash has had a chance to prove its stability and feasibility, we are committed to making Dash an open standard with involvement from the broader web community.”
This way of thinking also makes it easy to derive the max-sum algorithm from Programming Pearls:

We have to compute max-sum for (x:xs), so first solve it for xs. If the max-sum is within xs, we are done; if not, it somehow involves x. To find out, the recursion has to also return the best sum of the beginning of the list.

A small case analysis can find out what the new max-sum is: x, x + max-begin(xs), or max-sum(xs)? And the new max-begin is either x or x + max-begin (xs).

The naive recursive implementation will require linear space though, so there is an extra step to find out how to eliminate the recursion.
"This is why every computer and IT employee who is classified as exempt, should speak to a California labor law attorney to review their employment matter."

Gag.
I am not sure if this is what you meant, but cogent means convincing.

1. Are you convinced that going forward, Apple's most "sustainable advantage" is economies of scale? Do you believe that consumers primarily buy Apple products based on price?

2. Do you believe that building up economies of scale would take Dell or Samsung a "decade"?

(These are the primary claims in the conclusion of Gruber's essay.)
Yeah. Elsewhere I posted this comment:

All three Macs I've owned were ready to use out of the box. No stickers, no crapware, no nothing. Contrast this with a recent Anandtech review of a recent Sony Vaio that, hardware-wise, is quite nice, but:

Because of that initial bloat I have a hard time recommending the VAIO S to any end user that can't fix it (including but not limited to just plain physically upgrading the hard drive) or doesn't know someone who can. This is an otherwise fantastic notebook with a lot of potential just looking for the right user, but if you're not comfortable getting elbow deep in cleaning it out (or preferably doing a clean Windows 7 installation), it's not going to be the notebook for you. For those of you who are willing and able to put in the time, though, you'll likely be very well served by the Sony VAIO S.

(http://www.anandtech.com/show/4748/sony-vaio-sb-all-day-cons...)

I read something like that and think, "Where's the MacBook Air link again..."
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I completely understand your point on wanting to concentrate on the main product and not the billing. That's why we spent such a long time looking into the alternatives, and we would happily outsource that side of things if we could do so with acceptable losses in flexibility.

It's interesting that you don't rate promotions, and I noticed elsewhere in your slides you were fairly negative about ongoing publicity spend. On that we would somewhat agree as well, I think.

The difference is more that we're in something of a niche market, nothing like the stereotype HN fodder that is aiming for the general public as a target audience and low prices. We've done a lot of research into both the global demographics of our market and various potential marketing channels, and it turns out that something as simple (to the customer) as a promotion code can support all kinds of other activities beyond just a generic coupon code promotion, as long as you can implement the right systems for generating and recording those codes behind the scenes.

This is where we felt the simple options offered by the various billing services today just weren't up to the job, and to some extent I'm not sure they ever could be since beyond a certain point I think these policies are always going to be customised to a particular business model.

Anyway, thanks again for sharing the slides. It's useful to know where you were coming from on that particular one because it's the only one where our current approach is clearly different to what you felt had worked for you. Otherwise, your experience is actually quite reassuring, as we had come to many of the same conclusions on your other points and it's nice to know that we aren't completely crazy! :-)
It worked for me earlier in the day when I tried it at work, but it doesn't appear to work any longer.
"The two laptops weigh almost exactly the same"

Rofl no.

"and are the same thickness at the thickest point"

If by the same you mean the Mac Book Air is half the thickness of the Lenovo then yes.

[edit]It's really hard to take your comment as anything more then a troll when you call other people dim but make basic factual errors like this.[/edit]

This is where "configure your own Macbook Air" arguments always end up: some ugly as shit clunker with a couple +1 features that give you wiggle room to claim a "$200 Apple premium".
Sony VAIO S Series: A Lot to Like...For Enthusiasts [Anandtech]