skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, smooth performance is something very few consumers in the developing world actually care about. I bought an android phone for ~$130 in 2010. It ran eclair. Now it runs the latest version of gingerbread. I never really felt it's performance was a deal breaker at any point. And consequently, the galaxy Y duos, a gingerbread phone that retails for ~$160 today, runs pretty smooth. Here's a video of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=qZdAbI0ZMuE It's performance is really good enough and something most consumers would buy.
bear in mind that seeing why something failed (or is failing) is pretty easy after the fact, ridiculously hard to do before the fact. that said, i think many people saw the handwriting on the wall before "the fall", even at nokia. so, why did they continue to slip and become irrelevant in the smartphone ecosystem?

inertia. plain and simple. not market inertia - although that plays a part - but internal inertia. and nokia had around a decade of inertia, some of it is technical debt that gets harder to pay off, some of it comes from big customers and partners you acquired. but underestimate the weight of that at your peril.

every business has stakeholders, internal and external. when you recognize a significant shift must be made, these stakeholders still have to be satisfied. you have teams of people - customers, partners, business units - invested in the way things are. to make changes to your core technology and violate the expectations of those stakeholders is insanely difficult to pull off. RIM is going through this, as well. one cannot simply "just adopt android (or windows mobile)" and be done with it. you have to see contracts and expectations (e.g. core applications and solutions) through with those stakeholders.

clayton christensen did a great job of elaborating on this in "the innovator's dilemma", everyone should study it. this is a ruthless market with fickle customers - developers, end users (witness the crash of motorolla in about one year!), everyone you need to win over - and an insanely fast cycle, much faster than your platform and hardware development cycle. today's darlings will be tomorrow's road kill, they always are in this business.
"On a side note, robber barons are largely a myth."

What exactly is mythological about robber barons? The term is widely used and I've never heard anyone question their existence.
Labour? Work doesn't always translate to digging the earth to seed trees.

There is something called as relative value, and people tend to get paid depending on how much valuable their contributions are.
I don't read Mises, but thanks for the assumption. The causes of the housing crisis are and were, for lack of a better word, obvious. You don't need to read this or that, or even subscribe to a certain form of political thought to see why things happened as they did.

> Like you assuming what people in the past thought about an event without searching from some data to support your assertions.

They elected Roosevelt how many times in a row?
I am obviously responding only to the "In 2006 Milgram claimed that I had engaged in scientific misconduct" part.

I am not suggesting I approve of any of their actions.
The 4 and 7 has been an ongoing debate among marketing academics, it seems. I recall the "right" answer alternating course by course through school, pending the professors interest.

If I recall, the 4 P's are the standard marketing mix, with the 7 P's being called the extended marketing mix. FWIW, the 4 was definitely more central at my school.
No rebuttal of concerns in the "paper" except to say that it was improper to identify the schools?

No explanation of why she contacted the police about Wayne?

No explanation of why she apparently thinks hosting a not-peer-reviewed paper online is wrong?

No sympathy from me.
I think the problem is that the people who are attacking the original post would like to make lots of money with only programming skills. Unfortunately, as patio11 and others constantly repeat here, most people don't value code, they value results that solve a business problem, and this requires the ability to sell those results.
The only good way to develop apps
Arguing semantics -- e.g. "you said 'testimonial' instead of 'quote'" -- is the last refuge of scoundrels. But that's okay. Just like you with your "BS" and "taking advantage of" and off-handed tales of deceit, I mean scoundrel in a nice way.
I really like Ars highlighting these questions, I would often not have seen them if it wasn't for them republishing the answers. They also highlight questions which are relevant to people in the wider tech community that may not be working developers and expose them to some interesting questions.

Ars is hardly becoming an aggregation site, IMO they have always had thoughtful, high quality writing with a balanced perspective. One article a week is not a sign of a change in strategy.
1. What constitutional limit?

>Yet we don't realize that it was precisely the largeness of the government and its influence on the market and money that caused the crisis.

2. Just how was overregulation responsible for a massive price bubble?

>At the time, people blamed the crash on capitalism when the real causes were anything but

3. What part about your definition of capitalism excludes massive price bubbles, followed up by the government of the time constraining monetary conditions?

>how would we afford iPhones and all of the miracles of modern technology without globalization and.. technology?

Well, I'm not going to argue against global trade. It's pretty great, and the growth it's generated in China absolutely benefits the Chinese. Mass exploitation of the labour force, hopefully, is a transitionary stage.

That said, we'd still have iphones. They would be a bit more expensive but not that much more expensive.
I once maintained that Senate Republicans on the Banking committee supported a complex regulatory regime because their influence and status derived from the value they provided helping banks navigate that regulatory apparatus. My left-wing friends regarded this as the most cynical thing they'd ever heard, but they didn't have much evidence or analysis against it.

Politicians want a powerful state because their power derives from their influence over that state. They want their power to grow because no one is ever satisfied with what they have.

If the US has a Serratta, it would be in the impossibility of doing business without managing political relations, and thus the exclusion of people with serious interests from any serious effort to reform the state. I'm not sure we're there yet, but if we aren't we're dangerously close.
Why are you using embedded mode of mod_wsgi?
Unless I am mistaken, they both do. There are multiple kinds of red shift.

> "Redshifts are attributable to the Doppler effect, familiar in the changes in the apparent pitches of sirens and frequency of the sound waves emitted by speeding vehicles; an observed redshift due to the Doppler effect occurs whenever a light source moves away from an observer. Cosmological redshift is seen due to the expansion of the universe, and sufficiently distant light sources (generally more than a few million light years away) show redshift corresponding to the rate of increase of their distance from Earth. Finally, gravitational redshifts are a relativistic effect observed in electromagnetic radiation moving out of gravitational fields. Conversely, a decrease in wavelength is called blueshift and is generally seen when a light-emitting object moves toward an observer or when electromagnetic radiation moves into a gravitational field."

The increasing distance between stars due to expansion is not velocity as we traditionally think of it. Things that far away get red-shifted because at distances that large expansion becomes a factor, not because of how they are otherwise moving about. It's basically the general idea behind Hubble's Law.
Sounds like a really interesting person, I expect you could hook him into a support network of developers, marketeers, and brand managers and his insights would start supporting an entire mini-industry, like Pierre Cardin, or Ives St Laurent.
>I would believe US is far better of at this than any other country I know of.

It's not a leader overall. It may have the most billionaires, but if you're looking at average outcomes you're probably best off in Norway.

>I think any economic system should reward getting wealthy

Absolutely. It doesn't work nearly as well otherwise.

>The poor will be given opportunities, but however remember using them and converting them to goodness is really their responsibility.

Responsibility and availability of opportunities. The more opportunities, the more people benefit. We're talking about increasing the pool of opportunities.
Ready Player One - Did the Pentagon Just Take Over America's Cybersecurity?
The one fundamental error in this article is the assumption that money solves everything. As many have pointed out, we spend lots of money on education - it has had little to no effect on the quality of that education.
the article is about how rich places start to decline. so it makes sense only as an article about somewhere that is rich.

or maybe you're not criticising the article at all, just keeping us informed about the rest of the world?

[rather than downvote, try clarifying how an article on the decline of rich communities should be written about somewhere that is not a rich community...]
I predict that the ability to exaggerate and caricature an era will be inversely proportional to that era's ability to store information and make it accessible to future eras.
More like it is blog spam to drive traffic to the bloggers startup/blog/etc..
Well if you really mention this you are likely to be badly admonished to keep this to yourself.

I can't even imagine how anybody in the US can even describe themselves as poor. I mean the definitions of poor so badly put down in this case, it makes the actual poor look like they don't exist at all.

Sometime back there was a post here about blacks(in the US) in some place not having good sanitation facilities. They were considered very poor. And they had cars, good enough homes, food, electricity, roads, park and ask what not. In my country they would qualify as very rich people(In India).

Its law of diminishing utility, a massive hedonic threadmill to describe at the best.
I'm always dismayed to read comments in HN when an article like this comes up because their is always such a complete backlash against it. Don't get me wrong, I saw problems with the article too, but I don't necessarily disagree with overall premise and I find it sad that there isn't even an inkling of an opinion of someone trying to defend it.
I think most liberals would agree with you. I want the absolute minimum amount of regulation that effectively manages the free market as well as minimal basic social safety nets.
> Err, Einstein's static universe did not preclude the death of stars via exhaustion of their fuel.

Yes, by a process of radiating away massive amounts of energy.

> So, the entire universe would "heat up" to a uniform distribution (i.e. evolve according to the heat equation), with the future local heat being everywhere equal to the mean local heat at present.

No, not "at present" "At present" is the outcome of a combination of energy radiation and cosmological expansion leading to the present. Were it not for the factor of expansion, the universe would be much, much hotter than it is now.

> And, in general, the universe is overwhelmingly empty and cold.

Yes, it is -- because of cosmological expansion. Were this not the case, the universe's temperature would be equal to or or greater than it was at "recombination" time, i.e. when normal atoms formed and the universe first became transparent to radiation, at about 300,000 years and an average temperature of about 4000 kelvins.

> I'm not sure what the mean energy of the universe is ...

Don't you mean average temperature? One can speak of total energy, or average temperature, but "mean energy" doesn't make much sense.

> ... or what the minimal energy required to coax an electron to jump around and create visible light is ...

That's well-established. When the energy of an impinging photon is equal to that for a possible electron orbital transition, and ignoring for the moment a few other considerations, the electron will absorb the photon and move to a higher orbit. Conversely, if an electron should drop from its present orbit to a lower orbit, a photon will be emitted whose wavelength is proportional to the energy difference between the orbits.

> In other words, given a perhaps dubious mixing of temporally diverse understandings of physics ...

At any given time, there is one understanding of physics. It's obviously open to challenge as all scientific theories are, but each challenge must be accompanied by observational evidence. The point of science is not to have any number of theories, the point is to have one -- the one that best answers observation.

> the relevant homogeneously energetic universe would likely be nowhere energetic enough to cause light.

For a sufficiently comprehensive definition of "light" (meaning electromagnetic radiation), no, not possible. There will always be electromagnetic radiation, even for a universe at zero Kelvins, because of quantum effects.

> Thus, perhaps we should be more surprised that everywhere we look isn't dark?

Not in this universe, no -- not with stars converting mass into prodigious amounts of energy everywhere we look. Which leads, full circle, to Olbers' Paradox.
I point that out to people and it annoys them. I ask how is it we've doubled the funding per student and our results are so bad, maybe funding isn't the issue.

It is a hard thing for folks to hear though. If the thing you are telling them means there isn't an "easy" (or even imaginable) solution to the problem they care deeply about, they really can't accept it. It feels like accepting defeat.
Complete Ruby/Rails Project Documentation with Sdoc and Sublime Text 2
Anyone in software development saying "this is the only good way to do ..." is not only never going to innovate anything, but they're also already wrong.
Cool. I agree if they had done the counter studies or worked through channels to analyze the data, all would be fine. Scientific disagreement is scientific.

This type of "I'll pull a bad movie plot" conduct just puts all human-based research in danger or makes it more difficult to get approved.
>while the middle class barely felt a prick

A lot of middle class people's portfolios lost a huge amount of their value and the overall tumult let to a lot of job loss. The economy still hasn't recovered to where it was then.
Yes! AngularJS's concept is similar to RAD frameworks such as VCL (in Delphi) and the UI frameworks in .net frameworks on Windows.
And the rebuttal, "Yes, I want to be writing Game of Life easter eggs"
Before Instantgram, there was Histamic (and why they failed)
Hah! Me too!
> if the speed is greater or equal to speed of light, how we can be sure that we won't see ourselves in telescope?

That doesn't follow. We can't see an object moving away at greater than C, so we also can't see ourselves.

There is one place where we might see the backs of our own heads -- while observing at the event horizon of a black hole, all practical considerations aside. At that location, the spacetime curvature is such that light emitted "horizontally" would curve around the horizon (and the black hole) and reappear 360 degree away -- for example, from the opposite direction of someone shining a laser beam "horizontally" along the horizon.

> I mean, even if the radius is infinite, because speed is increasing, we should see sun light returning to us over universe surface at some point

No, not really.
When the time comes to negotiate terms, it is a short conversation.
Just google his name and "rivets". Looks like it's actually a joking remark Card makes himself to express what it's like to dabble in both sci-fi and fantasy (Card is successful with both).

Card maintains that switching genres wasn't a difficult
thing for him. He believes that, ultimately, the
difference between the two genres is largely on the
surface. "Half joking, I was writing to Ben (Bova) about
this very subject, and I said, look, fantasy has trees,
and science fiction has rivets. That's it, that's all
the difference there is, the difference of feel,
perception.
All finite lattices are posets, but not all finite posets are lattices, so I stand by the usage.

Yes obviously, but nowhere is it clear that you actually have a lattice of any kind. Specifically, I see no reason why pruning DAGs of unused computations would yield a lattice, and this is a result you seem to rely on. Program lattice does indeed sound nicer than program bounded poset, but I would be more wary about misusing terminology than having a nice name! :)
hey that's pretty cool. given that i was just reading about ted nelson's project xanadu this fits pretty neatly with that.

hopefully you can tune it to ignore various words that have less impact on things and instead focus on more core and unique elements.
Ask HN: How do you approach learning new languages?
Recently when starting to learn a new programming language I became conscious of my thought process. I was looking at segments of code, and comparing the segment to performing the same process in a language I am more adept in.

Is if helpful when learning to program to relate different language's syntax to each other, or should you take each language individually(aside from the general logic)?
Yes to both points. I haven't read the source code, but this feels like a case of code-oriented-programming instead of data-oriented-programming. In other words, they write printf twice: once in the C library, and once in the warning system. A more careful programmer might write both in terms of a ruleset that's declared a single time.

(Or they did that and it's just a bug somewhere.)
$1 in 1970 would cost $5.94 in 2012, so, there's that.

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=197...
You can buy likes on eBay for about $10/thousand. I'm guessing that the sort of people who sell that service pick random pages to do before/after screenshots with datestamps etc. Sure, screenshots could be faked, but it's probably cheaper in terms of time spent to just do it for real and treat it as an overhead expense for your clickfarm.
Do-Not-Track Movement is Drawing Advertisers' Fire
> Google barely got in with android and the door slammed behind them. Meego was too late and Windows Phone was far too late. It does not matter how good Windows phone is, their DOA based on the network effect.

This. If you draw a Venn diagram of competent iOS developers, Android developers, and Windows Phone developers - there is very little intersection in my experience. An individual developer's bandwidth is limited - they can't simultaneously easily grasp the intricacies of UITableView and ListView. It's like the old cliche about multi-tasking - it simply does not work in practice. I have met a few who claim to do both iOS and Android well but in practice they are sacrificing depth for breadth.

Windows Phone is DOA for the reasons you stated and the fact that if there is a small consultancy or product shop that does iOS and Android - it is likely two different people. If you add Windows Phone, it will likely be a third person. From what I've heard from reading MSDN-type magazines about Windows Phone, those third persons are griping about how Microsoft keeps on changing the technology stack (e.g. WP7 is not compatible with WP8, Silverlight's evolution, etc.).

Also, I have yet to see a Windows Phone in the wild in the hands of the coveted 18-39 Female demographic. That is dominated by iOS with some Android and Blackberry exceptions.
Between 2007 and 2008, the median household income nominally increased, and inflation adjusted dropped $1900 out of $54,000.[1]

From December 1, 2007 to December 1, 2008, the value of the S&P 500 was cut in half. Somehow I suspect if you compared tax returns from 2007 and 2008, you'd see that high income taxpayers lost huge.[2] That's how it looks to me when I eyeball it. Look at taxpayers with more than $10,000,000 in income vs $50,000-$75,000, for example. The former dropped $160 billion in AGI, while the obviously much larger latter group dropped only $15 billion. That's the mirror image of the kind of data that allows Saez to claim that 90% of income gains in 2009-10 went to the top 1%.

[1] http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php

[2] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07in12ms.xls http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/08in12ms.xls
Getting Lucky and Still Failing - Don't Be Outwitted
In CA at least there is prop 13 so unless you also have many new home buyers you have a percentage of the population still paying at 1970's tax rates... Slightly f'ed if you are correct about the spending increase - more detail here - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(19...
> When you order cooked food, you're already paying a premium for someone to work on your order right now. So the price differential doesn't seem that great to go from takeout or eat in to delivery. This is why pizza delivery seems so cheap ($4-5 depending on how you tip).

On a related topic, why is only pizza delivery common in many parts of the US? In other countries, such as Japan, you can find home delivery options from all kinds of restaurants, but this doesn't exist in a lot of America, particularly the suburbs.
Remember Saez is talking about income. IRAs and 401(k)'s aren't reported as income until you take disbursements. So the phenomenon I'm discussing only affects those who truly make their annual income from investment.

If Saez used wealth rather than income, I suspect this stat would end up much less impressive for just the reason you mentioned. He's essentially just capturing the effects of the market rally.
> 1. What constitutional limit?

The limits imposed by the Constitution. It's really not that mysterious of a document. The interstate commerce clause might seem ambiguous, but it certainly was never intended to be as abused as it is today. The existence 10th Amendment makes this even more obvious.

> 2. Just how was overregulation responsible for a massive price bubble?

I'll be a bit more clear: we either need much less regulation, or a whole lot more. Given how badly more regulation generally goes, I'd prefer less. We were stuck in this awkward middle ground as a result of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act. It didn't get rid of the FDIC, but it got rid of certain regulations preventing commercial banks from being investment banks (simplification). So it basically encouraged risk taking by banks. Remove the FDIC, and you'll see much less risk taking. So we really need to get rid of ALL of the Glass-Steagal act. As well, we need to get rid of the SEC. By this sort of deregulating, you discourage risk by making banks much more accountable to their investors.

> 3. What part about your definition of capitalism excludes massive price bubbles, followed up by the government of the time constraining monetary conditions?

My definition of capitalism, ideally, would not include the Fed.

> They would be a bit more expensive but not that much more expensive.

But would the lower/middle classes be able to afford them? Or as readily? Given wages here, probably not.
Marxist tripe.
The problem isn't the amount we're spending, it's how it's being spent. Everyone I know who is a teacher has severe issues funding class activities and are usually told they have $0 for supplies for the entire year. That tells me the money is being used in largely unproductive ways.

Where is the extra money going? Probably to pay for a bureaucrat to enforce the new standardized testing and feedback crap that isn't really helping all that much. Probably to fund more sports because sports, amirite? Probably paying for iPads that, while useful, aren't being use the way they're supposed to because of untrained teachers.

Wherever it's going, it likely isn't going to fund classroom equipment that teachers actually need or quality textbooks for students.