skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you think of the current SOPA-like "Research Works Act" bill being shuttled through Congress?

http://publishing.umich.edu/2012/01/05/more-legislative/
http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/24541-H...
As goods are produced more efficiently, they become less expensive to purchase for the consumer. As efficiency increases, then, workers have to work less.

The amount that Americans have worked per week has dropped almost monotonically (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us) since the mid eighteen-hundreds. The end goal is that we all don't have to work so much; maybe some of us not at all.

In short, an economy should pursue the most efficient strategy for manufacturing and delivering goods, and that happens (mostly) through the price system.
Form letter template for open source abandonware
It sounds more like you worked hard for two weeks to make that $1000 over a 6-month period. That sounds like trying to me. Of course, there's nothing wrong with trying to make money.
Link to the single page version, for those who don't want to read an article chopped up into seven parts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and...
"The primary reason for a native app is to provide functionality with poor or no signal."

Huh? The primary reasons for a native app are to create a superior user experience and have access to native hardware features.

You can create an offline mobile web app pretty easily (on iOS, at least, not sure about android).
In my mind, there are two ways to "kill" the movie and TV industries:

1) Replacement of the medium--have movies and TV go the way of Vaudeville through a more popular form of entertainment. Comcast makes upwards of $150/month per customer (2010 data), so there's money waiting to be made, and

2) Competition in the medium--low the barriers to entry for movie and TV production to displace today's power centers. Data from GE shows consumers are willing to spend $15-16/month for VOD-like services, so there's a market to foster alternative content in the medium.

That said, it's a difficult market. People's habits don't change easily. I worked for a Sequoia-funded streaming movie startup that just went out of business.
With automation, many of the jobs won't come back with the factory. There will be a few highly-technical positions for the engineers that set up the plant and keep it running, but for the most part it's like building a datacenter as mentioned in the article - $500 million for ~100 jobs.
LeanDomainSearch.com has a problem with "net"
There is no major white label producer in the US like Foxconn.

All the major manufactures of hardware have shops in the US. IBM in New York, Intel in Arizona and Oregon, AMD(back when they did that kind of thing) in Texas, etc, etc. Saying the US lacks sophistication and talent says more about them than it does about the US.
When research publishers' copyright trumps open access to science: H.R. 3699
Larger corporations such as Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit had a very important role in this. Arguably much more than the citizen action alone.
Select an actor for main role in the movie.
ie: Samuel L. Jackson in the Fight Club movie instead of Bard Pitt.
I know that the decentralized nature of Anonymous still befuddles the traditional media, and offshoots of Anonymous are apparently somewhat centralized, I foresee Anonymous as a name being co-opted by these stories of activities that make for good web traffic, and the real heart of the decentralized flux being more under the radar, which is probably what everyone would like anyway.
Zynga 'losing $150 on every new paying customer'
"Complexity theorists"?
I'm not so sure we should even aspire to train our future workforce for these jobs. Robotic workers are slated to supplant some of the most complex manufacturing tasks currently executed by humans. By the time our manufacturing force is primed to take on these jobs, we may find that they no longer exist.

As a side note, I think it's interesting that at a time when Americans are clamoring for more employment, they are simultaneously emptying their wallets for iPhones in record numbers. Somehow, despite the ailing economy, Americans can find it in their hearts to lift poor Chinese workers out of poverty.
Better information does not necessarily allow faster reaction. It could lead to information overload. In general, I think the problem of how to improve buyer reaction times in a market is going to be a lot harder than "give them more/better information" (although simply providing more/better information may indeed be the solution for some markets).

Also, that mobile app (or several) exists. But they rely on users reporting the data, so there are significant network effects -- the more people use it, the more timely and useful the data becomes.
Indeed, and Madonna's greatest genius was in marketing. Her singing and dancing were both technically mediocre, but she made listening to Madonna music something cool and fun in young people's minds.
I don't think it's a really big issue, but I agree with you wholeheartedly.

The color of the post should only change when it hits a negative score. A post downvoted by only one person is a reflection of that person rather than the post. Also, since they start at 1 point anyhow, it would be a very elegant system.
This. I'm not sure any country in the world ever rose up out of abject poverty (which persists in rural China, e.g. Szechuan province, where no Western reporters ever seem to go), without going through a phase where everyone had to work 12 hour shifts at shitty factory jobs. That includes the US, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and every European country.

It sucks that things seem to work that way, but it looks like China is moving in the right direction here, not the wrong direction. At some point (as was the case in all the countries I mentioned) they will demand and receive there rights. There is evidence of this happening in China already.

At least all the Foxconn workers all agreed to work at Foxconn, which implies that their alternatives were worse. There are countless millions of others in the world who aren't so lucky.
> 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.

That's second half of the 19th century western world by all accounts. It's exactly the kind of stuff you find in e.g. Zola's Germinal.
There is an excellent book "Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game" by Paul Midler [1] for those who want to know more about behind-the-scenes of China's manufacturing.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Poorly-Made-China-Insiders-Production/...
What I don't understand about deists (of every variety) is why they don't leave it to their all seeing all knowing deity to sort out those who don't believe in them...

But of course they can't because nothing happens because ...
slaves aren't paid, though, and these workers are. for me, the saddest thing about those conditions isn't that workers have to endure them, but that they voluntarily endure them. whether it's because either the pay is high enough or the job is better than any other job they can find or a combination of the two, the important thing to realize about these working conditions is that people are fighting to get/keep these jobs because the other jobs are worse. industrialization is messy and horribly exploitative.
Having worked a 12 hr shift in a tire factory I can tell you the only thing that would have to happen is the pay would have to meet American standards. I am not sure Apple is willing to pay that much when slave labor is available elsewhere.
Are you asking what a complexity theorist is, or are you asking why the title uses the term despite the fact that the article text introduces the researchers as physicists?
Well.. I already don't have a TV subscription. The only ads that I'm ever really exposed to are from watching The Daily Show online, occasionally, which are so annoying I always just mute.
While not directly comparable, this is almost what StackOverflow does. They don't force you to comment, but if you downvote they ask you to comment and the community does not approve of random downvotes. Additionally, downvoting costs a bit of rep.

In all, this means downvotes are uncommon; usually, people try to fix the problem (editing or asking the writer to edit). However, if something is downvoted, it is extremely likely that that post is irrelevant or actively wrong.
XML Schema (XSD): Using Compositors
In XML, you can use XSDs to define markup structures in varying levels of detail. Compositors are among the many XSD structures you can choose from when specifying your XML content models.
>The economist sees value being passed on to American citizens in the form of a price reduction of Apple products

The person in denial more like. Any ecomomist would realise the price of apple products is tied to how much you will pay (ie for profit maximisation), not how much it costs. That is how you make over $400k per employee.

The article points out that wages are a small part of the cost.
Any evolutionary system without appropriate mutation leads to a "monopoly" for the dominant. Capitalism is no different.

Our best bet solution is currently regulation. Not great, but it works.
Explaining Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem to a Twelve Year Old
An interesting related question might be: what happens when a subset of buyers can react quickly, but the rest react slowly? And ditto for a subset of sellers.
Kasia - Teen Kasia Fucking Herself at AmateurIndex.com
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 that whole decade was immediately full of labor unrest, most famously the Haymarket riot, but including thousands of strikes, protests, and other "labor disturbances" across the country, due to a feeling that industrialists were getting rich by treating their employees as quasi indentured servants. The backlash was severe enough that by 1900 both major parties were attacking the industrialists, with Democrats having ties to the unions, and the Republicans led by trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt. (I'm guessing the Chinese authorities are keenly aware of all that history.)
It's a nice idea, but I'm very unsure even this democratic model will be enough to convince enough consumers to actually _pay_ for content. If there is to be a future for commercial cinema of any sort, income will probably not be generated from sales, it will be be something like royalties from subscription (Netflix, Amazon, etc) revenues, which for the majority of inhabitants of the long tail will be woefully small, or we see the trend of films being glorified commercials continue with ever more egregious product placement.
“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

The rationale for doing a startup in Silicon Valley is that everything you need is right there in Silicon Valley with you. Apparently, parts of China are turning into the Silicon Valley of manufacturing.
On the topic of residuals and the intentions of studios ("Their intention is to keep money on the table of all those creative people. To keep paying residuals to actors who might not find work for years at a time."):

First, in 2007 the CEO of Warner Bros., among others, called for an end to residuals [0]. Second, studios are notorious for creative accounting which results in people with residuals on "net" profit being paid nothing; for instance, one of the Harry Potter movies grossed $938 million worldwide but "lost" $167 million [1], [2] The latter link cites a court saying the way Hollywood determines pay for authors was "unconscionable" (I wish its citation was to a source that's online). And third, I don't have a reference at hand for this one because I heard this on NPR years ago, but there was a trial where a studio accountant was questioned about the accuracy of movie profit statements, and he said that in his entire career he'd never seen a single movie where the accounting was accurate.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/business/media/11cnd-guild...
[1] http://www.deadline.com/2010/07/studio-shame-even-harry-pott...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchwald_v._Paramount
I don't see any indication they aren't paid overtime, and other stories indicate that they are, in fact, paid overtime.
repair and maintenance jobs are better than what is currently here
Yes, I also read that very paragraph and highlighted it to copy in to a post over here for further discussion (and with much the same conclusion as you). Here were two others from later in the article:

:"The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day."

Not just slave labour, but Chinese-government subsidised slave labour.

:"The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day."

... no further comment.
Check out Browncoats: Redemption on how a movie can be produced relatively inexpensively.

iirc, they received ~$100k in cash and $250k in donated resources, equipment, etc. Yes, $350k is a good amount of money but compared to the production costs from a major studio, this is probably the catering budget.. and it's nothing for most of the VC's we read about around here.

(Disclosure: I was an extra and a buddy of mine was the producer.)
would you mind expanding on why you think this result means capitalism is flawed?
On Book Writing - A Q&A With a Successful Author
Apple working to adopt 802.11ac 5G Gigabit WiFi this year
It's as if they stumbled upon the hype from a few months ago...

What USV wants, USV gets.
>Any ecomomist would realise the price of apple products is tied to how much you will pay, not how much it costs.

It's tied to both. The profit maximizing price varies with production cost.
We don't need to Kill Hollywood - We need to change hearts and minds.
Cumulative chart of tweets by members of U.S. Congress for "SOPA" and "PIPA".
I don't they are so much coming back, as they are probably moving to some other country (e.g. India).
Dwolla is different because they're not building a PayPal, their building a Visa. Long term that's their vision. That's what USV is betting on that someday you'll be paying with Dwolla at Walmart.
> You then distribute the film through the site, for a fee. Split the revenues 70 / 20 / 10. The film makers get 70%, the "producers" (the funders) get 20%, and the site gets 10%.

This would be illegal unless everyone is a qualified investor. It's the reason Kickstarter requires you to "donate" money and you cannot return any kind of financial compensation.
We've been discussing HR3699 on Scholastica: http://scholasticahq.com/conversation/questions/hr3699-and-t...

At the risk of being reductive, I generally believe publicly funded research ought to be publicly available (or at least available at a price that's reasonable for the average person).
The article clearly describes a study performed in diligence (from the looks of it) which reveals a perhaps serious flaw that permeates (or can permeate) in all markets. The conclusion being that cartels emerge as a product of the system, not as a product of immorality or deceit.

I guess I understand why people would not want to see it put so bluntly (capitalism is flawed. full stop.) but even you in so many words said the same thing. It is in part inherently corrupt and the silent hand of the market is sometimes a sinister one.
Um, the reviews say it doesn't play music.
Have you actually looked at their API? I'm using it for something quite different from that. (My site isn't live yet or I'd show you.)
Quick and easy Javascript Namespacing
What's a possible monetization strategy here? Am I missing something?
How awesome! The key to success in device manufacturing is: 1) treat your employees like animals (or worse) 2) get the host government to subsidize the endeavor under threat that you'll move your business to a more accommodating country and 3) have a deep disdain for the responsibility of corporations to do anything but make as much money as possible.

Apple is certainly not the only company that does this but they've certainly made a fine art of it. This is simply grotesque. Society created corporations (though there appears to be some debate about this) because it was thought that limited liability would make us better off, you know - more, better stuff. Corporations clearly feel that they have some inalienable rights and those include screwing the societies that enabled them if it means making another buck. This is vile and sociopathic.

If a corporation does not serve the best interests of the society that enables it, that corporation should be terminated.
That is exactly what will happen. Robots will eventually replace nearly all manual labor.
Actually no, people don't just take their ball and go home like this in funded proprietary projects that aren't maintained by very small teams. If he was a paid for contributor, he would have handed off the domain no question. Because it wouldn't have been his to keep in the first place, it would have belonged to the project collective.

Smaller proprietary get shut down and money dries up, but nobody simply throws a wrench into the machine quite like up and leaving a project but taking project resources with you like that. It simply doesn't happen outside of the open source community, and it is a unique problem. Branding it as a simple shutdown is also glossing over the problem.
Thousands of workers putting nuts on bolts aren't the problem; the problem is the dozens to hundreds of industrial engineers supervising them.
Personally I would rather have people contribute to open-source and quit when they want. I rather prefer the "clusterfucks" you mention, versus the alternative.

That's the nature of open-source that people don't understand: it's not about getting stuff for free, although that's a nice side-effect. Instead it's about having the freedom to fork it.

So if you find yourself in such a situation, either donate enough money to keep the maintainer happy or step up and contribute.
Apparently "all" is an exaggeration, but I have received similar emails from the two courses I signed up for. The telltale paragraph seems to be "Unfortunately, there are still a few administrative i's to dot and t's to cross." So the problem isn't technical, it's likely political.
The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business.

And of course, when people in the '70s and '80s complained about Asian companies dumping TVs and memory chips in the US, they were denounced as anti-free-trade. And this is the result.
That's a false dichotomy. A good's price is tied to how much you'll pay and how much it costs. If an iPhone cost $200 more to make, it'd be a good bet that it wouldn't sell for the same price.
UC Berkeley's course on Data Structures [Fall 2006]
There's nothing wrong with dropping support, but trying to delete the source on the internet seems petty and completely unnecessary. Some of the projects I use a lot were basically abandoned but left open (hey, Google Code and Github are free); they were later picked up, improved and supported by others. (JS2 mode is the best example of this.)

Also, I really think you should be polite even if rudeness is justified. Of course, being polite does not mean yielding to requests. But that's a different matter entirely.
I would just go somewhere else and start working. If someone actually had the balls to try and cause problems for me (for zero gain on their part) I would probably liberally advertise that fact and drag them through the mud.

In your friend's case, since he will have to quit under duress, he should be entitled to unemployment benefits while he finds some sane employers. No, it is not reasonable/normal to negotiate with insane idiots.
> Label how many children were used to produce the product.

Exactly who is going to count this and not report back 0? Either because they resolved all the issues they found, because it's illegal, or because they're not going to admit to it, because it's illegal.
The $40 plan for the link you provided only gives 6TB/month. These guys charge $5/TB beyond that, so with 30TB would put you closer to $200/month.

Not totally unreasonable, but five times higher (400% higher) than the number you quoted. So, back to the numbers - that's 1.5cent per full length movie -- and they're probably getting something like $0.40 CPM == 400 microusd; Assuming they show 10 ads per download, that means they get 4 milliusd per download; slightly higher than the cost you assumed, but almost 25% of the cost at the link you provided.

Even if they get it much cheaper, something still doesn't add up here -- unless most of their downloads are not full length movies (e.g. tv shows, songs, pdf files) - in which case it makes much more sense.

[edited: corrections]
Taking your argument as a premise, for cinema 2) is well in progress. Canon EOS SLR's, stuff to hang them on, and digital editing are knocking down a big part of equipment costs. (You still have lights and all that, but there are ways to keep that manageable.)

You're left with wages, permits, and stuff I won't try to guess (e.g. catering, etc., etc.).

High level professional abilities will continue to be a minority of interested parties. But, with cost of entry so lowered, the population to draw from will be much larger. And with the lower barrier to entry, people old and particularly young will be able to practice these skills and have the motivation of a distribution channel to fuel them on, without fight for a place and clamor to buy into such an entrenched regime.

Another big, undersung aspect of such a transition is to get the writers, and the artisans, to work for the new model. Really good writing does not come easy. But there is still plenty of talent, and compensation under the new model(s) should not have too much difficulty being competitive for these jobs (maybe I'm wrong, but based one what I hear/read).

Oh, the other 800 lb gorilla: Unions. Movie and TV production is very heavily unionized. If they want to strongarm their members and potential members from participating, this could present a significant problem. A question might be whether beginners/outsiders can build enough momentum if there is little or no support from seasoned professionals.

This is all off the top of my head. I may be wrong.
>making it in america would only add $65 to the production cost of a single phone.

I did read the article. I wasn't talking about total money to make an iPhone in the US; I was talking about total money to employ 200,000 workers.

Sure we could make it in the US, but it wouldn't add anywhere near 200,000 workers. The OP was talking about employment value.
My money is on conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and National Review coming out against it (largely for reasons that the tech community was not focusing on) as the main driving force of change, at least on the Republican side.