skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> GM paid dividends up until last year, decades after it was known that they had large health care obligations.

If you look at the post I said that GM did not take into account their future obligations. Their profits was nothing more than fancy bookkeeping.

> GM management made a deal they were unwilling to keep.

I agree with you on the point that GM should never have made those lavish packages and kept their salaries in line with the market (or relocated their factories).

> These companies are not easily replaceable. If they were, another company would have replaced them by now.

There are numerous companies that can replace the big auto companies. Toyota and Honda has been slowly replacing GM is most of the world markets (including the US). If either GM goes into bankruptcy and gets split up/sold off (e.g. Opel gets sold etc...). It would not be a bad thing.

> Setting up an operation of that magnitude requires decades of experience and huge capital expenditures.

Setting up a car manufacturer is not that impossible in the market. Over the past years there were 10s of new car manufacturers that started (and some failed). A good example is some Chinese companies such as GWM, Cherry. There is also no reason why existing car manufacturers can not grow to fill the gaps that GM leaves (as they have done for a long time – e.g. Hyundai, Honda, Toyota, etc...).

> AMD employs 15,000. GM directly empl

Starting a new x86 processor manufacturer would probably be impossible. The x86 is a patent minefield (to which only AMD and Intel have cross licenses to use each other's patents). Setting up a new generation fab can cost more than $5 billion.

And if AMD goes Intel will have a monopoly. Both Chrysler, GM and Ford can disappear and there still will not be a monopoly.
i am a conspiracy nut, though the purpose of the post was to illustrate that web platforms need to develop their own legal system that will challenge the nation-state in order to grow. so the political nature of the last paragraph was wholly relevant to the thesis of the post.
WTF!!?
How is this going to pan out for the end users? Anyone here has any ideas? How did they come up withe 10 billion euros price tag?
Here's to hoping pg doesn't make an April Fool's day post saying Hacker News is getting ported to Java.
"The Pirate Bay team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Warner Bros’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful," said Jim Kjeyzer, Chief Executive Officer of Warner Bros.

Ha, ha, Warner Bros. thinks it's Google.

...then it hit me: Somewhere in the world it's April 1st.
watch out for those pesky time zones!
the fool knows best.
I was told by my ophthalmologist to not use those red eye drops. I wear contacts half of the day, and I typically use rewetting drops or Systane eye lube... definitely cuts down my cause of red eye and discomfort (typically dry eyes or something in the contacts that the liquid tends to flush out and wetten).
Can we not do the whole "let's submit every stupid April Fools joke on the internet" thing?
The potential opportunities Facebook has are TREMENDOUS. I feel like the potential is there, but it's is barely touched, and I'm not sure why.

Facebook's value is in moving toward mobile. They are ubiquitous enough where the chances of having Facebook in your local area is very high if you're a user yourself.

Given all of Twitter's hype, I feel Facebook could easily crush them. While Twitter's monetization strategy is also, of course, questionable, the two companies are tapping into a paradigm shift that has value that isn't quite fully understood.

Imagine people using Twitter, but with the richness of Facebook's content. While Twitter's 140-character limit was intentional, it's ultimately a limitation, since Facebook users utilize the service very much in the same way. Above all, though, Facebook knows profile information about you and your friends. It can not only serve ads based on what it knows about you, but where you are, and who is around you.

Facebook should ultimately strive to be the omnipresent social tool. There is undeniable value and opportunity for expansion in this. They have the user base, they just need to encourage people to use it in new ways. Twitter seems to be moving toward this, yet there is a huge difference between Twitter's user base (6M last I heard) and Facebook's (150M last I heard).
Sounds like Macy has a strong case. If you're right, I expect he'll win at trial.
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Skype shows BlackBerry, iPhone applications
Skype unveiled its iPhone and BlackBerry applications at the CTIA Wireless trade show on Tuesday, taking its VoIP capability into the inner sanctum of mobile operators that still depend on voice minutes for most of their revenue.
Or erlang.
Tell HN: Your april 1st link is not really funny...
It is that time of the year again. People who are not really as funny as they think they are will be flooding the net with "prank" sites, stupid fake rumors, and similar dumb links.

Can you please post the gag link to reddit, digg, or some other site and spare us all?
What you're saying is a non sequitor. I'm saying Morrow can be an abusive tenant, and the Macy's can still have committed a crime in their efforts to get rid of him as fast as they can. It is, after all, absurdly hard to shake an abusive renter in San Francisco.

You're talking about prosecutorial misconduct, and in effect saying "the whole damn system's out of order". Maybe you're right, but that has nothing to do with what I just said.
This seems to be a microcosm of the problem Facebook is facing. Everyone is on it, yet significant (public company esque) profits have yet to materialize. It is definitely a social phenomenon, but unlike eBay and Yahoo monetizing the service is proving to be difficult at very large scales.

Theres also the problem of advertising on a social networking site. If we could observe everyone in that US Airways lounge's average Facebook session, how many ads would we see people click on out of that group? How many people brought something or signed up for something after clicking those ads? Advertising dynamics on a social networking site are fundamentally different. A question I always ask people when the topic of Facebook comes up is "have you ever clicked an ad on there? I don't think I have" and the answer is always some variation of "actually, now that I think about it I haven't". I'm not going to extrapolate too much on this given my sample size, but if this is the standard response to this question everywhere, then Facebook has a serious problem (despite its phenomenon status).
> Why would they have a problem with something that gives them extra revenue?

Because the data plan isn't metered. Tethering will cost them capacity they aren't billing to anyone. Sort of how like you can get in trouble for using a residential cable modem in a business--consumers get a price break and power users pay more.

> Connecting your phone to your computer as a modem is a standard feature for all other phones.

Not totally true, the iPhone is just now getting this in the upcoming 3.0 release for example. Many times tethering requires a more expensive data plan with the carrier and that may turn out to be the case with both Android and iPhone.
Yeah I'll get right on that, Jon. It's not Morrow's apartment if you accept the Macy's argument that he lost any claim to the other rooms when his roommates moved out; either way, we're discussing a room in a single apartment in a multi-apartment building.
Newegg actually sells non-prescription Gunnars. I've been looking into those since I'd like a pair of computer glasses to try.

And if you thought finding a dealer was hard, I'm having a hard time finding a dealer that'll do prescription lenses, unless I'm overlooking something completely obvious and all of them can do it with an eyeglass prescription...doh.
Ach Processing - Is It Good For My Business?
Not really, since the blades are still cheap.
Title: Are monkeys taking over the job market?

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=programmer%2C+monkey&r...
On my Mac, F11 is Volume Down. They keep changing this based on machine model and keyboard model, it seems.
Hassle Free Fat Loss
A smart BeagleBrick
> Because the data plan isn't metered.

Fair enough. In my country it is (I did not think that there was a country that did not charge for its data).I use a SIM with pre-paid on it which is nice (no contracts, nothing).

> Sort of how like you can get in trouble for using a residential cable modem in a business--consumers get a price break and power users pay more.

This is actually just a devious scheme to rip companies off.

> Not totally true, the iPhone is just now getting this in the upcoming 3.0 release for example.

Maybe. I only personally know of one person with an iPhone (again, it is more popular in the states). Most newish (e.g. last 4 years) phones (from Nokia or Samsung) have 3G built-in (when compared to iPhone's EDGE).

Also, connecting to the Internet using these phones' modems is straight forward and the majority of them accept micro-USB (through which it also charges).
Unfortunately for me, that bookmark and its code requires me telling NoScript that I trust each website - Not something I care to do, at this point. But I agree that it works quite nicely on sites I "trust."
we should have a Montreal one too!! who is up for it?
LOL you folks crack me up, downmodding me for that!
> Fair enough. In my country it is (I did not think that there was a country that did not charge for its data).I use a SIM with pre-paid on it which is nice (no contracts, nothing).

In the US it's common to require unlimited data packages for smartphones. The G1 and iPhone are examples of that. It's also common with BlackBerry. It's uncommon to pay by the megabyte here, you either don't have internet access or have unlimited (well, "unlimited") access.
From what I noticed among my japanese friends however, Mixi is a lot more popular over there than Facebook. It's less open though: invitation-only, and you need a japanese cellphone address to register, so I've seen few travelers/foreigners on it.
Perhaps Conficker will go active and nobody will be able to post anything, anywhere.
It may be true that it is different - but it can be as profitable as other (search companies).

Remember that Facebook basically have all your personal data with which it can select products for you to buy.
I have four road vehicles and a Honda 4-wheeler. All of them have needed a repair at some time and the online forums geared to each type of vehicle are excellent. I think you'd be hard pressed to improve on the expertise of people who have solved the same problem asking you questions that you can respond to, warning of potential mistakes and 'gotchas' etc.

Checklists are nice, but people who recognize the problem immediately and can give you the solution and save you hours of time and hundreds of dollars are much nicer.
Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but could this have possibly been deliberate? The language in the badge seemed quite unambiguous to me. Could they have done this deliberately, waiting for someone big (and somewhat vocal) like, oh, 37signals to notice and speak up, then swiftly make apologies and correct the "accident"? If this is true, then GetSatisfaction has truly played 37signals, HN and possibly many other sites as news gets around, like a flute. A publicity coup of magnificent (if a tad Machiavellian) proportions.
I found the Express edition of MS Visual Web Developer very useful.
I tried Aptana(eclipse based- memory hog), TopStyle(neat tool, with instant changes seen). But it came to the MS Web Developer, which i felt was more intuitive than others...me not being a web designer.
but i never tried all the ones you mentioned...never felt safe enough to try web design on an online editor.
Well, in theory we already have the counterweight, it's called government and it's supposed to protect us from evildoers.

In practice our governments are unfortunately struggling to adapt to this whole "globalization" thing where multi-national corporations are alarmingly ahead in most regards.

So far not many of the corps have abused their power in truly damaging ways (apart from evading taxes and the occassional uncomfortable law) but I do agree that this is a worrying tendency. It might even be part of the cause for the current meltdown.

But in the longterm I'm actually less worried about google here. Not because of their motto but simply because they're a rather small fish when you compare them to some of the energy-multis who operate at petrodollar scales.

An Ombudsman at every large corp is not the solution either way. That would just become another sock puppet on their salary-list.

The only cure seems to be global regulation of the financial sector - a subject that you don't hear much about in the middle of all these bailout discussions...
There's a 1 in 365 chance the first time-travelers, aliens or some other cool event will happen on April 1st, so it's your loss if you miss it! :P
Yeah, no kidding. I think the only funny April Fools tech joke was the original announcement of Parrot.

Which is even funnier since Parrot 1.0 was just actually released. :)
Eh, a little fun won't hurt the site as long as we only post them in the comments of this submission -- we could share April Fools' Day stuff that might be amusing to hackers (not necessarily from this year, either). It's up to you all. To me, April Fools' Day is a chance to express your creativity. Anyone planning anything interesting?

Here are a couple past ones that might be worth a chuckle:
http://www.zug.com/static_pages/pranks/harvard-vs-mit/index0...
http://www.nmsr.org/alabama.htm

Has anyone heard of any really creative pranks?
Well, you don't necessarily have to pay. Just that your local BBB will be a lot less annoying if you do, and they'll also give you a shiny seal of approval and a better grade that doesn't mean squat.

I have no idea why so many people I know are so willing to jump to file complaints with them before some more logical ways to solve a problem...like, oh, calling up the business in question? BBB don't have any authority over businesses and their tactics are annoying on both ends. I've been burned by the BBB from both a business and a customer perspective by being ignored and told to go around in circles and do things I already attempted to do.

What was that issue I had as a customer? The alarm company I went with not providing service, which we discovered after routine monthly testing..can you say negligence? They wouldn't stop billing us and they even billed us for the equipment they gave us originally after we got a new company in to replace everything and told the old company to give us an address to at least send this back, or have someone pick it up (but they never did). The local BBB told us "tough, deal with it, talk to them" even though we filed an online complaint and the old alarm company kept hanging up on us before we could talk to anyone in charge of billing, at the least. So what happened? We sued the company and the owner and the situation ended happily for us, except if you go to the BBB and look up information on this business that still exists, there's nothing bad about it. Good job BBB, really, good job.

The business one was even more preposterous, where the BBB informed me that a customer had a complaint for something that wasn't even our problem, it was user error. She had never told anyone about it, she never called, she never visited again, she just went and filed a bullshit complaint that we went to unreasonable lengths to resolve to her satisfaction. What do we get for dealing with user stupidity? A lower grade on the BBB website? They're insane. You'd be hard pressed to find a business that doesn't hate them, especially smaller ones who don't want to pay extortionate rates for a stupid BBB "approval" when they already provide stellar customer support.
May be you can use Facebook Connect to take down the sign up barriers, and this way, you will also get promoted in your new user's newsfeed when they join / create a group.

But the value prop of what features I would need that Facebook Group doesn't have isn't prominent enough.
- Hey - you are stealing my sutff!
- Oh, you noticed? Sorry, I will stop now. I will go steal someone else's stuff then.

This is not to equate GS actions with stealing, but merely to demonstrate a fault in your reasoning.
They are making more. With so many people scared for their future financial stability, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that more people are more likely to fall for a "get rich quick" scam. Sex-related spam might go down with respect to male targets also, but you can bet some spam will appear targeting women with "get rich quick stripping online (doing phone sex), etc".

Spam and most blackhat businesses are just that, business. The operators are your average greedy bastards, the great majority of whom are technically incapable twenty something men who think "the internet" is still in a dotcom boom. I'm not pulling this out of thin air, all you have to do is lurk in spam boards to see the prevailing mythology; a huge majority of 20-something spammers who want to live the Hip Hop lifestyle and who will do anything for money.

They themselves get scammed left and right by everyone from competent systems programmers who sell them backdoored tools to sophisticated mafiosi who open fly-by-night "online banks" to fake advertising networks that lure them into distributing their spam links and malware and then fold just when it's time to pay up, not to mention the ponzi schemes.

The life of a spammer is a bitch. If you were dealing drugs you at least have your tangible goods in hand and cash proceeds in the other. Spamming is like drug dealing, except someone keeps your stash and drop-ships it, and another keeps your cash and gives you a metered ATM card, nickle and diming you in every step of the way.

So the question becomes, what sort of spammer is making the real money (or the most of it) instead of asking if all spammers are making moolah. And the answer would be, the guys getting paid are not exactly in the spamming business :-)
I can't believe you guys don't like the monkeys thing. Monkeys are always funny.
+ 1 from me, dude.

After all.... I like monkeys. :)

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/html/monkeys.txt
I did, no worries. There's just some confusion currently as to whether we should be silly or not. It seems like hacker-related silliness in the comments of this submission should be ok.
You might be able to get a larger sample size by polling the audience of a related board, I can recommend movie-fan sites. You can also try GetSatisfaction or do the usual google fight with "netflix rocks" vs "netflix sucks".

Good luck!
I dunno, seems a little redundant to me.

I mean, it'd make more sense to have residential and commercial combined real estate in a non-urban area.
This looks cool. Is anyone using this? Mind sharing your thoughts? I'm getting ready to do a site redesign and this might be right up my alley.
This is a default setting. I believe you should be able to modify it on System Preferences>Keyboard and Mouse>Keyboard : Use F1, F2 as standard keys.
There was a funny April Fools Day joke once. It was when Google announced a truly preposterous new service: free email with a whole gigabyte of storage for everybody. It was ridiculous; nobody would offer that for free, and it was completely unrelated to Google's search business.

The punch line is that it wasn't a joke. Gmail is real, and it really did come with that much storage space. Ha ha ha!

Fake news stories on discussion forums just can't compete with that.
Of course we should be silly. As if the question even needs to be asked.
This is crazy haha! I'm not sure I see the sustainability in this but it is fun to see innovation like this out there. It's probably one of those things where new or better technology will be produced regardless of its applicability to FACE itself.
Pics from my visit to the Reddit office. Click on "show info" for my comments.
What is so Hard About Parallel Programming?
Get Satisfaction's Rant: a Poor Response to 37Signals
I don't get it man, I haven't gotten a spam email in months or at least weeks.

Don't these guys realize that it's just not getting through any more?
they say "discover" because they believe it was present ever since. just like physics don't say they invented helium or oxygen, they just discovered it.
It may be uncommon but there are limited data plan options where you pay by megabytes. (T-Mobile has a couple)
2009 april fools day sms message
I'm with you on that. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070726
Thanks for pointing this out--this is either a new feature since I wrote the tutorial, or I didn't get it right the first time around. I think it is correct now.
I've looked at a few. Mainly FCKEditor and TinyMCE. I ended up using TinyMCE in the end for my projects. The amount of plugins they have tend to help at times.
http://code.google.com/p/jwysiwyg/
Its going to be massive mayhem like the Y2K bug!
In Australia, we have something called 'Superannuation' which is a bit like a 401k plan, except it's mandatory. The employer must pay 9% of your total wages into the plan. You can also contribute extra if you like, and some employers offer terms matching your contributions.

You are not allowed to draw down on your 'super' plan until you are at retirement age, and even then there are rules as to what you can take as a lump sum, and what is paid as an annuity. After a certain point (I'm not an expert) you actually get your money out tax free.

You take this super plan with you from employer to employer as you move jobs, and you're free to transfer the money from one fund to the other. You have to choose the fund yourself, and you can even create your own fund to invest in whatever you like (there are rules on size and reporting, and you can't leverage your fund with debt).

These rules enforce saving for the people who can't do it themselves, because they never see the money. They are a little annoying to people who can quite capably invest for themselves, but there is enough incentives and flexibility to cater for the self-directed investor. It was actually the unions who pushed for this system as they could see the folly of the employer-funded pension scheme. Plus they formed their own 'funds' which their members use - the management fees probably brings in more income for the union than the union dues do.

In addition to super funds, Australia has a universal health care system which you pay with a 2.5% tax on your income. This system covers everyone who is a citizen,whether they are working or not. You may also opt for private healthcover, and there are tax incentives for people on higher incomes to do so (both for the employer and the employee). With this system there are no co-payments or anything like that : just turn up at either the public or private hospital, and get treated. Elective surgery (knee reconstructions, etc) goes onto a waiting list for public, private hospitals you get it done sooner.

The system has it's flaws, but for the most part it works, and you don't get companies with massive pension and healthcare liabilities. It also means that employees are more confident to move between jobs knowing that their pension and healthcare are not tied to a particular employer.

Finally, and most relevant for this discussion, it allows startups to run much leaner because they don't have to worry about pension and healthcare for their employees.

And, to answer the question, on average, an Australian worker pays less tax (local, state, federal) on their income than the equivalent worker in the USA. So it's not about paying less tax and choosing : it's about building a national system that has lower running costs but still allows for choice where the individual can afford it.
Nice branding all over but all I can take away is they are very messy.