skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But “commodity manufacturing is unsuccessful. It is the opposite of China…We have archaic labour laws. Nobody in their right mind is going to set up a plant employing 10,000 people.”

This.
The labour laws protect unions; many businesses simply do not want to create large manufacturing jobs due to historical labour trouble. The communist ruled states of Kerala and (previously) West Bengal have been very prone to labour troubles and strikes in the past. We don't have a Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin) here to take these labour unions on. Most of our politicians consider the unions as a good place to buy votes for cheap, and wouldn't consider reforming the old labour laws. Indian IT has far less union laws and has had a higher growth rate in the past decade, whereas manufacturing and textiles are still laggards in terms of growth.
There is just too much socialism in this country. And people want even more.
Skull implant treats epilepsy in rats with few side-effects
The biggest problem I see is that Baskerville isn't standard on Windows. They may have specified a Baskerville font-family, but that's not necessarily what the reader saw. The original test article displayed the asteroid passage as text, not as an image, so unless they accounted for the rendering differences among OS's, the entire test seems questionable.

I'm on a Vista system at the moment, and it does have a Baskerville Old Face variant, but "Gold has an atomic number of 79" does not look like the text shown in the article.
That waterboarding seems "like a 5 year old girl's birthday party" tells us that either a. there is no torture so bad as a children's party (as a parent, I can relate!), or b. that the torture dished out by the Vietnamese, Chinese, Iranians, Russians and Turks is truly horrific.

However, it is interesting that you bring up the torture used by a number of countries, because guess what? It was used extensively in China and Cambodia. Not to mention by the Pinocet regime in Chile, by the South African police under Apartheid, and even all the way back to Spanish Inquisition.

In fact, the underlying assumption you are using when you compare waterboarding to the torture used by other countries is the invalid premise that torture performed in America can never be as bad as the torture performed in other countries who have historically had poor human rights records. This is a falacious argument.

To remind you exactly what waterboarding is:

You bind an individual, then place a cloth over the subject's mouth and eyes. You strap them to an inclined bench. You then poor water over the cloth which restricts air flow. You then poor water for 20 to 40 seconds continuously on the cloth. This causes the subject to believe they are drowning (Fox News, not exactly a bastion of independent reporting, once did a demonstration and the subject gagged).

You then let the subject take two or three breaths and repeat. This process can be repeated for up to 20 to 30 minutes. That's 20 to 30 minutes of becoming close to drowning.

You say this is not significant torture? Either you are dissembling, or you are ignorant. Either way, you are wrong. It is torture pure and simple. People have actually drowned in U.S. custody while being water boarded, so you can't ever argue that it's not mortally dangerous.

None of what I'm saying is even remotely delusional. I took all of this information from well documented facts, one of which was a report from the U.S. Office of Legal Counsel.

Water boarding is a disgusting and heinous act. Those using it should be charged with the crime of torture. Anyone advocating it should be treated with contempt.
Let's try this with me...

The original: "PHP is easy to learn. Golang is as easy as PHP!"

Some str_replaces:

"Ruby is easy to learn. Golang is as easy as Ruby!"

"Clojure is easy to learn. Golang is as easy as Clojure!"

"Python is easy to learn. Golang is as easy as Python!"

Hmm, I'm still not feeling offended. Are you sure this might not be some sort of inferiority complex at play? I think a lot of PHP developers get needlessly offended whenever we talk about PHP, positive or negative.
Easiest Possible Way to Web Design Guest Posting
Becoming a successful guest blogger or a website developer is not that much easy but you will become master of your class after you gain experience.
Telerik Launches Webinar Series for Faster, Smarter Coding
>What makes this a massive effort?

Well for one, if you have ever worked on a well established high traffic site, even to add a "simple feature" without breaking something is not that simple.

Going with your logic: User Searching for a domain; Godaddy adds it to the queue; Pulls out the domains one by one from the queue and registers it for themselves. Although it might seem simple there are few flaws in it.

a) What happens if the user want to register the available domain, wait but we already added it to our queue for automatic registration. So we need to check if the user goes through with the registration or not.

b) We are going to make millions $ holding domains hostages. But since every registration will cost goddaddy atleast $5.50 to ICANN and that there are millions of searches of domains in a month, well it certainly is one way to tank your company.

c) Alright lets then try to filter out only the popular domain name searches. But how do we determine what is popular and what is not popular. Common words? Trends? Hyphenation? Numbers? TLD? User Profiling?

d) Lets hold the domain hostage and make the user wait until they agree to backorder it from us. That will always work out for user retention.

Given that I used to own a lot of domains from Godaddy, I can attest to the fact that they have much simpler ways to hold your domains hostage if they wanted to. For example: When a domain is about to expire, the sheer volume of emails you get from Godaddy reminding you to renew is outright annoying. If they had to score better money, cut it down to just one and sent them about 4 weeks before the expiration. When most people forget to do it, go ahead and charge them $80 to get it back from redemption!!
Just going off memory here, but I believe he was found to have been ftp'ing code or snipplets of code to a server he had in Germany.
There's a ton of cheap $5/€5 VPS providers, since Go apps are statically linked you can run Go code just about anywhere...
You don't understand intelligence. Doubling the circuits doubles the speed of the intelligence, but it has no effect on it's quality.

You are assuming the existence of not just an intelligent parallel algorithm but an infinitely scalable one (i.e. one that could actually take advantage of more circuits)! Because without that, you don't need to double the circuits - you could just give them more time.

Concepts that are beyond a particular intelligence will still be beyond it, even if the speed is increased.

People have a really hard time admitting that some people are truly fundamentally smarter than others. It's not just that they can think faster - they can think things that other people simply can not, even if they worked really hard at it.

I'm sure you've heard the saying "I didn't think of that". That's exactly it, even if it thinks faster, it will still never "think of that".
So, this is the culmination of 8 years of rants and blog posts? This is what he's been trying to say all that time? What a peak he has reached. What an insight.

I'm trying to think of an apt analogy for this post that doesn't involve vomit or defecation, but it's hard. From the introduction proclaiming how readers will be stunned by how clearly and resoundingly true the revelation revealed within will be, to the literary diarrhea it's followed by... it's like a little kid proudly telling his parents he finally used the toilet properly only for them to find he completely missed the bowl. Yeah, I failed.

If the political spectrum is deeply flawed, as he said, then why even try to hack it onto something completely unrelated, made of individual technical points where each programmer may have a different approach?

I don't know, I like a lot of his past posts, but I don't dig this one. I don't think it provides any useful insight whatsoever.
From the Wikipedia:

"A British court later rejected this argument as scientifically false, finding that 149 °F (65 °C) liquid could cause deep tissue damage in only two seconds."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonalds_Restauran...

"If this submission be right, McDonald's should not have served drinks at any temperature which would have caused a bad scalding injury. The evidence is that tea or coffee served at a temperature of 65 °C will cause a deep thickness burn if it is in contact with the skin for just two seconds. Thus, if McDonald’s were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55 °C and 60 °C. But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85 °C and 95 °C. Further, people generally like to allow a hot drink to cool to the temperature they prefer. Accordingly, I have no doubt that tea and coffee served at between 55 °C and 60 °C would not have been acceptable to McDonald's customers. Indeed, on the evidence, I find that the public want to be able to buy tea and coffee served hot, that is to say at a temperature of at least 65 °C, even though they know (as I think they must be taken to do for the purposes of answering issues (1) and (2)) that there is a risk of a scalding injury if the drink is spilled."

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/markup.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/...
You are not using a valid mathematical method because paradigm shifts include emotions and social behavior. What you obviously left out or just don't understand is that AI is not bound to pain or instincts of self-preservation. When the time has come for an AI to supersede the human intelligence the singularity will happen faster than the writing of your non-scientific patchwork article.

Arrogance is unjustified because your arguments are without any solid background and only show someone in research at the beginning of his career. If you are young you should better listen than speak out loud.

Saying scientific progress is linear is a pathetic explanation of someone who obviously compares scaling to a paradigm shift. Of course being able to write 10GB on 1cm² of a hard-disk was done by researchers, but they took a hard-disk with 10MB on 1cm² and tried to make it smaller. That's scaling and not scientific progress which could result in a paradigm shift or even a singularity.

My only advice for you, as I am myself am too arrogant to write more, is that you take the works of John von Neumann about AI. Then you compare the maximum different states of the human brain to the actual capabilities of super computers, find the break-even-point with Moore's law, then add 10 years of progress to improve the software and you have 2040.
It is indeed possible that India may become 'the next workshop of the world'. This will, at least in the short term, lift the country more in the span of a decade than it has risen, against all odds I might add, in the last 50 years. The only thing we Indians need to do is change our cultural bias against physical labour. And every passing day I can see this changing.
77 quotes on Learning
Android Tutorial: BroadcastReceiver
Buy a whois protection from any registrar and the registrar's name shows up. Given the risk of publicizing your real email and the cost of just $3.99 per year, most people do opt for whois protection.
i both agree and disagree.

if IT sector wouldn't be so hungry for developers, author of this article would be called at minimum insane when he asked 100k salary. and it isn't some constant thing. i think that if now would be bubble burst in IT sector, this author would continue to work for 10$ per hour.

i agree with main idea, that college should not be mandatory thing in everybody's life - all job market should be in balance : somebody must work lower-level work, somebody has to do programming, managing, financing. if everybody would be with Professor-level education, who would clean toilets in restaurants?
I think a better analogy is

Conservative: the existing system must not break!

Progressive: we must add new features!
I don't think you are trolling, I just can't control what makes it to the front page or not. Clearly this resonated with some people. I am not sure why my story as a startup founder isn't the right kind of stuff for HN, I've been a part of this community for a long time and posted a broad range of stuff from code to news to marketing advice and on and on... I'm not trying to fit the mold, I'm just sharing my experiences and its way to late for me to get apologetic about it
Imagine the next generation of hacker t-shirt : "I can replace you with a small bathtub of rat brain cells"
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Sorry, the language wasn't supposed to be the key user action here: it was more how people navigate to en.wiki from wikipedia.com.
The author completely misses the point of these arguments.

This is not about science increasing the rate of scientific progress. It's about computation improving the rate of computational progress. Particularly, the "Singularity" is about that happening in a world where strong AI exists.

And I'm not even going to harp on the fact that the number of computations per second that we perform on this planet has been undoubtedly exponential at least for a while, because that's not the real point.

The real point is that like the author says, human creativity is still the driving force in computational advances, and human creativity can't be sped up by periodically doubling clock rates or core counts.

If it could? Those doublings would happen even quicker, and the exponential growth we've seen so far would be nothing.

This does, of course, require that you believe that strong AI is possible at all, and that the entire process of creativity could eventually be put into software. If you don't believe in that in the first place, then there's no point having the argument at all - you don't argue the details of a nuclear chain reaction with someone that doesn't believe in neutrons.
I would probably place C# as significantly more
"liberal" than Java

Only if you look at these languages in isolation from their virtual machines and operating systems on top of which they run, also disregarding the communities around them.

Java as a language is more conservative, definitely, but the Java ecosystem is definitely more liberal. As proof, compare Java's open-source community with .NET. Or compare the maturity of alternative JVM languages (e.g. Scala, Clojure, JRuby), with the alternatives running on top of .NET ; or compare the web frameworks available for each.

This is the reason why, when faced with a choice, a "liberal" developer will most likely pick Java over C#, even if C# as a language is more liberal.

Only very brave--very liberal--companies are going to
use Haskell or Scheme in actual production

I do not think this is an issue of liberals versus conservatives. It's actually an issue of pragmatism versus idealism.

I'm pretty sure that many people wanted to use Haskell or Scheme in production, but then they'd shoot themselves in the foot, because the available libraries and tools for a language are far, far more important than the language itself. That's why Perl was so successful in the first place, because Perl hackers were getting shit done, then contributing to CPAN, which allowed other hackers to get their own shit done, and so on.

On the other hand I'm seeing lots of startups trying out and even using Clojure and Scala in production, at least for parts of the project. That's because these languages have all the Java libraries at their disposal, even if the languages themselves are still immature.

Don't mistake pragmatism for conservatism. That would be a mistake.
Still sounds pretty frivolous. Tea is generally made from a boiling kettle (210F) poured on a teabag. Still millions of us manage that without burning ourselves.
And I am quite sure it can not. Just walking near the table will move it more than the stated 0.009" accuracy.

And supposing you could counter it - your method is wildly more complicated than a sticker. Why not just use a sticker?
I wouldn't recommend using jQuery to style your site. That sounds incredibly silly. Apply a class that is already properly prefixed. You can use a tool like www.compass-style.org to write one line that writes it for all. Please don't use jQuery for styling.
This implies that intelligence equals willingness to conform to the potential employer's worldview.

I would definitely order wine at a dinner, mostly because I like wine at a dinner, and secondly because it would allow me to use it as a negative filter--to see if they have some sort of a problem with it.

I would rather apply elsewhere if the company didn't like wine-drinking (or if they made me file TPS reports), and leave them alone with their drinking problem.
1. Dart is less liberal than JS. For example, it is early bound. This fact alone allows the IDEs to do a much better job with less complexity.

As I mentioned, Carmack and Sweeney make engines, the artist interface is UnrealScript, or Lua, etc. But that's besides the point: performance matters. Carmack isn't trying to build yet another Box2D casual game (the Iphone Angry Birds uses a C implementation of Box2D, and Lua for game logic)

For someone like John Carmack, they are trying to push the state of the art, and starting off implementing say, idTech 7 in Python would yield unrealistic data if you're trying to see how feasible a given new rendering technique works on the large scale.

C is a typed language, there's no getting around it. It is in fact, a manifestly typed language, the types aren't optional. The fact that you can freely cast your way out of any situation doesn't really make it a dynamic language, anymore than Java reflection or bytecode rewriting makes Java a dynamic language.

The basic fact remains, the Mars rover is a highly performance critical piece of software with hard real time requirements, and it's simply not going to be written in a language that doesn't allow precise control over numeric types and memory allocation behavior. It's really those guarantees that many people associate with strongly typed systems programming languages, not the compile time checking.

Game programmers are very liberal, they want to escape straight jackets, and get deterministic and low level control over everything, often breaking the rules of the system. And in this regard, dynamic languages often taken away some freedom -- the freedom to control memory, stack, and cache behavior. They are conservative in a way.
The point of linking to articles like this is to encourage the next batch of hopeful teenagers to learn from other people's experiences and stay out of the games industry instead of having to learn the hard way.
A few improvement suggestions:
Using Chrome the entries of the File Menu are not readable
The Bold and Italic buttons should change their state if the selected text is bold or italic
It would be nice if the size of a text field can be changed by resizing the box
Clojure is tied very strongly to the Java toolchain (note "toolchain" rather than "ecosystem"). The packaging system and package managers use Maven and Java jars instead of a clojure-based one.

This means that promising projects like Clojure CLR have no chance of taking off the ground, unlike say Ruby vs Jruby vs Ruby EE vs Rubinius.
The author, rightly, makes the point that finance, like most things, is primarily about trust. But that's about the most interesting thing in the article.

Capital introductions are hard, and everyone wants to cosy up to someone looking for a 'home' for their excess millions. It's an environment where a couple of dudes/dudettes with laptops and an idea might have a potentially successful hedge-fund idea but lack the credibility and track record to make the risk worthwhile for a potential investor. The investor could lose a lot of money very quickly if your idea is wrong. The chances are, that if your idea is 'right' they'll listen to you explain it (because you really will need to explain it in depth) and then go and find someone who they do trust to implement it for them.

My point is that, it would be very hard for me to gain sufficient trust from prospective investors to raise $200m because I don't have any contacts or access to the necessary capital.

However, the daughter of a financial advisor for high-net worth individuals is playing a very different game to me. She very well might easily be able to do, what I easily can not. So, for me at least, there's nothing of interest in this article. I'm pleased for Elle to be in such a great position and wish her well.
I am European, so I really don't get that. Why don't you try to make education cheaper? Why are you taking it as granted that university must cost x 10000's dollars a year? Out here outside of UK it is mostly around 1000 Eur max a year.

Having free higher ed changes the picture. When you are from a middle class family it is your ticket to maintain or even climb the social ladder. Even if for some people, the education content is less useful, then you get a huge lots of social interactions that you don't get elsewhere, and probably not out of a online learning offering.
No, you have to sell .mobi files. However .mobi files don't have to be DRMed. You can have non-DRMed .mobi files. When you sign up to the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), and are setting up a book to be published, there's a checkbox "Enable DRM". just don't check that.

Lots of self published authors use creative commons work as a cover art, so it even can be creative commons licenced.

Many books are sold on the Kindle Shop without DRM. Some large publishers (e.g. science fiction publisher Tor) is selling books on the Kindle Shop without DRM.
First time I've heard of alcohol having benefits in near-homeopathic doses. I am strongly sceptical.
Yes, I've thought this for quite some time.

Heh, I just wrote a "me too" post. :J
another victim of the second system effect?
So the office romance per se wasn't the problem but the system that allowed concretely bad things to emanate from it. If the courts take such lawsuits seriously, then that allows people to shift responsibility away from themselves and that's generally when bad things start happening.

In another culture the two would've just broken up, caused a stir in the office, and in the worst case one of them might have left the company if they wouldn't have been able to recover and speak to each other again.
> I don't think that Tim Sweeney or John Carmack are prematurely optimizing ...

Well, this is where the rant misses the mark, I think. Whether some programming thing is Liberal or Conservative really depends on the context, how much is at stake and where you're currently pushing the envelope.

The code for the Mars Rover has to be ridiculously safe and conservative, since it cost billions, is deployed in a harsh environment and if it crashes you've lost the lot.

If you're hacking and validating some startup idea, then something that's bloated and poorly tested is fine, since it's likely to be wrong at first, and speed of development is more important than safety.

Both of these are safe choices, and they're the choices that you'd make, but they're at opposite ends of the spectrum... but you're the same developer.

He has 9 points for each side, but my take is that they're all true.
Linear increases in science can drive exponential increases in what's possible.

I remember computers of 30 and 40 years ago. Today everyone in the world has free access to supercomputers that translate languages and search petabytes of data (aka Google). We didn't need to revolutionize basic physics to get here from punched cards.

Expect a similar revolution in the next 30 to 40 years.
In my youth I had a reasonable capacity in the evenings but not at lunchtime: half a pint would be noticeably incapacitating, a pint would send me to sleep.