skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the growing dichotomy and split of american class. You have the educated who run the business side and programming side of amazon and from what I hear like their jobs and get paid well. Then you have the labor force. They don't have the education (different class and have a harder time affording the expensive american education or affected by the growing american anti intellectualism) and so they are left with hard labor jobs, which are drying up. Part of the reason they are drying up is that the rest of the world has a vastly lower standard of living (and some would arguer better work ethic too) and so the job can be out sourced to those who will do the same work for less. And now technology is replacing some of the remaining jobs. Seen the automated checkouts stores now? DVD rental placing like blockbuster are being replaced by websites (netflix) and big red boxes in other stores. And automated assembly in factories. These jobs are never coming back.

This leaves the uneducated class of america fighting for the few remaining low paying labor jobs left in the country like these ones that have to stay for locational reasons (the one location on the highway that is with in 1 days drive from 1/3 of the american and canadian population) and haven't yet been automated with technology.

The impulse of many of us is yes to just say "well then get educated" but it isn't that easy. There are big social forces in america about entitlement and anti intellectualism and education in america is also often just bloody expensive.

It's a mess and a further symptom of the growing class divide that now their own lower class people are being worked like we saw nike sweat shops working Asians not too long ago.
Are there really work environments so distracting that 8 hours in the office equals 1 hour at home? That seems crazy. If so, there's is something seriously messed up at that office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telecommuting and did a 100% telecommuting gig for 3 years straight, but there's no way to get a days work done in 1 hour.
Google now advertising G+ on home page.
It's not as black and white as that for me, but that definitely does happen.

I find working from home 2 out of 5 days to be great for my productivity, while still being very available to colleagues.
Don't know about the legality, but you're correct about the reality. There are number sliding and rotating parts in the lower receiver that determine whether it fires single shot, burst or fully automatic. Modern M-16s have single shot and 3 round burst. The original 70s model had single shot and full auto.
This is incorrect. Phil Welch gives the most precise answer.
In other words, you would replace the IRS with the PRS (pre-revenue service)? And Main Street with the Back Alley, where you pay no taxes at all? And incentivize export businesses over domestic businesses (b/c exported goods are never taxed)? And over-incentivize capital investment even more grotesquely than it is now with a mild capital gains preference?

There's a reason the Fair Tax was DOA. It's an over-engineered solution that's worse than what we have right now.
Probably in the context of the grandparent so assured that he knows how to assess programmers' abilities within 5 minutes.
The majority of US states have no such requirement. In VA I can purchase a gun from another VA resident with no paperwork; I can purchase from a dealer by filling out a one page form with name, DOB, address, and place of birth.
I imagine that's a photographic issue given that his untouched mouse is also a blur.
That's a good point. I do believe that to people that are a bit more handy with tools the change isn't nearly as large as you make it out to be.

Making this part out of wood or plastic is a days work or less for a person that is moderately handy with tools, it would be probably a run of an hour for a 3D printer with some serious post processing required, say 2 hours altogether.

And that's with an investment in a 3D printer in one case and an old drillpress and some milling bits in the other, which at the moment is the lower bar to entry.

That's less than an order of magnitude.

If you could print a fully loaded ready to use weapon in a few minutes then yes, that would be a game changer. As it stands this isn't, but it may evolve in to one.
So... how do I convince an interviewer that I am someone who can Get Shit Done?
An amazing TED talk by a guy whose father worked on the project: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/george_dyson_on_project_or...
does anyone know what those glasses they show at the bottom are for? And that strange looking charging station thingy?

Also, the monitor, by itself was $10k back in the day: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/New+Ultra-Wide+Format+Monitor+...
Why don't I use Google+? I have no reason to use Google+. It solves none of the problems that I had with Facebook or Twitter and only adds another layer complexity to my daily communications.

Google+ may be better than Facebook, but it's not better enough that I want to give up the 6 years of history that I've put into my Facebook profile. It's also not better enough that it's worth the extra time of maintaining yet another social network.
Running a startup on Haskell
After a conversation with a cynical friend on this, I really wonder how much of this naysaying is from companies and "experts" who've invested in Facebook and find another player inconvenient.

The media linkbaiting end of things is obvious, of course: start by building G+ as the Big New Thing, then explain how it "failed" when it didn't obliterate Facebook after a couple of months.
Financial "products" are regulated by the gov. That didn't seem to have the desired effect back in 2008.

I don't think fraudsters care about regulation. They care that they can sucker people.
If you still have the data backed up I suggest you mention this to Jason Scott (@textfiles on twitter) or the archive.org team as I'm sure they'd love to help you with such a project
Huagonglei.cn
UEFI secure booting - signed bootloaders for Windows 8 PCs
Anyone else feeling as contrarian as I am about these articles? Every time I read someone criticizing Google+, it makes me want to go log in and see what's going on there.

This is in addition to the persistent activity reminders nearly every time I use Google software (which is frequently).
Seems like they're doing pretty well financially.
Fine, so cast it using the lost wax method and clean it up. There are literally a hundred different ways in which you could make this part for pennies and some of those methods would be much more rapid and much cheaper than 3D printing.
One way to use the older city areas would be to be able to construct modern buildings in them. Unfortunately, the alternative to suburbia is old, awkwardly divided apartments made out of older houses with inefficient heating and AC, and little ventilation. It will be hard to rearrange the suburban landscape so fast, but some sort of free market "gentrification" may not be a bad idea.
"If you could print a fully loaded ready to use weapon in a few minutes then yes, that would be a game changer."

This is the interesting discussion to have, and the one I am having. And even if the weapon itself is not ready in minutes, it's easy to imagine a world in which printing the open source AK-47 is as easy as: Visit website, search for AK-47, click print on first result, eventually refill relevant cartridges. It may only pop out hours later, but it'll still be a different world than the one we live in.

I completely disagree with anelson's characterization of the difficulty; I could make "printing a web page" look as difficult if I spelled out all the steps ("purchase paper for printer, insert paper into printer..."), but that's not reflective of the real difficulty.

Remember, Thingiverse is not version 7.2.3-final. It's 0.0.1-pre-alpha. We are not at the endgame of this technology, we are at the very, very, very beginning, and even this discussion about guns is merely one high-profile example of the sorts of questions we're going to have to grapple with when the full power of software is unleashed into the physical world.
The great thing about BBSs was they were really really local. Craigslist is the closest thing to it these days. For me, it was the gossip and teen angst back channel for all the in-the-know nerdy high school kids in the local calling range back in the early 90s.
Abyhs.cn
THE Tech Scoop
Was 1080p relatively unheard of in 1995? What about 16:9 displays in general?
The intro is pretty funny. But then this raises the question about how to use copyright to defend design. And how much design can be defended?
I guess when you're talking about the 27" and 30" displays that's the case, but 24" seems to be where the very low power use can be seen. LG has a display it claims only consumes 28 watts, so an array of 6 of those and you'd still have some watts to spare on the InterView.
In absolute amounts sure, but that's irrelevant to spending power or quality of life.

The bottom 5% of households in the US make nominally more than the top 5% of households in China, but I'm willing to be the bottom 5% in the US lives far worse than the top 5% in China.
I'm curious about this statement as well. Any leads ?
They didn't really rule that the string was a machine gun. They sent a badly proof-read letter saying words to that effect, but their intent was to declare that a rifle jury-rigged to fire automatically (using a shoe string) was in fact an automatic weapon.

And I doubt they will declare the manufacturer of the lower receiver is manufacturing a weapon, if it's done in such an automated way. They will just change their rulings so it's a crime to order such a part. If they can't do that, they will work with whatever federal agency regulates telecommunications, and it will suddenly become a serious crime to order certain gun parts from a 3D printer.

Laws don't always change faster than technology, but they change pretty quickly when there's the right kind of pressure.
Last time I checked lawsuits cost lots of money, this saves the consumer the expense of paying for the lawsuit. Whether the law should or shouldn't be this way is a matter for another discussion. The current reality is that getting sued for patent infringement can be VERY costly.

Assuming Amazon is a reasonably rational economic agent they would probably choose the lawsuit if it had a lower expected cost compared to licensing the patent portfolio, or reimplementing the infringing code in a non-infringing manner.

Thus licensing a patent portfolio reduces costs for the consumer, of course it could be argued that with out patents Amazon wouldn't have to pay, but the current situation is that we have patents.
Good looking template.

I personally author my resume in XML and transform it into various formats using XSLT.
Maybe it's because the calls to functions in DLLs could, in theory, change it?
You actually don't need a license. You just pay a $200 tax, submit to a background check, and wait a few months
What I find more amazing than anything else is that Amazon apparently has 30,000 spare cores that one can ask for when needed.
Regarding this suggested letter, the author is spot on with how this should have been handled. There's really little reason for taking the DVD portion of the company and rebranding it under a totally different (and poorly selected) name.

I don't understand why Reed and the rest of the team at Netflix are throwing away such an incredible business. Like any business that offers both old and new options, they should have merely announced a plan (much like what was suggested in this letter) to slowly phase out DVDs and educate their customers on the benefits of streaming (as well as developed a plan for making more DVD-only content available via the streaming service). This just feels like that scene in the Beach where the guy gets his leg bit off by a shark and is taken out into the woods to die slowly. Despite this mistake, I still love Netflix (it's my primary source of television save for torrents). I hope they can recover from this and really turn around the brand. If not, I'll be really sad if I have to subscribe to cable again.
The message is “write something fucking interesting”
Anyone know what machine he was using? I guess it was some SGI machine but it didn't say the exact model.
I don't consider pissing off a large portion of your customer base causing a backlash so strong that you backtrack to be "listening to customer feedback". It's more like "poking the hornets nest & getting stung". Netflix has a history of shooting first & asking questions later.

As far as giving feedback or suggestions voluntarily as a customer, good luck. You can't do it on the website & any suggestion you give to a customer service rep stays with the customer service rep & goes no further. It's a sad state of affairs when the best 1-on-1 communication with customers Netflix has had as a company is their CEO doing damage control in Facebook comment threads.
> I assume it's really easy to buy a new computer and install XP on it, right?

Why would you want to? It won't be any faster. If you need XP compatibility for something, use regular virtualization or XP Mode.
that's the problem of the american entitlement. There are still huge chunks of the rest of the world who would jump for those jobs at those wages. This is why most of these jobs that haven't been automated have been outsourced. This one remains for locational reasons.

Sure it'd be great if they didn't deserve that, but it's not just americans making $11 or $12 an hour. It's huge chunks of the world living off less than $1 a day
Couldn't there be some bias from the people that were polled? For example, I love working from home, right? So of course I'm going to tell someone polling me that I do a lot work from home.

Not saying that this is anecdotal...just sayin'.
The creation of high level programming languages is not analogous to easier gun making. It would be more analogous to easier gun making accelerating the pace of firearms development and resulting in firearms that are orders of magnitude more lethal.
I'm a little curious about this line from the article:

"Here's the basic idea: 54.5% of U.S. consumers make less than $100,000 a year"

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...), a household income of $100k would put someone in the 84th percentile. They put the 54th percentile at around $50k.

Any idea what I'm misunderstanding here?
Would You Bet $100,000,000 on Your Pet Programming Language?
Open Government Partnership launched
> Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way […]

Err, I think this one is a non-sequitur. The actual argument would be to say that science and philosophy aren't the same. But, as a believer of reductionistic materialism myself, I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was (except maybe the moral ones, but even then, moral realism isn't far from my mind).

Of course, it's not like Darwin invalidated all prior philosophy, but it did invalidated some beliefs, like Young Earth Creationism.

So here is what I believe to be the correct phrasing: "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded". Well, you can scrap "philosophical": it applies to any result.
Nope, he is moving the mouse with his mind.
I think even a Bayesian approach will have to grapple with the issue of looking at the results too often. The problem is that if you make your decision on "when do I stop testing", dependent on the test results so far, then the test results can be biased.

I'm sure you're aware of this, but I'm just trying to clarify the idea for other readers.

The idea is not well-illustrated in the article. (Although the article does provide some usable guidance until the whole Bayesian framework gets built and populated with correct parameters, like the reward structure.)

So, to be concrete -- Suppose you're flipping coins and you figure (by some procedure) you need 100 flips to reach significance. By the 70th flip, you observe that p(head) ~= 40/70 ~= 57%, so you decide to stop the test because clearly you're not dealing with a 50/50 coin. That's not OK, because you'll always see favorable and unfavorable excursions in a series of coin flips -- if you choose to stop in the middle of such an excursion, you'll bias the result. You've made the stopping time dependent on the observed values.

In some situations you can do this (it's related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_stopping_theorem), but the way that I described above is not one of them.
Sticker Printing
ticker printing is considered a very creative and artistic method to promote your business. Almost all businesses launch some sort of this marketing technique since it arrests the attention of the potential customers and motivates them to buy your products. Sticker printing is very effective and efficient way to promote small businesses. This is versatile and can be used in a number of ways to gain long term business goals.
A DVD-by-mail queue makes sense to me. What does "queue" mean in a streaming service, especially one where availability is frequently changing? In fact, DVD-by-mail and streaming services require and invite dramatically different management by the user.

I don't want a unified queue, because I don't want a queue for my streaming service. I can think of many ways in which I would want integration between my activity in each service, of which a unified queue is one of the least innovative and least helpful.

I have to believe that, even if Netflix/Qwikster can't provide useful integration, someone can. Despite my initial negative reaction to the split, these opportunities actually make me a little excited.
Sony FW900, last, best CRT ever made (that was affordable).

23 inch 16:10 CRT, 1920x1200 - weighs nearly 100 pounds and draws 150 watts if I remember correctly.

Originally like $2000, down to $300 at the end (refurbished).

Had variable phosphorus pitch, denser at the corners and an internal cpu adjusted the corners to correct for (earth?) magnetic field.

Only went to LCD when mine finally died and there was no one who could repair it and getting another was out of the question because shipping prices have gone through the roof.

There is a huge fan thread on them in [H]ardForum with lots of photos.

The colors on them are unbelievable.
Well, California is the center of the world.

Just kidding, but truthfully speaking a lot of the news on HN takes a very California-centric view.
> Depends on your jurisdiction

Oh definitely, when I said federal law I was just referring to the U.S. I don't know enough about UK law to speak to your questions, but they are interesting ones that will have to be answered in the coming years.
A 24" dell Ultrasharp uses 75W. I doubt he is using anything lower quality than that.
Usually aluminum. But you are otherwise correct.
Note that in this case, you mostly get the "benefits" of legalization by including strict regulations in the package.
If you haven't done so please read Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.

It's the kind of book that opens your eyes to the kind of change that you are talking about. I think that you are basically talking about a post-singularity society, that's how much change that would cause. As a result of that we can speculate about the changes but we will never ever be remotely ready for the real thing, if and when it hits.

The 0.0.1-pre-alpha of the cornucopia machine is not even close to the real thing in terms of effect, the one is a neat little machine that you can use to experiment with additive manufacturing rather than the usual subtractive methods, the other will change the world in ways we probably can not even predict.
No. Think bigger. 1M people at $150K each, living in the biggest and nicest castle ever devised. This is the kind of thing we need, if we are to move up the Kardashev Scale.

http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
How Apple badly messed up with in-app purchases on Lion and didn’t tell anyone
I'm surprised they don't paint the roofs white.

Amazon's Allentown warehouse on GMaps: http://g.co/maps/ehxta
Has anyone ever considered making a reverse-ageist start-up? I kniw it's not legal, but I'd love to know what a company of people who have seen a couple cycles go through comes up with. Though reading PG, thay answer seems to be "really hard stuff on the back-end".
Would you advocate no cutoff at all, then?
They were very expensive. A typical high end CRT monitor might be 19-21", with the ultra high end being 24". 1600x1200 @75Hz refresh was what you wanted, but you usually had to use lower color depth to achieve it.
Home made semiconductors, that's hard! :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM

Mechanics is easy.
HTML5 will neither be as good or as bad as people expected to be, in my opinion. While it does present a uniform architecture for development and speed enhancements via access to hardware another more serious point is overlooked. The US's Internet infrastructure. we are seriously outdated. Until serious high quality high-speed penetration is achieved people well not put up with spotty coverage and slow connection speeds. HTML5 will only thrive right alongside native apps not instead of them, at least for the perceivable future.
450,000,000 licenses sold so far...seems pretty successful considering how long its been on the market.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...

I have contrarian impulses, but I don't think they're productive. Better to acknowledge and try to understand the impulse, then think critically about the subject at hand.
Well, if it's beta, you are already showing it to people, so I would definitely show it to someone with a high chance of being a customer.

If they don't like it, you can always email them / call them to have a second look when you feel you've made noticeable progress.

EDIT: If using it in production carries a lot of risk for this customer, don't pussyfoot around and advise him to wait.
Whether or not 90 days is an excessive amount of time for a service to be invite-only depends greatly on the nature of the service. For a social network any amount of time spent in invite-only mode is a huge problem because the value of the service is directly proportional to both the willingness and the ability of your social contacts to also join the service.

On Google+ I've got 100+ people who have me in circles, but they are all hardcore geek early adopter net-fiends like myself. Very little of my real friends and family social circle is on Google+... many were interested when I explained it but have since lost interest due to their initial inability to join when the service was the hot new thing.
> E.g. "I am average compared to other engineers". For an early stage startup, average is not enough.

If you bailed them on this, you're process is seriously flawed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others"
Historical references
Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger have quoted Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision") as authors who have recognised the phenomenon.
> You can't simultaneously have an invite system and a huge marketing push.

What huge marketing push? All Google did was post a blog about it and send out some invites.