skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there is nothing wrong with the top 1% of people owning 99% of stuff

Presumably you can imagine a point at which inequality would cause the world to grind to a halt; in the extreme, let's say just one person on the whole planet owns everything that can legally be owned. If you can imagine that not being a particularly good thing, then the argument just becomes one of "how much is too much".
Not necessarily. Implementing client-side saving would be trivial compared to the other kinds of DRM that have been successfully bypassed over the years.
Help Contribute to Python's Flask with Code Triage
Yeah, I felt the same. I can appreciate good writing, but from the first paragraph this screamed to me a story about how someone actually fell for one of those scams. Maybe I should be happy that it's so rare that people fall for them that it's noteworthy when someone does.
The design is quite a bit nicer. This is not just a function of iOS widgets, as the design isn't particularly native. I think the reason for this is that the Gmail iOS app recently got a huge overhaul and a lot of attention, but the Android one hasn't had one yet?

It's not bad by any means. It is more that I was surprised that a a flagship app was not quite as nice.
You can add a page rule for your whole domain and set custom caching to "everything".
Fair enough, those are some valid points.

But if Google does try to manipulate people in significant ways without them knowing, eventually it will get out and people's trust in Google will be broken. That's why I don't think they'll risk doing it.

I mean, for instance, if they try to steal your credit card info by reading your emails and steal money from you. If they pull something like that off, it may work in short-term but definitely not in the long-term.

If they do, they can only get away with manipulating people once.

Of course they can manipulate in a smaller scale, in small and harmless ways (by showing you more ads of competitor A vs. competitor B), but I think we all accept that as it is already true today. By helping me find what I'm looking for faster, they're manipulating me into saving time.

So if Google ever betrays my trust on a large scale, I will stop using them.

I tried reading the [2] article and despite its length, I couldn't find very good arguments. I agree it's bad if the government knows more about you without you knowing about them or what they know. But if everyone knows everything, that's something I'm less concerned about.

If you really want to take a naked photo of me, I would ask "why would you want to? Seriously?" Even if you put it online for everyone to see, chances are no one will care. There's 6 billion other people who also have naked bodies.
"Introduction to Algorithms" contains a summary on that subject.

This page looks like my notes (cheat) I used in finals. You need to know what you are doing to make that information useful.
Apple (finally) fixes App Store flaw by turning on HTTPS for customer data
As far as interoperating community-run servers: cheating is the first thing that comes to mind. A lot of restrictions in MMO's are not so much for DRM as they are for maintaining fairness in the game, or preventing people from destroying the in-game economy.
Agreed, though I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. In fact, we suffer from both maladies at present.

Government can spend, but that spending should be as investment, not overhead. Current government spending is akin to charities which have 90% overhead per dollar donated.
Judges, Juries and the Explosion of Online Content
It is for me. I do mostly static sites for small business, and use embedded forms from jotform.com but would really prefer to be able simply to post the info to an external server which handles sending the email.
For a sovereign currency issuer, taxation and spending are not operationally connected. Taxation serves to regulate inflation and unemployment. Too much taxation, you get high unemployment and idle output capacity, too little, you get inflation.

In a situation with a general lack of aggregate demand and high unemployment, adding a minimum income would work similarly to a tax decrease on the extreme low end of the income scale.

I'm not sure what the windging about middleman bureaucrats is about. Look at something like Social Security, it's direct payouts to beneficiaries, so the decision making is left to the beneficiaries as to what to buy. No central planning, just let demand and markets do their work.
My guess is that it's because payments are much easier thanks to online and developer-friendly merchant systems. PayPal has had IPN for a long time. Then there was BrainTree and open-sourced libraries like ActiveMerchant. This made billing for your own app and some marketplace options easier. We do 3rd party payment aggregation with NextProof (www.nextproof.com) and I still get an email every week from someone who read an HN post I wrote 2+ years ago. But after the financial crisis, most merchant underwriters frowned upon payment aggregation.

Then all the billing/charging services came along. Recurly, Chargify, Spreedly, CheddarGetter, etc. These made billing and charging your own customers easier. They never really handled "products" but I think they paved the way a bit by showing that having easy APIs is important.

Now you have services like Stripe. So, you can do recurring billing and individual charges. You can let your customers setup their own accounts (via Stripe Connect) but still keep the business logic in your app. This also takes care of the disbursements/payout issue and puts the onus of chargebacks on the user. The API is easy. PCI compliance is not as much of a problem. Transaction fees are in line with PayPal (but our BrainTree fees are lower). You can build a tool like this, a marketplace like Etsy, a crowdfunding site, etc. ... If you look through Stripe posts on HN, the biggest gripe is always international payments. I built www.bngal.com because it was easy and fun.

It will be interesting to see what's next ... possibly integration with in-person payment systems (like Square) or maybe cardless payments (linked to bank account?).
No I'm questioning why you are saying they should have come up with a different name like SimCity Online and start afresh when they did just that... But with the normal SimCity name. Maybe I didn't word it well, I'm running on 2 hours of sleep.
United Airlines reunites son with dying mother
When iOS launched, it didn't even have native applications.
This is like an audiophile review. "I didn't actually measure anything, but X sure felt better than Y!"

I just upgraded to the Nexus 4 from a G2, I kind of like the G2 size and keyboard better, but apparently physical keyboard aficionados are a minority.

After a couple of weeks, I have 0 crashes (and I bought my Nexus on Play, so no t-mobile software installed), so I guess that's cool. I rarely use anything but a weather app, maps, and the web browser, though. I'd say the biggest single feature I'm interested in from the Nexus 4 is continual firmware support for a long time. The G2 stopped getting updates after about 6 months.

Also, the Nexus 4 is just large enough, it's actually difficult for me to operate with one hand sometimes, because I can't reach my thumb quite as far across the screen.
In terms of features

3.5% fee compared to 5%

PayPal Integration (for your customers who feel safer using them)

Physical Product Handling

Access Windows for digital sales (https://trychec.com/assets/img/anything-digital.png)

Inline Social Payments on Facebook (checkouts in customers newsfeeds)

Social Deals - Based on influence or demographics

And a powerful merchant backend.

as well as a few smaller features around.

Groad is primarily built to deal with digital files, we can handle any type of good.

and that's just in v1. we've got a lot to do, and you'll see us differentiate more in the future.

It might be easier to give the stories behind the idea to help.

So, i created this initially for myself. As a teenager i had resale rights to a DVD info product, and made a couple thousand a month selling it.

I hated the checkout process of 2checkout, 1shoppingcart, ejunkie, and others. So I ended up throwing a paypal checkout in an iframe and creating a post hook script to manage the order.

I wanted a simple, clean, yet powerful app to manage everything, so i made one. The first version of this was built in 2010.

I had one professional/full product to sell and i sold it in fairly high volume, and I didnt need a fully fledged store, i just had a single product to sell. Over time i created more and more minisites to sell different types of info products so i could have some passive income whilst i was at school.

Gumroads story

Sahil created an icon on photoshop that he wasnt going to use, but thought other people would find value in it so he wanted a service that let him sell his "value" to his followers (if that makes sense).

Gumroad allows people to sell their small snippets of value. (primarily digital).

Chec allows smaller merchants to start selling online who have no need for a front end store. Merchants like mmfixed.com etc..

Is that a little clearer? :)
It seems tricky to me to define what "at the expense of others" means. I can see some people saying pretty much any private gain is that the expense of others because others could have had it. On the opposite end of the spectrum I can see someone arguing as long as you didn't physically harm someone in acquiring your wealth then it's not at their expense. How do you classify it?
African expats find success in China
Was hiring a PI for perspective hires standard procedure or was there something with this candidate that required it?
Why is there no date for the post? When I read "last Friday", I immediately scrolled up to check when it was written, but there's none.
famous != open
What other than DRM?

There is no DRM in an MMO. What stops you is the lack of them giving you the server software.

Facebook doesn't give you their server software either, would you call that DRM?

This is absolutely no different. Considering that a huge proportion of Hacker News is devoted to web based startups, you would think that this would be fairly obvious.
We're not trying to be a cloud ide :) Think content, and lots of it..
If a working offline crack is produced BEFORE the game developers can produce a fully working version this would be a BIG development
I prefer: http://javatester.org/version.html

Tells you whether it's loaded, and what version you have loaded. No frills, no crap website.
The US has a military base in Djibouti. It has a military base in Cuba - which the Cuban government has been asking the US to get out of for over half a century. The US has military bases in Germany. It is now openly bankrolling anti-government forces in Syria. The US has 10 aircraft carriers in service and is spending a massive amount of money to build a new class of supercarriers. No other country has more than 1 aircraft carrier other than Italy which has 2 - and it is unlikely the US will go to war with Italy any time soon.

None of this of course is on the chopping block. I've paid into Social Security my entire life. It's one of the few things my massive federal taxes are going to give to me in this life. Of course, this one "entitlement" (it's apparently an entitlement to at some point pull out some of the thousands I pushed into Social Security) is the only thing really on the chopping block in any form.

There was an economist who wrote a book about a century and a half ago how the economic system would eventually lead to slow growth, with ever larger recessions, depressions and economic crises, with ever higher unemployment etc. The economist was Karl Marx, and the book he explained this in is Capital. It seems the higher unemployment goes, the worse the economic crises get, the less any kind of left prognosis seems to come around, the establishment view from Paul Krugman to the Cato Institute is full steam ahead. Thus for any other kind of answer one must look outside the establishment view.
I'll check out gReader Pro. Thanks for the tip. I agree about Google's reader app. It's horrible, but that's what I've been using so far.

As an aside, I'll say that I've been trying out Google Voice and continue to find it a little confusing and hard to use. As a developer, I understand a lot of the tradeoffs and limitations, but even with that knowledge it's been confusing.

It seems to work quite well for what it does, but I can't help feeling that much of it must address use cases I don't have. Specifically voice mail transcription is something I care almost nothing about, just as I barely ever used visual voice mail on the iPhone.
Do you know of an online wallet that seems to be reputable? I'm looking at Coinbase at the moment.
Storylane is joining forces with Facebook! Read about it more in our CEO's story

The link from here is a little disappointing, this would have been a perfect opportunity to showcase the technology instead of just a blog post.
Balloon Pilot Hopes New Solar Plane Will Succeed in Cleaner Skies
AFAIK, Guild Wars 2 has essentially zero downtime for updates. There was a talk posted online a while ago about their backend tools and architecture. It's really very impressive actually.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13u1mz/watch_thi...
Apparently nobody but me!
Although I respect what you're doing for conversions -- I find it odd how difficult it is to get to a demo of the video or read anything about the practice, not theory, that went behind creating this (i.e. what software was used to record, what equipment, etc). These two are supposed to be front and center given the title of the article, no?
You might also like TheBrowser.com which is a collection of great reads sorted by topics.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about if you think there are no female-only rape survivor groups.
Or is the internet lure scenario so "standard" that it can be used as a defense when caught smuggling drugs?
I was going to back then until I realised it's an MMO. Not since 1995 did I ever want anything to do with MMO's and I have no intention of playing them.

Please give me a meaningful single player experience.
$0.02 or 2¢ =P
Sorta-cynical answer:
Yes, convince other people that they can make money on the web and tell them to pay you to help them... then use their money to go learn how to make money on the web... and BOOM, you both benefit.

This is called consulting.

Edit: For clarity, I'm not trolling. I assume you mean passive income and the delta between where you are now and having something that can pay you passive income is large, IMO. If you can get into a paying gig that helps you learn skills to move you toward your passive-income-earning-thingy... its win-win.
How an Orthodox Jew Is Scamming the Pants Off NYC’s Women
Eh the Nexus 4 is a good chunk smaller than the Note, doesn't have a Wacom based pen digitizer built in and doesn't support LTE.

I guess I'm paying for the features I wanted with a currency made of "waiting for updates".
Yeah I agree, how can a mega billion company like EA fail so badly on marketing. Strategy should've been simple:

1) release it as sim city online, with marketing emphasizing it's like a sim city mmo. People will be more tolerant of launch network issues. Make lots of $$$

2) later release single player sim city 5 (just rip out online parts from above) make more $$$

Such an inept company.
From the article:

> "Logan’s fabricated back story hinges on a seed accelerator known as Y Combinator, which has helped produce such companies as Reddit, Dropbox and Airbnb."
Personally, my biggest beef with the current situation is that we're not borrowing to fund infrastructure. You talk to any corporation in America, offer them the opportunity to make capital investments at 0.1% interest, and they'll jump at it. And we need infrastructure investment. But unfortunately, that idea's a rhetorical casualty of the debate on entitlements, despite being a drop in the bucket by comparison.
That's naive. Where there is profit margin, there is crime.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-05-02-atf-ci...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/27/cigarette-smuggl...
see my answer just above
Superb analysis. Please feel free to add this reference for your final point:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/06/t...
Git is going to be coming, very very soon ...
I'd be paranoid that I was being watched by drug dealers who would try and intercept me on the way to the police station. Or more likely that the local cops were paid off. Not sure how much I'd trust the justice system there to get to the truth either.
My post got a couple of upvotes...

Then it went back down to 1 point.

Since you cannot undo upvotes, I guess people are also downvoting me.

Can someone refute my arguments, instead of just downvoting? When you agree, it is easy to just upvote, you agree, thus there are not much else to discuss.

But I urge people to write when they disagree, how can we discuss things, if you just do some drive-by downvoting? I made a very big text, I want to know what you are disagreeing with! I want to see your counter-arguments, so I can argue back! It is this way that I can learn more maybe, or teach.
I found this in one of the other sim city threads du jour:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1584821767/civitas-plan-...

they are getting much of my monies

EDIT: Don't remember which thread i found it in, so here are the posts that may have been the one that I found the kickstarter link in:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5343788
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5341070
I'm not disputing that what the finance sector is supposed to be doing is good for the economy.

But the line is about the brightest young people going into finance. When your brightest people are going into allocation rather than the actual invention and building of things, because it's soooo, sooo much more profitable, you've got a structural problem.
I like to think of Prolog as an "intellectual diversion."
Airbnb and the Sharing Economy on the cover of The Economist
Thanks for linking this! There's some discussion on the bottom of the post as well as on DN: https://news.layervault.com/stories/2070-the-design-ego
Reconstructing 2000 year old hairdos
Especially true given the prevalence of base style frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation.
I agree that a lot of people are "abusing" Kickstarter and just cashing in on nostalgia. But ultimately it is up to the consumer (or backer) to determine what they think is a farce and what is not. Garriott might be caching in on his legacy to some degree, but he has also clearly put hard work into this game, which many other veterans have not (they simply show concept art, or worse yet, nothing at all). If Garriott were just programming this himself in his basement, it might be a different matter, but he has team members that depend on him for salary/benefits, and he has already had to go through layoffs. It would seem kind of foolish to turn down "free" money in the name of being virtuous, and risking more layoffs.
The post is overall good but it misses one huge question and seems to implicitly assume something that is incorrect.

I agree growth is good, but shouldn't we then ask what causes growth or halts it? The post does not explore this, but Sam seems to assume that growth is caused by government investment in infrastructure, science and technology. This is false. What are real concrete examples of this abstract idea 'economic growth'. Many of the best examples are actually due to individuals acknowledged in the post such as Peter Thiel and Paul graham. Growth comes from individuals like these choosing to invest in entrepreneurs (at various stages) based on their judgment. Those investors who judge right enough accumulate more capital to reinvest and continue encouraging growth as long as their judgment about what should grow is good enough.

Sam seems to suggest that growth is achieved through government investment. I disagree. Every dollar the government spends comes from a Peter, a Paul or an Elon. Who is going to do a better job investing and causing growth? Elon or a government bureaucrat. Elon is one of those rare entrepreneurs who has plowed into areas of deep regulation such as space travel and transportation. Imagine if the government wasn't financing roads with money taken from those accumulating capital, then how much easier would it be for Elon to disrupt transportation and grow that industry through innovation? How many more entrepreneurs would be willing to work in that industry?

Each of the most broken and stagnant industries are most touched by government: education, healthcare, defense, finance, transport, and energy. Growth has happened in software/tech because government is far away meaning it is easier to work on problems free of intervention and more people are willing to. Growth has stagnated in these other areas because government has disincentivized entry (and often teamed with established inneffectivr big cos) by getting involved, regulating, giving away for free, and generally making it difficult to impossible for entrepreneurs to enter and thus undesirable.

So what has caused growth? Individual investors and entrepreneurs exercising good judgment. What has slowed it? Government regulation as government has grown its tendrils into more and more areas. What should we do to promote growth? Shrink government leaving investors their money to invest and opening more industries for potential private investment that won't have to face burdensome regulation or competition against public entities that don't try to profit.
As an aside...the bottom of the web page mentions help from Peter Thiel. Thiel has been standing up and saying he has had the brilliant insight that competition hurts capitalism, and this sort of thing. He says he is stating economic truths no one else has said.

While I can't concur with everything Thiel says, I think what he says about competition is correct, and he's also correct people don't say it. But they don't say these things because these ideas are part of capitalism's raison d'etre. It's kind of like him wondering why no one is mentioning the wife of the cocktail party host is ugly. It's something everyone knows, but doesn't say. I guess we should be thankful he's being candid about such things. Perhaps the 1% is so powerful nowadays they feel they can be candid about such things.
And the way tailoring works is. We detect were the user clicked the link from (using the headers) then tailor the landing page to leverage that source.

I.e. clicked via FB? Let try and use fb connect to prepopulate the checkout, provide an incentive to share this page if they're influential. etc..
Oh gosh. I just understood the problem. It's simply the fact that it runs the code. I thought it was somehow a problem of the editor. Shame on me.
> We should understand that as a consequence of technology and an economy of ideas, the gap between the rich and the poor will likely increase from its already high-seeming levels.

The gap doesn't just "seem" high, it "is" high. The core reason this is a problem is that higher gaps in income in a society are correlated (not necessarily causal, but they frequently appear) with social instability.

As voters, we currently want more America than we've proven willing to pay for. This means one of 2 things must happen.

1. We pay more for the America we have

2. We get less America than we want

"less" in this case could mean really obvious things like less services or benefits of certain types. It could also mean less of intangibles/unquantifiables such as social stability, or opportunity etc, which are hard to value until they're not there (I've spent much of my life in seriously unstable places in the world, and I can attest that little else works when you dont have the basics). Most likely, we'll have to pay a little more, accept a little less, and as OP suggests, buy slightly different things with what we're paying. If we don't make those decisions, gravity will make them for us.
Kickstarting: A 3-D Mouse Worn On Your Finger