skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames."

Is anyone else disgusted by this? Waking employees during their rest period, not to mention it being after midnight. These poor workers are essentially slaves in all but name. It's quite unconscionable that Apple should make $400,000 profit/employee while the aforementioned is happening.
Exactly my thoughts...

Everyone still loves series and movies!!!
A new proposed entertainment would go parallel and not kill hollywood...

There has to be a proper, cheap/free "itunes for series and movies". NOW!

Who's up for it? :)

roberto.cr
This means that capitalism, at its core, is somewhat flawed.

Surprisingly and scarily in tune with Zeitgeist Moving Forward [1]

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYLLFpNn4lM
Short answer: obscene amounts of money.

The issue isn't that the US can't make an iPhone, it's that it would be expensive (particularly up-front).
Unless we want to turn a small part of America into a third-world country by suspending worker's rights, environmental protections and safety regulations, I don't think we could compete with these Asian countries.

I also don't think we should.

These jobs, well, suck. They are semi-skilled and are doomed to inevitable automation. The people who work these jobs are treated as chattel right now. When these people rise up and demand to be treated better forcing costs to rise, these jobs will move again to some other desperate country.

If the first world wants to compete better, start certifying products as (human & environment) cruelty free. Label how many children were used to produce the product. Label how many years of life were robbed from people by working on the product because of chemicals. Stick an import tax on any place employing children or harming the global environment. Because straight nationalism isn't going to cut it.
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That is a terrific video, but the accompanying soundtrack and all the shh shh of the images sliding in, wow, horrible.

Good content "ruined" by someone getting excited with the canned sound buttons.
I think I understand what you're saying...The site (say of a bunch of indie web series, for example) acts as a production company that deals with all the logistics of getting the work distributed to venues where one would actually watch them?

I think there might be something there (if I understand it correctly), but I also think that it would almost be moving backwards because one of the goals should be to completely cut out digital distribution platforms as we know it. Not that I have any personal or strong emotional issue with them.

But with smartphones and iPads and God only knows what other engaging new technologies that will come out, the distribution infrastructure doesn't need to rely on top box manufacturers, or cable, or movie theatres. And similarly the content doesn't need to be made in the traditional way or even resemble traditional forms.

I love going to the movies, but more and more it's becoming the exception instead of the norm. I'm a little old fashioned in that I think you can't replace the experience of seeing a movie in the theatre. There's something there that makes it absolutely worth it. Similarly, you can't replace the experience of seeing live opera at the Met, if that's your thing.

For me, the hope is that kids growing up today will think that cable TV is dumb and going to a theatre to see a movie is old fashioned, something reserved for their parents' generation.
I can see where you're coming from, but I have to disagree. For one thing, I think you're reading too much into the word kill. In the the startup vernacular you always hear things like "company X promises to be the Y killer", and I really don't think "kill" in this context has any kind of mean-spirited undertones. It's just business. (Perhaps you'd like to make an etymological argument about the connotations of startup/business terminology being unnecessarily hateful, but that's irrelevant to the argument here).

As for your earlier point that disrupting Hollywood would mean replacing thousands of people with $30K jobs with hundreds with $150K jobs, that may very well be what happens. But the same argument could be made of any industry that gets infused technology or new ideas. Instead of taking such a reactionary approach and fighting to keep a seemingly dying industry alive just for the sake of the status quo, why not have a more productive discussion and think of real ways that the sometimes corrupt and, more importantly, no longer effective Hollywood model can be improved? Whether or not it comes from a trendy new YC-funded startup, it certainly seems like it's coming.

Personally, I find the idea of technological growth to the point of a "singularity" in the coming decades pretty compelling, and I think one of the biggest challenges we as a society will face is maintaining employment rates as technology continues to make things more and more efficient. Protecting those on the lower rungs in Hollywood and the music industry is certainly an important part of this.
The main problem with a direct representation of the society (even without a direct democracy) is that this enables the Tyranny of the majority.

Under this kind of system, every minority would be oppressed.
Paid-for projects go under all the time. This is nothing particularly unique to open source except that with OSS, someone can actually take over.

People just couldn't be bothered to, and are now paying the price.
As specced, that’s actually incorrect then. The porter duff “over” operation is identical to what’s used in browsers for regular painting of semitransparent layers (or as another example, Photoshop’s “normal blend mode”). If the below pixel A is entirely opaque, and the above pixel B has opacity P, then the color of each pixel can be computed as (1 - P) * A + P * B. If however you apply a global alpha to the below image beforehand, you get something that isn’t a cross-fade at all, and in fact isn’t even fully opaque.

[edit: When I think about this a bit more, there is one time when cross-fade is useful: For cross-fading between two semitransparent images. In that case though, what’s wanted is not really a compositing operation at all, but rather a straight linear interpolation between the respective RGBA components of the two images.]

I don’t at all believe that people working on the color and graphics aspects of web specs are sufficiently critical. In general, those aspects have been quite under-specced, and browser implementations have been incomplete and buggy. Things are improving little by little, but to take one example, there is still no proper color management of CSS/HTML colors in any browser except Firefox, and I believe it’s still turned off by default there.
Agreed. The media is not helping either by framing the issue wrongly. It's not US competitiveness that is the issue here -- it's China's lack of human rights.
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Not to mention the new jobs created overseas. The notion of “American jobs” seems illiberal to me.

Further, Apple is creating jobs. The criticism should be directed toward those who aren’t.
If the US imposes higher import taxes, certainly other countries would respond by raising barriers for US exports, thus not solving the issue at hand.
What I take out from this article is that a company like Apple creates work for some 763 thousand people worldwide.

That's mind-blowing. 763 thousand people working together to produce my macbook pro, my iPhone, my iPad. 763 thousand people earning a living because of Apple. Seven hundred and sixty three thousand.

My business currently employs 3 people full time, including 2 founders. We're looking to hire some more in the next year, but we have a long way to go.
I've been using Big Data techniques(using nosql and processes such as map-reduce) to do data analysis and to produce useful and actionable information. My data isn't super huge right now, my mongodb data directory is at about 33GB. It is a good start and useful for working out techniques that can be applied to much larger datasets.
I always assumed that the job trend would work its way back to the US when automation trumped the masses in factory labor. The problem I see is that we are not doing enough to get ourselves ready for the next generation. Our school systems have been stripped down and do not have enough of the sciences or vocational studies that would allow people to get interested in engineering.
Right, but it all boils down to having an army of cheap workers in the end. That feeds everything else, because we still don't have manufacturing robots that are as adaptable as humans for cases where you would have to retool your whole line on the fly.
The form letter template for open source abandonware:

http://raganwald.posterous.com/form-letter-template-for-open...
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Why worry about Chinese workers making iPhones, eventually robots will be making them anyway.

Yep. When people complain about losing US manufacturing they are really complaining about losing US manufacturing jobs. Sure, manufacturing output is growing in China, but it's also still growing in the US. Automation is what has killed the US manufacturing job and not offshoring.
Working more productively with bash 2.x/3.x
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Those are not at all similar except that they both involve multiple entities doing something. All the rest of the details are different. I think you have abstracted the situation too much in your attempt to make it amenable to logical analysis. You're ignoring too much relevant information.
This is a somewhat controversial article but it makes a point that China's unfair competitive advantage is its lack of respect for most human rights, IP laws, etc.

http://www.tapsns.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/what-is-china/

EDIT:

Another thing is that going to college is not a fundamental right of a citizen. If you do not score high enough on the NCEE, you are basically slotted for factory work (if your family is not well-off enough to pay full freight at at a European or American institution)...

"Students in the Chinese education system endure six years of elementary school and six years of middle and high school to prepare for what is often the most important turning point of their lives: the National College Entrance Examination. The exam takes place once each year. If student scores are high enough, they might be able to enter one of the few high-ranking Chinese universities in big cities like Beijing or Shanghai. This builds the foundation for good jobs after graduation. And if their English is good enough, they can take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) or the IELTS (International English Language Teaching System, or the British equivalent of the TOEFL). And last, if their families are financially blessed, they might have a chance to apply to colleges in English-speaking countries such as the USA, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand.

Unfortunately, if their entrance examination scores are below a certain point, the options after high school are limited to obtaining associate’s degrees or starting in extremely low-paying jobs.

For most Chinese students, the only way to a brighter future is to ace every subject in school and to be in extraordinary condition on the three days of the National College Entrance Examination...

Many American students find it hard to understand the Chinese schedule. But we accepted the rigor because competing for the few high-ranking Chinese universities requires a lot of work. Nearly 8.8 million students take the college entrance exam each year, and only about 20,000, or 0.2 percent, make it to the top colleges in China."

http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/06/chinese-teenagers-stick-...
So what you're saying is most open source communities are like the onion article: "Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others" [1]. Someone should step up and provide hosting and maven repos and blah blah blah... but not me. Which makes you wonder if there's really a community or it's just a handful of people donating to charity and a thousand people taking.

[1] http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-98-percent-of-us-com...
It's not so much the midnight wakeup and the rush to accomplish some necessary goal. In the right circumstances, that's actually kind of neat.

But we do have to understand, these employees live their lives in company dormitories, and for this above and beyond effort, are not paid in overtime, but with a biscuit.

Apple (and others) are arbitraging the more humane and worthwhile labor arrangements our parents (and their parents) literally fought for, and died for, to make our working lives much better.

It actually is, pretty despicable, not that foreign workers are given a chance to better their lives, but that the Apple's (and others) decisions work not to raise everyone up, but to bring us all down to a minimal level.

I think all of us are eager to see living and wage conditions rise all around the world. It is the race to the bottom that is disturbing.
I agree, but only up to a point. When a book is advertised as part of a series, that is in effect a promise that there will be a series. Otherwise it's false advertising.
The article and video don't seem to be arguing that it's bad to lower costs. They aren't even saying that it's inherently bad to outsource some of these functions to China and other countries.

Rather, there seem to be two points:

(1) Ignoring the cost of labor (which everyone thinks is the reason that US companies outsource to China), it's still logical to send manufacturing to China. Their plants, labor force, and supply chains are all better suited to the needs of high-tech manufacturing than anywhere in the US.

(2) Moving all of these manufacturing jobs to China (or elsewhere) has not only meant the loss of many mid-skill manufacturing jobs in the US, but also many jobs that were created to support those jobs, to a degree that the service sector doesn't even come close to reaching. This has long-term ramifications for US jobs, in that many of the traditional middle-class jobs that people used to be able to get no longer exist.

It certainly sounds to me as though the US should not expect to get any of these manufacturing jobs back. It also seems unlikely that you can train an entire country to do white-collar, high-tech and service-sector jobs. And while I know that the US continues to do a huge amount of manufacturing, it's with many fewer (and more highly-skilled) employees than ever before.

So, what's an economy to do? It's easy for me to tell my own children to study hard and to try to get good jobs, but that's not scalable, nor is it realistic. Maybe when everyone can manufacture things at home, using 3D printers, then manufacturing will be as flexible and portable as software startups nowadays. But barring that, the solution is far from clear to me.
Sure, ununionized labour would be more employable, but these would be lower-class jobs, not the middle-class jobs that the west of today was built on. Nobody’s going to be able to support a family at middle-class standards on $10-15 an hour.

For some reason, the broader socioeconomic discussion the western world should be having has been condensed to creating jobs. But jobs aren’t a binary thing; and they’re means to an end, not the end goal (an equitable society in which the average person can be a member of the middle class).
I think the important point of the article is that when buyers are unable to react as fast as sellers to changes in the market, the market is ripe for what I'm going to dub "auto-cartelization".

Taking this a bit further, the best way to fight this phenomenon may be to improve buyers' ability to react quickly to the market. I'm sure there's some startup ideas here for specific instances of "market".
Factories get built in the U.S. all the time. Since there is some amount of competition for them between states, the typical approach is to shop around for a nice deal, where the state/city will usually not only offer to shepherd you through the environmental/approval process, but actually pay for it or subsidize your construction, and give you 10-20 years of tax breaks. Happens with car factories all the time. Even Apple is doing it with the A5 chip manufacturing facility it announced it's going to open in Austin.
Fair enough, but this perspective is very Western, ie, further along the economic development timeline.

In China, it can be argued that this represents progress over the alternative, which would likely be rural poverty. The alternative might be 16-hour days, without anything resembling a dorm.

Again, I understand the disgust, but sweatshops are part of our economic history too. The question is whether it is a necessary (and net-positive) step. It might be.
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Perhaps they're betting on PayPal's terrible reputation.
Tim Gowers is also the editor of the extraordinary mathematics companion Princeton Companion to Mathematics (http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timoth...)
If cartel-like behaviour is an emergent property of an ordinary market, how should it be controlled, regulated and punished?

Why punish it? By this reasoning, all you need to do is to give buyers better information so they can react faster.

The problem with gas prices, I suppose, is that you have to drive around to collect them, and once you come to a station, if you decide its price is unacceptable there's a cost to checking out the next one (the time it takes you to drive there).

Seems like there could be a mobile app that tells drivers the gas prices at stations in their vicinity, which, according to the article, should change the system's behavior mode to push prices down instead of up.
I agree with your sentiment, but job creation isn't the end goal. Prosperity is. Prosperity comes through automation, which is the exact opposite of job creation.
I'll say here, what I said to a friend who sent me this:

I say music industry folks should get together and do it.

Let me tell you why. On our in end and for our part us in the tech industry we're like its just the MPAA, the RIAA, and the militant people who are crazy rich already and just want the government to protect their outdated business models.

To us piracy is a service problem.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/story_type/site_trail_story/intervi...

The old way of distributing this stuff is over. And only the people who are versed in the newer ways (i.e. blowing up on Youtube and then doing shows) are going to make it. And the record labels can't control that and that is what scares them. Becoming obsolete

If regular people in the music industry were to strike to bring attention to the issue, we would take it more seriously. It would go from "a bunch of greedy people just want more money" to "this is actually hurting regular people" and our conversations would change to how to combat that without risking becoming China.

Look up the Great Firewall. That is effectively what laws like SOPA and PIPA would have and still could create right here at home. No conspiracy bullshit, for real. And the way it started was the politicians there said it was for "combating piracy and pornography." But the Chinese don't care about pirates so they don't even pay attention to that. They just head straight for the dissenters because they have the power to.

So what I'm saying is a boycott of regular people would make it realer to us and we would take the issue more seriously. And also we have to be extremely careful with laws like these because they can easily lead to abuse no one wants.
We're not currently planning to open source the platform. But we are encouraging (though not forcing) journals to provide open access to their content. At the moment, our goal is to provide journal editors with a quality tool. We'll be thinking more about open access as we continue to add publishing functionality.

As for open source solutions, there is OJS (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs). It's heart is in the right place, but it's an unfortunately clumsy product that lacks many of important features we're looking to add.
The currently pending Research Works Act is a SOPA-like debacle that seeks to impede the free flow of scientific information to a degree previously unheard of. Thank you for lending your voice to stop this counter-productive madness.

http://publishing.umich.edu/2012/01/05/more-legislative/
http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/24541-H...
“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” <-- agreed
The results make interesting reading. It turns out that a crucial factor is the speed at which buyers and sellers react to the market. When buyers react quickest, sellers are forced to match the best possible value for money and prices tend to drop.

By contrast, when sellers react quickest, they are quick to copy others offering poor value for money. This reduces the number of sellers offering good value for money in a vicious cycle that drives prices as high as possible.

Does this model match practice?

i.e. If we consider all industries in which there are price cartels, particularly those that were formed without price collusion, could the existence of those cartels be attributed to sellers reacting faster than buyers?

Also, are we confident of the converse? That there an no examples of non-collusive cartels in markets where buyers react faster than sellers? This seems plausible to.
I think we have killed the music business. The problem is that there is so much music we listen to that they own the copyrights to, and will for 70+ years, that we're sort of locked into them for a certain amount of time.

But the future is micro labels, digital distribution/sales via Apple/Amazon/Google/eMusic, music videos at YouTube, publicity via Pandora/Spotify/LastFM, PR via Facebook/Twitter, shows with indie ticket sellers, t-shirts with Zazzle, etc etc.
If China were to improve its records on the environment, worker rights, and human rights, it sounds (from the article) as if they would still have an advantage in manufacturing that would be pretty hard to overcome by another country.

But I would certainly feel a lot better, and would even be willing to pay a bit more for my products, knowing that the government did indeed enforce similar regulations to what we see in Western countries.

Ironically, the Chinese government, which is still ruled by the "Communist" party, is demonstrating the worst aspects of capitalism -- namely, that profit trumps all other considerations.
Indeed! Automation distributes the proceeds to consumers in the form of lower prices.

The only way to “run out of jobs” is to run out of things that people want.
Considering the entire system of journals and papers is about reputation rather than profit (from what I understand, nobody in academia gets money from the publishing process), it’s a prime candidate for disruption. If a small group of universities started publishing all their papers on an official website (maybe with an opportune system of ranking, to somehow reflect quality of the reviewing process and make it really equivalent to traditional journal publishing), then the incentives to publish in an Elsevier paper would disappear. The system could then grow as more universities join.

I’m surprised nobody has done it yet, there must be some stumbling block I’m not aware of.
I don't think that conclusion is justified, at least not directly. A more conservative conclusion might be "capitalism requires buyer flexibility in order to function correctly" (where "correctly" means that prices accurately track the intrinsic value of the goods being sold).