skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
India is already getting too expensive. The Philippines is the hot place now, but wages are rising quickly there also. Companies could start to look to Africa, but the corruption and lack of a government in many of the countries makes that a tough move.

What will happen is as wages rise more and more work will simply be automated. Factories will be built where they most geographically make sense (close to components, raw materials, customers, etc...)

Expect to see mini silicon valleys of manufacturing pop up much like what happened in Detroit with automakers and part suppliers during the hey day.

Also, saying they aren't coming back is ignoring that they never really left. US manufacturing is still growing strong, and the main reason long term for more new factories to not be built in the US will have to do with the EPA more than labor wages.
I might be an outlier - but I know that these bad habits formed BEFORE I was an outlier.

As I mention in another comment, the important part is the transition from inbox to to-do list having a level of intelligence to it that considers context, the relationship with the person, current workload and priorities, etc. Right now a human does that. I'd pay for a product that did it, if it didn't feel to the sender like a robot was working for me.

I've collaborated with Amy, yes, but we're not nor have we ever been business partners. Good friends and co-conspirators for sure, like many of you on here. Her husband Thomas is her only business partner.
That's right. Assuming you're American, its exactly what your grandparents or great grandparents might have done in the late 1800s or early 1900s when they got off the farm.

When the Chinese people have had enough of their working conditions, they'll change things themselves.
Prestige is not something you decide you want in the morning and have by evening. A lot of the most prestigious universities are very old, and so it is with the most prestigious journals.

The whole academic culture needs to be changed. People like Gowers who already earned their stripes can begin to change attitudes. 99% of mathematicians can do nothing except hope they can get a permanent job one day. And even then their institutions are going to force them to undergo yearly evaluations where they have to give an account of what papers they wrote that year (too bad if you are working on a multi-year breakthrough) and whether the papers were published in journals they deemed respectable (universities are also competing with each other for prestige).

Another problem is that too many mathematicians are devoutly religious when it comes to speaking out. Any kind of rocking the boat is likely to affect your karma (chance of getting tenure/promotion/funding).
Solving Easy Problems
And, even if you get something recorded, mixed, and mastered by really talented independent professionals, the label will sometimes ask you for the stems (or even to re-record certain parts) so they can bring in "their guy" to put "their sound" on it.

Luckily with the labels fading as a distribution mechanism for independent music this is not happening as much anymore.
Brrr, I would be terrified if something like this happened to any of the open source software I regularly use; and I even tried to get some 'pet issues' into them, which weren't honored, so I had to carry along private patches which I had to apply after every update, but at least I didn't 'bitch' about it.

Doesn't this happen all the time?
OK, what do you propose as the solution then?

If you read the article none of the executives quoted directly mention how cheap Chinese labor is. They talk about how quickly they can "scale up or down." There are only 2 countries where you can scale up your semi-skilled work force rapidly, and the other country hasn't started ramping up for manufacturing just yet.

Regarding your comment about suicide, China for various reasons has a rather high suicide rate. Its not clear to me if the suicide rate amongst FoxConn workers is just a symptom of their society or something really bad about FoxConn itself.
Open-source alternative to Adobe Flash: Alpha released
It's basically an umbrella term for studying systems that are complex in the sense that they have strange nonlinear effects and may not be "well-behaved" in the way that classical, mathematically well-understood systems are. A large portion of it grew out of chaos theory, though some has gone in other directions since then.
Yet PayPal is already doing that too.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-paypal-t...
You may not fully understand the situation based on what you wrote. My company is suing California, not Dwolla. You cannot just start doing business in a state where you are suing the same regulators who have already threatened you with jail time for doing business. This isn't a matter of out-innovating.

The clever manner that Dwolla found to get around the law was to break it and ignore it and hope no one would notice. That's why I think it's worth writing about.

If my lawsuit against California is successful, then my company and Dwolla will be able to compete on a level playing field, which is the ideal situation. The lawsuit isn't designed to prevent innovation, it's designed to allow it.

So as you can see, you have the entire situation backwards. Instead of telling me to stop (which I won't, because I'm as entitled to voice my opinion about these laws and the way companies are skirting them as everyone else was to voice their respective opinions about SOPA), some support would be nice. Maybe your company would like to get into payments one day, too, and if so you shouldn't have to run the risk of jail or being shut down arbitrarily.
Not only that - but it is American's companies willingness to exploit those conditions for their own benefit.

Apple cannot make the glass screens or the iPhone in the US because no US contractor can supply those type of conditions.
I hope you get a chance to go and do this one day. It sounds like you may be onto something.
It's a very common bug actually. When you use php_explode() for the REQUEST_URL for a case like '/webmasters/tools/submit-url' the array returned has a structure like array([0] => '', [1] => 'webmasters', [2] => 'tools', [3] => 'submit-url')
Whereas in case of REQUEST_URL like '/webmasters/tools/submit-url/' the array returned has a structure like array([0] => '', [1] => 'webmasters', [2] => 'tools', [3] => 'submit-url', [4] => '')
So, in the case with an extra '/' the length of aruguments increases and also the last argument becomes ''. Usually this is handled by busting the empty last and first array indexes.
Thats why better to make your own function to decode urls when using them with .htaccess ;)
Research Works Act
Keep in mind that it is an American company that these workers are manufacturing products for.

Should we as Americans feel good about ourselves for giving work to overseas workers that is better than their baseline, but still represents shit work that we ourselves would never do?
Commodity News for the week ending January 20, 2012
So what I read here is that because Americans desire more normal lives than having to get up at midnight with a pastry and coffee to meet a last-minute design decision, that work should not be in America.

Quintessential Jobs, if you ask me. And not the way a world economy should be run.
I don't like their assumption of 50% profit margin (including nothing but hardware). They have the manufacturing cost and the retail cost, why not use the american manufacturing cost to think up a real retail price?
There's a newer version (1.3.4 vs. 1.0.6/1.1rc2) at http://pencil.evolus.vn/en-US/Downloads/Application.aspx

I don't know if it fixes any of the problems deyan mentions (or which version he used), but 1.3 is about 2 years newer than the version on their older site. They really should delete the old copy of their website's URLs, and redirect to their new site.
Oh, I guess that explains the suicides at Foxconn, then.
A lot of the "casual" households I know that were second-wave Wii adopters now have and use Xbox 360s with Kinect.

So they did buy another system, one that in most ways delivered on the promise of the Wii interface better than the Wii did.
That, my friend, is bullshit. Here in Indiana, we have factory space standing empty, thus no environmental review required, even if we had environmental reviews in Indiana, which we fucking don't.

All we require is health care and a working wage - and it's cheaper to let us die.
HTML5 Gaming: animating sprites in Canvas with EaselJS
It sounds like you saying the indexing services are the problem? I don't think that's the case. The citation indices can give you a rough idea of a journal's clout within their field based on how frequently their articles are cited. That's (at least arguably) a reasonable way of measuring prestige. Obviously, authors want to be published in the top journals in their field, which also makes sense. We're not specifically trying to disrupt any of these practices.
Six ways to write more comprehensible code (2007)
Exactly, they both see the end game.

When I referenced Paypal, I meant it in terms of what we traditionally think of as Paypals core business which is online payments made via checks, credit cards, and debit cards.
What will your 5 bullet points be at the end of your life?
http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2012/01/your-5-bullet-points.html
Inbound Marketing Attracts Millions from Google, Salesforce and Sequoia
That's the main problem I see, really: buy-in from high-profile institutions. If a decent number of them started to publicize that they see papers published with New-Uber-Journal-System.XYZ as "preferred" over traditional papers, then people would queue up to publish there, and would force others to follow suit or be seen as "2nd rate". To do that though, NUJS better be have a bombproof method to produce quality reviewing (high-profile reviewers, a system of incentives targeted on quality not quantity etc etc).
The jobs aren't coming back. That doesn't mean manufacturing won't come back.

Fully automated production in the US seems more viable than manual labor in the US. Perhaps it will be more viable than manual labor in other countries as well.

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who has experience in this area if that is likely?
He has the right to quit, but the domain is a .org, and its name is not his but that of the language; it should belong to the community. If he wants to stop running it that's fine, but he should let it lapse or sell it to someone who will maintain it for the community, not turn it into something else.
Also, there may be structural reasons why it can't work for everyone. I imagine that if everyone studied harder, the score needed to go to college would go up.
That's already there in droves: that's basically the mantra of every indie film director, iFilm, most film schools, alternative distributors and theaters, and just about everyone else connected to movies who isn't the big studios. They even have substantial seed funding for that kind of thing (much larger than YCombinator's typical seed funding) through a large number of directors, actors, grant agencies, universities, and rich film fans who regularly fund "not Hollywood" experimentation (sort of that industry's version of angel investors and incubators).
Kill Hollywood, Not Movies
He tried to transition it to a new owner. No one answered the call.
Well just see what there is to see, go to Rio for the weekend or see the Grand Canyon or visit Panama or London. Visit all 50 States. Go to SF and hang out on Berkley Campus for the weekend. Just Go try different things and see which ones you like. Go to New Zealand for your vacation. Just GO
Direct contributions are capped at $5,000. SuperPAC contributions are not capped at all and are anonymous until well after the election. [wikipedia]
You were downvoted, but as a longtime EFF member I have much the same question. I pay them to get out in front of issues like SOPA/PIPA, and I was disappointed to see that it didn't happen. I don't believe I saw a single instance of press coverage, either online or off, where the EFF's name was prominently associated with the anti-SOPA resistance effort.
Thanks for your reply.

I don't really understand the difference you place between physical property, and intellectual property. My ownership of both is imposed by the government. Without government support, I am sure I would lose control of both my physical and intellectual property very quickly (unless, in both cases, I started shooting people who tried to take them).
"This ignores the fact that H.264......"

What ignores this? This article is talking about the market share of different web browsers.... What are they ignoring? I don't understand how this comment has anything to do with the article.
More information is not necessarily better information.
Especially concerning privacy, these cartoons remind me of the Qatar censorship page:

http://i.imgur.com/MfKOJ.jpg

They are trying to make something nefarious look fun. I mean, it's great that the barista down the street knows that like cream with my coffee, but I wouldn't want her to know everything about me. So why would people feel comfortable allowing a distant corporation to "get to know them"?
To be fair, it sounded like Foxconn was at capacity and the 18 hour shifts were more common, but I don't really know for sure. And make no mistake: a shift like that is brutal for anyone who has to stand the whole day.

But yeah, things like that happen in America, too. It usually leads to high burnout unless the workers are desperate. Things like 15% turnover per month are pretty average.
This article is misleading for several reasons:

* The article describes a guy making sodas from freshly made juice. That changes the entire picture. The headline should be "Making Sodas From Freshly Squeezed Juice (It's Harder Than You Think".

* It's perfectly simple to make natural sodas with cane sugar instead of HFCS — indeed, a lot of smaller soda manufacturers in the US already use cane sugar, including such brands as Fentimans and Jones Soda. In Europe, most sodas, including Coca-Cola, are made with cane sugar, not HFCS.

* You don't have to use fresh-squeezed juice to be "natural". Fentimans, for example, uses spices and fermented juices in their sodas. The original Coca-Cola was a blend of essential oils (lime, orange, coriander, nutmeg etc.), ie. natural ingredients, and it's perfectly feasible to make sodas today using the same ingredients.
Our concern is [whether or not it's worth] spending $300 to get these customers when people are spending $150

Good god. My concern would be whether they will still be able to milk people for $150 after there are 12 step programs and "just say no to Zynga" PSAs.
$6.50 of manual labor in China translates into $68 worth of labor in US only if you forget about automation. At American wage levels a whole set of production steps could be more profitably done by robots.
I don't know about monetizing, but I had this for a few years with when my mom married an airline pilot (until I got too old).

I abused the heck out of it. Found places where flight schedules facilitated daytrips and would spend afternoons in NY or DC. Went somewhere for a weekend every month. Went to Europe for a summer. Dated someone in another city for a while. I became very familiar with the flight schedules for the airline.

Ah, those were the days.
Interesting to see a startup funded by Kickstart rather than VC.
Ok, here is the plan: cut them off from the internet:

1) Open source service that identifies every hollywood agency, movies studio, and major individual by IP.
2) Home IP address as well.
3) Attach tracking cookies to them
4) Open source API that operates just like an ad server does, and instead of checking home for ads to serve up to these customers, we serve 404 pages. Just black them the hell out.

The result: hollywood is now unable to use a sizeable portion of the internet.

They fired off the nuclear missiles first, fuck it, it's time for DEFCON-1.
Agreed. The whole "Einstein was bad a school" seems to be a myth based on a misinterpretation of the 1-6 system (apparently Germany and Switzerland had them reversed). Some more discussion to the origins here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/956/was-einstein...
Haha, and you really believe that "we" stopped it? And what did we stop?
Hollywood Is in the Past—The Future of TV Is Now
Here's a suggestion; don't ask about creative ways to use airplanes with the user name "killa911".
Yeah, the math is a bit wonky and requires speculation about many numbers we don't know, but the fact is that Zynga spent $120MM to grow...slightly. It's not the straw to break the bulldog's back, but a straw nonetheless.
The US used to have worker dorms (actually, more like company towns) back in the day. They often forced people to shop in company stores and otherwise exploited them. I don't know if that's happening in China--I have yet to read allegations of that--but it's one thing I wonder about, given the historical precedent. With long shifts like that, it's not surprising that they want to keep workers close. So it could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on whether and how they're taking advantage of the arrangement.
I've worked on a remote mine site in Australia before. Single workers are housed in dorms built by the employers. These have cooks and cleaners. We have regular hours, but if there were to be some urgent work, we would be expected to get our act together and get things done. (The only point of difference is we get paid overtime).
how about something like this:
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/

:)
You are probably correct in that I don't doubt you that I got that detail wrong. I'm sorry I got these details wrong, but I still think my point stands.

Aaron, I'm giving you support through tough love. I'm telling you that the way you show up on these threads and behave isn't doing you any favors. That's all.

I appreciate the effort to campaign for this -- long term it's probably a good thing for startups assuming you can set the right precedent.

However, it goes back to the resourcefulness bit, in the long term my money is on Dwolla succeeding because they are focused on building stuff and skirting the regulation. I know you've had issues getting VC money, and I think this is why.

I'm not trying to start a flame war, just some suggestions on how you appear to the HN population. I wish you the best of luck, and if nothing else you're very persistent.
Just to make sure, do you agree with the definition I alluded to in my comment (where "correct" means that market prices track intrinsic value, and "flawed" is anything else)?

In any case, we already know that there are cases where capitalism fails, the best-known probably being the monopoly. We even know that there are certain market conditions that encourage these failure modes (for example, economies of scale encourage monopolies and oligopolies). Recognizing another possible failure mode (non-collusive cartels) and the conditions that trigger it doesn't push capitalism over the line from desirable to flawed. Maybe you already believe that capitalism is flawed, but I don't think that this by itself pushes it over the line.
> the domain is a .org

That has no particular significance. The Big Three TLDs haven't had any special requirements or policies in many years.

> its name is not his but that of the language

The language's name is "Scala", not "scala-tools.org", but let's assume you just think any domain with "scala" in its name is effectively the name "Scala". I have some news for you:

"Scala" is also the name of a typeface, the student chapter of the American Library Association, part of human anatomy, a unit of area, a couple of music albums, a software company with no connection to the programming language, a couple of entertainment venues, two locations, a surname for I-don't-know how many people, and a snail.

> it should belong to the community

A "community" cannot actually own a thing. Who exactly do you think should have the domain? Who represents "the community"? And why exactly does this amorphous "community" have some special claim to one of an infinite number of domains that might be used for similar or entirely different purposes?
Thanks and that's definitely worthwhile. However, despite the free tickets, rental cars, hotel cost, eating out can really add up. Not to mention, I end up relaxing more than I should and get backed up on my startup work. Thus far I've burned thru several thousand dollars from my savings (not really regretting it, but it's not sustainable)

I've thought about trading trips to the Bahamas in exchange for coding with me on some projects. I suggested this to some hackers I met at a codeathon but they didn't seem to receptive (in retrospect, I can see how that may seem really shady).
Especially in a factory, you shouldn't trust anyone giving you numbers that are too good to be true. Sure, you can have automated processes that keep track of things, but if anything unexpected happens (which is common) and the processes change in ways the monitors don't expect, your numbers become meaningless.
Um, 'middle class' is squarely in the $10-15/hr range in the US today. That's about $25-30k per parent, with 2 working parents. That's 'average' in most of the US.
Y Combinator: Kill Hollywood
Why Some Startups Succeed And Others Fail: 10 Fascinating Harvard Findings
That's exactly what I thought when I saw it. How can they completely ignore the fact that he publicly states how heavily they lobby, and yet all Fox takes away is "See, Obama takes in way too much in donations from Hollywood."
I only expected to read about SOPA/PIPA on HN and other tech media sites, but I was rather surprised to see dozens of my non-techy friends on facebook protesting the bills. Good step forward. Lets keep it up.
Surprised Backbone.js(http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/) didn't make the list.
Massive economic benefit, yes, but also a massive ecological disaster, as anyone who has experienced the smog around manufacturing centers in China could tell you just by seeing the impact with the naked eye (and feeling it in their reduced-capacity lungs).

China's version of the CDC is currently advising people in Beijing to stay indoors because the smog is so bad.
In programming you don't have to be monogamous, you can select another tool for a certain job without implicitly saying that all the stuff you used before was worthless crap.

It does not mean anything, it means at most that he doesn't think it is a silver bullet.
I'm looking for it myself. I wouldn't be surprised if Dodd himself requested the video pulled from the network.
I have been following the creators of the platform for a while. Currently they are working on Iron Sky (http://www.ironsky.net/).
Email basically is other peoples TODO list for YOU.

Product look kinds of cool but the statement that every email needs to be actioned turns me wayyyy off.

Email is pretty much the worst productivity tool ever. Mainly because the second you freaking open it you hit the Inbox, which can contain stuff from relatives, spam or assorted marketing messages. Lots of stuff that should never have made it there in the first place. Even if something useful arrives it's so unlikely that it is the number 1 thing you should be working on.

But yeah will be interesting to see how they look at it.
Boffins Propose Secure Method For Quantum Computing In The Cloud