skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article makes a couple good points, but the assumption that competitiveness can only be measured in capitalization is stupid. Anyone who believes that need simply review the proportion of acquisitions by fortune 500's that are still competitive in their markets 5 years later.

In annoying MBA language: cost of goods for cinematic content is falling rapidly due to technological and social progress, and this is reducing the negotiation power of large integrated production and marketing companies like the big studios.

The cost of script-writing and conceptual development is largely constant and independent of production cost. Nearly every feature of production cost is falling rapidly, from cameras to post production technologies. Even location shooting, which you might assume independent of technological factors, is being rapidly undercut by digital backdrops (which became the norm in cinema quality television shows with shocking speed).

The net effect of all this change is that negotiation power is moving from large integrated studio ventures to original content producers. Small production companies are less dependent on the capital advances, production infrastructure and marketing channels the big studios can offer.

Netflix definitely understands this, and also understands that the current Hollywood players fail to meet significant areas of demand. You see this in their choices of what productions they've funded directly like arrested development. It's a high risk venture, but it's not just a bluff or impossible. They are hiding in the blind spot of nearly all large market players: the unwillingness to abandon or cannibalize currently profitable activities because of changing market conditions.
This message was sent by a homeland "Y Station", most likely from the RAF, to a decoding facility downstream, in the SIGINT community. At Bletchley or elsewhere. Y Stations were monitoring German military communications from the UK. It is why what we can now read on paper is the verbatim retranscription of a procedure that was heard on a radio receiver by a radio intelligence operator, --ie the presence of the standard "checksum" and EOM signature comprising the reiteration of the header group followed by the total number of 5-groups sent -- 27 in the instance. The origin time "1522" is the ZULU at which the actual transmission started while the end of transmission time is written after the checksum "1525/6".
Taking pauses into account, this means the morse code operator was transmitting the groups at 10wpm, a credible speed for this type of operation. I hope this helps.
Greetings from rainy Montreal
David Thorne-Alexander
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumanor_Hall
I disagree. There are a number of large consumer facing companies that have excellent service that reflects their attempts at caring about the customer. At their size, it becomes incredibly difficult, nay impossible, for everything to remain perfect and there will be bad experiences here and there but overall some have done an amazing job.

Apple and Amazon as bluerib24 has mentioned, but as well as companies like Costco and Nordstrom has proven to be valuable as well, in my opinion.
LLVM IR provides a clean API boundary separating the compiler frontend from the backend. This has two notable advantages: it limits the complexity and "code tangle" of combining two extremely complex pieces of software, and it lets you swap in new frontend / backend components easily. For example, if you want to develop a new language, you don't need to worry about writing a fancy optimizer or backends for X86 / ARM / MIPS / esoteric processor X: you just target LLVM, and you get an advanced optimizer outputting many instruction sets for free. Additionally, if you're creating a new instruction set, and you write an LLVM backend, you get the benefit of supporting every language outputting LLVM.
Can someone explain to me why I would build an application in GTK(+) verses html? Given the availability of webkit bindings available for most languages, why wouldn't I call a webkit html rendering area and create my application in there? Is it to take advantage of system-wide styling?
I have an amazon prime app on my ps3. Works great.
...highly skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know how to run the computer that runs the machine. --

Thinking meta for a moment here: How far does this concept go of machine process. Could we program machines that can run the computers that run the machines? And how about machines that program those machines?

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s
I don't know what the job mobility statistics are, but remember that the US workforce is about one hundred and fifty million people and the European one is a similar order of magnitude. You need to scale comparisons accordingly (eg comparing the US to Canada where the latter has a workforce under 20 million).

Additionally it is far easier to move in the US. There are no immigration requirements, language barriers, major cultural differences, different education systems, certifications (sometimes states differ) or similar impediments. Many states are "at will" meaning that employment is not protected to the degree it is in many other countries. This means that mobility can happen from both employee and employer sides.

I don't think job hopping is due to being self centred (in the pejorative sense). The US tends to be very productive which means employment and employees are more able to move around to meet needs. That they do so is not a bad thing.

I've known couples where one works a big boring established company in order to bring in the healthcare while the other works at startups. They would both prefer to work at startups but by the time people approach 40 there is likely to be some health issues forecast if not already happening. (Even the fittest people wear out body parts!)

And if anything economic policies have been discouraging mobility. Higher house/ing prices makes people sticky and diverts income into unproductive use, but seems to be a goal. (We'd all be better off with a lot cheaper housing costs.) The lack of competition in communications (largely due to regulatory capture) means that remote participation is a lot less effective than it could be. And of course health care is dysfunctional and expensive, although the care received by some of the people some of the time is world leading.
Something similar in India: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-22353...
I am not sure in the sense of: If I were dropped on a desert island, I could derive a water-tight proof of this result from scratch.

I am confident, though, based upon my reading of secondary sources written by people that I trust.

From one of Bengio's works (http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~bengioy/papers/ftml.pdf):
"More interestingly, there are functions computable with a polynomial-size logic gates circuit of depth k
that require exponential size when restricted to depth k − 1 (Hastad, 1986)."
Firstly, the title is linkbait and is a total non sequitur. What's the bluff? Is Reed Hastings lying when he says Amazon is spending $1B? Probably not, as the author admits. Basically the title is meaningless.

Secondly, Kirwin (the author) is making the classic mistake of seeing all these big massive companies entering the market and thus declaring that Netflix is doomed. The problem is that for these companies, video is an afterthought compared to the main product. Netflix is completely focused on video. There have been countless cases of nimbler, smaller companies out-executing larger, broader companies. I can understand why the author makes this mistake - his background is primarily in film production and working at Paramount and Microsoft (the article says he has worked at some startups, but none that I could find on his site).

I find it ironic that Kirwin is calling out tech bloggers for being "wannabe Hollywood analysts," when it seems to me that he is a Hollywood blogger writing as a wannabe tech analyst.
Ask HN: What is the future of Clojure on the JVM?
When I think of scala or groovy, I feel assured that anytime in the future, they will be running on the JVM... What about Clojure? Will it run on the JVM in future?
I'm still waiting for ZRTP to catch up in normal XMPP/Jingle clients like Pidgin and etc. Somehow support for it is really lacking.
This is a reminder that even First World nations don't always live up to US standards with respect to freedom of speech.

I think I've heard that video games that feature Nazis -- even if they're strictly enemies -- can't be sold in France and Germany.

It really makes you appreciate how powerful the US Constitution is. Maybe the Tea Party was on to something...
Many used books are not all that appealing on Amazon since they do not include free shipping. If you can get close to those prices but people only have to drop by the store rather than pay for inefficient shipping (it's usually not two day like most are used to with Prime) it could be compelling. The hardest thing of course is building awareness of your offering. I've never been to your store but have heard great things. Why have I never been? Well I live in Boston and I honestly cannot remember the last time I bought a book in a bookstore. I suppose I'm not your target customer and I think the challenge will be indetifying precisely who that is and considering if they are enough to run a sustainable business.

I think labors of love can be foolish but at the same time I have the utmost respect for them. Best of luck. I will be stopping in sometime soon.
I was going to ask the same thing and then decided to do some research myself. I read some of her books many years ago, and they struck me then, but right now I don't have a strong opinion on the matter.

So far I have failed to find any well-reasoned criticisms -- most of the criticism appears to come from people who misunderstand her work (or perhaps I do). I think the topic is ripe for analysis.
Don't feel bad, it's not your fault. The only thing betraying your true age is the fact that you even think about privacy settings. Most Facebook users have no idea how to limit (or judge) message visibility, nor do they desire to. Facebook also sabotages such attempts on purpose.

For instance, I used to think I got my publication settings down pretty good (by dividing FB friends into groups), but it turns out Facebook ignores and resets your preferences every once in a while for good measure. So even if you belong to the small minority of users who go through the trouble of trying to compartmentalize their message publication, Facebook will override you and enable interesting things like your coworkers commenting on party pictures they shouldn't even be able to see.
> This is a reminder that even First World nations don't always live up to US standards with respect to freedom of speech.

Seems Bradley Manning was as naive as you. You are of course joking right? I'd like to draw your attention to this if you think that freedom of speech in the USA is any better than anywhere else.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/...
> He obviously had a lot of cultural exposure to the US

Which he has promptly gone on to satirise in the gangnam video. Oh the irony. ;-)
I see a similar problem even in software jobs. Employers frequently advertise for highly specific skill sets that almost nobody has. Then when nobody or only fraudulent people apply, they reject them all and claim a skills shortage. The problem seems to be a basic misconception about how transferable software skills are. An excellent programmer with no experience in Python will be out performing a poor Python programmer in a matter of weeks, even though they have had to learn an entirely new language. This idea, however, seems entirely lost on most HR departments, and the result is an almost entirely "fake" skills shortage.
“A rational man never leaves his interests at the mercy of any one person or single, specific concrete. He may need clients, but not any one particular client — he may need a job, but not any one particular job.”

I included the Ayn Rand quote because it's simply the most straight-forward and succinct summary of what my blog post was all about.

In the context of your blog post, the Ayn Rand quote is arguing for MULTIPLE clients and MULTIPLE jobs to avoid dependence on any one client or employer. Your post argues for choosing ONE single particular job, with ONE single, specific employer, using criteria not based on employer benefits. I don't see what one has to do with the other.
The post is narrowly focused. Unless the author plans to make no friends with anyone at a place where most people spend more than half of his awake hours, his plan is insufficient to make it easier to leave a job. At this point, I would say letting down my peers and friends at work is a strong motivation for me. Perhaps in the eyes of some people, perhaps the author, caring about what others think of me makes me somehow weaker or less "rational". As a matter of preference, I would rather trade off some independence for the benefits of friendship and camaraderie.

Furthermore, his argument is unrealistic. Most of us don't compare one job with no benefits vs. another with benefits. The situation in the Bay Area at least means that we are often comparing jobs with very similar benefits. Thus, the benefits offered by my current employer is nullified by the equally good benefits of the competing offer, just as companies offering the benefits hope they would do. In the end, most jobs in the Bay Area are fairly comparable in terms of benefits and pay. What matters are the less tangible things: culture, opportunity, challenge, etc. The biggest factor that's keeping me at my company right now are the friends I've made there over the years and I have no regrets about having tied myself down with friendship.
Many cities regulate taxis as public utilities, in a similar fashion and logic to the regulation of telephone, power, water and public transit companies. We don't see much discussion of it anymore, but if you look to the early-20th century, you'll find many examples of granting monopoly licenses in exchange for universal service and non-discrimination.

To the extent that you think this is unconstitutional, unprecedented or inherently destructive, I encourage you to look at US economic history before 1970. AT&T's monopoly and rate regulation included transfer pricing which allowed them to subsidize rural services and connect the last mile to (almost) every home and business across North America. (Most of Europe accomplished the same with state-owned telephone companies.) The AT&T monopoly came with the mandate to provide services even where they were unprofitable (and sometimes for free), with the guarantee of profits elsewhere. That regime ultimately extended Bell Labs' $0 transistor licensing, which made the semiconductor industry possible. Similar requirements were made of power utilities, and that's also the logic behind taxi regulations.

Vancouver's taxi laws require at least 6-days/week service, for a minimum of 10hours/24hours. Taxis are (basically) required to accept all fares and serve all areas at all hours, without discrimination. In return for providing universal service (and to keep monitoring practical), the licensed providers were guaranteed a monopoly (and kept small in number). Of course, as soon as you grant a monopoly, you set the stage for price gouging, which is (as with AT&T) where the government-fixed rates come from.

In short: the prices aren't fixed arbitrarily, technocrats use them to advance designated public policy objectives.
No we can't. I base that on being a software architect who sat through endless useless marketing meetings from IBM & their ilk promising the imminent advent of Doodleware (have a business person with domain knowledge & no technical skills draw a process on this monkey-easy UI tool & we'll generate a working application from it.)

I maintain that being a programmer will still be a highly paid skill in demand for decades to come for one simple reason : You can't bullshit a computer. You can't sweet-talk a machine into accepting your algorithm because of your great personality , looks or any other intangible except for knowing what you're doing.
if you want a parallel, look no further than the sorry state of machine translation & that despite the enormous amounts of datasets they've been playing with. Human intelligence & judgement, even on a very very narrowed use case is not something computers are close to replicate.
People have run software that manage mechanical turk campaigns that manage people performing tasks such as filling out online forms to create email accounts and such....
I dunno. Perl does a pretty good job of "do what I mean" style programming. Sure, not every hard problem can be solved automatically, but a lot of tasks can be accomplished by a short script or banging keywords into Google, etc.
The problem with VOD is that Hollywood holds all the cards (as the article points out). With DVD, Netflix had leverage because the movie studios sold DVDs. Fair use and first sale offered Netflix the leverage and cover to get content at reasonable prices. With VOD, Hollywood can negotiate rates to their liking. I'm sure a part of Hollywood wouldn't mind Netflix dying with the logic being that customers would buy more DVDs if that happened (I'm not saying that would be the outcome, but that seems to be the logic that parts of Hollywood might employ).

This is one of the reasons I was saddened by Netflix de-emphasizing DVDs by mail. That part of the business offered them leverage over streaming rates. "Look at it this way: you can offer us movie X for 30 cents per viewing or we can buy a DVD of it and rent it to 200 people for that $20 purchase." It provides a compelling scenario: $20 for 200 people seeing the film vs. $60 for 200 people seeing the film. However, as Netflix's customer base moves to all-VOD and Netflix itself indicates that DVD by mail is going to become a thing of the past, studios see a Netflix without an alternative to whatever rate they set. Netflix used to have an alternative rate: the price of the DVD.

I'm not exactly sure how we should deal with this situation. I don't think VOD services can realistically thrive unless they get similar footing to what DVD-rental businesses got. Specifically, that they can get a show on equal terms to their competitors (ie. Amazon, Netflix, and my hypothetical video startup can all license movie X for 30 cents per viewing or whatnot). In the meantime, exclusives, content that disappears due to renegotiated licenses, content that won't be licensed, etc. will be the status quo. These are bad ideas (it's 1 am and I'm tired), but maybe something like "you can rent by streaming X times a DVD that you've purchased" so that they could pay the DVD's price and that price would cover a number of streaming rentals or a law saying that companies must give substantially equal access and terms on their content.
Only paid accounts and government/education accounts have a "customer PIN", apparently.
The Manning case is a little different than this. He systematically leaked tons of classified information that he had access to as part of his job.

I'm not going to take the discussion off topic by taking a position either way on whether his actions were right or wrong. I just want to point out that it wouldn't be logically inconsistent to believe that Manning's treatment was justified, but also believe that criminalization of the burning poppy and "die and go to hell" comment discussed in the article goes too far.

(Interestingly, "criminalization" isn't a word in my browser's spellcheck dictionary, but "decriminalization" is. I'm running Chromium 20.0.1132.47 (the latest in the main repos as of this writing) on Linux Mint 13.)
> This is a reminder that even First World nations don't always live up to US standards with respect to freedom of speech.

That made me cringe. A lot. My first-world western country doesn't live up to your "standards" of freedom of speech because we have different standards. We value speech differently.
You still need to tell Perl your intent, laid out in a very specific way. by the time you're ready to write your code, you've already solved 99.9999 % of the problem at hand. you're severely underestimating your smarts.
Interesting. I find editing much less mentally straining, so I use my stupid hours (or better yet, unmotivated hours) for editing/refactoring and my good hours for generating the new content. I've noticed that my prose style tends to be very hierarchical and not very free-flowing, so I wonder if there's a correlation there.
@iamfahd
I switched from an Apple TV to a Roku for Plex, but the Roku's usability is far worse.
Trying to think creatively here...

Could you try to capitalize on the fact that you're right in between two enormous populations of PhD students and professors who are eager to both give talks and learn more?

Maybe you could support micro-publishing of books, or collections of interesting papers, for local distribution around Kendall/Harvard. Kind of like academic blogging but on paper.

Or you could host themed nights where a few academics give talks about why Subject X is interesting, and then you tell the audience they can buy/order books on Subject X from you at the end (and please do, it's how you pay for the free talk).

Also, I live right near Inman. You guys have the "Refrigerator Repairs" sign (or something like it) above your store, right? Hard honesty, from someone whose walked by many times and never gone in: the Refrigerator sign made me think you were a) too lazy to put up a sign for your store, or b) trying to be ironically lazy, which I think isn't a positive vibe to send to society. Either way, I transferred these impressions onto my expectations about the product waiting inside for me, and passed by every time. Perhaps that is a silly reason not to enter a book store, but at least it is a data point for you to consider.

EDIT:

Another idea: what if you provided a nice binding service for graduating PhD students. Package up all your papers and thesis together into a nice volume to show the kids one day. I know you can do this online, but you would provide nice Harvard and MIT themed leather book jackets with some stock material about the school or department history, along with a thicker page for the student to put some photos in from that time period. I would pay $100 for this. Maybe $200 if it was really nice. There's no class ring for PhD students, but this would make a similarly nostalgic memento.
George Mikes (1912-1987) - Hungarian writer : "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one".
Awesome stuff!

The cool thing about a laser projector is that unlike with a lens-based projector, there is infinite depth of field: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1S9P57VXN5LSH/

But I think there should be some regulation on legal maximum instantaneous brightness. Per the review I linked, the projector used in this project has a 848 x 480 pixel framebuffer. But the laser bounces off a scanning mirror, so at any given time, only one pixel is bright as day and the rest of the pixels are black. This means that the actual power being zapped into your retina is about 400 thousand times brighter than what you perceive. Have there been experiments over the long term to make sure these don't cause retinal sunburn?
A few months ago I began finding my seat in theaters, hanging out with my friends, and leaving as the trailers began to stand in the lobby listening to music till the trailers ended before coming back in. Avoided all internet/tv trailers too.

I enjoy movies orders of magnitude more now not already having seen the set piece scenes / heard the important lines.