skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Me personally, I am not so much shocked as I do have an overwhelming feeling of deja vu. Similar stories of greed, power and also corruption are a regular occurrence (everywhere). Actually, I find a bit candid honesty refreshing.

And out of the many shocked, only a couple of people seem to have the audacity to point to the root causes of this problem and talk reforming campaign financing and lobby laws, and even less talk about reforming the way the democratic process now works.

You hint that changing the system via the incentives in place could be very easy.

But this begs the question, why isn't this done yet? Is it not that big an issue actually? Is there a majority with a vested interest in the current system? Surely the thea party has shown that a well organized vocal group can gain influence, so a starting minority doesn't have to be a problem to further political ideas.
How to make your first videogame
I have a problem with trying to kill the internet.
He mentioned "cheap labor" and "unregulated work conditions"? Aren't those the arguments against and for unions?
Axiom: If you don't pay them to keep the lights on, they will go out of business. Corollary: If it isn't worth it to you to pay for their added value, they don't have a real business.
tldr

When President Obama asked Steve Jobs why iPhones can't be made in America, he replied: "Those Jobs aren't coming back."

Companies no longer feel an obligation to support American's workers. Apple feels that to design one of their products with the highest quality - that it has to be manufactured in China. There is no other place in the world that can scale up (millions in weeks) while maintaining a very healthy profit margin. The fact of the matter is that the supply chain for high-end and low-end electronics does not touch America in a significant way - it is mostly in Europe and Asia. Even Corning's much touted Gorilla Glass is manufactured in new factories in Asia because that is where the action is.

Even though once Apple marketed about being made in America, that is no longer the reality.

In America, you cannot wake up workers for an emergency production shift at midnight. In China, that is business as usual.

As the pace of innovation quickens (five iPhones in four years), American businesses must rely more on China to compete globally.
This was essentially Slashdot's approach to voting. Make mod points a sparse currency, forcing users to be far more cautious in their use of them.

I don't agree with their policy that those who vote in a thread may not comment in that thread but I think a lot can still be learned from Slashdot's model.
I know many people operate this way, but it's not standard enough. I get people who CC me on stuff because they want the primary person to feel like they're the real decision maker, and the CCed people are supposed to chime in if we want to support or vote down the email's content. Who is CCed and who is TOed can be something of a political game. Not saying it should, but it is.
There are many of these "content curators" out there. Perhaps none that has gained as big a following as Ebert, but there are people out there like the Smithian, Christine Friar, Bobby Finger, even Sasha Frere Jones running very popular blogs curating internet content.
Man faces five years for 'God does not exist' Facebook post
Those jobs couldn't exist in the US. The article said Foxconn has 200,000 workers assembling iPhones. The average wage for a factory worker in China is ~$200 (according to a quick Google search). That's $40 million per month, now move those employees to the US and it's going to cost around 20 times that.

Close to a billion dollars a month to employee an equivalent number of US citizens. The iPhone couldn't exist at those prices.
Well it seems anything having to do with manufacturing moves to China. How long before software engineering moves there too?
The part about Eric Saragoza (the guy who worked for Apple in Elk Grove 10 years ago) was interesting. He was at a level of education that could have given him opportunities to work his way into middle class maybe 20-30 years ago. But why did he have 5 children? This may seem harsh, but that seems like a foolish decision. Why would he decide to support 5 more people?
'Anonymous' hackers attack Brazilian websites
This is a great example of why large parts of the open source community are complete clusterfucks. There have been some amazing programs and services that emerge from this model, but by and large all projects have the same caveats: Nobody takes overall responsibility, everybody contributor is an unquestionable Jesus character, every contribution is a donation with strings attached, expecting the status quo to be maintained on a popular project is unabashed entitlement.

It's not like his standpoint is wrong, or incorrect, even selfish or unreasonable. Yet it does still damage the community and nobody will take responsibility for said damage. This is why people get paid for things. No matter how altruistic your intentions and actions, if people come to rely on your service then they will be upset and frustrated when it disappears.

TL;DR - He's right, he doesn't owe anyone anything. That doesn't make his actions any less damaging though, and simply glossing over this as "user entitlement" is ignoring a systemic problem with unfunded open source projects.
This is relevant now, because the EU Parliament will vote if they pass ACTA or not on January 26th, just 6 days from now.

A few countries, including US and Canada have already signed ACTA, but if EU signs it, too, it will have global ramifications.

More information on ACTA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=citzRjwk-sQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_bERAf5KAg&feature=relat...

Taking action for Europeans (call/e-mail your own EU Parliament members):

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/full-list.html
Megaupload.com Update: Lawyer Says Swizz Beatz Is Not Company CEO
I tried logging into several of these. The first time I did, FB gave me a message saying, "whoops, you changed your password on Jan 5th, do you not remember doing that?" I wonder how long ago he retrieved this data.

After that, they all gave me the roadblock page. https://www.facebook.com/roadblock/

It is interesting what the first line of that page is. That seems rather ingenuous:

"Recently, there was a security incident on another website unrelated to Facebook. Facebook was not directly affected by the incident, but your Facebook account may be at risk if you were using the same password in both places."
You are right in most of your comment. And yes, people always has been tired of having to learn how to use new stuff (I can imagine a caveman grudging about having to learn how to start a fire. LOL)

But the scale and complexity is important too. You can't compare a radio with two dials, and a smartphone with lots of screens. It's a whole new level of effort to learn how to use it. It takes more time, and it stack over previous knowledge you are supposed to have. But I know lots of elder people who don't even know how to turn on a computer. And sadly, they reject smart phones and other new things because they just gave up.
Deploying a Superfeedr-rack Sinatra app on Heroku
Social Engineering Toolkit – User Agent Switcher – setuas.sh
I'm surprised at the fertility rate figures for the US, as I expected to see a downward trend there.

Among lower middle class and immigrants (especially those that are Hispanic), I expect fertility rates to remain higher. However, with the current anti-immigration climate in Washington, I suspect a steep drop off as these groups start to shrink with the decline in immigration to the US.

As you get into upper middle class and higher class families, fertility rates appear low. Two kid families are the norm that I'm seeing in people in my age group (30 years+) and I see a lot of one kid and no kid families too.
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Clickable, non-obfuscated link: http://www.scholasticahq.com/
The problem is the ecosystem. Those low-paying slavish jobs support the next layer of skilled middle-class engineers and infrastructure. If there is no manufacturing in the USA there is no need for manufacturing process engineers. As the article said, even material suppliers like Corning have to locate their manufacturing nearby to be responsive to orders and save money on shipping costs.
The Next Web is hiring a Lead designer
> If I take a bunch of photos on my digital camera, and my camera is stolen, are my photos not also 'stolen' from me as I no longer have possession of them?

Your camera is stolen.

If someone left you your camera, and merely deleted the pictures, and copied them onto their system, that would be copyright infringement at best (ignoring the act of hacking your camera, etc).

Whatever other philisophical argument you want to present is meaningless without an actual law backing it up. While it might feel like theft, it's not.

> is that depriving the original owner of their only copy is being called stealing.

That's the argument. It's flawed. If you make a copy of something an upload it to MU, MU now has a copy. If you delete your original copy, that doesn't bless the copy with special protection. Indeed, by uploading to MU, you probably gave them permissions to distribute the download, as well as other rights. In fact, I'd be surprised if any cloud service like what we are discussing gave you special rights over the hardware that was storing your devices.

MU is the bad guy here. They are the ones that were allegedly doing illegal things while accepting honest customers. It's a shame, yes, but the reason people are up in arms is because MU is the "little" guy fighting against the "evil" government and the vile "MPAA/RIAA." Sorry, but I don't sell out just because I don't like one side.
Stripe is the best right now. Great user interface, great API, and awesome staff. Give it a try.
2checkout does not have a great API (they do have an API), and their subscription reporting is lacking.
FTA: "However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays."

Economists? Only economists who either don't understand basic principles like division of labor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour) and comparative advantage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage), or are willing to neglect them in return for being on some protectionist politician's payroll.
Evil media corporations also make money from advertising, so add in TV and guess how much they get per advert you watch...
So in a generation or so, those jobs won't exist in China either. People won't stand still, and they want better for their children.

Robots?
i think you didn't read the article? They cited a study that claimed that since the majority of iphone cost is materials and logistics, making it in america would only add $65 to the production cost of a single phone.

But the real barrier is that making all the screws, the gaskets, etc, is all overseas and it would be prohibitive to have to ship those raw materials.

And sure, to make ALL those things -- American all the way down -- would be quite expensive. But nobody is advocating for more american factories making screws.
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I've only ever been able to think of two directions we can go in.

We can strip away pensions, insurance, environmental regulations, unions, OSHA, and every other advantage the U.S. workforce retains. Or we can add some friction to offshoring and free trade.

The former approach means that we'll lose our stronger buying power and eventually become a less attractive market. The latter means there's less profit to be made and we'll become a less attractive market.

I personally favor the latter approach because retaining our buying power means we're less likely to be shocked by rising energy and food costs down the road, fewer people will be injured and out of work in a system with no safety net, less garbage and pollution gets pumped into our environment, etc.

But right now it feels like we're going halfway down the former road, chipping away at our workers' infrastructure while still remaining uncompetitive on the world market... and continuing to reduce friction on trade.
The "video games are bigger than Hollywood" claims are at best wrong, and actually bullshit. Those claims are made from comparing the entirety of the Games Industry to the US box office, which is only Hollywood's first pass at profit making.

Consider second run theaters, on demand and rental, physical purchase, digital purchase, broadcast rights, and THEN consider licensing for clothing, toys, and everything else.

Games are nowhere near the size of Hollywood. They just don't bother correcting people who make those claims.
While that may be possible in some segmented systems, it's worth noting that on just about any modern system having a set of strings bigger than all available memory is unlikely.
You won't find anything quite like PayPal but some nice options include Payfirma, Versapay and Intuit GoPayment.
Yeah, they really did community management well, and continue to do it well. Digg pulled all sorts of sketchy admin stuff, but Reddit maintained an integrity that won it loyalty from users.
The U.S. probably does have the sophistication, talent, and infrastructure to make the iPhone, if price was no object.

For things that are economical, which mostly means low ratio of employee-hours to value of the finished product, the U.S. does a reasonably good job manufacturing them, which is why U.S. manufacturing output by value is the highest in the world.

China actually imports a substantial amount of the machinery it uses in its factories from U.S. factories, which are fairly competitive in the meta-factory category of building industrial machinery for use in other kinds of factories (China annually imports about $20b in industrial machinery from the U.S.).
It's simple to bring manufacturing back to the USA. Impose tariffs on imports, thus making local products competitive in price.
Any chance that you might open source the software and provide a hosting solution instead? Are there other such OSS platforms?
Anatomy of Startup Development: Social Channels
Actually, the defense industry sort of proves that we DO have the ability to manufacture myriad high tech devices.

But the analogy fails because the defense department doesn't have to concern itself with profit margins.
The untrained eye sees jobs being taken away from Americans. The economist sees value being passed on to American citizens in the form of a price reduction of Apple products, and healthy acknowledgement of the reality that the American workforce is no longer suited to produce computer hardware efficiently.

Jobs are not a sign of prosperity; we don't go to work just to go to work. If that were the case, we'd mandate that people must farm with spoons.
Using Flash as a fallback (at least currently) requires an H264 version anyway.
While I'm at it, I wrote a fairly long comment about working conditions a few days back on another story:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469159

Basically, I think the Chinese have it a lot worse than the US with respect to safety, but that some things are exactly the same in both countries.

I would also note that, right now, it's possible that Foxconn is one of the best factories in China, simply because they're under scrutiny. So on one hand, it's quite possible that someone will be able to point out that they're being unfairly singled out.

On the other hand, conditions are still bad and one might hope that the scrutiny focused on them will force them to improve. Hopefully other companies will follow suit, but I doubt they'll do so without coming under pressure.
I'm still hoping someone will post a recommendation for a site that I can use to accept donations through.
Perhaps we could start with the elements of films that inspire and delight? The array of emotions that they evoke makes us feel human and connected to a greater human experience; something that I have yet to experience through a game. (Good) films build empathy - they invite us to engage with a different perspective (a miner in Nicaragua, a ballerina etc) and impassion us. This requires effort. Tech often gives us an escape from the effortful human experience, with quick hits that appeal to our egocentrism and primal instincts. Instant gratification. Long-term dissatisfaction. Perhaps why Hollywood is dying.
Why shouldn't Chinese people have jobs?
The brief mention in the beginning of the article about Chinese government subsidies allowing the Chinese manufacturers to offer better pricing options than even their cheap labor force should allow is the key to their success. The government is taking an active interest in promoting this industry.
The focus on 12 hour shifts and dorms in China is all dandy, but what does it take to build a factory in the US?

By the time all the environmental reviews and other regulations are observed, and law suits from Sierra Club and others are cleared, there is simply no way to build the factory! Hence no one builds them, hence ...a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”
A name and shame site for dicksinopensource.com would be nice to nominate the biggest troll of the year.
His clients are the ones accepting payments though, so they need Canadian merchant accounts. Beanstream accepts Canadian merchants. We just started the sign up process with them last week, from Victoria BC.

We're going with Beanstream + Chargify. You might want to take a look at this: http://expletiveinserted.com/2011/10/02/stripes-new-online-p...
>The fact these agreements were generally secret says a lot about the people making them and the fact that they knew full well it would be viewed very unfavorably by their employees. When you are instituting something you need to 'keep secret' from your employees maybe you should really think hard about the validity of what you are doing.

And what about employee who goes to a job interview in secret - does that reflect on validity of his actions ? Again, the double standards are really bugging me with these sort of things, it's OK if a consumer does something, if a union pushes on employers and legislators to protect labor and act monopolistic/like a cartel - but when it's the other way around then all the sudden the moral fabric of the society is falling apart. It's likely that competing corporations are doing this because they are loosing more than they are gaining by stealing employees from each other. As long as they can't influence the legislators people will break the pact when it suits them, cartels have a very hard time enforcing their agreements and break up because of incentives for any individual entity to cheat. For the record I'm not an employer, I just hate double standards.
It's about managing user expectations, which David has done rather poorly.

People have short memories. When you're going to shut something down, you really should put up a HUGE javascript timer at the top of the page saying:

83 days, 14 hours, 23 minutes, 11 seconds until this site shuts down. Contact me if you can take over maintenance.

Unless it's constantly in their face, they won't feel the urgency, and so they won't act.

However, now that Dave's said "time's up", the urgency is felt, but there's nothing people can do, thus their frustration.

You can say "The users should have known" till you're blue in the face, but so long as you fight against human nature rather than guiding them in ways reinforced by their nature, you have only yourself to blame for the fallout. Such is the responsibility that comes with leadership.
FTA: "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. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.” """

If that's the sort of existence we'd have to face for bringing those jobs back to the US, I'm not sure I could envision many Americans doing it – and, I, personally, couldn't expect that sort of availability and devotion.

I'll even go so far as to put my own moralistic spin on it – if that's the cost to humanity, I don't want my iPhone made more cheaply... but that may just be me.
Yes they should send a link to the government so they learn what's really the problem.
Because it's not an app in the regular sense, it's an email filtering and tagging web service. You'd be paying for their servers crunching your emails over the time you were subscribed to them.

Edit: From their FAQ:

Mail Pilot is more than an app; it's a comprehensive online software
service. It runs on servers, and delivers and syncs content between
every Mail Pilot app that you might use.

You can access Mail Pilot through a number of desktop, native
mobile, and web applications. To make this possible, Mail Pilot adds
services to your existing mail accounts that it syncs between all of
your devices. Our servers store metadata about your messages (not
the messages themselves, however!) to bring to you the reimagination
of email that so many have come to love.

Mail clients can get away with charging one time. Our apps are all
free, but the service is paid for, much like other online
productivity and email enhancement services.
That is interesting point of view - and refreshingly optimistic.

So as China become more expensive (that is given), these jobs will come back.
So a common mis-conception is that US manufacturing is in decline. This is empirically not true - the BLS Manufacturing index has been rising over the past decades and continues to rise today.

What is falling is manufacturing employment. This is due to a combination of rising labour productivity and a jump up the value chain (which produces fewer, more sophisticated products).

Regarding arms, the US is the largest arms exporter. And it is all built here. That's not just because of export regulation (ITAR), but because that precision manufacturing basically only exists in the US, Schweiz, Sverige, Deutschland, and Russia (plus a couple more).
I found it harder in large enterprises to anticipate the future with any certainty. One of the big problems was changing laws. Anytime the legislator is in session can cause serious changes in software. I remember a whole release totally shot because of changes in how reporting was done for the government.

I often wonder what would happen if some fundamental change occurred that affected a basic assumption of a lot of software. The nastiest example would be civil unions allowing more than 2 partners. That would probably destroy a goodly chunk of release schedules in most enterprises.

I think the simpler you keep it will help when you really need to change something. Programming in Forth really let you feel that.
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How many of you would like to work in dormitories at your employer, be called up to start a 12 hour shift within a moment's notice be given nothing but one biscuit and a cup of tea to last you through that shift? Maybe you'll do it for your own startup, but I don't think any of you would do it for an employer.

The reason why Apple manufactures in China is because workers have no rights -- and with that comes unmatched labor flexibility and rock bottom prices too.

It's not US competitiveness that is the issue here -- it's China's lack of human rights.
So you're saying Amazon S3 runs on a single CPU? :D I think we're talking about different things.
GW NeXT Computer Collection