skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory"

That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get permission to grow the economy by expanding, and that permission was denied.

That's the core of it.

So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue.

The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth. That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see, donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.)

The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.

Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this).

I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design. Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke. His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state.... instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.
I heard about him from his work on the original Tron.

http://www.google.com/search?q=moebius+tron&hl=en&pr...
Thanks a lot for sharing that NPR story. It was very enlightening to learn more about the differences between the GM and the Toyota production methodologies.
Audio is a big one. The HTML5 audio APIs just haven't caught up yet. Live video, as mentioned elsewhere, is big as well. The vast majority of web games are still Flash, as well. Even video delivery is more robust with flash than with HTML5 - ever tried doing a preroll on an HTML5 <video> tag? Notice that it basically...doesn't work?

Flash is certainly has less of a monopoly on "interactive web content" than it once did, but it still fills an extremely important and currently unreplacable role on the web. To be ringing its death toll just yet is premature.
I joined the French Institute in my home town because they had a lot of his work and he was the reason why I got pulled into art at that young age. The work was so vast and different, so fantastic, I couldn't imagine the things he gave life to, on my own. I understood that then as I do now. It was greatness and he shared it through art. By that process he made me a rich man. Rich of thought. A true treasure. I have no words that can express how saddened I am by the news of his passing. It simply makes me cry and hurt. This is an irreparable loss.
It's the chicken and the egg with these guys: we can't get factories because all the components are made elsewhere, and we can't get the components because we have no factories...

You can't use trade barriers anymore because if you block someone then you're getting blocked too. At the same time you can't let companies choose between local or abroad else those going to dirt-poor countries will have an unfair competitive edge that may bankrupt the ones that stayed, something that already happened 20 years ago.

You know what's the biggest industrial innovation right now? Toyota's new model factory: it's designed to be moved at any time to anywhere in the world, cheap and fast. It has a lower degree of automation than most car factories, why? Because Toyota realized it was easier and cheaper to hire people than to use robots which are still very expensive and need to be reinstalled and reprogrammed each time you move them.

That's the future of manufacturing: if X place is cheaper than our current location then we're moving everything there.
Can anyone explain to me why the comments on that article are so full of fear (about the economic impact and it being a waste of time for California)? While there will certainly be a large economic impact that could affect certain jobs, I can't see that as an apt reason not to progress technologically.
> But there's no reason to believe that to be the case when you introduce autonomous vehicles.

Care to expand why do you think that?

I think there are many reasons to believe human errors will still be the majority cause of accidents after some cars are autonomous. The main, and most touted reason, is that driving is one of the types of tasks computers are much better suited to than human beings. Driving well is, mostly, just following a few clear repetitive rules over and over. We still fail at that very often, but computers excel at following clear rules repetitively.

So there are many reasons to believe computers will outperform humans at driving. And, in my opinion, by a large margin. I'm intrigued to know why you wouldn't think so.
Despite being checked, they do not necessarily have to be caught if you add a `throws` clause in the method declaration.
Not that I want to distract from you going Galt on us, but wikipedia has describes the event slightly differently:

> In 2002, the company transferred vacuum cleaner production to Malaysia. Dyson claimed that they requested planning permission to expand the factory to increase vacuum cleaner production, but that this application failed. However, the local government claims that no such permission was ever sought, as the land Dyson planned to use was privately owned and the original owner did not want to sell.[0]

> Although nearly 800 manufacturing jobs were lost, Dyson states that the cost savings from transferring production to Malaysia enabled investment in research & development at their Malmesbury head office.[1]

And

> The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.

That's completely nonsensical, there are millions of things which can not be fixed when destroyed, the only way to handle them is to prevent them from being broken in the first place. Post-regulation of razing somebody else's home or of dumping toxic sludge on commons is indefensible.

[0] http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offi...

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm
dtrace is not supposed to replace strace on Linux. It's allows you track and process all sorts of parameters of your operating system and it's programs. It's essentially a quick way to introspect into your application without tons of printf hacks, and get to the buttom of bugs and performance issues.
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3554698
As politely as I can: I dislike the small font and grey-on-white combination of your website.

One disadvantage of greyed comments (on HN) is the potential for "pile on" down-votes.

But I think you need to provide more examples of people responding to grey comments. And, really, if it leads to thoughtful discussion there's nothing wrong with replying to grey comments. Especially when some people are suggesting that downvoting is being used to express simple disagreement rather than "doesn't belong on HNness".

This is so meta. I need to set a filter.
I think there's actually a balance between the self-sacrifice view and the optimization view. Your parents have to sacrifice to give you care and attention. Likewise, you have to sacrifice to build skills. All along, chance factors come in to affect whether you're going to remain a healthy person, or crippled/dead.

However, once you cross certain thresholds of ability, optimization becomes a preferred solution. Networking starts to matter more. To build a desired connection you can "sacrifice for someone else." Once you have the connections, unique chances to work on ideas pass through you, and as we already know, ideas + opportunity are prerequisite to most forms of "success." Once you have that, the self-sacrifice process starts again, as now you have to prove that it can be done.
While this looks very interesting I'd love to see what those with extensive knowledge of security think about this.
Fantastic work. This is one of the most unique usability tweaks that I have seen in quite a while.

My only wonder would be how to implement this so that it doesn't confuse or intimidate users... but I'm sure there is an answer to that.
Boys Forever
Prezi certainly seems to take Tufte's "chartjunk" to a ridiculous new extreme. The crazy transitions distract the user from the content, and make it almost impossible to really go back and review things after the fact.

I missed a local Android developer group's meeting a month or two and I wanted to go back to review the materials from talk I missed. They mailed out a link to their presentation, which turned out to be a Prezi slideshow. I tried to find some of their code examples and gave up because trying to navigate the presentation wasn't worth my time.
Just make flagged comments have a smaller font-size instead?
can someone tell me how the autokilling of accounts works? My current understanding is that if you write a comment that goes below -x karma, your account is auto killed and every comment you wrote and will write in the future is dead and not visible unless you have showdead enabled.
http://www.dasplankton.de/ContrastA/

Click the "Show Color Deficiency Simulation". It also helps with contrast. I am not close to anyone who is colorblind but this is a good reminder.

I am about to do a major rework of my site. It is going to be mostly black/white but I kind of want to use a small amount of a rainbow scheme. It kind of works nicely since we sell flavoring. I guess I will just try to minimize the damage and make sure I leave other cues.
Is the graying of comments meant to hide them, or simply to warn that they are inflammatory, incorrect, or otherwise not worth your time? I sometimes do read grayed comments but I rather like how it filters the whole comment so well while still allowing me to read it without uncollapsing it as on reddit.
This is very sad. His visions of the future, that seeded so much of our collective imagination, will be missed. Our distant future will not be the same.
The funny thing about your request is, that one of the most well known books about negotiation called "Bargaining for Advantage" by G. Richard Shell (was talked a lot here and on other Start-Up/Tech related sites some time ago) starts with an example where it turned out bad for him, to negotiate the package and not point by point.

In the introduction (not to find in the amazon preview, sadly) he bargains with a class mate of one of his children or a neighbors daughter or something like that. She wants to sell fruits in different boxes, he of course not wanting to be impolite but not in need of fruits, orders the cheepest. And then without closing this one point, started by his wife he asks the girl if she can take care of the family pets, while his family is on a trip. So the girl says "Of course, but then you buy the big box, right?"

Is that good enough an example?
Larry Page often tells us "Aim high, not because you'll get there, but because you'll often discover things that are useful in their own right on the way there."

We can't control how things eventually turn out. But why sabotage yourself by intentionally aiming lower? We can certainly control what we put in, and if we put in more, well, we may not get what we want, but we're likely to get something that's pretty good regardless.

It is an optimization problem. It's just not a maximization problem. We try to make the best decisions we can with the information that we have available, and if those turn out not to be the best decisions in the end, well, we now have more information.
I have a bunch of negotiating heading my way and i think this is some advice that will really help. We have a lawyer and now i think about it, that is how i recall him working...although i just thought that was how he worked.

Who would have thought problem solving skills would hold us back?
"In the real world, these just people with ideas; They just like me and you when the smoke and camera disappear."
I started learning programming in January using K & R. C is great. Doing so many things manually really teaches you what is going on. It's definitely challenging, but I think I'm learning faster this way.
I don't know how I feel about this. To tell you the truth, I already did some small use test with 2 users (medium and advanced). And they both have a bit of trouble understanding what that sign was for.

It also didn't help the fact that the outline of the password was distracting: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/4651065/files/2012/3/Screen%20Sho...

The idea itself is interesting, though without previous explanation or knowledge it's just hard to guess what it is about.
I'm pretty into this idea, im not sure there is enough information here for me to act on it but if i could be assured its safe (enough) and would require minimal impact to our existing hashing scheme, id give it a go.

Thanks for sharing.
Count one more here, I'm quite happy with my DC32: I'm very happy not having to buy (and throw) vacuum bags anymore, the vacuum works well and though it's heavy the body is very well designed: all the brushes can be clipped or attached to the main body somehow, which both makes everything look pretty neat and avoids wondering where I put whatever brush.
I hardly see this as an example of what's great about map/reduce or functional programming… It doesn't illustrate either the core concept of map/reduce, or that of functional programming.

I think this is a better basic example (in clojure) of what makes functional programming and map/reduce powerful (skipping Hadoop, while we're at it):

(defn wc-map [str]
(let [words (split str #"\s+")]
(map
(fn [p] [(first p) (map (fn [_] 1) (second p))])
(group-by (fn [x] x) words))))

(defn wc-reduce [h]
(map (fn [p] [(first p) (reduce + (second p))]) h))

Simple word count function, completely functional, and using the map/reduce concept.

This function allows you to infinitely parallelize word counts: you could simply run `wc-map` on a file and `wc-reduce`, maybe even on multiple servers, merge (merge-with concat) the results, and run it through `wc-reduce` again, ad infinitum.
I'm reminded of Paul Buchheit's post from yesterday "Be good to yourself, and to others. It's actually not possible to do one or the other - you must do both, or neither."
It is, but it just doesn't get upvoted even though I'm pretty sure many on HN would love it.
USG playing chicken with ICANN and ITU over the Internet?
I loved Moebius. And not just his sci-fi bizarro stuff. Blueberry is one of the best American Western graphic novels. His books were full of art and stories that you could simply get lost in, completely taken to a different world.

Some other books worthwhile checking out that are most likely available in English: Airtight Garage, The Incal, The Metabarons.
I use a browser add-on that lets me inject CSS into a page to add this to HN:

font[color="#e6e6e6"],
font[color="#9c9c9c"],
font[color="#737373"],
font[color="#bebebe"],
font[color="#aeaeae"],
font[color="#888888"],
font[color="#cecece"],
font[color="#dddddd"],
font[color="#5a5a5a"]
{
color: #800000 !important;
}

That makes flagged comments red, so they are easy to see. About 80% of the time I then up vote them, because 80% of the comment flagging is done by idiots.
Dear Google, please remember from which address I send mails to people
Mock Page Lets You Hack Like in a 90s Film
5 million manufacturing jobs is a lot, particularly given that we'd be exporting huge amounts of goods with those robots, which would keep more of our wealth domestic rather than exporting it to improve other nations.

Those robots need to be constructed; R&D'd; improved; maintained; installed; removed; and the robot ecosystem would support millions more jobs. The efficiency gains would justify the expenditures. The US economy will be made over by robots; we have the most efficient, large production economy on the planet, and are still the world's largest manufacturing nation (ahead of China, we export less).

Our labor force participation rate has dropped from 67.5% in 1999/2000, down to 64% now; our U6 unemployment number is 15%. Millions of net job gains by taking manufacturing back from China, would not destroy many jobs at all (domestically), quite the opposite.

Robots are amplifiers of human labor, not replacements. They still must be created, cared for, upgraded, overseen, and so on. The whole point is about one American with 30 robots to manage, becoming as labor efficient on price to output as 30 or more Chinese workers. The improvement scale in robotics is almost limitless; direct human labor however is extraordinarily limited in its capabilities.

5 million new jobs courtesy of taking manufacturing back from China would instantly push our labor force participation rate back up to where it was in 1999. While we'd simultaneously generate a massive pool of new domestic wealth by keeping that money here instead of sending it elsewhere for someone else to benefit from. We'd make more of the goods we consume; and we'd export more goods to the rest of the world. Competing with China is just one example, the reality is we'd want to look to create jobs by competing with everywhere we've lost manufacturing to since 1964 when America had 55% of all global manufacturing.

And then let's remember that efficiency gains produce more wealth. Wealth is not a static pool to be swapped or stolen back and forth. Neither are jobs. It's entirely likely that we'll be able to create entirely new products that are now impossible courtesy of advanced robotic manufacturing, and that will mean completely new jobs, that would not have existed otherwise (versus say taking back old product manufacturing from China or similar).
"In reality, our atrocious metrics for success have caused us to spend the past couple of decades slinging fantastic financial rewards at those who have inadvertently sabotaged our economy in their hunt for ever-greater returns."

This is exactly true, but it is also why these parables are relevant. The "atrocious metrics" you refer to were not created by the free market, but by the very same people who created them in the parable-- commissars.

For instance, in 2001-2002, after the dotcom crash, I knew there was going to be a housing boom because the federal reserve made the cost of money lower than the rate of monetary inflation. (I didn't figure this out myself, though, but learned it from some wise economists.) Banks were incentivized to lend as much as possible, because a housing boom is what the commissars wanted (Paul Krugman wrote about it, for instance.) This created a lot of jobs and while it also created the real estate bubble and consequential crash, it was good for the Bush administration.

The interest rates, the regulations on banks, and the inflation rate are all metrics created by the government. The low rates and high inflation are metrics that created a carry trade. The Clinton era changes in regulations[1] incentivized loaning money to people who could not repay it. Of course the FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are all government entities that distorted the market and created moral hazard.

Simply eliminating the FDIC (but requiring banks to have deposit insurance) would have mitigated a lot of damage- the banks who were way over levered would have seen their deposit insurance rates go up, and thus be incentivized to not be over levered.

It is not that our economy is immune to the impact of commissars. Our economy is ruled by commissars... we just pretend it isn't.

If we want to eliminate arbitrary formulas like the ones in the parable, balancing the federal government (removing much of the need for inflation) and letting interest rates float in the market (rather than be controlled by the privately owned Federal Reserve corporation) would help.

However, just like the situation in Communist era Poland in the parable, there are major political movements who think this is crazy talk and would like to spin these economic failings as proof that we need more commissars, not less. I can point to many members of both political parties in the USA who feel this way.

[1] Early in the Clinton era there was a lot of muckraking about how banks were not loaning to ethnic minorities. This produced changes in the regulations. Later an independant study was done that controlled for the ability of the applicants to repay and found no bias. Bank weren't "greedily" refusing to loan to minorities, they were greedily loaning to everyone who could repay. The regulations, however, incentivized loaning even to people who couldn't repay, hence the boom & bust.
I'd rather have Wikimedia in PHP that works than use a half baked solution because it's written in python. Languages are tools -- elitism not necessary here.
You have to write to your audience, and if your audience is primarily American or European, chances are they don't know what "Sina Weibo" is but do understand what "China's version of Twitter" is.
I am interested on knowing the details on reduction part. Secure hash should not match partially.
Looks like there are release notes available here:

https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/2.6/00-RELEASENOTES

And there's a 2.6 milestone here:

https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues?milestone=1&stat...
I was lucky enough to know some of his relatives and got to meet Moebius a few times in the 90s. He was not just a genius, he was also profoundly human and simple. He will live forever in our culture.
Looking at http://www.leg.state.nv.us/register/2011Register/R084-11I.pd..., it looks like Nevada decided to define a class of license (G) for operation of autonomous vehicles. The CA legislation just makes operating an autonomous car legal if it meets certain safety and performance criteria, which it doesn't define (instead, asks the CHP to come up with these rules). The way this bill is drafted, it looks to me like CA would be much less restrictive of autonomous car operation than Nevada.
The thing that really confuses me is the indicator on the right - what do the different states mean? From reading the page, it seems like there are only two states that matter, likely or unlikely. But the way the indicator is constructed seems to suggest that it tells you how close you are to the actual password. If there are really only two states that matter, why not just have some sort of binary indicator?