skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this is going to play out the way you describe it. It is a tempting scenario, but just look at the Internet. The Internet is the biggest equalizer in world history. Everyone can say anything to anyone who has an Internet connection. Billions of people directly connected to each other.

And what has happened? Yes, everyone can reach everyone, and everyone is equal, _in principle_. But the removal of competitive barriers makes the winner-take-all effect ("power-law") is stronger than it has been in _any_ context, ever. As robotics becomes more prevalent, this will happen in the physical world as well. The income disparity between the richest and the average will become a lot larger.

I am not sure that this in itself is a problem, though. But it is essential that we are able to develop the political and social innovations required to ensure that _power_ doesn't go along with money. Because the money distribution will be more lopsided than at any other point in human history.
Im seeing the same thing, I'm in downtown washington, dc and I get "no public transit information is available for this region".
The Light is going to complement my LIFX wireless bulbs perfectly. I plan on using a bedside Light as a switch for my LIFX bulbs - tap the Light, it begins to glow softly and instructs the LIFX bulbs between the bedroom and bathroom to also glow softly.

No more peeing on the seat in the dark!
I agree that sometimes the language you use does not matter, but how the developer does not care about the speed of his application. I am asking why the developer is wasting those CPU cycles.

Anyway comparing web site backend with compiled C to interpreted PHP is bad example when the language really does not matter as C is faster than any other language and PHP being one of the slowest.

Comparing python and php is another thing when both of them actually are interpreted languages and used for scripting web servers.

Anyway this is one place where personally even I do exchange cpu cycles for speed of development. The SQL queries will affect the same both of those languages.

Yes you can make any code to be fast it only needs to be optimized and compiled to binary.
I suppose a similar hang-up applies as with charity shops: do I really want to encourage a kid to learn old stuff?
I'm not sure whether it's that easy to break even on mining equipment and electricity any more, I think it was getting tight for a lot of folks. Unsure though.

As for money laundering - bitcoin laundry services do exist, I'm not sure how much money you could put through the exchanges without disturbing the economy significantly, but likely quite a bit.

Maybe it's already happening?
Rosettacode.org is great place for factorial (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Factorial#REBOL) and other code examples (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:REBOL).
You've got to wonder how much Apple are paying Google to support maps on iOS....or what other kick-back (more valuable to Google than cash) there might be.
I don't think money launderers expect to get 100% of clean money out of the money they have to clean up.
Seems like yet another aqui-hire to me :(

I didn't know Audiogalaxy was still around. But it seems the service was arguably better than Google Music and/or iTunes Match though, so it's a real shame see it die like this, with little over 2 weeks notice to it's members.
Google Releases its Energy Consumption Numbers
A gadget that makes you the doctor
I definitely remember the web browser interface which I thought was way better than Napster or Kazaa or DC was, from what I remember it would understand what an Artist and Album is and you could browse those instead of mostly raw files/folders like most file sharing programs at the time.

I was really sad to see it go, until Spotify came along it was by far my favorite music consuming program.
Most people that have lots and lots of capital have quite some luck to thank for it.

When automation starts destroying the value of that capital, I don't think it really makes sense to say that they are the ones paying for everything.

(To be clear, I do think that automation sufficient to build a factory factory leads to a situation where existing capital isn't worth very much. If anyone with a modest level of technical ability can bootstrap a manufacturing empire, people won't stand for a social arrangement that prioritizes the material wealth of the few.)
Goldman Sachs: Windows' true market share is just 20%
Some[1] programmers need to trust the compiler to do the optimisation. It's not easy.

Slow is subjective. People make weird mistakes about speed all the time. Anecdote: My dad used to move the mouse in circles (the pointer tracing many circles around his web browser window) because he 'knew' it speeded up his Internet connection.

Trimming those lost cycles causes some problems - code might be harder to read and understand; you might be introducing bugs; you might be competing with the compiler; etc etc. That's all fine if the gain is worth it, but for most people it really isn't.

It would be nice if machine start up could be a bit speedier - people seem to have forgotten about the 5 second boot of the ASUS EEE PC. I guess this is a good demonstration of the problem you talk about - vendors could tweak and recompile the linux kernel and tweak settings, but they don't.

[1] For some values of 'some' including 'most'.
Umm, all the fancy 3D in the world won't really help me if my maps app can't tell me how to get from point A to point B.

This is not a case of "it doesn't work perfectly", it's a case of "it doesn't work at all" (for my use case, at least).
Heroku pricing change coming soon?
What about a hardcover version of LoTR? The point is that this explanation is a retconing of the original reason for this rule, which has nothing to do with free-floating items in the cabin.
> As for those who say that there will be an increase in wealth inequality, you only need to look at the technological progress of the last 200 years to know that the reverse is most likely true.

While I agree with your post in general, in details, the technological advancement of past 200 years have produced great wealth disparity in world. By using their early gain in technologies, the West effectively exploited resources from other parts of world to gain huge income and lifestyle disparity over rest of the world. While in beginning of 1600s, Asia+N. Africa was as wealthy as Europe (which is to say quite poor), by end of 1970, huge part of Asia+Africa lived in utter poverty, while life in West couldn't be better.

All though, I finally think that technology (IT, shipment, containers, etc etc) has advanced far enough that it can overcome human nature and lead to betterment of all people in world rather a small number of them.
One of the business factors is the amount of competition.

If you're in a field where specific features dominate, then sub-second performance differences likely won't make a difference. Modern web browsers are roughly equivalent in feature support, so performance is one of the deciding factors for users. (If you had a web browser which didn't have CSS support but which was 100x faster in page display and Javascript performance, then I suspect you'll have few users)

Now, orders of magnitude performance differences might affect things, but then that's changing the market.
Herbs at home
I haven't used Audiogalaxy for years. When I used it around 2001 or 2002, I really liked the fact that you can schedule MP3 to be queued. So I would login into AudioGalaxy and tell it that I want a remake from Elvis, I log off. Comeback to it tomorrow and my requested MP3 would be ready to be downloaded. This was heaven when I was using dial-up.
Could someone please open a kickstarter for a new thorium reactor design and construction?

I'll gladly contribute to the initial cost (probably billions) just to get a lifetime of free and CO2-efficient electricity.

Couldn't this way of funding bypass most "big firm" inefficiencies and legacy cruft, just as SpaceX did?
I think it's more than possible to start a company as a developer, or even as the only developer. On the beginning, you probably don't have a lot of skype calls to make, or meetings to participate. On this phase, the thing that probably require most of your time is build your product.

And when you finally launch it, if you're lucky, you'll be more busy, but probably you'll also have more money, which will allow you to hire someone to help you. So you'll won't code so much as before, but if you want, you'll still have some time to do it.

The main argument against the article are the fact there's companies managed by developers who still code doing a good service to their customers: Instapaper (as far I know, Marco Arment is the only developer), 37signals (they have a lot of developers, but Jason Fried still codes), RubyMotion, among others.

Maybe this is not the easiest way, but it's definitely possible.
Go Playground Now Supports Time
Why people insist Apple made their own map app because they wanted to take Google out?

Hasn't it been stated already that the original Google-backed apps weren't being updated anymore and the contract expired?

It's the same situation as the YouTube app. Why would Apple not allow the Google Maps app?

If anything, this was actually good, now we have 2 map apps and Google is forced to make a good one, just riding on the superior mapping data won't cut it.
There was a lot more to it than that. Microsoft actively threatened to withdraw licenses from OEMs that preinstalled/bundled rival software as defaults. Given the Windows monopoly, OEMs had to comply or die. Given the massive inertia against the average non-technical user installing an alternative to IE, this effectively equated to Microsoft using their Windows monopoly to dominate an unrelated market.

Apple are nowhere near close to this until they own 95% of the global cellphone market and start making credible threats to destroy HTC or Samsung if they dare to sell an Android phone, or an iPhone with Chrome preinstalled.
Duh. Of course you can use compilers to dump to native, but then why no-one is doing it? They lose the power of the jre cross-platform support, which is pretty much all of the hype of Java and argument of pretty much every developer who I have asked why they are using Java for the project instead of C++.

Yeah. I have used asm, c, c++, java, php, python, etc too. Though C# is something I will never touch because of the monstrosity developer behind it.
It's crazy to think of all the energy that went into building great services like Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Soulseek, only to see them shut down by lawsuits.

If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.
9 Famous Nail Houses
The tiles are often wrong or lack sufficient detail. So no, you can simply use Apple Maps as a replacement for paper maps. It's bad in the suburbs and really bad in rural areas.

Then there is also the issue of bad searches, which is quite common from my experience, where dots are in the wrong place or POI data is outdated.
Oh sure. IIRC the economics of mining have been getting worse for some time but you're right that may well be irrelevant.
Good work for the visualization of the data. Take a look at http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/ his visuals are superb.
I love Bootstrap t-shirt
November 2012: two Cisco vulnerabilities
> Especially since you can just buy a bunch of very generic hardware with stolen money and mine pure money.

I think that would require buying electricity with bitcoin. Is that possible yet?
Nuclear Aircraft. The solution to peak oil for planes?
Well, given that you can install a keylogger on the usb keyboard nowadays, it is - even with encrypted harddrives. Or you can freeze the RAM, remove it and read the encryption key.

However, encryption makes things quite a bit harder.
Parrot threads (ParrotVM now supports fast and lightweight OS threads)
It's been 50 years or so that people are either waiting or fearing "AI".

Yet we're absolutely nowhere. Watson or Deep Blue may be "impressive" but they're not doing anything intelligent. No even remotely close to it.

"Siri: how can we solve the israelo-polestinian conflict while minimizing the number of human casualties?"

"Siri: how can I build a nuclear reactor that doesn't generate nasty byproducts and that doesn't go ape-monkey-shit should the sh!t hit the fan?"

I somehow really doubt I'll see real AI during my lifetime. OCR, finding patterns inside "big data", brute force searching, voice recognition, self-driving cars, etc. is not AI.

It's not because we can build "robots" mimicking stuff we do in an automated way ("I see a car coming at the right, let's slow down at this crossing") that we're getting closer to AI.

There's no thinking going on there.

I'm a bit surprised that a lot of people here seem to take it for granted that one day sentient Siri would answer like Leon when asked:

"Siri: what do you think about Asimov's three laws of robotics?"

; )
How to create a CSS Speech Bubble
Earlier post about same underlying story, take from a different site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4904151
That's why advocates of bitcoin (and tor) encourage everyone to use them for mundane things.
Convenience link: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
Google's design is Metro done right, IMO. It's clean, modern and minimal without being ugly and uninspired. I feel like there is an art director over seeing all implementations of the design, instead of a hosgepodge of PM-lead design-by-spec implementations.
That does not sound healthy. How long have you been doing this?
It's wrong, or at least simplistic, to think about "wasting CPU cycles." The goal is to optimize the user experience, and performance is only one of the factors. Features, cost, portability, ease-of-use, and security are others.

Here's a clear example of the difference. One search application I read about takes 1 second to do a search, no matter what search you do. Most of the searches actually take less than 0.1 seconds but occasionally more complex ones might take the full second.

The UI always shows a 1 second search time, even for the fast searches. They designers did this so that users know exactly what to expect. Otherwise they get frustrated when they are used to an "instant" result only to have the computer seemingly hang.

(I believe this was for the Bloomberg terminal, but I can't find the reference now. The numbers of "1 second" and "0.1 second" are made up as I've forgotten the real numbers.)

So yes, in this case the program authors clearly "waste" CPU time in order to provide a specific user experience which the users wanted.

And you think this is bad because .... ?
> As for those who say that there will be an increase in wealth inequality, you only need to look at the technological progress of the last 200 years to know that the reverse is most likely true. While Henry Ford became incredibly wealthy by building the car and mechanising his production to a large extent, the rest of humanity saw huge increases in productivity by being able to drive around and use advanced logistics. Those advances ultimately enabled the next generation of workers to be a white collar workforce rather than a blue collar one.

This is symptomatic of living in a bubble. What percentage of the world's population drives around in cars? What percentage of the world's population is white collar? Even if you restrict it to whatever wealthy nation you live in -- haven't you noticed that there are still people who work blue collar jobs, or none at all?
I think this will be an awesome gizmo. As ZenPsycho said, it's an ambient computer, it just does what it does without demanding our full attention. We need stuff like this. It's a huge bonus that it can be hacked to tweak it to do more stuff.
I've backed it and hope it gets funded!
Show HN: A dynamic layout for reddit's fp using d3.js' treemap (possibly NSFW)
I don't care even if I do play with it for a couple of months then forget about it. I think it's cool and I'm happy to help someone get an idea off the ground in return for the pleasure of playing with some 'cool' for a while.
I just laughed out loud. Thanks for today's laugh. I have seriously never heard that someone would think circling the mouse would make internet faster. Though I have heard of other things for making internet faster.

Well yeah optimizing that far that you are competing with the compiler is problematic, but if you can optimize your code that far you should know what the compiler actually optimizes. I'm not saying everyone should start optimizing their code to the point of having absolutely no waste in the code.

Readability of the code is much more related to naming conventions of variables and functions instead of how the loop actually reads constant size array size every time of the loop cycle.

Then again i'm annoyed at products where they just decide that they will use python for some application because it's easy to use and fast to code in and never worry about how fast it actually runs as long as it runs. Has nice graphical user interface and easy to distribute. fix some bugs if they actually are causing problems.
I am in Florida and use Apple Maps to travel all over the state. It was wrong countless times, from location of restaurants to taking me to wrong addresses because I did not spell "northeast" as NE. Worst of all it did not find most local businesses. Unless you have personally used it to travel all over the US, how can you say it works everywhere?
The "Script library" for Rebol is here:

http://www.rebol.org/script-index.r
How to create a text aligned linear-gradient background in CSS
Managing Jenkins job configurations by Puppet
Last.fm discontinues radio service in many countries
Bottom right button is tappable. I avoid sliding/swiping on the phone unless I have to.
This stems from an incorrect understanding of economics.

Does increasing the size of the labor pool have a detrimental or beneficial effect on workers? Overall it has a positive effect. The more people are in the labor force the greater amount of total work gets done, and thus the richer we all become. The same math also works with robots. Treat the robot like a worker. They have an effective wage in the form of maintenance costs, and they provide a benefit in the form of the value they create. Just as with workers every robot generally has a net positive effect on the global value of the entire economy.

They don't take away jobs, they don't destroy wealth, they create wealth and they create additional jobs.
This is already in place almost across the western world. Norway's welfare state is not all that unusual.

> Eventually, the social stigma of recieving such benefits will vanish, since a significant part of the population will not do enough work to cross the threshold.

That will only work if the government is able to raise sufficient taxes from the shrinking proportion of the population who are paying them. If trends towards income inequality continue, there will be few, wealthy taxpayers. But the larger their share of the burden, the more they'll use tax avoidance schemes, whether legal or illegal. That has already been seen in countries where very high taxe rates have existed.
Interview with Sahil Khan, Social Media Expert and Founder of the Tossed Salad
Psychonauts was in HB V (and was unfortunately dreadful, awful controls, bad camera, terrible graphics, potential to have been great). Bastion was the real gem in that bundle, such an amazing game. That bundle was a lot better than 6 and packed with great games, with Sword & sorcery, Super Meat Boy, Limbo and Lone Survivor. That bundle was brilliant.

HB6 was disappointing, too many platformers, Torchlight was repetitive, SPAZ was the only game I really loved in that pack. It even had two brick breaking games in it, a genre dead (and deservedly so) since the 90s.
"Siri: how can I build a nuclear reactor that doesn't generate nasty byproducts and that doesn't go ape-monkey-shit should the sh!t hit the fan?"

And when we get to a point where a computer can give an answer to that question we'll be dismissing it as "not real AI" since all its doing is pattern matching against a database of known experimental results and pre-programmed properties of elements and sub-atomic particles or whatever.

The reason we'll never see "real AI" is simply because as soon as computer scientists solve problem that used to be consider AI, it instantly becomes just another novel twist on a few obvious algorithms and the goalposts for Real AI will move a bit further down the field.
How to make a progress bar using jQuery
the social systems adjust to the facts on the ground

the facts on the ground don't adjust to the social systems

the next Marx will come up with a theory that fits the facts, and if it makes enough sense to the people on the ground, it'll gain steam and political momentum, and then there will be a new social system in place
You can post anything in Flickr, and there's a group for anything and that's part of the problem. The community used to be good there, but the community of Flickr just turns into a giant circlejerk of 'I liked your like mine back!' posts. Flickr's community devolved ages ago and with that all but the diehards stayed. I still can't see why people would return given all the other, better, options out there now.
Maybe it should be HackerNew Accept Bitcoin since we're dropping the s from every word.

Bitcoin needs to be plural and accept needs to be in the present tense. This makes no sense.
It's weird, last.fm used to be one of my favorite websites. But ever since CBS acquired last.fm, improvements to the site seems to have stagnated. They made radio a subscription-only service in many countries, and now will be completely discontinued due to licensing issues.

It makes you wonder what the long-term vision for the site seems to be, especially considering the competition.
Anti-Piracy Group Demanding -- And Getting -- Domain Names From Torrent Sites
Sorry that was I typo I meant HIB V. Yeah, HIB VI was a disappointment and Vessel was only finally released for Linux two days ago.
Well, THQ ended up getting a little money from me that they would not have otherwise. I had some slight interest in the Red Faction series, but the other games weren't even on my radar. But it seemed like a good deal, so I picked it up in the hopes that I'll get some use out of all of them.
It's only tangentially relevant that a given reactor type can be used to make nuclear weapons. Yes, it means that there are states on the planet that can't be trusted with them, so be it. But there are plenty of countries that already have nuclear weapons and/or are stable and transparent enough that they can be trusted to submit to inspections - these could start Thorium projects and the world wouldn't be worse off on the proliferation front for.
On the iTunes Store, 4 of the Top 25 free apps are from Google.
Show HN: mpuller - A lightweight companion on your Maven journeys
While this is valuable information, it is all anecdotal: you're assuming that the incidents you experienced were due to electronic devices, but the FAA has never tested this, so it's a single datapoint where we don't even know how many (if any) passengers had active devices.

If the FAA were serious about flight safety, surely they would be testing this to a scientifically acceptable standard. Then, once we have the data, and assuming that there is a problem, phone makers could introduce some kind of "do-not-send" code that planes can broadcast so that phones stay quiet during flight.