skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When the current entertainment cartels are replaced by lighting and shading algorithms, algorithmically generated or enhanced sets and story lines, artifically-intelligent actor agents and remotely live-actor operated machinima drones, the world will be a more creative and entertaining place. I for one welcome the coming Diamond Age.

To quote Public Enemy, burn Hollywood burn!
Did you miss the news about Chinese workers threatening mass suicide?
Why Can’t Google Fix its Own URLs?
Google's Add URL Page returns a 404 Error Page, works after removing a / (forward slash). Google engine itself returns the normal URL on a normal web search.
> But Hollywood funds artists

I'm an artist, a musician to be precise. I've done ok for myself without Hollywood. I've known many artists that have been wrecked by Hollywood's promises of wealth and fame, far more than have benefited from it.

Hollywood needs to die and let the next model(s) of the marriage of art and business thrive. I actually envy the younger generation of musicians that have been raised to think of producing and distributing their own work rather than depend on a larger, centralized entity for their livelihoods.
The Economist pegs the iPhone component cost at $178 and that Foxconn's margin at $7/iPhone: http://www.economist.com/node/21525685

Most of the iPhone components don't come from China, they come from Korea, Taiwan, and actually even Italy and Texas: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57344151-17/iphone-ipad-pr...

From another article: The total component cost of an iPhone in 2009 was $172.46. Workers in China assemble the iPhone, but because their wages are low the assembly cost per phone (labeled manufacturing costs in the table below) is quite small, only $6.50 a phone. The total production cost per phone is $178.96: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/29/the-innovati...

>"If iPhones were assembled in the US the total assembly cost would rise to US$68 and total manufacturing cost would be pushed to approximately US$240. Selling iPhones assembled by US workers at US$500 per unit would still leave a 50% profit margin for Apple": http://business.time.com/2011/01/11/is-the-iphone-bad-for-th...

However, I think it's fair to conclude: Slicing the iPhone in this way, we can see that the real value of the iPhone isn’t in the manufacturing process at all, but lies in its design and the development of its components. And by owning the technology and design, the U.S. also gains in global trade, even though the iPhone isn’t manufactured in America: http://business.time.com/2011/01/11/is-the-iphone-bad-for-th...
There was another article on Foxconn that was really good. The working conditions are absolute SHIT. No exaggeration. Despite being shit, the abuse at the factories is still better than a life of poverty. To you and I Chinese workers are treated like shit, but to them, it's better than before. And that's when it really hit me. As human beings, we like to climb UP, but not down, we like to ADD but not take away. We want MORE but never LESS. And as soon as a country stablizes and steps on it's feet, it's growth stops. There's no one to take advantage of. Everone has climbed up. And business is all about taking advantage of someone. This is a re-occuring theme in history.

I think this is what Americans need to understand the most.

China is the new America (in it's younger years, pollution, slaves, child labor, no rights, but lots of growth and opportunity), America is the new Europe. One day, everyone reading this will be dead, but rest assured China too, will stablize, be free, and then it will be Africa's turn.
After a few emails with DH support, I discovered that there was a file created by another user in two of my accounts. Somehow the permissions for two directories had been set to 777, and a compromised user put a trojan in them. I think that I jumped into conspiracy theory territory above, and misrepresented Dreamhost's security and response as a result of that. The combination of my emotions and my inexperience with dealing with hacking on web hosts led to an incorrect judgment.
It's funny because it imagines what the reviews would be like if these papers were reviewed today. The object of ridicule is the current state of peer review in computer science.
I am also confused by the uproar about this, why is what Dodd said wrong? Are campaign contributions not a sign that you support the goals of the politician in question? So if that politician is no longer espousing your values, you move your contributions somewhere else.

I guess my question comes down to what is the difference between contributing to whichever campaign forwards a platform and bribery (the assumption that Dodd was engaging in the latter being what caused the furor)?
That last sentence makes you a social startup, nothing wrong with that, but harder to get funding.

Consider your angles on this one. You potentially have a very wealthy, untapped, market ;)
This is endemic of the games industry as a whole. SW:TOR is just World of Warcraft with lightsabers. Modern Warfare 3 is an expansion packaged as a sequel. Angry Birds is just Castle Crashers with a different firing mechanic. We've become so efficient at extracting money out of the hits, it becomes hard to truly innovate.
Modules are iframes (that can live anywhere online) that communicate with window.postMessage() based on how they are patched together. They can be programmed to send and accept text, numbers, image data, audio... anything really. Programming the modules is a fun, because you can visually rewire them into another "app" that does something totally different.

I'd be happy to answer questions and get any feedback on design, UX, architecture, module ideas, anything...

This is my thesis project with help from Media Lab Helsinki and Mozilla WebFWD.

(There are more examples in the lower-right: cam2gif cam glitch processing flipbook camdoodle text2speech.)
China is lifting itself out of poverty and they aim to be the most powerful country in the world, not a cheap labour factory. Meanwhile the US is a rich developed country with over 2 million slave labourers (prisoners) living in dormitories, subject to violence and working for less than a chinese laborer with fewer rights. I would rather buy an iPhone made by aspirational Chinese than victims of the war on drugs. I tend to avoid US products due to a perception that US employees don't get decent wages or health care compared to other developed western democracies.
Yeah, its actually pretty dumb IMO that they say the money will go to hosting. With AWS etc you only use what you pay for and the costs should be pretty minimal for beta testing and then covered by subscription fees once they launch.

Money going towards mobile dev makes more sense although is much more risky to back given the short timeframe and limited budget even if they meet their goal.
There are web apps that do this already. The process itself is straightforward (at least for mathematics). An editor-in-chief and a group of associate editors (who are always top academics in related fields) accept publications, sometimes to their email addresses, other times through some automated system. The papers are then assigned to the appropriate associate editor who is handling that particular subfield. The paper is then sent to a referee (sometimes two or three, especially if the first review is not satisfactory). The referee will be an expert in the field capable of evaluating the work. The referee (after some months, or more) will return a written report. Part of the report will be for the editor, the other part for the author of the paper. Some journals also request that the reviewer fill out some additional details, such as scores on how important, correct, appropriate the paper is, etc. The decision is passed on to the editor and if the editor agrees the author is informed of the outcome, along with perhaps an edited version of the author comments. They may be required to amend some minor problems in the paper, rework it substantially and resubmit or it may just be rejected.

Publication itself can be complex. It often involves journal style files, professional typesetters, sending page proofs to the authors for approval, getting transfer of copyright forms signed, dealing with diagrams and so on. This side of things is the side that fewer mathematicians actually care about. Much of it is not relevant for web-only publications.
Why wouldn't it? It's an unrealistic expectation that the fact that we have ideas for certain econopolitical models and that they're superficially consistent in normal discourse should mean that, in practice, they exhibit multiple negative behaviors.

All systems are flawed and unfair to some level, and there are tons of examples for capitalism in particular. The question is to what extent we can mitigate some of the negative effects and which ones we're willing to accept.
How the Web Beat Hollywood
YC12 - Looking for an awesome web/mobile app designer
We are a small team in the current batch of YC. We are solving a big problem that millions of people face on an on-going basis. We are building an alternative that is 10-20x better than any existing solution (we have paying customer who rave about the service). Since we are in stealth, I cannot say much here. I will email details about the company to the qualified candidates.

We are looking for an awesome graphic designer who can help us design our consumer focused website and mobile apps. The goal is to increase conversion rate by delivering an experience that is dead simple, easy, and pure delight. We are open to consulting, or hiring full-time (will be great to find someone who can start out as a consultant and become full-time employee). Please be local (peninsual/south bay). Working remotely is 'not' an option.

Responsibilities include:
* Designing mock-ups/iterations using Photoshop, Illustrator
* Creating clear and attractive messaging, buttons, icons, widgets, and other UI elements
* Figuring out the branding/message/user experience

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

* 3+ years art/design experience working in "Consumer focused web/mobile apps"
* Solid understanding of UI design best practices and interaction design fundamentals
* Ability to translate flow charts and wireframes into fun, usable, visually polished UI systems
* Expert knowledge of Photoshop; strong skills in Illustrator
* Ability to produce high quality work quickly, looking at the data and iterating to increase conversion

To apply: please send an email (with your portfolio) to jobs@renovan.com. Thanks for reading this!
As a non-US citizen, I am seriously considering donating EFF in hope to stop US imposing its' law on the rest of the world.

Thoughts?
Has any non-USA citizen donated to EFF before?
Engineering isn't really vocational; it's math and applied science.
They "like" the factory because it's Better than starving and working on a farm. They make more money in a factory than on the farm. China is the place to manufacture but NOT the place to live. Everyone wants to do business with china but no body in their right mind wants to actually live there.
A more limited way of putting it would be that (neo-)classical economic theory has some flaws, in that it assumes prices will track supply/demand balance and maximize market participants' utility (as expressed via price preferences), in the absence of state distortion of markets, which appears not to always be true, since markets can be self-distorting. Not surprising given that most complex systems have strange pathologies in the form of feedback loops, local attractors, etc., but interesting to see this study nonetheless.

Whether that means capitalism is flawed depends on the extent to which you consider the neoclassical utility-maximization explanation of how markets work to be an important part of the justification for capitalism. It probably undermines the utopian libertarian vision of a laissez-faire, unregulated economy in which everything is free and everything is perfectly allocated, more than it undermines the U.S./European brand of pragmatic market economies.
The technology isn't the hurdle here, it's the prestige. The academic publishing world is all about who you are, what institutes you belong to, etc. To put it bluntly, a Reddit-like journal site just wouldn't have enough "cred" to attract decent content.
The US copyright lobby tried the same type of maneuvering in Spain. They took it a step further and threatened to put Spain on a list of countries that don't respect intellectual property laws, that is unless Spain passed the desired draconian legislation. This was all done through backroom deals and was all meant to be secret. It was a secret until WikiLeaks leaked the memos.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/how-wikileak...
Yeah great that he's okay with us poking at code that is being downloaded interpreted and run on our own machines(!) j/k ;-)
they make $150 per paying user, most likely

because I can assure you conversion costs on FB games are way less than $300/user
Ah, I remember you. Would you mind going over how unedditreddit saved comments? Do you think you'd be able to make the same service now where threads reach 5,000+ comments daily?
I'd say the last thing you mention is how most projects on Kickstarter work, at least those I've seen. A common project type is for someone to produce an album or a movie, usually with no open license or special licensing privileges for you, which seems along the same lines as proprietary software.
Polish Internet community goes nuts against ACTA
Bandcamp has a slick job screening quiz
The advantage is partly from having less focus on the good of an individual vs the good of the whole. It looks like there's an inherent cultural aspect to this that exceeds what we've ever seen in "western" cultures, but some of it will almost certainly fall by the wayside as economic development continues, as it did in the west.

The edge will probably be there for generations to come, but I expect the gap to shrink dramatically.
Would it be possible to disrupt a citation index though? Surely they have access to a huge number of journals and a certain standing themselves...
> Disgust comes very quickly in economic history after sweatshops, though. Major industrialization along the lines described here, with mass-scale factories and a "company town" where employees live/work/sleep there, happened in the United States in the 1880s.

...and yet most people are still not sure if their clothing / food / gadget / jewellery was produced ethically.

For sure, there's stuff like fair trade, and "Ethical Consumer", but these are still niche products.

It seems many people are happy to offload those dirty low paid over worked unsafe jobs to other countries.
One way to think about it is that we shipped a lot of our pollution over to China also.
Question!
I always assumed a URL is same with or without the ending / (forward slash). How can they behave differently?

The server just receives the URL from the client as a string; there's nothing in the protocol that requires a trailing slash to be ignored. Consider:

if (REQUEST_URL == "/something") send_something()
if (REQUEST_URL == "/something/") send_something_else()

Many web servers, such as Apache, helpfully adds a missing slash if it detects that the URL you're trying to access actually maps to a directory in the file system.
vocational gives you a good feel for the realities of engineering.
'Ask on Google+' Links Now Appear On Google Results
Summify Shutdown Means Big Gains for News.me
The website looks really nice. If I was the editor for a journal, I would consider trying this out.

There have been a few "change academia" type websites on Hacker News before, each with a slightly different twist (like http://science.io). It would be great if they combined forces to make something comprehensive for journal publishing, paper reviewing, paper commenting, etc.

PS: I encountered one bug where one of the lightbox came up with the same content as the original window. So I was looking at a window inside a window...
Okay, but why would Spain enforce the law that's bad for them, that was forced on them?

Why not pass it and then never use?
Google’s Mobile Ad Revenues Could Surge To $5.8B In 2012
I was thrown into the world of online journalism in the late 90s when it was dictated by most style guides to capitalize Web. I still retain this as a habit in professional writing, although appreciate and occasionally use the newer forms like "website" instead of "Web site." The AP style guide also recommended "Web" although I don't know if it does now as I don't pay as much attention to style as I did.

Put it this way, journalists who've been around a long time learnt "Web" and will often stick with it out of habit. "E-mail" seems to be a little further along the line here though with old school journalists seemingly more likely to use "email" than they did 10 years ago.

(This page - http://www.apstylebook.com/?do=ask_faq - indicates that AP recommends "Web" but also "website" and "email.")

Internet, on the other hand, is (and continues to be) capitalized in most cases and certainly in formal usage. The Internet is an internet, but an internet is not necessarily the Internet.. ;-)
I think the community knows he's not holding the whole of them responsible. David is a well known, smart, decent, civil guy among them.

And maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anywhere he threatened to "use the site for damaging the reputation of the Scala community as a whole".
Vote me down if you want.

I don't know why you see is workers living in dorms as being disgusting.

You have to compare these people against waiters who only make money when customers tipped enough, or stitched together two or three jobs back to back. These people have no leverage against small business owners. FoxConn workers may threaten suicide, the waiters in the US knows that suicide is not going to make an iota of difference to the bosses.

At FoxConn, workers earn enough to have money left over for savings. Can you honestly say that for the minimum wage hourlies you see everyday but care to ignore?

The fact is - as reported - even if the Apple or Corning wished to build the factories in the US, the center of gravity of manufacturing has moved to Asia. It is very difficult to shift. Structurally, the manufacturing world has changed. It is very the same reason why other countries struggle to reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or build a new financial center outside of New York.
The wii is a great example of a system that everyone has and nobody plays.

I can't count the number of times I've visited people's houses with the wii unused. All the casual gamers Nintendo attracted won't be buying another system again.
A good resource to track this and other solar events is http://spaceweather.com/.
Office Depot tests PayPal's new point-of-sale system
Oh, the I guess its same as doing via .htaccess file on a linux host.

But then surprisingly Google is returning a 404 error page to its own search result!
And yet the most amazing thing of all is that despite our expansive definition of the middle class -- the middle class is getting smaller.
A nice side effect is that you'll probably buy fewer DVDs, because the effective cost would be $37.50 instead of $15.
I wonder if a prestigious department could start a practice of ignoring Elsevier-published articles in tenure decisions?
I'm still wondering when did Firefox completely fall off? It seems like the best demos for HTML5 capabilities are all done on Chrome.
+1

18 hour shifts are once in a while things that is asked of any employees. Ask any software developer in the game industry.
Sorry for nitpicking, but I don't think we should compare a container format (WebM) with a video compression format (H.264 or VP8). A container format isn't very likely to have hardware acceleration.
Ask HN: What to do with the ability to fly for free?
I have the ability to fly for free, thanks to some benefits generally unusual in the tech industry (but common in the airline industry). But I can't help feeling that I'm not really utilizing this opportunity very well. I tried thinking of ways to realize the value by somehow monetizing on this ability but unfortunately nothing worthwhile (&legal) comes to mind.

So, I’m reaching out to the HN community for suggestions, which would be deeply appreciated, I wouldn't mind parting with a "buddy pass" to the best answer.

What I’ve done so far:

I've flown out to SiValley, LA, NY at different code/startup conventions and I've loved every bit of it. Florida is no SiValley, and going to these new cities and meeting hackers and entrepreneurs really helped recharge my batteries. I figured, I get the low cost of living in FL, but get the benefit of being where it’s happening too!
My issue with email is that it is hard to quickly extract the information that I need from it. This issue does not usually stem from what the sender has written, but how it has been sent, and how various email clients interpret the message.

Threaded email conversations were a step in the right direction, but I've yet to come across an implementation that just works. I wish email clients were designed to look more like instant messaging applications by abstracting away everything in the body apart from the actual content.

Most clients handle replies acceptably most of the time, but I also want to see signatures gone (perhaps recognising phone numbers and adding them to my address book) and automatic re-formatting forwarded emails so that it looks like it was sent directly to me.

Of course sitting back and complaining is lazy and unproductive, perhaps I should have a go at building an email client that abstracts away the frustrating parts of email.

Edit: I'm envious of a lot of collaborative communication apps that exist but unfortunately everyone has to be using it which is a barrier to entry that it some circumstances, is just too high. I envision a similar tool that is built on top of email as a standalone application (web and/or desktop). This would afford the benefits of making communication a much quicker and easier to manage process, while not requiring anyone you need to communicate with to change their process.
Startup - LLC Converted to a C Corp -Equity to options
Anyone know how this will work?
I started with a company when it was an LLC. My contract had me gaining equity over a two year period. Well, during that first year, we switched to a c corp.. and stock options paperwork will come.

What do I look out for? I'm sure I'll be contacting an attorney about this, but thought I'd give this a shot.
Why is he leaving Lift and Scala? What does it say about a web framework whose founder is leaving -- does this mean the death of Lift?
My understanding is that they are using a bank to front this, thus some legal thinkers see this as not being exempt. You already know this though.

I've seen you post in MULTIPLE threads about Dwolla and bit coin. Please stop. I've held my tongue for so long justifying it with "he has a valid point" or "maybe he is on to something"

The truth of that matter is you come across as bitter and you are pissing all over your reputation. They found a way to operate in a way you didn't think of so you filed suit against them and now are on a smear campaign to destroy them.

I promise you what you're doing will not stop them and only makes me and others think you are very bitter about the whole ordeal.

Please read PG's recent essay on resourcefulness. Think about how it applies to you. If I were in your shoes, I'd consider adopting their strategy (it's working after all!) and trying to out innovate them on the front end instead of trying to use smear campaigns and legal action to prevent innovation in a system we so desperately need.
PAC Track: An app to track the outside groups funding the Republican primaries
You have to understand that in context.

That $17/day ends up being up to ~$5300/year. The official "absolute poverty" line in China is $90/year. That's not a typo -- $90/year.

When the cost of your meals can be measured in US cents, what constitutes a living wage is vastly different.