skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, it looks like wages have nearly tripled in the last 3 years and looking at the numbers, inflation only accounts for a small fraction.

I've been expecting cheap manufacturing to move away from China eventually, but it seems it may happen faster than I thought.
> What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities?

I take it you've agreed universities are skewed towards the middle class and higher in terms of direct enrollment (and this is easily verifiable). To counter this, you talked about indirect effects:

> Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries.

How can you prove this? I don't think it's possible, but if you can I'm all ears.

> Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

I'm claiming one of the reasons university tuition is being increased is that we're in an environment where degrees are seen as being necessary, whether or not they are. In other words, degrees are being treated as an inelastic good. Therefore students are willing to pay whatever they can afford. As student loan limits increase, what students can afford to pay increases, so tuition increases as well. If even part of the tuition increases come from this, and your college president is making $1 million/year, I think it's fair to call that waste.

> This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

It's a product of the system we live in because we created and subsidized that system. Lowering the subsidy is the first step to solving the problem. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608680

> You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree

This is completely false. I did not say anything of the kind. In fact, I'm making the exact opposite point, so now I'm wondering if you understood what I was saying at all. I said universities are "fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value".

> yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

No, I was referring to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608628

yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.

> That's not what I'm claiming.

No, that is exactly what you claimed. You said, word-for-word, that it "would've been impossible [for me to publish the article] without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades".

> If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting

Yes, I'm claiming there is more than one way to do research. Your claim, that what was done was the only possible way to do it, is extraordinary to me. And again, that is what you're claiming when you say it "would've been impossible" for me to publish an article on the internet.
>Bigger domestic consumer base so it's no longer export only

Hopefully they have smoother transition than Japan.
It's amazing dogs are at 98 percent while the latest and best technology is at 83 percent.

I am sure some day we will at least match dogs, but still, damn.
Unlike most companies, facebook will have many years to iterate and many years to get this right.

Don't count them out.
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Also, when you go to a Casino that is on the ground level, there will be more escalators going down than going up.

The music they incessantly play in the background has sounds vaguely like a slot machine paying out.

Casinos are among the worst examples of an artificial environment to control behavior. It really is like a zoo. Makes museums that force exiting through the gift shop look benign.

As someone with an addictive personality, I find it shocking how casinos are so inclusive when it comes to sucking people in. All races, all ages (especially seniors). All focused on their game with an intensity that I wonder if they exhibit in their regular lives.

While I've been lucky enough (once or twice) to experience the rush of winning several hundred dollars at blackjack in the space of 20 minutes (it really is a surreal/joyous experience - you feel like everyone is cheering you on - like a celebrity almost), I'd rather avoid casinos than to get sucked into the vortex.
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I think the parent's talking about the backlash in NZ were there bloodshed, etc.

Obviously international warrant, cooperation, etc. etc. is how they arranged the raid.
Thats quite a nice article! Wonder how this could be related to startups (e.g. how to optimally design your website to "hook people")?

I am sure a lot of the game companies (Zynga, online poker etc) are all over this!

Also reminds me a little of this awesome Reddit interview as well (the guy explains how data driven the online game companies are and its quite awesome and scary); http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/pc6j9/iama_former_full...

Lastly it also reminds me of this article from a few days ago illustrates what crazy (but profitable) things you can do with data/behaviour/trend analysis (how the Target shops target you advertising); http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
The fact that the iPhone hasn't been cloned in China doesn't mean intellectual theft doesn't occur. Given so much lower hanging fruit to clone, why bother cloning iPhone?

And why exactly would manufacturing jobs go to India? Is there some preexisting manufacturing industry I'm not aware of?
It looks like this whole story was manually pushed off the HN front page for some reason (or it was flagged and the sorting algorithm takes this into account?), but I just wanted to say while I'm here that I was really glad to read this particular subthread.
So I took this Wired Magazine reporter to a hackathon and we built this app ....
Because lots of people like to shop together with friends, and most ecommerce sites don't provide a good or even any experience for social shopping. Facebook or someone will eventually get this right. Pinterest is a down that path.

OTOH, I don't see a need for Facebook to necessarily be involved, since I don't think people shop with all their - just a few. Not being a social shopper though, I can't comment much more than that.
How to make more 'makers' - and why it matters
Be wary of trying to further "lucidate" the lucid dream into another lucid state. I've woken up going a few tiers into such very dissasociative from reality for several (4+ hours) over weekends :) EG: building in my dream a "jump pad" standing upon such, to "jump" to an even deeper reality, etc.

It sounds wonky, but, throwing it out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder
Subset: Depersonalization disorder: periods of detachment from self or surrounding which may be experienced as "unreal" (lacking in control of or "outside of" self) while retaining awareness that this is only a feeling and not a reality.
Hm, guile doesn't seem to like it either Anyway, the original article mentioned Common Lisp, so I assumed that's what you were working with in the examples.
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the statement is just as lost as the retailers are on facebook.
There's a long way to go before there's anything approaching parity with the US.

$400/month is still less than $5000/year. Federal minimum wage in the US for 40 hours/week with no overtime comes out to just over $15,000/year, and it's unlikely most of the workers in a hypothetical US iPhone factory would be making minimum wage.

Remember, the Foxconn workers are already making a lot more than most Chinese manage. These workers are getting attention because of Apple's unusual public image and high profile. There's a lot worse to be found in China.
The gap is still big, so there is a room for improvement of Chinese workers conditions.
No; there are definitely some major differences between the two languages, but they seem to have a lot of similarities. Julia's obviously made for scientific work, and Lua's a general-purpose scripting language designed to be embedded in a host application, but they seem to have a lot of design constructs in common.
And it's also common practice to send all bad DNS queries to an ad-ridden search page. Go figure.
Doesn't quite work that way since US workers get payed in dollars and Chinese workers get paid in yuan. Once the Chinese government stops artificially keeping it's currency low, it should even out.
I've always thought that "smart intersections" were an obvious step to be made when we have self-driving cars. It's nice to see work is being done on this front.

I would be interested to see if the intersections we already have could be made a bit smarter, especially when the roads aren't so busy. If computer vision was used to tell that cars were coming, then the lights could be smart enough to change when needed, and the lights shouldn't need to rigidly cycle through everything to let that one car go through.
This is interesting… but I admit I found it a bit odd that point 1 was about "how round everything is on the casino floor", directly followed by an example of the Venetian's color scheme complete with a photo example showing not a single round feature...

This is a very interesting subject, perhaps worthy of a more scientific study.
I hear you, thanks. It's a pet project and switching to the cron job or just tail'ing the log file is a trivial change, just as you said. Doing it directly from the page is just easier for now.
Many people probably have no immediate interest in becoming a fan of their favorite mop. However, given the overall user volume and degree by which users are encouraged to participate in such information sharing activities without any obvious downside, even mid-sized brands seem to have a fair number of fans. It also probably helps that nearly every FB contest requires that users fan the brand these days. ;)

Anyway, I think there's something about having people you trust and/or admire (friends, celebrities) publicly depicting their interest in a brand. It almost seems like a means to lower the barrier for a kind of "automated word-of-mouth" advertising. Besides, clicking to a brand fan page without leaving the comfortable and relatively familiar neighborhood of facebook's interface is awfully easy.

Now, how that actually plays out when applied to marketing & sales? I don't know. Can't say I recall Facebook influencing my purchasing habits in some manner, but who knows. Perhaps I might subconsciously choose brand A over B due to how frequently A showed up in my feed when dealing with a product when I would otherwise not have any strong feelings in either direction. Or more importantly, perhaps by becoming a fan of a brand/product/whatever, suddenly I've become a qualified lead for future marketing purposes in the eyes of that brand.

In general it seems like the Facebook allure has at least some to do with being a part of the next big thing. There's a certain degree of cool and relevance by association that comes with being on Facebook, much like brands were once pushing their MySpace pages in a similar manner---although perhaps with less fervor back then.

The barrier to entry is just so bloody minimal in trying out new sites like Facebook that I'd imagine for many it's worth the implementation costs to at least see how things play out. That being said, it's interesting that brands have been using valuable marketing dollars to promote their facebook pages instead of properties which they actually own and have complete control over. Whether we're talking print ads or television commercials, I recall having seen a fair number of references to facebook.com/brand while completely leaving out www.brand.com. It's rather interesting... and like you indicated, these brands are basically promoting facebook in the process.
Having in lived in both countries, and being originally from neither, I can tell you that's not true. I obviously don't know what percentage of the population would be willing to volunteer their time, but I don't think the English are any more altruistic than Americans are.
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I don't know how the economics work out at the moment, but India does have a couple benefits. A lot more people speak English well (like ten times as many), and it's culturally more accessible to the west. They were under British rule until after World War II, and have in general a long history of closer ties to the western world.

It's also less politically sensitive in the US. Americans have a knee-jerk reaction to China that goes far beyond outsourcing and call center complaints. India is seen as an ally rather than a potential military threat.
Zynga continues a long tradition of gambling/addiction innovation in San Francisco, going back at least to the invention of the slot machine by Charles Fey in ~1895:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machine#History
I wouldn't call it massively unreliable from what I've seen so far.

For one it is offset by the fact that the site it is used on is Ajax'ed, so it is fairly simple to filter out those who poll just the container page and don't follow up with querying any actual content. For two, I'm getting good at detecting bots by simple filtering by User-agent strings and IPs. So it is far from the picture of an utter disaster that you describe.
I hate to say this but... is there a tmux for Windows :0
When you are making the lights anticipate the every move of cars, please make them anticipate the every move of pedestrians too.
I prefer higher energy music for coding. Stuff like Trance Around the World (http://www.trancearoundtheworld.com/), Jaytech, Myon & Shane 54 and Tritonal podcasts (all on itunes podcast directory)
To each his own, but do elaborate. I'm interested to hear why you think they are very artificial.
I've seen it, but I haven't used it.
Yeah Zac! Want to take bets on how long til he starts a startup of his own now that he's seen what its like to rock a hackathon?
Most countries IP laws are not as obnoxious as ours so they don't have to give minor concessions to pretend to care.
If a Varnish instance keeps access logs, they can be used as traffic data source instead of the actual webserver. It makes no difference.
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Nope, not pre-existing, but emerging. There are a number of reports on the topic, Wiki references one by PwC (1).

There's also the fact that China appears to be heading for a serious problem with respect to the age of its population. Conversely, India is expected to maintain population growth for at least a couple decades longer than China.

(1) http://www.pwc.com/en_GX/gx/world-2050/pdf/world-in-2050-jan...
The sensory overload both attracts an audience to the spectacle, and interrupts normal rational thinking. A double win!

But, interestingly, you can see the place differently if you change the 'soundtrack'. If you're in Las Vegas and have a good set of ear-sealing headphones – for example rubber earbuds – try listening to your own choice of music while strolling around. It creates sufficient detachment to let you view things as if with new eyes, and a slightly clearer mind. It's not quite the glasses from 'They Live' – but close.
"for Facebook to justify a $75-100 Billion valuation it would need to grow its earnings by an order of magnitude"

Even if this was true (and personally I don't doubt that it is), it won't matter. FB will go public at a valuation of $100bn, and people will buy the stock. I am willing to bet on this.

The stock market is rarely driven by business fundamentals these days it seems, but by perception and a form sheep mentality of the (mostly individual) investors.
An interesting article.

Some of those things are mentioned in the classic hacker book "The Newtonian Casino"

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/Newtonian-Casino-Penguin-Press-Scien...)
Hey Danielle!! Maybe down the road here soon, but right now I'm focused on making sure SeatMe is a huge and successful.

(PS.. Still need to talk to you about my plan to integrate Growl and Twilio soon though.)
I don't use Facebook, but keep up with web stuff and hear a lot about it otherwise.

I had no idea that they had e-commerce ambitions.

Sounds more and more like one of those Yahoo!/Netscape/AOL portal projects every day.
One of the (many) flaws with libertarian dogma is the assumption that a person can be intelligently informed about every aspect that might affect them, from social effects of libraries to air quality to choosing services right down to who picks up the garbage. Building regulations? Who needs those, right? Let's just replace it by doing 'buyer beware' and making every purchaser of a property have to do an in-depth research of everything, down to what kind of metal the pipes were made out of.

Volunteer charity also only works for <i>visible</i> problems. There's no need for it to go away, but to suggest it could replace (and improve on!) governmental social services is just silly. Everyone gave money to Katrina funds... when it happened. What percentage of the original donators were still donating 6 months later? 12 months? 24 months? Same question for Haiti. Private charity is good for the initial burst for visible causes, but it sucks for ongoing support on the grand scale.
"that constitutes a libertarian-fundamentalist rewriting of how American jurisprudence works"

Also known as accurately representing what the document literally says. I find it really amusing that people pretend that the constitution is some vague indecipherable document that requires court cases to "interpret". It isn't, its written in quite plain english.

I'm sorry that the facts of reality, and the ultimate legal document in the country, disagree with your ideology. I'm sorry that your ideology leaves you ill equipped to make a counter argument, and thus instead choose to characterize me personally.

The definition of libertarianism is "Someone who believes in the nonaggression principle." I'm not afraid to stand behind my principles, though you have not mentioned what ideology leads you to attack me in this way. Whatever it is, obviously you want to initiate force against innocent people[1], so, by definition, you'll never have the moral high ground.

I am, however, quite fascinated that, despite people being obviously against the non-aggression principle, that I've yet to meet one who can make a counter argument against it. I really wonder why that is so. I can defend my arguments against attacks on them, but always it is the case that opponents attack me, instead of my arguments. The only possible reason I can think of for that is that my opponents follow ideologies the are not based on principle, but are instead a collection of beliefs that they swallow whole. That would explain why they cannot defend them, or construct counter arguments to philosophically based positions, such as mine.

All they seem to be capable of mustering is name calling-- like you called me "far out" "uninformed" "wrong", "misleading", "fundamentalist", etc, without never once backing up these claims, making them essentially pure ad hominem.

If your ideology is strong enough to hold such sway over your thinking, why doesn't it provide you with arguments you can make on the facts, and to the point?

Calling me names is really easy. But who do you expect to persuade that way? People who already agree with you?

[1] Because if you didn't, you'd have no motivation to hate libertarianism with such fervor. All libertarian positions derive from this principle, and this principle can be derived philosophically from basic moral premises. When I first became aware of it, I figured it would quickly sweep the nation-- as the idea of not using violence against the innocent seems compellingly right. However, I've been forced to accept that many people, either because they are taught it, or maybe just by their nature, actually do want to use violence against other people for their own profit. And that's sad. But its also embarrassing and so nobody wants to admit it, and so maybe that is why you chose to call me names.
I went to Vegas in November last year, it was my first time and I am too young to gamble -- doesn't interest me anyway and I was there for work -- so although casinos were an interesting experience they had no real value to me. Anyway, on my last day I had some time to spend before my flight home so I (with 2 others) went to meet a friend who was staying in a different hotel on the other side of the strip. The instructions we had were simple, take one shuttle then another and you'll be there, sounds fine to me... but it wasn't. We spent at least 30 minutes walking through casino after casino, instead of there being a straight path from casino entrance to casino exit we had to snake our way through a maze of slot machines and attractions, it was probably the most agitating experience of my life. We had a clear goal, get from one hotel to the other, but the entire journey was one big upsell: "look at this machine wouldn't you like to put a dollar in, maybe you'll get two back!" and that drove me crazy. As someone who can only cope with structure and logic and things being well defined it was a horrible experience, having a vague idea of where I'm going with things constantly trying to grab my attention sucked. Worthless story but stuck with me and vaguely related to the article.
How soon will it be possible to pick-off Mechanical Turk tasks using computers - assuming it is not being done already? Is this a real opportunity or is the big money going to be made in helping businesses design their work so it can be automated this way (assuming the problems don't degenerate into just another parallel programming task).
Here is a blog post discussing data. After graduation, the sheepskin effect is about 50% of the value of a degree. (Over time, as a worker builds up a track record, this goes down.)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2a012/01/the_present_val...

Unless you believe human capital jumps massively between 116 credits and 120 credits, this is strong evidence in favor of the signalling model.

Another big chunk of the measured returns to education are merely ability bias.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/correcting_for.h...
For purchases like a new MacBook or iMac, I generally prefer to purchase them in-store, for a few reasons:

1) Save money on shipping
2) Get the item quicker
3) If there isn't someone in your household who is home during the day, having big/expensive things delivered to you is usually a huge pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, the Apple Stores (at least the ones I've been in) aren't really optimized for someone who knows exactly what they want and wants to get in and out as quickly as possible. Every time I've been in there to buy a computer, the experience has been really frustrating, as I have to wait forever for someone to help me, then they have to spend time tracking down someone who can go get the actual computer.

Obviously the model they use is working out incredibly well for them, I just wish they'd make it a little easier to actually buy stuff.
What does "pick-off Mechanical Turk tasks using computers" mean?
No, it actually is difficult. I put this question forth to a bunch of people, and lots of them tripped over something.

I'm beginning to think it's a decent "weed-out" question.
Anybody know what that Gilt mash up to analyze competitor revenue was? I have a few theories but I'm curious to see what they built.