skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In that definition, the surrender of part of the browser window to advertisement is the "valuable consideration". It's only worth tiny fractions of a cent, sure, but heap those fractions up high enough and it becomes worthwhile.

For your position (that ad-supported implies searcher is not the customer) to be correct, there would have to be some minimum amount of cost involved before a human can become a customer. Say the search engine charges one dollar per query. The searcher must be the customer, obviously. What if the search engine charges one a penny per query? Is the searcher still the customer? What about one thousandth? One millionth?

At what point does the searcher's expenditure fall so low that you consider them to be a product, rather than a human?

---

Aside:

Apart from my day job, I write a lot of software. Some of it is made available for use for no monetary charge, and supported by ads. I do not consider the humans who use my software to be "products", nor the advertisement networks to be "customers". To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic.
Interesting I assumed the colours from star pictures are mostly faked / enhanced / thickened / filtered.

I'll have to look into it more.
Your point is that being constantly offered less and not asking for more is a chicken and egg problem. Even so, you cannot tell which created the other, hence my pointing out that the "evidence" is flawed.

> If you don't want to accept the evidence just because you dislike what it tells us about the world, you are not a scientist
Further, please avoid ad hominem attacks, it is unprofessional and does not further your point.
Straight Talk provides a $45 plan that's very similar to a much more expensive AT&T plan. (Perhaps most iPhone owners are too cool to step into Wal-Mart.)
Nitpicking grammar on a casual internet forum is a great way to win an argument. I post on here (like most I'd imagine) as a distraction from the more mundane parts of my job, forgive me for not applying enough rigor to my grammar in such a context...

While you were busy being condescending and not making a point, you ignored my main point that, with the amount of money the Americans (happy?) have available to them, the answer should not just be blow up the entire system because GP has a hardon for libertarianism, but to use the vast resources available to make the system better, and allocate more if need be.
One relatively cheap way to learn about how to observe corporate formalities is to google "legal MCLE" in your state of incorporation/residence/doing business and look for a one hour MCLE course that covers the subject. It will be cheap ($20 or less) and you will have no problem understanding the content. It may also come with checklists and a presentation. I just finished my legal MCLE requirements for California and there are tons of valuable information for entrepreneurs on these types of basic subjects that you can access much more cheaply than using a lawyer.
Ways to Make Progress in Evolutionary Psychology: Smash, Not Match, Stereotypes
JavaScript Time Zone Conversion with Walltime
That's awesome! I'm so glad to hear you're in a good place. Of the many places I've worked, I'd say about half were kind of hostile for women and half were pretty okay. I've found that conferences are more consistently in the former category.

Now let's figure out what to do about that other half.
Bingo. And atmosphere control, CPUs, etc. These are what we called "hotel loads", don't know what they're called in the EV industry.
#ruby-lang irc logs: http://irclog.whitequark.org/ruby-lang/search?q=tits

It happens. I don't know how often.
Exactly. It should also have a search functionality in case you have a thousand friends.
Linode customer for years. I'll buy 4 servers and give digital ocean a shot just because it seems the community approves the service and they accept paypal (Linode doesn't and it bothers me)
The Growing Technological Generation Gap
I think it has to do with that post where someone missed out on important legal mails because gmail chose to only forward those mails that passed their spam test.
"most of the flat-screen TVs sold in the United States, from companies like Samsung and Sony, are made there, along with everything from medical devices to aerospace parts."

Not sure about medical devices or aerospace parts, but one of the reasons those float-screen TVs are "made" there is the tax advantage. They were mostly made in Asia and the final assembly was done in Mexico.

Still, you have to start from somewhere.
I wonder how you would first go about testing whether something like this is viable or not.

Did he just throw salt at a fly? Or maybe blew some through a straw?
The reason it's in the news RIGHT NOW is due to the current story about leaked documents showing the US government secret legal case for targeting US citizens.

You neglected to mention that the document in question was obtained and published by NBC, not Wikileaks.
Well, that's the beautiful thing about regenerative braking: The "external force" required to slow down the car comes from the electric motor itself, from the counter-torque of the motor acting as a generator to charge the battery. It's not lossless but it's far better than letting all the kinetic energy dissipate as heat.
The arguments he is making are about UX, not UI fluidity.
This article neglects to mention the disproportionality of the sentence Aaron was threatened with.

Suppose you were a 1960's civil rights activist staging a sit-in. Suppose the worst you were expecting was a couple hundred dollar fine and spending the night -- or maybe the week -- in the county lockup for misdemeanor trespassing.

Then an ambitious prosecutor looking for another substantial case to win goes after you with all her resources, disrupts your life for a year with an incredibly intrusive investigation, and then threatens you with a 30-year federal sentence.

I'd imagine a substantial number of actual 1960's protestors would reconsider their decision if the likeliest outcome is a ruined life, rather than a short-term disruption of your life that will go away fairly quickly.
The dawning horror for the console vendors is that the change is already happening around them and on every iPhone, iPad, Samsung, Android, etc device. These already have digital-only distribution. These already have very high-quality GPU's that push almost as many triangles as an xBox 360 or PS3, and are on a faster product-iteration-cycle. Some of these - iPad3 and Samsung Galaxy Tab's - already have higher-resolution screens than your 60" HDTV and many people are using them more hours per day and spending more dollars per device than they ever did on consoles. Yikes, if I were still in the console biz, I would push like hell to move a little faster than updating hardware every 7-8 years and doing poorly with software.
Random tip, try to run any PNG you have through a compressor like http://tinypng.org/. For example by compressing your main logo, tinypng saved you 68% of the original size.
Surface RT firmware update just bricked my Surface
I dutifully installed this week's raft of updates, including a firmware update. Coming back to my Surface RT a little later, it's now shut itself off. Holding the top button down to start it simply shows a low battery warning and it immediately shuts off. It's plugged in (and has been all day). Anyone else having this issue? (All three other Surface RT owners out there ;-)
If you're using firefox and can install extensions, I recommend noscript [1]. Admittedly, it'll take some time to whitelist all the stuff you actually want to work, but it does cut down on silly stuff like the fly (which for me remains parked in the upper left-hand corner). There's apparently a Chrome extension called ScriptSafe if that's your browser of choice.

[1] http://noscript.net/

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmn...
I don't mind so much the ban on plastic but I really hate that it was shackled to a requirement that the stores charge for the paper. The two are completely unrelated.
Perhaps because I've had my own odd experiences with online and offline commerce, as well as having read about others' on FatWallet.com, I may tend to see red flags where others don't.

For example, in my experience, online inventory doesn't typically get updated very quickly. So, seeing inventory suddenly show up for a sold-out item as I was rapidly refreshing, I think, might trigger my spidey-sense but perhaps other people might not think this way.

In any case, my comments aren't meant to excuse any poor customer service, or any other issues, on the vendor's end and I hope the author's case is resolved to his satisfaction.
They are neither "customer" nor "product", they are suppliers, both of information which Google uses to assemble their targeted advertising delivery product, and of the actual advertising page impression opportunities.

They get less individualized attention then either customers or many other kinds of suppliers because there are lots of suppliers of the same inputs and the marginal value of each one of them to Google's business is very, very low, such that spending significant resources on direct support would very quickly turn them into a net liability.
These Scary Maps Explain What Sea Level Rise Will Mean in Boston
It's easy to imagine it being possible to build a consciousness without having built one. Life began millions of years ago and hasn't stopped since; whatever we come up with now sits on the shoulders of all that. We imitate what we are or what we find around us, and even if we are genuinely creative; why is there something instead of nothing? That is ultimately what enables us to do things or think about them, after all, and so to me no magic is lost. Yeah, not even making a mini universe with people in it would make this one less awesome, to me, and wouldn't answer a single one of the more profound questions, for me.

I dare say if you really think you found solid, objective answers for, uhm, anything, I encourage you to look even closer and/or consider the bigger picture... at least for me, it always ends up being a huge mystery again :)
Hey, Microsoft: It’s Time to Pull Phone into Windows
$('#up_5210503').click()
Sure, it's a valid question.

This is a collection of experiences across many settings, including professional, casual and personal. I don't think anyone would ever say this seriously in a professional setting, but shit like that still happens a lot elsewhere and has a real impact.

Joining a technical IRC channel for help and being told "tits or GTFO" is pretty demoralizing. It makes you feel like you don't belong in the community, that you don't deserve to be there and that no one wants you there.
They also lost more money in years prior. I think they're in the black since inception, but not by much.
Unless they've changed something you should be able to use a keyboard with the PS3. I used to have a wireless USB keyboard/mouse that I used with my PS3 for web browsing.
Octave is a nice language for doing matrix operations, I'm glad someone made a port for Android.
It took me a minute to understand what you meant by "coworker gets touchy". At which point my reaction was as portrayed in "lady problems".

I am changing careers to something less male dominated. I am taking up long distance truck driving.
>If Apple can position the AppleTV as a console (maybe open it up to developers) or build something more along the lines of a traditional console, they will crush.

This opinion is pushed around a lot, however I cannot really see it happening, and I doubt Apple will ever pursue such a strategy.

For Apple to enter the console market, they would have to compete with the big boys, meaning if it can't push 100 million polygons at 1080p it will never get great adoption (who will want develop for a console with graphics out of 2005, and who will buy a console that doesn't have Call of Halo 7?). This means they have to create a modern console platform AND sell it at the price of an iPad. I'm not sure how the ghost of Jobs will take the news once he finds out Apple is selling hardware at a loss.

Next I doubt they would have anything to gain other than "you can now play CoD on the Apple ecosystem." They would lose money on the hardware, they wouldn't make much on the software if App Store profits mean anything (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-11/tech/29964545... reports they may have made ~$300 million). It just doesn't seem like a good idea finically. As far as the game console ecosystem goes I don't think MS/Sony/Nintendo will ever have to worry about Apple.

All in all, I am not really convinced that the App Store market will work for any of them. I strongly believe only Valve has the resources (and direction* ) to transition into the digital delivery era, at the expense of introducing yet another company into my living room. Still the question is how do you effectively deliver a magic box capable of playing Call of Duty at 1080p at the price of current consoles sustainably/profitably. Vavle's success so far doesn't worry about hardware. Their customers are either willing to spend $1000+ on a gaming every couple years, or just suck it up and blame Dell/HP for why their laptop can't play CoD.

* If Sony got their shit together, you are right, I believe they would take over the living room. They almost did it with PS2, and if the PS2 had come a bit later, or the PS3 was able to sell as much they might have done it. I think Sony could have built an Apple level brand loyalty (in the sense of having a Sony Computer, Phone, Laptop, Console) and (if they got much better at software development), they could have built a Sony store to manage your content on all those devices (after all they already own most of the movies and music). In another universe Sony may have been a Google + Hardware.
Do you have more info on this? I'd love to read more.
Google doesn't sell people to advertisers. For one thing, that would be illegal. For another, they don't have a delivery infrastructure that would support it. And, finally, advertisers aren't interested in buying people, they are interested in buying advertising impressions (particularly, ones that are targeted so as to be more likely to produce sales.)

What Google does is use information it receives from users to sell targeted advertising impressions in services that the users use. The users are suppliers -- both of the information and the advertising opportunities -- rather than either "customers" or "products".
> I'm saying they're still losing money.

In what world? The Xbox has been turning a profit for most of its life. AFAIK it lost money its first couple of years (primarily due to the fact it was rushed to market), and since then it has been largely propping up Microsoft's entertainment division, which otherwise would be bleeding like mad. (The division lost money last year not because the Xbox was unprofitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough to cover Windows Phone's tab as well as its own.)
Since I'm the op, I'll answer ;)

First, I do want to thank for pointing those frameworks out. I Knew about all the Haskell ones as well as Lift, but OPA I had no idea. Currently looking at it now. Not a fan of JS, but I'm open minded enough to take a loot at.

I quite like Haskell, but I feel the Haskell frameworks aren't there. They may be secure, but the way we have to develop around them makes me cringe (snap for example, and how to get parameters from actions, or yesod with the template haskell everywhere). Also, not sure how battle tested they are. Looking at Haskell wiki, each project has about 10 sites to each framework, and none high profile enough.

I love my unix shell, but I'm really considering .net for this (I think c# is quite a decent language, and f# allows me to have functional programming in there.) Microsoft is trusted by the enterprise (Even if there are issues, managers are more willingly to allow .net patches than framework of the day patches.)

I'll look at lift/scala/play now, see if they allow me an ease to develop that I like, combined with JVM security (whatever that is, but more likely a manager will know about JAva than Ruby/Python)
Ironic since the original comment complaints about too much diversity. Just because a good rant is recognised across cultures does not imply a loss of diversity. Somethings are just common on this planet, like gravity.
Very interesting. However---and perhaps maybe I've read too much American drug war propaganda---I wonder if the cartels would be interested as well if it turns out to be a profitable industry.

In this regard, China has the advantage of a very strict government.
Well, do you know who the authors of the Donald Duck comics you read were? Maybe I should have said Donald Duck comics in general, but Carl Barks created the majority of that particular comic universe.

(The funny thing is, I still don't know any authors except Barks and Don Rosa, but I can see if a Donald Duck comic originates from the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, etc.)
I hear you. Can you be a bit more specific and say what you are currently trying to learn? I'd like to help if possible.
Wow, really? I've worked at a few large companies and the percentage of women in engineering seemed to hover around 15%. Where is this wonderful 50% land so I can go to there?
> As for voluntariness, it is arguable that the fish
> enters into the transaction voluntarily, if perhaps not
> fully informed.
> [...]
> my cat provides certain intangible benefits to me in
> exchange for food. I can assure you that my cat is
> entering into this exchange voluntarily. Who is the
> customer?

A fish or cat or any animal, cannot consent to anything due to lack of intelligence. Consent is only meaningful when all parties have roughly equal information about what's involved in the relationship, the consequences, and the alternatives.

> Fine. Two kids collect baseball cards. They agree to
> trade a Hank Aaron for a Babe Ruth. Who is the customer?

If only one kid knows that one card is much more valuable than the other, then it's not a customer relationship, it's a scam.

If both (or neither) know the value of the cards, and there's no coercion, then the customer is whoever initiated the trade. They understood what was involved just as well as the other kid, and made the informed decision that they wanted to exchange the cards.

> Unlike a barter relationship, a customer-provider
> relationship is necessarily asymmetric. The only way
> to reliably identify which way the asymmetry runs is
> to follow the money.

I don't buy into this idea that a customer relationship is inherently imbalanced. In fact, the ideal of such a relationship assumes perfect balance -- two people with things worthless to themselves, but valuable to the other.
دردشة برق
North Korea Follows One American on Twitter
Mexico was "China" before China was "China" (for scoped values of "China").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora

My limited understanding and impression are that, now that China and transportation have become expensive enough (both in direct costs and in logistics and support issues), Mexico is warming up again -- for the present. I seem to recall that, actually, a significant portion of this activity is now backed by Chinese concerns, including for the favorable effects of NAFTA and whatever else I have some vague recall of having read.

As for this marking the "recovery" of U.S. industry... No more so than watching Zenith implode (personal case), a decade and more ago. IMHO.

P.S. I also have not kept track of the following in a manner to argue it well, but my impression is that part of Mexico's narco-state problem was exacerbated (not caused) by the vacuum left when China's rise sucked the life out of the maquiladoras in a matter of a few years, transforming these localized pockets of relative, if uneven and risky, economic success into economic wastelands.

I guess the overall lesson might be not to trust in such tenuous economic relationships and advantages. Here today, gone tomorrow.
God's planning a war with China to kill gen-y or whatever. Your offspring will die.
His other pet subject is that MySQL has a better replication story than PostgreSQL.
And now you have me wondering if your comment gets a new id when you update it. If so, convincing people to execute random javascript code could be a good way to build karma. Let's find out :-)

$('#up_5210561').click()

EDIT: Comment id's remain the same when you update them. Now for the social engineering aspect...
I assume that anything that includes "support" in its product description when I purchase it includes support exactly as described.

Assuming more than that is unwarranted, and assuming that free additional services not advertised are included with products because of high price is especially unwarranted.
Haven't read the article because the NY Times is blocked in China, so not sure if the article says it but...

There's almost no foreign transport costs for manufacturing just south of the US/Mexico border. Fuel for shipping can only go up over time.

If Mexican workers get too expensive, Mexico would find it easier politically to take in immigrants from poorer countries than the US would.

Then there's Turkey for Europe.
I suppose its a vaguely interesting technical point regarding terms and conditions, but in reality people will just go ahead and reinstall it anyway - with no penalty. I don't really see how this EULA change actually changes anything in practice.
I was surprised that this article seemed devoid of historical context.

Surely I am not the only person who remembers that twelve years ago, it was a big deal that the Xbox was being assembled in Mexico by Flextronics -- heck, Wired even published an article about it: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.11/flex.html

Or we can go back twenty years, when Maquiladoras were kind of a big deal. And over the last decade, there was a lot of recognition that China posed stiff competition for them. For example, here's an 2003 article from The International Economy titled "How China Is Eating Mexico's Lunch":
http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_Sp03_Rosen.pdf
If you google 'maquiladoras china' you can find other articles with the same theme.

In other words, over most of the last decade, China was the new Mexico. I can believe that the trend might be reversing now, but writing an article with the title "Mexico: The New China" without mentioning any of this history seems... disingenuous? uninformed? I'm not quite sure what to think about it. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that the space constraints of a NYT opinion article didn't allow for a discussion of it. Whatever the reason, it strikes me as odd. Am I the only one?
"To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic."

Subjective feelings, while perfectly reasonable and acceptable in their own right, should maintain little bearing on the objective and consensually derived definitions of words, if one is being intellectually honest.

Simply put, it would be a stretch to convince us that your distaste for the concept (calling it 'borderline sociopathic') is not influencing your POV.
That's reading into it quite a bit.
Provably Fair Bitcoin Casino, in Minecraft
Do you think its reasonable that government takes less from you if you commit suicide than if you renounce your citizenship?

I never agreed to be a citizen in the first place. Why should anyone have to give up everything they have just because the government decided to auto enroll them into a system without their consent?
Microsoft does supply a full suite of viewer software

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/office-online-fi...

Your point is well taken, though, that the experience is generally inferior to other operating systems out of the box.