skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't looked into it extensively and I could be mistaken, but after the suicides at Foxconn, I remember reading an article about how the suicide rate at the factory was far lower than the suicide rate of the surrounding towns.

The conditions in Chinese factories are horrible to think about, but it's important to keep in mind those conditions are often better than the places the workers came from. Shutting down factories in China wouldn't do anything to improve the lives of poor Chinese.

And I've read that Foxconn is actually the most desirable employer compared to other factories.
I think article is essentially right on. It's very difficult to succeed in the education space and, at a minimum, it typically takes a long time to succeed. If you have the patience you can definitely make money in the space (witness Wireless Generation as an example) but there are very few quick wins.

Education also really is several separate industries rather than a monolithic one. K-12 has a very different dynamic than higher education and those industries have a much different dynamic than corporate training. Consumer education, which I would consider to be stuff like Kaplan Test Prep, Lynda.com, LiveMocha, etc. is essentially another industry albeit with some overlap with the others. And consumer ed is probably the toughest one to make money in, at least in the U.S.

One of the biggest challenges with education companies in the United States is that I feel we've almost been conditioned not to pay for education. Public K-12 education (which is the vast majority of consumption) is paid for by the state. Higher education is heavily subsidized by the government and when it is paid for by the consumer it typically comes in the form of student loans. And then we you become an adult your employer steps in and pays for the majority of your education/training.

So while people will spend lots of money for clothing, entertainment, food, etc. it's tough to get people to pay out of pocket for education. The industry that is most similar in this respect is health care and end the dynamics in these two industries are much the same. I'd highly recommend that anyone wanting to understand these industries more deeply read Disrupting Class and The Innovator's Prescription, both by Clayton Christensen.
I don't think the issue here is that Stallman lacks empathy, although he does, but that he's attacking a cherished societal value: that reproducing is a good thing to do. You would get the same negative reaction to someone declaring that Christianity is just another false religion to a bunch of Christians, or that atheism is a dangerous and foolish belief system to a bunch of atheists.

However, given that this value is currently the gravest threat to human survival and human welfare, I wish more people would attack it.

Empathy and practicality, however, dictate that the time to attack natalism is when people are considering conceiving a child, not when they're struggling with postpartum sleep deprivation.
This is great news. Republicans are blocking all of Obama's nominations so it will take a while to even replace this guy (there are currently 109 vacancies in federal courts). The more overloaded and clogged up the courts are the harder it is for trolls to do real damage, especially now that they've lost their go-to guy.
It's not that it's hard; it's largely out of your control.
Auxmoney GmbH
Google Sues Itself With Help From Intellectual Ventures
Just the mere fact that Obama would make a statement is touching. Did any tech leader before Steve Jobs receive such a tribute? I'm curious.
Compare this to an existing product: http://www.plasmatweeter.de/acapella.htm

One drawback is the production of ozone. You wouldn't want to run this sort of thing for several hours in a closed room.
What Do You Stand For?
Hence its indefinite de-prioritization, yes. Is there actually a dispute here?
> There's nothing inherent about usability that requires jailed computing.

Not a requirement, but there is a correlation. Programming for an unjailed ecosystem takes more effort to support the vastly wider environments on the devices. Classic example (in an industry largely orthogonal to Apple, to factor Apple out of the discussion): game programming for a PC versus a console. The PC game company has to support a million different combinations of video and sound and input hardware and operating system, which takes mountains of effort (or cost) that the console company can put into the actual game experience instead (or save the costs.)

This happens at smaller scales too. An iPhone developer has to support exactly one form factor, exactly one screen size, exactly one input method. An Android developer needs to contend with a wide range of screen sizes and resolutions and keyboards and touch responsitivity. Sure, it's possible for the Android developer to accommodate all those devices. But we live in the reality of the capitalist market, where the resources to make that investment of time and effort may not be available.

Taking choice away from the user, imposing a jailed environment, can indeed lead to a better experience overall, in that the content producers can focus more tightly.
This is just sad. The next wave of entrepreneurs aren't being exposed to logical business decisions.
I have always been surprised as to why people think its offensive to talk ill of someone just because the person is dead. Death does not change character. If a person could be criticized for something when he was alive, he should not be immune to that after death.

There's a time and place to show restraint.

How would you feel if one of your mom's ex-boyfriends came to her funeral and started cursing at her? Maybe that's what he did the last time he saw her alive, but you know what, there's a time and place for restraint. (Note, not a dig on you and your mom at all -- but recall that Jobs has family too).

Would it have been too much for RMS to say, "I'll respectfully voice my opinions at a later date" Apparently so.
Autonomous Car drives through city traffic in Berlin, Germany
Video of "MadeInGermany" during the autonomous drive in Berlin's city center
> why would you scale all the way to Windows?

For the only reasons such stupid thing happens: the clueless manager wants the machine to run a modern OS and thinks Windows is the most modern OS out there.

post-downvote edit: I am saying nothing about viruses like Stuxnet, designed as weapons tailored to infect specific systems, for which no OS would be safe, but how brain-dead is it to design critical systems that control airborne weapon systems around an OS that's vulnerable to each and every piece of malware known to man?
The title conjures images of a person breaking a macbook as a symbol of breaking up with Apple now that Steve is gone. Instead it is a truly beautiful tribute.

Something like "Steve remembered in macbook pieces" would seem like a fitting title.
Shaders compile once and execute millions of times. Most code on the Web code compiles once and executes zero, one, or a small number of times. He's saying LLVM is less suited to the latter case because it compiles slowly (though the resulting code is fast).
"Sociopath" is the new term for "psychopath", more or less. The differences are hairsplitting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Psychopathy_vs._soc...
Maybe. Bone marrow donation is debilitating and really painful. I suspect not everybody would want to duck out on labor gang for it.
> Blue Screen of Death and all.

Remember: for the military, death is just business as usual.
My first thought was "oh, another e-mail client", but it has some very nifty features. Well done.

Sent a pull request, by the way.
They're apparently enforceable in Texas, although they don't seem to often be enforced (to the point that most people I've spoken with have the false notion that they are unenforceable). So it really depends on the state.
Downvoted for spreading FUD. Software development is a vast enough field that you can't be possibly be blacklisted.
I totally expected the section titled "Epilogue" to be about a Prolog variant.
Microsoft does make interns sign non-compete contracts. I have mine in front of me. It's much tighter in scope, however; I can't work on the same thing as I either worked on or learned confidential information about at MS for 6 months after employment. Not at all as bad as the one in the article, but not the worst.
I found this awesome explanation while searching for more information (specific to Missouri): http://www.mobar.org/journal/1998/mayjun/corrigan.htm
With the exception of Reagan, none of those people were well-liked. In the case of of Reagan, he was about equally loved and reviled. With Jobs, even most of those who didn't like him had a grudging respect for him, and acknowledged the contributions he'd made.

You can get away with saying you're glad someone's gone if there are enough people out there who feel the same way. You can't if there aren't. You can't boil it down to a logically consistent principle or moral value; it's just one of the vagaries of human interaction. You can debate the merits of such an unspoken law, but you can't deny its existence.

Stallman broke that law, and that's why his comments were viewed as distasteful, whereas you could say anything you wanted about Bin Laden after he died.
And it's a really good one. It's easy to ensure that all the system software or all of a particular package (e.g. Office) uses the same version of a DLL, but approximately impossible to ensure that all third-party software is always refreshed to use precisely the version that's loaded on a particular machine (where that version can very based on Windows release, service pack deployment, etc.).

This is especially a problem in enterprise deployments where there may be a variety of spottily maintained internal and third-party applications loaded on a machine. Having to choose between refreshing every single one of them or throwing the unrefreshed ones out is an impractical choice. Thus DLL versioning.

Avoid resulting problems by either maintaining your apps in a way that allows them to all use the same build of a DLL or simply by running as few apps as possible to minimize library loading in general, duplicate or otherwise.
Except that your regular speaker doesn't have live wires sticking out.

> It's actually a pretty good speaker, as it contains no moving parts

That's a strange qualification for a "good speaker". Reliable, maybe. Good - I don't know, but it sounded like crap in that video (maybe just a bad recording).
That's the incredible thing.

By all accounts he's remarkably accomplished and intelligent. To make everything worse, he's already impossibly rich. It's as if he's decided to just make the world a worse place because he can.
GNU already included the best C compiler, the best text editor, and a number of other development tools, before the Linux kernel came around. For the people who were on the internet already at the time, it was quite notable.

It is certainly true, though, that without Linux, GNU might easily have collapsed in the early 1990s.
On Flickr too: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mintdigital/6217723462/

(with downloading "turned off" -- uh.. Right-click > Inspect Element...)
The home of IspCP Omega a VHCS fork
This reminds me of that other news story from 2009 claiming that people were intercepting drone video feeds with $30 of software.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/predator-dro...
If it happens, hopefully people will learn the right lessons.
Says the guy who chose the name of a mass murderer for his HN handle.
That's an interesting point, and changes how I look at the new kindles. I had assumed the marginal cost was closer to the ad-free version, and the ads subsidize the price for those who can't afford that. But if the marginal cost is less than $79 it could just be an elaborate price discrimination strategy. Fascinating!

I guess the real question, then, is what's the marginal cost of a Kindle? I haven't seen any tear downs of the new version indicating the component prices.
> And, furthermore, the size of the bitcode is still enormous, comparable to the generated machine code or even worse (think about the size of C++ binaries)

Actually I believe the bitcode is much larger than C or C++ binaries. The issue is that LLVM bitcode is basically a statically-typed language, lower than C. So for example to convert a pointer from one type to another you need to do an explicit cast (using an LLVM 'bitcast' operation). However, when you compile all the way down to native code, you have no need for such niceties and you just copy the value. So the bitcode ends up significantly larger than the native code would be, in order to maintain static typing correctness. There are some other issues as well.

LLVM bitcode was not designed for size, it's - exactly as the article says - just a compiler IR. So it isn't designed for size, portability, JITing speed, or anything like that. Trying to morph it into those is problematic and worse, may lead to compromises in LLVM's core goals. Which would be a shame since LLVM is a damn good compiler IR!
Internships are supposed to be the real world training though. It seems highly unethical for companies to take advantage of interns because by definition interns are inexperienced.

I had great internships and never felt like I had to be vigilant that the company was trying to take advantage of me, so I could spend my time learning. Its unfortunate that you are most likely correct that colleges should now be informing their students of things they need to avoid or deal with like this.
His retirement was announced months ago.

As far as the Techdirt story goes, there is nothing to investigate since he did nothing even remotely wrong. Techdirt, as usual when they cover legal matters, pretty much completely botched their reporting. See the earlier HN discussion for details.
It's not the specific company that is the problem. It's not like they are the only ones doing this. The problem is the practice in general.

Not signing noncompetes isn't a vague warning, it's very specific. I would extend it from interns to everyone other than senior sales staff.
It doesn't even make logical sense, what he's saying. If you've had a kid, it is in everyone's categorical best interests for you to do the best possible job raising it. The guy didn't say he was putting Emacs on hold so he could conceive a child.
You know, it's stories like this that inspire me but are, at the same time, somewhat depressing. They make me think of all the things I WISH I had done. I've always considered myself to be capable of doing whatever I want to do, but I've also been pretty lazy. My mom never made me do my homework while I was growing up and it took me until my second year of university (this year) to realize that I really do have to work to get what I want. I like math and I frequently hear stories about people who leaned calculus when they were 11, 12, or 13 years old and I wish that I had even bothered to take some AP math courses while I was in high school. Now I am, quite literally, paying for my mistakes.

Kudos to you friend.
I distinctly remembered the intern employment contract including a non-compete clause (with a 1 year duration) limiting work on any competing product or project (rather than entire employers).. but I didn't have a copy of the contract to check so I withdrew my comment.
What If the China Bubble Bursts?
I don't think you can compare a physical product with software like this. The incremental cost of goods of MS Home is a couple dollars; the incremental CoGs for the kindle may be more than the $79 price. At the very least, a segmentation needs to cause CoGs to be covered (note that those CoGs might be covered by the more expensive kindle). Of course, engineering time needs to be taken into account to develop the segmented products.

I don't think the $30 will be earned in ads, but the strategic value of a kindle or two in every house is big.
The operating system the drones run and the control software are different. A RTOS does not run on the desktop as XP is not used on UAVs.
Best of craigslist: you stole my freakin' cameras
If you're a Cringely fan, you've noted his next prediction...please take your grain of salt before reading kthx

"Running this story in reverse it’s suddenly clear why Apple didn’t introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs’s death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. I’m sure the phone will appear in a week or two with that appearance in part to encourage the recovery of Apple shares from what is sure to be a short-term decline."

Personally it doesn't make much sense (the 3GS is still on the plate). Then again, we have leaked case designs for the iPhone5 (or did we? https://twitter.com/#!/Cabel/status/121243424350412800 )
Moody's may downgrade ratings on Belgium
That's exactly it. A product rollout is a careful public relations exercise. PR interacts strongly with public perception, and public perception is shifting wildly right now. They need to rethink and rework.
That is great work
Italy and Spain downgraded by Fitch over eurozone crisis
I hope I'm not the only one here upvote your comment simply because you decompressed IR into Intermediate Representation.

I like to read about LLVM and some of the things that are a bit (ok, in a lot of cases, way) above what I do day-to-day, except that it's sometimes taken for granted that the readers know the acronym/reference. I read the whole article and I understood what it was referring to, but for the life of me I couldn't land on the two words because IR in my world is always infrared.
In a sense. I was after a bytecode that had a JIT for the more common platforms (e.g. x86, ARM, possibly MIPS), could be extended for new ones without massive effort (even if sub-optimally), and had reasonable facilities for hooking into native code, and I was trying to avoid the complex baggage, legacy or otherwise, of a JVM.

LLVM initially looked like a candidate, but I walked away with conflicting ideas about whether it was even intended to be suitable for such a case, much less whether it actually was.
> I'm not sure how that refutes the point.

>> [LLVM] is designed to be a static compiler framework, it hardly fits other purposes [...]

I presented a ready example where LLVM was being used not as a "static compiler framework", and was being used for "other purposes". If that's not an outright refutation, it's at least a useful data point.
It's impossible to know whether or not Linux would exist without GNU, but GCC isn't something you can hack together in a few months. Clang is the closest thing to a GCC replacement we have, and it didn't compile Linux until October 2010 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang)
Every time I think about the education space, I think back to a couple of Steve Krenzel's posts about his startup's experience.

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343380

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343564

Quick summary: Union politics can rear its head in unexpected ways. :(

There's probably good money to be made in this space. Goodness knows there's plenty of low-hanging fruit. But you may run-up against some terribly well-entrenched opposition.
Link to one from The Onion referring to Steve Jobs.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/last-american-who-knew-what...
The article is from 1998. Please forgive me if I don't see it as framing the situation of today.
HA!!!!!!! Well said, very well said.

My only problem with it all is that to me, there's just nothing better than seeing your child happy and knowing that you made that happen, you made some human being's life really good.
It's okay to express gladness about the death of the truly evil (Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden).

It's not okay to express gladness about the death of people with whom you merely disagree, or who might have done things of which you disapprove (Strom Thurmond, Jack Valenti, Ken Lay, Steve Jobs).

The dividing line is something along the lines of "Did this dude actually murder people?" (And no, I'm not interested in discussing any particular borderline cases.)
I really hope this works out because I really want to play around with some programmable memristers and this would help make them cheap.
17 awesome companies transforming the tablet space
Moody's Downgrades British Banks
Title: "Steve Jobs' private funeral held Friday"

First paragraph: "The funeral for Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was set to be held on Friday, the Wall Street Journal was reporting."

The reporter needs a refresher on present tense vs future tense, although I guess today is Friday, so maybe it was held already?

Submitter: Please update the title to say "will be held" or at least copy the CNN title exactly.
Ha, yeah, I'd assume Walter Bright would be able to do that... :-)

But he shouldn't have to! We want him spending less time fiddling around with a home network and more time working on cool things like D.
Thank you for mentioning the specific number for The Teaching Company, which allows me to relate it to my local public school district. I was just at a public meeting last week where I learned that my local school district, one of a few dozen school districts in the suburban Twin Cities (and by no means the largest), has an annual budget of $137 million. Other HN participants may want to check what the budget is of their own local school district. (As an update, a Web search I just did turned up my school district's budget documents online.)

http://www.minnetonka.k12.mn.us/administration/Budget/Docume...

On the basis of The Teaching Company bringing in less revenue than one school district in a single state, more than twenty years after it was founded, I would have to say that the submitted article's main point is correct, that there isn't a lot of big money for private enterprise in education in the United States.

Note on background knowledge: I have bought a few sets of videos from The Teaching Company, as has my local homeschooling support group. Our local public library system also buys them. But the local school district spends more money in a year than the full revenue of the company even at that.
The Romo is something a primary school kid could assemble.

I'm actually doing various projects (robotics-related and non-related) with AVR and Arduino, and they are definitely not primary-school-friendly.
> see VLC trying to get on the iPhone, which concluded that Apple's app store is not compatible with OSS license requirements)

That's incorrect. The App Store is not compatible with GPL license requirements. It is compatible with most other OSS license requirements.
Clickbump Engine Review: Easily Create SEO Friendly, Wordpress Sites
Minecraft Pocket Edition now available for all other Android devices
"The start-up, which has no revenue to speak of yet"

This is the aspect of the site that always made me scratch my head and say "huh?"

It is no doubt a well designed site that engages women. Despite being in beta and invite only I know a bunch of women who are really into it. I don't think being engaging is enough though - where do they go from here? How do they actually justify the valuation? Are they going to have "paid" posts for advertising? Are they going to some how sell the data mined from their users? Paid accounts?

This site seems like it is going to be even harder to monetize than reddit.
"FOR TWENTY-TWO years, the United States has been the freely-chosen home of Albert Einstein. For fifteen years, he has been a citizen of the United States by his own free and deliberate choice. Americans welcomed him here. Americans were proud, too, that he sought and found here a climate of freedom in his search for knowledge and truth.

No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of twentieth century knowledge. Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly. To all who live in the nuclear age, Albert Einstein exemplified the mighty creative ability of the individual in a free society."

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 18 April 1955.
How competitive play affects testosterone