skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought they suffered too much from "scope creep". The scope of the first book was nicely limited, but the later books made the story's consequences so far-reaching I couldn't take them seriously.

As regards deconstruction, I think Gene Wolfe does it so much better than Herbert that I don't really consider it a selling point that Herbert tries to do it.
It's a pretty good indicator about the real impact of poverty in that society. If a lot of the wealth is concentrated, the people in the middle and bottom are very squeezed in terms of what society actually offers them (generally), whereas if the wealth is more evenly distributed, society tends to make sure everybody's getting along well, with health care and schools and what-not.

Of course, you can definitely throw the baby out with the bathwater on that one. If there's completely even income distribution, the only motivation you have to do any work is just because you like to work - and most people don't like to work much. And then people compensate with non-income power imbalance, usually, so things are still not equitable.
> If you release the invention as a product, and someone files for the patent after you released it, that is a clear prior art case, and they should lose the patent.

Releasing a product does not constitute prior art. The invention must be documented and you must explain its use, in a public forum. Today, most inventions play supporting roles in the background. They are rarely seen or heard or documented.

In our current system, you have some protections as you can demonstrate that you are indeed the first to invent by using your product as evidence and you can publish your work down the road, if it becomes an issue. In the new system, nobody cares. He who files first wins.
I'm not talking about any crappy dirt pile anywhere, I'm talking about owning my own place to live in a community where there are jobs and 1960s technology.

I could move to Nebraska but it is unlikely I could find a job that would afford me a residence.

This isn't about social norms, this is about whether the computer revolution has been worth it for the great majority of Americans.

A lot of Americans would kill right now for a job in steel or coal. And in 1960s America you didn't even need a high school diploma to own a house.
You know A+ is way below the credit rating the US was downgraded to (AA+), right?
Good list, thanks.

Weird to make the equation (writers / Margaret Atwood) = (bands / (Celine Dion | Nickelback)). I would make the right side (bands / (Tragically Hip | Rush)). There's nothing light weight about Margaret Atwood.
Most definitely. When I have a question about a product, having an employee read specs to me from his iPhone is not really what I think of as helpful.
I heard Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop, comment that Lowes was trying to position in itself in the DIY/homeowner community as opposed to HomeDepot going after the contractor community. I think the iPhones would reinforce this strategy.
Ask HN: "Idea Guys": Help or ignore?
What are the basic technical skills you think they can learn on their own that will help them get started?
AT&T Responds to Justice Dept's Lawsuit Over T-Mobile Deal
Some thoughts on the postal service
Do’s and Don’ts of Google In-App Payments
As usual, we are the product being sold
30comments and 81 points. what are you talking about?
Age and complexity had absolutely nothing to do with why Java didn't get closures in Java 6 or 7. It's purely political.
I've enjoyed every Stephenson book apart from Anathem - obviously a lot of people love it but I couldn't see it all, a smattering of maths & philosophy mixed into an overlong and pretty boring 'students journey' plot. Why do people like it so much?
Look at the trade data, one person made a large selloff that triggered a cascade of automated responses. That, of course, could only happen if that person was hoarding BTC. Maybe he read that article and decided to cash out as a result.
This one is my favorite. The shape of his mouth is priceless: http://bleeoo.com/videos/787c08d0-bb04-012e-3c83-123139208ff...
It won't, as long as you clearly comment your code and explain what everything is and what it does. You should be doing that anyway for an OSS project.
Great question - as an "idea guy," I find myself translating in-speak...
It is interesting to see all the tweets exploding on this.

The rumor is clearly that, just a rumor, but it is amazing to see so many people reject the idea outright. He may not be dead now, but I'd be shocked if he made it through 2011... I just don't see why he would have resigned and then basically disappeared if things weren't very grim.

I personally dislike Apple for a lot of reasons (I think the injunction that was just upheld for them in Germany, for example, is ridiculous), but it still sucks for anyone to have to go through what Steve Jobs has been going through for a few years now, so I do hope for the best in regards to his health, but realistically even if it turns out he's not dead, I think all these people emotionally invested in his continued livelihood should really start coming to grips with the fact that he's almost certainly not long for this world.
A few adjustments to App Engine’s upcoming pricing changes
Disapora is a semi-sequel to Permutation City, both are written by Egan
Long and depressing. Unfortunately it is all true.
Don't you think that the top tax bracket being slashed from over 70% to well below 50% had something to do with it as well?
This is a nice overview of the different feedback and testing services.
Make the prediction, encrypt it with a private key. Release the encrypted prediction with a "do not open till...". Release the public key at a given date. This way the prophecy won't influence the future.
Admittedly, the book is more a triumph of imagination than of craft. I won't argue there.

That said, I agree with the comment that it takes a few reads to really appreciate. The writing has its flaws, but it has its real charms. And those charms can be lost on a first read-through. Many of them were on me when I first plowed through the book. (It is not a book to be plowed through, I would later learn).
for someone that is complaining about twitter, he uses it quite frequently.

For every time I hear someone complaining about "being the product", its simple just don't use it.
The slides you can type in are quite annoying. I didn't find any way to continue other than clicking with my mouse.
That's a great quote, glad you see it that way.
No, I'm pointing out that just owning land isn't enough. If you want to idealize the 1960's, no skin off my nose, although you're probably white and male. And you weren't alive in the 60's.

The only reason to put "owning land" on a pedestal is because you can grow food on it. There's no other reason to care about land ownership. But you don't want to be a caveman and actually grub in the dirt - no, you want to be an industrial worker, apparently. One without silicon technology - just steel and coal. Because that world was just fantastic.

Aspie computer nerd my ass. Punk.
Right, again, I think there's a political dimension to this, but I don't think Reagan created the problems two years before he got into office. My gut tells me economic repercussions like this probably lag their causes by several years, and looking at the graph, there's reason to think the problem started even earlier in the seventies.

In short, saying Reagan had a big part in this is a claim I would support, but saying it's all Reagan's fault is clearly untrue, barring time travel.
> Why would they want to pay more for iPhones with locked out features (like calls and email) instead of cheaper iPods?

My guess is that they want a persistent network connection for the devices and it ends up being cheaper to just use the cell network for data with an iPhone than it would be to outfit every one of their stores with adequate wi-fi coverage for an iPod, ensure sufficient bandwidth on their outgoing network to support all devices, and they may have lower maintenance costs in the long run as they will not have to pay IT staff or other support to keep the wireless network maintained and, over time, upgraded.
JavaScript: The Good Parts - Google Tech Talk (Video)
Alfred Bester check.

Greg Egan check.

No Peter Watts, understandable Blindsight is relatively recent and unknown. (Seriously though drop everything and read this now: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

No Stanislaw Lem you best be trolling.
Does Linux Community Need Corruption?
Ask HN: What free tools or websites do you donate to?
Wikipedia was asking for donations and it got me thinking. I use a lot of free tools and web apps that don't bombard me with advertising, yet I rarely donate. There isn't a lot of spare money right now for me to make donations, but I'm beginning to make a personal list of all these useful resources I utilize on a daily basis. Eventually I would like to be able to support them all in some small way.

(Obviously, there are charities and other organizations doing a lot of good in the world that could also use contributions. I prefer to keep these two groups entirely separate.)

I'm curious what tools other people find so incredibly useful that they donate to them?
Long weekend with User Experience
Seems like Google and Offline are like Oil and Water.
I heard a different wording of "ship early, ship often" tonight. One that is to me a little more tought provoking even though it says exactly the same thing: "It's better to have unhappy customers than no customers at all."

Because unhappy customers provide feedback that allows you to change your course it's the same thinking as Ship Early or Fail Fast and the rest of the lean mantras. But those have been repeated enough to loose their meaning.

So it was refreshing to hear a rephrasing (that actually predates Eric Ries' lean startup methodology by two full decades) that wasn't as easily dismissed as plain common sense.

It's better to have unhappy customers than no customers at all.
>What does one person's income have to do with anyone else

If I make $10/yr I could be the richest man on earth or the poorest. It kind of depends on what everybody else makes too.
Y Combinator 6 Years Later
Douchebag posting links to lead-capture pages.
Yes, if there's one thing that Doug Crockford should have taught us all by now, it's that Brendan was actually pretty smart, and we were damn lucky to end up with Javascript compared to what could have been.
Is there an "iPad native" (built for the larger screen) app for Twitter? I'm using the iPhone version and it's very responsive.
As always, interesting ideas, some might even work, but it's completely ignoring the regulations that are in place. Congress won't allow them to do these things.

The underlying problem with the USPS is that they are not allowed to run it the way it needs to be run. Congress is dictating minimum levels of service, and incompatible maximum levels of charges.
Visualizing House Hunting Habits across Desktop/Mobile
I'd re-read it, Greg Egan is perhaps the hardest Sci-Fi writer out there, everything is rigorously thought out. He used to be a software engineer and hacks on some of his more interesting flights of fancy - check out his website http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ for some interesting stuff, Quantum Soccer anyone? http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BORDER/Soccer/Socce.... If NH should have an official Sci-Fi author it should be him ;)
I think that most people won't have a problem with any domain registrar as long as the price is decent, they don't cause any problems, and DNS management is sufficient.

I personally use 1and1 for all my domains, but it's just because of the above reasons.

When I feel i need a little more DNS zone magic, i set Amazon Route 53 as the nameservers and configure it there as needed.
Rumor: AOL’s Tim Armstrong Wants to Merge With Yahoo
> It's led me to ask the question "If Rails isn't good enough, then why are you using it?"

That's a pretty poor question. Rails is a framework, and for the most part it works. However, that doesn't mean it's the one and true way of doing things.

Granted, I generally agree with the article. Helpers are a step backwards.
Agreed. I can't even take TechCrunch seriously. They continuously lace every other story with opinions. I want real reporters, not blowhards.
If that's true, it's a pretty common error. Most tech companies operate under the (usually valid) assumption that their employees are all salaried and exempt from OT comp. But it's usually to the benefit of all those employees to be classified "hourly", and theres a bunch of innocuous things employers can do to make that happen.

More common than breaking people's status with overtime payments: threatening to dock pay for coming in late or missing days.
Completely agree on The Shockwave Rider, which I feel is a great precursor to cyberpunk. Extremely prescient book considering it was published in 1975.
I nodded along to this article and even sent it to some friends. One of them pointed out that the tide comes twice a day, meaning that these hypothetical sailors would be risking capsizing to avoid a 12-hour delay. I call shenanigans.
On re-reading, I think you're right.
It's a bit more complicated than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_productivity
Less than people think. Back when taxes were so high, the rich were really good at tax avoidance. So the rate doesn't tell you the whole story.

As one of the people whose opinion about working for a large company changed during the 1970s, I know I didn't consciously think about tax rates. (It's possible they affected me unconsciously though, via the examples of people who'd cleared more after tax due to lower rates.)
Most traditional religions treated the spiritual sphere as part and parcel of life in the physical world, rather than something to be segregated and distinguished from it. Only a handful of religions, mostly under the influence of Platonic philosophy, have deviated from this. But the concept is no more specific to Judiasm than it is to Catholicism, Hinduism, or Roman Paganism.

The opposing trend, which you might say treats religion as a form of escapism, is something that's really found only in certain strains of Protestantism, Islam, and Buddhism.
From her novel Barrayar:

>"The people’s right to access information shall not be abridged. It’s the first item in the Constitution."
Pirating Your Own Game
"Technological progress should cause increasing economic inequality"

Does that mean you are unfazed by growing inequality, and view it as an unavoidable byproduct of progress?

Or do you believe economic inequality is a negative externality (like pollution) that needs to be remedied?
I said the following here on Yahoo almost a year ago:

"Yahoo is dead.

I don't know how they can do a meaningful recovery. Sure - they probably have enough cash to stay alive for a while - but if I were yahoo, I would be focusing on investing in every single startup in the valley in an effort to own some % of future innovation, which they have lost.

I cant see anything revolutionary occurring with their web property - their IP is mostly uninteresting and I cant imagine a large % of their staff being of too much interest to FB or Goog. I am sure there are some top devs there that would do well to migrate out - but for the majority of their staff, they must have few options.

Seriously - Yahoo could do well just becoming a very prolific investor in everything happening around them, rather than thinking a new haircut and convertable will alleviate their mid-life crisis."
How to Keep Your Website Content Fresh Using The Power of Your Own Voice
> With this new law, there will be absolutely nothing to stop a large firm, a competitor, or just a random patent troll to notice your invention (which you are using) and then file a patent for it. And then, guess what? You're screwed.

Nope. From 35 USC 102:

A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -
...
(f) he did not himself invent the subject matter sought
to be patented
Question: Ship or Beta Test?

Have a Mac OS X productivity app nearly ready to go out the door, but my partner and I have planned to have a dozen people or so beta test the app first.

The reason behind this is that you only get one first impression. And if that's "your app crashed", or worse "your app lost my work", then I feel like that is worse than delaying a release.
Here's mine :) http://bleeoo.com/videos/2e353c80-baff-012e-07c7-12313917124...
Hahaha. I totally missed it the first time around. :)
What's the current sentiment on Chef vs. Puppet these days?
Man, what fantasy world do you live in? Large corporations decrease inequality? [citation needed] Ambitious people started to lose interest? I can't even dignify that with a [citation needed]. Ambitious people have what to do with anything on a national scale? Ambitious people somehow caused, or were party to, the decimation of the middle class, which somehow never once gets mentioned by the actual economists and political theorists who actually know stuff about this stuff?

Oh! Are you "pg" of that ludicrous "hackers and painters" essay, the one that actual painters tore to shreds because it's the same sort of bizarre nonsequitor drivel? I can see you're still at it. Nice "work".
True. There's a kind of semi-comedic irony that can be read into his character. He's sort of like Wallace Shawn's character in "The Princess Bride" in that sense.
ClojureScript gets a new REPL
The ClojureScript REPL has been refactored to support multiple evaluation environments. It now supports Rhino and the browser.
Go back further. 70% itself was a major slash by JFK (a very rich person from a very rich family) from the previous 90%+ in the 50s.

Before that, there was no point in being paid more. The only thing that made sense was to take pleasure in the organization that you ran.
And also, can we say that when Ford released the T, his company was a startup?
The first graph is the most interesting. Productivity has increased substantially while wages have remained relatively stagnant. More of the surplus value of labor has been accumulating to capital.

This means that people who get their income primarily from labor have lost a great deal of power vis a vis those whose income comes disproportionately from ownership of capital.

Questions and some guesses:
1) Why is this? If labor can extract less value, that would suggest that it has less bargaining power. That is, labor is more fungible. This fits in with what we experience as developers: one of the great emphases that (successful) companies place is on making developers replaceable and their labor roughly equivalent, through an increased emphasis on frameworks and general languages. It also makes sense for less professionalized labor. Heavy industry requires skills to operate effectively and runs the risk of shutdowns at centralized production facilities, while services and light industry are much easier workplaces to dominate workers.

2)How do the unemployed and underemployed fit in? This is complicated, as women have entered to workforce to make two-income households, while zero-marginal product men have left it as they cannot be employed profitably.

3) Was the threat of communism an enabling force for the middle and working classes in the "good times" leading up to the 80s when it finally started to crack and fall? Before the ruling class in the United States had to optimize the economy to be as effective as possible against the threat of Communism. This meant sacrificing some of its own well-being to buy off the rest of our consent for the ability to play a major role in geopolitics ( this buy off taking the form of concessions to unions, more forceful labor market interventions, healthcare, investments in public education).

4) Could the increasing inequality somehow be a statistical artifact? Smaller countries tend to be more egalitarian than richer ones. Most individual countries in the EU and states in the USA have a lower Gini coefficient than the EU or USA as a whole. Could a similar mechanism cause a larger and more sophisticated economy to feel pressures to become more unequal?

Its tricky to simply blame it on USA policies, as most Western countries have also become significantly less egalitarian than they were in 1970. Which isn't to say that US policies didn't cause it in the USA; it's just that those policies didn't appear in a vacuum, and you've got to identify the forces that caused it around the world.
I've been a heavy user of notifo myself, and will be sad to see the service go. Also agree that the notification was very professional and should set an example for other services.
The Hyperbole is strong with this one
"Back when taxes were so high, the rich were really good at tax avoidance." first, [citation needed]. Second, compared to now? Third, is it relevant? how? I see you glossed over that. It's like hacking..and painting..isn't it.
Rails/python mentoring
Repost of something I wrote the other day that I think is relevant:

My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s.
I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those.

I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy.

That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics.
I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?
The word "land" is a colloquialism for "owning your own residence"

Leave it to Hacker News to be overly literal.

Most people know what I mean. This isn't a legal document. The price of land drives the cost of housing.
I second Diaspora; his vivid description of artificial intelligence is worth the read by itself.

Egan's stuff divides evenly into near-future and distant future science fiction; the distant future stuff tends to be very abstract. His latest novel, Zendegi, is a very near-future setting, and coincidentally is a more accessible read than most of his other stuff. I'd recommend it to start with.
I think this comment only acknowledges the existence of white collar jobs. You used to be able to pay for a house, a car, and the kids' college education with a factory job. While the wife stayed at home. Now, that scenario is eye-popping unbelievable. You're probably at wal-mart or starbucks if you don't have some sort of specialist skill or a connection into the white collar world.

I'm not endorsing a particular solution here, and specifically not endorsing forcing factories to employ expensive people instead of cheap robots to 'create jobs'. But it's important to see the situation clearly.
"Cyberpunk is largely an expression of fears about an Asian (Japanese more often than not) "takeover" of Western society. It's actually very xenophobic"

This is a very weird statement to make, the architects of Cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling etc.) are Japanophiles if anything, the opposite of Xenophobic. Do you have any evidence to back this statement up?

Cyberpunk was just an extrapolation of the tech scene of the 80s, Japanese tech was massively superior to other countries and, rightly thinking that tech would rule the future, they made Japan the dominant superpower - unfortunately the Lost Decade put paid to that.
Fund raising is a bitch
Interesting that they're full up already.

I guess that's either a good sign for their business or a bad sign for their business model :-)