skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
White is the new black, 50 is the new 40, and now poverty is the new slavery.

The fact that one percent of the nation's richest individuals control 42 percent of the nation's wealth is, to me, a stunning revelation in the wake of a recession.

When you say things like this, you presuppose a world where we could take all the money, put it in a pile, then share it equally. But such worlds do not exist among systems of intelligent actors working in their best interests.

Poverty is a symptom, not a problem. The author doesn't go into what it's a symptom for, perhaps because such detailed analysis of how we got here is beyond his ability, or perhaps he just wants to have a good lament and rant. Don't know. But in either case, I got nothing from this aside from "bad things suck"
I generally believe that society should educate kids up to the level that society expects of them to get a decent job. We don't ask kids to pay back the cost of their K-12 education, for example, even though the cost is substantial. And it's not clear to me that there's anything magical about the age 18 as a cutoff (I mean, you can't even buy alcohol at that age! so clearly we don't consider you an adult).

Either college should be purely a luxury, not needed for most jobs, or it should be covered. I don't like the idea of people "starting out" with a big pile of debt before they can even get to the workforce; that doesn't produce any sort of level playing field. If anything, I'd support Thomas Paine's idea that people should start out with a modest positive net worth, granted upon reaching adulthood, in recognition of the fact that everyone has equal right of inheritance to at least a small portion of the existing wealth produced by the country's previous generations.

To me, it's the responsibility of the current workforce to fund the next generation's ability to reach it. I don't see anything wrong with funding education from general taxes, in any case. It's one of the classic, almost universally agreed upon things that a state should do, which even classical liberal writers (e.g. Jefferson) were strongly in favor of publicly funding.
Just move letters slightly. And make them morph a bit. Would still be obvious to a human, but a computer trying to average anything would fail miserably.

This is an unsolved computer vision problem.
You mean like https://github.com/emacsmirror? :)
In technology, long term thinking is impossible, because everything changes so fast, and the pace of change is quickening. The rules are Nobody knows when a sudden shift in technology will open up new markets and business models.

Thinking about self driving cars is certainly long term. We are all excited about the possibility of self driving cars, but it will takes lot of money and engineering brainpower before it become viable in the market. Remember, the first DARPA Grand Challenge was in 2004.

Software startups deal with what is just about possible. They don't try to make quantum computers or launch rockets like SpaceX(Which itself is a startup from 2002).
Agreed on some points. A mention of the serious trouble you can get in with variable variables is in order. I would never feel comfortable using user input to dictate a variable reference.
In the context of social interactions, "anti-normative behavior" is academic speak for being a dick.
You can feel both. For me static fields are a very strange feeling which is not very comfortable. Having only one small magnet (the second generation ones from Steve Haworth) I have to concentrate to feel a low static magnetic field.

Changing ones are more obvious and way more comfy. I think this is because a static one pulls or pushes the magnet all the time while changing ones let the magnet "vibrate" (from pulling and pushing all the time).
Imagine writing code like this and having it build to native apps on both platforms:

I think Xamarin are going to be a really interesting company to watch for this stuff. Right now they have MonoTouch and MonoDroid as entirely separate products, allowing you to make apps using C#. But you can already reference libraries across both, and just do the UI plumbing separately, and if they're smart they will work very hard on what the author is describing.
They're forcing touch paradigms, like seeking screen edges with the mouse since you can't swipe, essential a workaround, onto desktop environments. With previous mobile versions they were forcing the mouse paradigm where touch would've worked better. If you as a tech person find it odd and need time to adjust then you have to multiply that many times for the average user, and all this without any benefit to a desktop user.
Good point. 10 choose 3 = 120.
Can anyone who supports Craigslist show me how, their selection and arrangement of facts are creative and original?

Because if they aren't, their data isn't copyrightable.

They don't select anything--there is no one at Craigslist performing a creative act of selection.

Their arrangement of apartment listings isn't creative or original. It's based solely on geography, and time. I also don't think Padmapper is actually copying the arrangement.

Furthermore even if there were actually copyrightable text within the individual ads, Padmapper doesn't copy the text, just the facts.

You should read the Feist v. Rural decision if you want more information on copyrighting collections of facts.
Similarly, if you run the forum on a LAN instead of the Internet, you also don't get any spam! :-/
"The middle class and non-connected sort-of-wealthy are the ones getting screwed by the bailouts."

They're still better off with the bailouts than they'd be without them. They'd be even better off if policies that prevented the necessity of bailouts were in place back then. I hope the policy changes since then have been enough.
One thing all those "let's build our app on top of 1000 layers so we can use our $favourite language"-people tend to forget is that mobile software runs on mobile devices. Which have one remarkable property: they are energy constrained. So you better write some fast, native code or your users will have trouble keeping their devices alive for one day.
Technology changes, but such changes don't necessarily dictate the product.
Yayy!.. Did they lose the war though?
No, that's just a list of stuff (there are other really good pointers to elisp on github too) - I want an index of all the functions and variables used in the code there, hopefully with a usage index (where is find-file used?). It would be big data but totally awesome.
Craigslist can claim whatever they want but that does not make it true. When you post an apartment for rent that is factual information that an apartment at a particular location is available for a specific price. Much like the case of a movie theater offering tickets to a showing at a specific place and time.

Padmapper (which I just used just before this whole situation and found an awesome place) doesnt take your 'creative' post. They merely take the factual title and existence of a listing and direct you to it.
Hip Hop Diamond Watches
Hip Hop Diamond Watches: Watches International is one of Texas's leading fashion jewelry & watches Importers and wholesalers. We offer high quality wholesale hip hop iced out watches & jewelry, bling bling wholesale jewelry & watches
New? More like the same old, same old...
I'm amazed that he even considers himself a skeptic. Everything in here has already been said by other scientists already, eg. his analysis apparently consists essentially of fitting temperature to CO2 levels:

"Our result is based simply on the close agreement
between the shape of the observed temperature rise
and the known greenhouse gas increase. "

About the only reason that this is newsworthy is that he's a notable climate skeptic, and he's funding comes from Koch, a coal based lobbying organisation.
I saw the NYT piece earlier today, and I'm amazed that he even considers himself a skeptic. Everything in here has already been said by other scientists already, eg. his analysis apparently consists essentially of fitting temperature to CO2 levels:

"Our result is based simply on the close agreement
between the shape of the observed temperature rise
and the known greenhouse gas increase. "

About the only reason that this is newsworthy is that he's a notable climate skeptic, and he's funding comes from Koch, a coal based lobbying organisation.
HOME LAND SECURES YOU
Can you imagine in the USA if individuals were allowed to donate millions completely anonymously to political campaigns but not allowed to post a comment online without a real name by law?
Whether press is a neutral party or not is a separate issue of the assumption that it's PR work on Padmapper's part. The press may be having a field day, but it's not Eric's doing.
But what is simplified about it? It isn't easier than

(a plus b) times 'whatever'
equals
a times 'whatever' plus b times 'whatever'

Which you can easily show geometrically, and which helps you generalize to products of sums of three terms, etc.
Poverty is the old slavery too
Since when has Craigslist asked for money when posting a job listing?
Still not a copyright violation. You can't copyright a fact.

I write a post that says "I am renting an apartment at 221B Baker Street."

Padmapper copies it.

My post is not copyrightable, so (regardless of what you think of the copyrightability of a collection of facts), Padmapper has not violated the copyright on my single post because it doesn't exist.

If I were to include some original creative text that was copyrightable, Padmapper is still fine, because they only copy the facts of the post not the full text.
"Forced" doesn't have to mean robbery at gunpoint. It just means that your range of choices conflicts with your needs. Making decisions at gunpoint is only the most obvious case.

Consider food. You need a job in order to eat. You have to work a lot of hours (maybe with a long commute on top) in order to keep your job, or worse, to make enough money to afford your food and housing. You could save a lot of money and improve your health by cooking your own meals, but that's time consuming. Every minute you spend shopping for groceries or cooking your own food is one less minute you could spend at work. So you live on fast food and a big chunk of your paycheck goes to a fast food restaurant.

Now consider the corporation itself. Its foremost incentive is to provide wealth to its owners. Any incentive to provide value to employees or customers is incidental to that goal, and there are of course ways to avoid doing that. Ideally it's just funneling as much money as possible from the customer to the shareholder.

The poor can't afford to be shareholders. So where is the money going?
So what motivated this? What do you see as differentiating you from ikiwiki?
When you say things like this, you presuppose a world where we could take all the money, put it in a pile, then share it equally.

This is an obvious non-sequitur, of course.
Where does this idea come from that the percentage of total wealth controlled by the extremely wealthy is unprecedented in American history? It would be an interesting assertion except that anyone with even basic knowledge of American history would know it is not true. This is not a value statement about the facts, only an observation about the relative ignorance of people making this claim. I thought they taught this stuff in school.

In fact, what is unprecedented is how little wealth the extremely wealthy currently control. As a share of the GDP and total wealth, historical titans such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller were vastly wealthier than anyone alive now when adjusted for current dollars. In fact, the only American in modern times that even approached the wealth of numerous historical figures is Bill Gates.

I think there is a systemic problem creating an impoverished underclass but the obvious ignorance around the claims of unprecedented concentrations of wealth just grates.
I think the real criticism around flipping companies has more to do with the fact that it is (generally speaking) a fake economy. When companies, with no revenue (or more likely - negative revenue) are getting acquired for (up to) a billion dollars, only to be shut down after the founder's stock vests (or sooner)...it makes the whole startup world look a like a Ponzi scheme (as Mark Cuban said, in so many words). Get popular founders, get popular angels/investors, get users, get money. The only person who really gets screwed in that equation is the stockholder of the public company that acquired something it intends to shut down in a few years without recouping any of its investment.
> I don't know if it's legal to put a capacitor behind LM1117 regulator.

Oh gosh yes. By default you want at least a 0.1uF ceramic close to the output of a regulator, and the additional 100uF electrolytic is good. Then since it's a one-off and not worth worrying about, I'd put another 0.1uF close to the input of the regulator, and another 100uF across the battery. And if you're still having problems at that point, possibly a small resistor in series with the buzzer to limit its inrush current. You could also replace the mechanical buzzer with a piezo buzzer (or piezo speaker and generate tones with the avr). (PS if you're stocking up, you might as well opt for 1uF ceramics and "low ESR" electrolytics for these purposes)
"We don't ask kids to pay back the cost of their K-12 education, for example, even though the cost is substantial."

If it were possible for such a large amount of debt to be granted to a person with no track record and structure it in a way that it could be reasonably paid off, I'd be for individuals paying for their own education beyond what's necessary to be an informed voter. I doubt that's possible, so everyone paying it off over a lifetime via taxation isn't such a bad compromise.

After a certain point, however, the ability of a person to pay off their own debt can be reasonably estimated, and we should let individuals pay for their self-improvement rather than forcing everyone else to pay. In general, we should strive to assign costs to those that benefit from them. Most of the benefits for an education accrue to the student. Some accrue to society. Why not pay for education using a similar breakdown?

"I don't like the idea of people "starting out" with a big pile of debt before they can even get to the workforce; that doesn't produce any sort of level playing field."

Using taxes to pay for education guarantees that you'll be paying for education until the day you die.

"To me, it's the responsibility of the current workforce to fund the next generation's ability to reach it."

I agree, but I'd say it a little differently. Successful people have a responsibility to ensure that every person has a chance to be successful as well. That said, I don't think such responsibilities should be mandated by law. Putting someone in prison because they don't help other people become successful sounds wrong.
When, specifically, did taking another company's data and trying to build your own company around it become "innovating"?

I am not saying such apps are useless; I'm building one now for a marketplace with pretty shitty UI.

But it's not an innovation.
> it's unclear that Craigslist listings qualify as facts in the relevant sense.

Padmapper only publishes the relavant facts from the listing. Even if the whole text contains copyrightable material (some prose describing the house maybe), they don't copy the whole text just the facts.

This apartment is available for rent here, it has 4 bedrooms etc...
I'm a developer and I don't like it. It's like a house that makes you go through the bathroom to get to the living room, that has the light switches hidden, and one room is decorated by IKEA while another is stuck in the seventies. Sure the AC is better and the beds are comfy, but there are so many oddities that while I could live in it, I wouldn't like it.
What are the advantages to your proposal? It seems like it would simply start out everyone with a large burden, for what benefit? Lower taxes for the better off? That seems like a poor tradeoff.

It could almost be equivalent to my proposal if you limited the amount of debt repayment to a percentage of income; then it'd be more like a tax you opt into (if you go to the university, you opt into an extra 10% tax). Sweden does something like that for a small portion of university fees. The main difference between that and a normal tax is that the tax would have a cap, which basically benefits the people who hit IPO jackpots and such. Again, I don't see a benefit to that.

Mostly I don't see any benefit to all this accounting, unless it's a roundabout way of making sure that people who hit outlier incomes don't have to pay past a cap. Or is there some idea of libertarian "efficiency" that this is all going to produce? I'm more of a social democrat, and think all this extra accounting is what produces the inefficiency; just tax people and provide public services, the way Denmark (where I currently live) does.
How would you exclude the same kinds of files that ack does in grep without typing out the exclude patterns?

As described here ( http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/default-grep-options/ ), you could use GREP_OPTIONS, but then you run into the problems here ( http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/24141/ ) -- scripts that use grep without clearing GREP_OPTIONS will fail.

Do you have an alias? Or another script that wraps grep?
Ask HN: What to do with sortgadget?
I built this site http://sortgadget.com/ a while ago after looking around for a camera.

After building it I found out that, hey, you can't actually use it in an ad on Google since it's all auto-generated from Amazon. I've thought about maybe putting an ad on reddit but it seems somehow slimy.

I essentially get zero traffic today and have not done any SEO.

Looking for all feedback on what to do with it, whether I should can it or push on.
Swrve: Beware Activision has been watching you play 'Skylanders'
Oh. I remember reading some vision paper and in the supplement materials there've been a couple of videos with letters moving. Doubt, I'll be able to find it that easily.

Should be relatively easy to code with any library that can draw a text on a bitmap. Like PIL, matplotlib, etc. Use ffmpeg to make a video out of frames.

1. draw letters (just black/white) masks;
2. fill letters with noise;
4. fill background with noise;
5. copy letters using a mask onto background, using X,Y as loc;
6. add a little bit of new noise to letters;
8. modify X,Y coordinates (move letters SLIGHTLY);
9. go to step 4.
One, the presentation of factual information can be intellectual property; two, the presentation of someone else's factual information can be intellectual property.

The Craigslist-hate is very strange considering much of this community was seeded by people providing web interfaces to information. I bet there are a number of YC companies that would send out the lawyers if they found their sites being illegally scraped and repackaged.
> the usefulness of they (and its forms them, their, and themselves) in situations where the sex of a singular referent is not determinable, known, or relevant

I think most would use "themself" in this situation.
The digs weren't so much against Orkut as about the emergence of two distinct, but conflicting, language/national cultures on Orkut, with few tools to separate them for users who weren't interested.

Curiously, I'm seeing this play out on G+ as well, which has a pretty broad international following, including a large multi-lingual contingent. There are people whose occasional English-language posts interest me, but whose non-English content is rather less compelling (you might feel similarly if I regaled you in Krell). It's part of a larger problem of poor noise controls on G+.
> That's really irrelevant, though, isn't it?

To me, it sounds a lot like the MLB statements before every ballgame and I question whether they have any actual legal force.

If CL had any sense, they'd try to buy PadMapper to improve their service.
There is a commentary on this article also on HN at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4309692
Proxies like unotelly may send more of your traffic through their service than you would like. You can protect your traffic but still use the tunnel if you only send bbc.co.uk DNS lookups to unotelly.

Here's how to do this in Ubuntu 12.04. The DNS has changed in 12.04 to use NetworkManager, which makes the process more convoluted than it should be. The below instructions could be improved but it'll get you some BBC Olympics coverage.

# https://gist.github.com/3202101

Ubuntu 12.04

$ nslookup bbc.co.uk
# you should see a UK IP e.g. 212.58.241.131

$ vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf
# comment out dnsmasq
#dns=dnsmasq

# save+quit

$ vi /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

$ service network-manager restart

# create a new dnsmasq.conf with unotelly California DNS 184.169.139.227 206.214.214.28
# note that server=192.168.11.1 is my router (which handles my upstream DNS) and you'll need to change that IP.
$ vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf

server=/bbc.co.uk/206.214.214.28212.58.241.131
server=/co.uk/206.214.214.28
server=/bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbchdsodsecure-a.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbchdsodsecure-b.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbchdsodsecure-c.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbchdsodsecure-d.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbchdsodsecure-e.akamaihd.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbc.co.uk.edgesuite.net/206.214.214.28
server=/bbcfmhds.vo.llnwd.net/206.214.214.28
server=192.168.11.1

# save+quit

$ nohup /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --no-resolv --keep-in-foreground --no-hosts --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/sendsigs.omit.d/network-manager.dnsmasq.pid --listen-address=127.0.0.1 --conf-file=/etc/dnsmasq.conf --cache-size=0 --proxy-dnssec &

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

$ nslookup bbc.co.uk
# you should see unotelly proxy servers e.g. uk-cluster.unostructure.com
I think it would have been worth pointing out the slightly more readable syntax for variable variables (and other metaprogramming features within PHP):

${$var};
${$name.'Controller'}->function();
$something->{$functionName}();

With all the appropriate warnings, of course. For a start, don't find excuses to implement this style of code. You almost certainly don't need it for a basic website.
Not feeling the issues with Win8, I'm on a low end Dell 13" and apart from the missing start menu I've noticed no real difference in usability.

After pinning everything to the home screen and task bar it's generally one click to get to most things (or Windows key -> Click) which feels more intuitive than Win7. Even the corner targets and new Alt / Win + Tab behaviors are solid enough. Was dubious about the quick app switch when you click at the top left but it's been unobtrusive enough.

The Windows Key + Live search on typing, while basically the same as the Win7 start menu search tool, feels a lot quicker in 8, maybe due to the metro search result style. Few other small bits like the new task manager are generally more useful as well.

The default fullscreen apps for photo viewing and what not feel like little horrors though, feels like a highjack when you click a photo and suddenly get dumped to a fullscreen app. Hitting escape does nothing and it can get a bit jumbled working your way back to the desktop (is there a faster return than Windows Key + Clicking desktop again?).
Oh wow. This attitude is exactly why i don't post much on HN. Have fun being a dick.
I'd say that with careful study you can have a pretty good clue about some of the near future, the difficult bit is knowing when that future is going to occur and in what order. So making long term plans is fine as long as you allow leeway for the dates and have plenty of what-ifs and backup strategies and things to do while you wait for the wave you have guessed is out there.