skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And where there will be another thing (of some critical importance) that the poor cannot afford tomorrow that the rich can.

Yup. And then that thing will become available to the poor. Do you really want to argue that it's good to slow down that cycle?

> No, I'm arguing that a society where progress is slightly slower (i.e the pie grows more slowly).

Actually, you weren't. You explicitly stated "the society where the cure does not exist at all, and all are in the same boat". Even if we rewrite that to "no availability short of universal", we end up with "no progress" because you can't start with universal. You have to start with expensive and rare and grow from there.

Me - I'm glad that rich people are willing to pay to be alpha testers.

> I am saying that this is a fact.

Actually, it's largely a construct of an envy campaign. Telling people that they have it bad has consequences.

> Happier societies generally have lower income disparities than those displayed in the US, and really, what else do you need to justify it?

Do you really think that "happy, brutish, short" needs no justification? (Not to mention that "happy" is overstated.)

>> Oh really? You find what I say to be "lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere"? On what basis?

> Because I think when people say it that their motivation is not accuracy, it's just an excuse to justify not caring about the poorer segment of society - a way to ignore the fact that although the absolute amount of pie they get has increased, there's still a problem.

Look. You've accused ME of lying. How about some actual evidence.

As far as "caring" goes, you've conceded that my way results in faster delivery of essential goods to poor people. That leaves us with I'm evil and your way kills people.
Tried to use this for a while, but in Vista some system pop-ups and whatnot made the screen flash back to normal. This hurt my eyes quite a few times when in happened after the screen had been a lot darker for a long time.
"I had read on the Consumer Reports website that Circuit City's liquidator had actually raised the price on many items for the going-out-of-business 'sale.'"

That I can believe. I made the mistake of going in to Circuit City's going-out-of-business sale to find a wide screen TV, only to find they were all at least $200 more than I'd spend at Sam's Club or Costco. It seemed they had no care if they sold any merchandise whatsoever.
Russian Mac anyone?
Well, not really... But the eeeMac (or MSI Wind Mac) look realy funny. Hey! They all feature a legal copy of Mac OS X!
I've been on #clojure and asked stupid questions more than a few times. I've always gotten very well thought-out answers, and everyone has always been friendly.
I am sure that its just the owners who are Jews. Employees would be regular folks, and theft just means getting fired - no different from other stores.
i totally don't agree with that. Clojure enforces a much more functional style "by default" than any other lisp i know of (not that i am a vet lisper).

I for once understood lisp with clojure and scheme 1 year ago. Now i can do Common lisp, but playing with clojure was much more enlightening. If you ask me why, i'd say that it's a mix between good timing (i had been reading about lisp since a lot of time) and the fact that it's motivating to learn on a new platform with access to a ton of libraries.

My advice though : Don't start with common lisp. Most of the ressources for learning it are really unclear (PCL included)
Start with Scheme (lots of good newbie-oriented ressources), and then switch to clojure once you grasped the basics.
Haha thanks, yeah I check it
What the hell? They deleted his page? The man's papers and his +HCU crowd trained a whole generation!
> C programs start up faster than HLL programs. They run faster. They consume less memory. They tend to be more responsive.

That's working C programs vs working HLL programs. And, by those metrics, assembly language programs are better still.

> Hey --- I write most of my code in Ruby.

Which suggests that performance of working programs is not the only important factor.

Yes, "premature optimization" is arguably the wrong term for making that suggestion, but it is quite valid.
My MacBook changes the screen brightness and that's all I needed.

If I wake up at 4am (having gone to sleep mere minutes before :P), my MacBook dutifully shows me a screen with a brightness of 1 - given, of course, that the lights are still off as they usually are.
I think all employees are Jewish as well, or at least I haven't seen a non Hasidic Jewish guy behind the counter any of the half dozen times I've been in the store.
simplicity is nice. I look forward to the 'aggregation' of the links shared. Top 10 "O" ratings..will be cool.
Is this enough to short Apple?

Probably not yet, but it will be if Apple continues treating its developers like this. This is not a question of being polite or kind to their developers, it is a failure to meet their legal obligations as a corporation. The fact that they see anger over a legal breach on their part as an annoyance, shows that they are starting to think they cannot fail.

The developers are the single biggest part of Apple's competitive advantage in this space. They know this at some level, because the commercials are about all the cool apps you can get for your iPhone. However, I do not think they are in such a dominant position (yet) that they can do anything they want to their developers and not suffer any consequences. This gives their competitors an opportunity to poach the best developers and apps for their systems, and get back in the game. All they have to do is actually pay for the apps that are sold.

We'll see if those competitors are smart and disciplined enough to actually do this, and whether Apple will shake off the complacency evidenced by these actions.

As one more note, this is part of what did in the Mac. Microsoft did a better job catering to Windows developers. Microsoft eventually screwed over their developers, but only when they were on the verge of monopoly and it was too late for developers to go anywhere else. I don't think iPhone is at that point, yet.
> Yet my most cherished advice to all friends is the following: learn to enjoy your contingent present, don't be obsessed by the future. Carpe diem, and enjoy the current emotions: a starry sky, a fresh wind, the shells on the seashore, your love at your side in the night, a long talk in the evening twilight with a friend, the smile of your kids. Substituting that with a TV -or a computer screen- is a very poor bargain... that is one of the few things I am now pretty sure of.

Gobsmacked by this. I've been starting to apply Stoicism towards my life and I'm speechless.

Stoicism: This has been posted on News.YC before but this might impact you:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...
Almost every file format is flawed in one way or another; time has a way of changing your assumptions and magnifying flaws.
Why don't you recreate it? Wikipedia is supposed to be edited by everyone.
what's the "studio" for if this stuff has to be installed? Consider included some information on how to modify the color theme. I would think most creative types would want a neutral gray palette with minimal visual interference.
I was finishing up my last project and looking for something new to work on. I wanted a good name for it so I hit up ajaxwhois.com, where I spent a good ten hours over the course of two or three weeks looking for a good domain name for one of the projects I was considering (How crazy is that: I was letting the domain name availability decide which project I would pursue).

Frustrated, I wrote some software to scan for available domain names. Surprise suprise: some of them were not half bad. "Hey, I thought, some people might find this useful." I dropped the other ideas and started working on a new project:

http://www.domainpigeon.com

The name -- Domain Pigeon -- was discovered using the software I originally wrote to find available domain names. That same software found the 90,000+ domain and Twitter names that are currently listed on the site.

On an unrelated note, a decent percentage of people that search for Domain Pigeon on Google misspell it: 'Domain Pidgeon' (like fridge or ridge)--stupid French etymology. I also own and redirect people from domainpidgeon.com because of that hiccup. I admit its a little ironic that its a somewhat difficult domain name... :)
Using Firefox, I moved the bookmarks toolbar to the menu bar.

To do this, make sure you have the bookmarks toolbar visible. Right-click on the menu bar or around the location box, then select 'customise'. Drag 'Bookmark toolbar items' to the white box next to the help menu. You can now hide the bookmark toolbar again.

Now if you add a bookmark to the bookmark toolbar, it appears on the menu bar. You can also drag bookmarklets on to it.

I have been doing it this way for years. Of course, there is less space on the menu bar, so you can't have as many bookmaarks as on a toolbar.
It would have to be one heck of a backlash

However bad Apple gets a developer is still talking about a couple months payments vs a decrease in their total income if you go to Android/Blackberry/etc... That's why Apple can afford to treat developers badly in the first place.

My only hope is that it might convince some developers the smartphone market needs a strong 2nd place which in turn might give them reason to target one of those platforms in addtion to their iPhone development.
Finally one made it to the home page!

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=joschi
I think one of the major causes of this, although not mentioned in the article, is the institutionalised culture of having to arrive at the office at a certain time early in the morning, then having to spend the next 8-9 hour block trapped in it.

With such an inflexible regime, all it takes is one night of going to bed late (real life can disrupt even the most disciplined schedules) and you're doomed to exhaustion for the rest of the week. Let alone the fact that people aren't clones of one another; not everyone has the same sleep patterns.
Wow, I had EXACTLY the same experience. We were going to buy a TV and thought "What the hell, why not?" and stopped in at the CC going out of business "sale". It was a joke. The TVs were $300 to $500 more expensive than Sam's Club. I had the feeling like they didn't actually want to sell anything. It was ridiculous.
It depends on if you're in it to make a living or if you're just doing it for fun. Few people have an Android phone, and there's no unified app store. The fact is that people are buying iPhone apps in droves. Even the worst development experience on the iPhone will probably make you more money than the best on Android.
I love the CEO blaming the economy. When times are good, these weasels take home bonuses for their managerial success. But the moment things go wrong, they are right there blamestorming everyone and everything else.

Schmucks.
Love that pedal train. I would definitely hop on.
The 1% Solution: Cocaine, Statistics and the Linux Desktop
Why get voted down for this? Stating an opinion gets voted down?
Ours is "Tjetter" (http://www.tjetter.com), which is "Chatter" spelled phonetically in Dutch.

We really wondered whether this would be a good idea, because I'm guessing it's practically impossible to pronounce 'tjetter' in English (is it not?).
Never knew that Tom Hanks is 30 000 years old.
RSS readers modeled after email clients are fundamentally broken
The Ubiquity team at Mozilla is lead by Aza Raskin, son of Jef Raskin. (Jef wrote the book "Humane Interfaces" and developed THE (The Humane Environment), which never progressed beyond the tech demo you can read about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy and download the last version from https://users-www.wineme.fb5.uni-siegen.de/home/Sebastian%20... ). Aza started Humanized, to develop Enso, a direct predecessor of Ubiquity, but which I find even more useful since it runs outside the browser,and is therefore useable from any program, and is written in Python, and it totally hackable. You can get Enso from http://humanized.com/ .
I'm Canadian and I've tried Hotspot shield to watch Hulu. It does work, but I find the performance terrible. There is quite a bit of overhead, it seems, in tunneling through a free VPN.
Ask HN: How do you manage your news reading time?
I used to subscribe only to /. for tech news. Read an article and the always lengthy and worth-reading comments would already take a good amount of time. Then I discovered HN, and more.

I'm sure I'm not the only one that (try to) read tech news from all over the web. As of late I discovered more and more interesting tech news sites and now I have problem catching up with newspaper sites and can't focus on my projects as I keep checking and read more and more tech news!

Care to share how you manage to find balance on work, tech news and local news?
Nowhere in the article did it state that people were sitting at home playing video games.
I normally pick the names of my projects randomly. But the names in some sense describe the essence of the project. If its an outstanding name it will definitely stick.
It's been fun playing with that plugin on non story sites, like twitter, tumblr, gmail, nyt.com etc.
History page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fravia&action=...

... Protected Fravia: Repeatedly recreated ...

(wasn't me, by the way - I've only done occasional anonymous minor fixes and original source contribs)

P.S. I also looked for a place to protest the deletion, but couldn't find anything suitable.

P.P.S. Please do not upvote this and my grandparent comment. Thanks.
you can also own the IP on physical products. Or you can work with digital stuff you don't fully own (licensed bits and pieces, third-party software)...

and don't forget you're sharing revenue with Google when you get your hard-earned 30 bucks a month in adsense. And with Amazon, when you get referrals. And so on, and so on..
100k is very little for medical research. Scientific instruments are far far far far more expensive then desktop PCs. And labs are far far far far more expensive then garages.

I am still waiting for the day when med. tech. is commoditized the way IBM clones were, and the price of scientific research drops so low that almost anyone can dabble in it.
Actually, yes. An opinion without some kind of justification or explanation behind it isn't particularly valued by the HN community.

Suggesting that unemployment in countries with high social benefits is the product of laziness places the blame on individuals when the economic system itself is largely responsible for making it extremely expensive to hire new employees.
While B&H rarely has the best online price, they always have a fair price. Typically you can see other online retailers undercut B&H in price. However, B&H has the upper-hand in customer service and advice which, to me, is worth the extra premium. When comparing against regular brick and mortar stores, B&H beats them hands-down.
Jim Coudal on Copywriting, Inspiration and Working Farmer Hours
That sounds like Apple is really screwing up, but considering the source (The Register) I may as well have read this in a supermarket tabloid. Is there any other source citing problems like this?
We surely do. Here in Norway we have either 4 or 5 weeks of vacation (I myself has a special deal which gives me 6 weeks).
You should try to sell BlueSwarm.com to the Columbus Blue Jackets :)
From reading the article, the phrase "bordering on harassment" came about when a single individual sent 22 emails within a 2-day timespan. (Perhaps they forgot to take their meds?) It makes no sense to compare this to a collection of spam from various, automated sources. If I were that engineer, I'd have had similar thoughts. I realize the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but at some point you'd think a neuron would fire to make them ask themselves "does sending another email this hour really help?"
Demand for Bandwidth Leads to Fiber Boom
I can imagine that he'd have some ugly things to say about the lectures being available only in Windows Media Player format.
X-Day: SubGenius festival July 5th
The Church of the SubGenius holds its annual end-of-the-world festival in Sherman, New York on July 1-5. Underground bands, hackers, mutants all welcome. Anarchy (and wi-fi intranet hacking) encouraged.
goodbye fravia. We will miss you. I will catch you in the next life and use what you taught us to not get lost in this one.
I think the best place to lose your job is the US. The economy is dynamic, people are raised with tales of startups and success, folks don't feel bound by class or caste or good taste in not rocking the boat, there's not too much credentialism, taxes are high (but not as high as elsewhere).

If you're forward thinking and interested in creating value, the best place on earth to be unemployed is the place where it's easiest to launch a new firm and have a chance of winning really really big.
I'm always impressed when people can make a living giving ho-hum advice like "listen to soft, relaxing music" and "cut back on sugar".
I am sure you haven't been to B&H before.
I have 4 weeks vacation and I live in the US.

It is possible when living in the states.
All agreed... I still have no clue why 37signals settled for basecamphq and campfirenow. Terrible domains. And agreed with dropbox. If I ever want to check out dropbox, I now need to google for it, or try to decide which sub-optimum domain they're using.

Surprise, basecamp.com has adsense at the top, which includes an ad for basecamphq.com. Same with dropbox.com. That's silly expense.

There's tons of great domains not taken out there. Don't believe any of the domain whores who tell you "Premium 4 letter domains like srxq.com usually go for 4 figures". There's a large range of even 4 letter .com names available for the reg. fee.

Just sit down for a day with a domain checker, and find something easy to say and spell, which isn't taken.

I did that a year and a half ago and decided on mibbit. I still like it enough :)
Request for Arc Bugs
It stated one government was cracking down on their younger folk for claiming no jobs while at home with their parents. And what do most young people do most when they have no need for a job? Get bored.

What do you do when you get bored?
Switzerland:

"Despite the generosity of its benefits, the country maintains a low rate of unemployed and underemployed workers."

vs. France:

"Unfortunately, because the French workforce is so cushy, it can be a very tough club to join. France has astronomically high rates of unemployment among youths -- up to 40 percent in some areas -- who’ve never held jobs and therefore do not qualify for benefits."

and Luxembourg:

"The government of Luxembourg, however, has recently grown fed up with wastrel youths applying for unemployment benefits while still living with their parents."

So, is this just a cultural difference, or can a government provide generous benefits while still incentivizing full employment? The Luxembourg solution:

"Anyone applying for social benefits now has to take minimum-wage government jobs or attend subsidized vocational training instead."

seems to make sense. Economic support, but with a requirement to work or get training of some sort. One trick is for the government to successfully predict which vocations will actually be in demand. Or just let the unemployed decide what to train in, with a flat cash amount to spend? You would still need checks to prevent abuse.

Of course the big Hacker News question: is any or all of this compatible with entrepreneurship? Should a government allow people to start a business venture while collecting benefits, instead of accepting the first employment opportunity?
Well, the eeeMac and MSI Wind Mac are sure a novelty... http://russianmac.ru/?p=624
All of the bastards come with a licensed version of Mac OS X. I wonder if that is a response to all those who install Windows on MacBooks...
this is how pretty much every liquidator operates. if you see a "going out of business" sign, avoid it at all costs.

all the "good" stuff will be marked up to or past MSRP and then marked back down again to the level of their original costs just so that they can legally advertise huge-sounding discounts. they mark something up so that they can then put a "30% off" sticker on it and run an advertisement, despite the price not actually changing.

you won't find anything worth buying until the final days when they really do discount items. but by then, the "good" stuff is gone because the liquidators have tricked unwitting consumers into buying it up.
But the idea isn't just one market, it's supposed to be rebalanced according to whichever asset class is cheap, so you catch the upswing of that. As to how that works, I'm curious...
Sometimes I wonder if this is a chicken and egg scenario.

Are they blaming everyone else because they failed or did they fail because they were too busy blaming to act?
But on what basis could anyone possibly object to
his tactics anyway?

Because those tactics selfishly add to the massive pile of bullshit we have to deal with every day.

[edit: not very constructive of me, true. But really, I think that's a pretty good objection.]
Some angel investor who wanted to cut a check couldn't spell the name of the company right, so we had to change the name of the company to the misspelled version and live with it forever. It was a disaster! Watch out for bad company names!
Wow. If you ever wanted evidence that Wikipedia isn't genuinely open to everyone, that would be it: an entry that is "protected" against too many people trying to create it.
Our company is named Illuminati Karate, which arose from an MF Doom (as King Ghedorah) song, "No Snakes Alive."

We wanted something memorable, rhyming, and catchy that we could own in Google and get the dotcom. We also liked the themes of higher knowledge and discipline the name implies.

We've been in business for a few years, and if I had it to do over I would probably choose a different name. That said, I started my business with one of my best friends, and a big part of the spark that got it off the ground was our desire to do something different. So in that sense, a ridiculous name like Illuminati Karate captures the spirit that started the enterprise.

Regarding domains, Google my company's name. There's a pretty good story that will come up.
the red tint is irritating (though its only been half an hour for me), and not only to eyes. Human eye is most sensitive to green wavelengths, dont know why they chose red.
maybe.

but the masses-at-large don't really know about, pay attention to, or care about the plight of the developers. if people keep buying iphones, iphone development will continue to be where the money is.
I wouldn't, but I can't speak for everyone else.

Sex outside of marriage is much more frowned-upon in the Hasidic community than petty theft, and yet there are Hasidim who have been caught soliciting prostitutes.
Ubuntu Studio does have a neutral grey palette. Modifying the color is easy, System->Preferences->Appearance.

I think it's called Studio because the Linux kernel was built with more aggressive real-time options turned on by default, to reduce jutter in audio+video capture.
"blamestorming" - my new favorite word of the day.
Now that you've explained it I can see how its pronounced. But honestly I would have thought it was "tee jetter".

I like the local flavor though.
Ask HN: Need Realty Web Site
Does anyone in the community develop real estate website software or known of a good modern product?
Exactly. A good example of not competing on price alone, but overall value. I'll gladly pay a little more to order from their website vs. some fly-by-night yahoo store.

Any time I'm in NYC I try to visit B&H just to absorb the atmosphere and play with all the awesome toys.
Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms
Techcrunch has become the onion. I guess they realized that they get more page views even if its a rumor pulled out of their behind