skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why should the US sign free trade agreements?

The US was screwed by signing NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the USA and Mexico beginning in 1994).

A bit of history: From c. 1950-1980, unions had a monopoly on labor supply in many industries. This allowed them to charge monopoly pricing, so employees gained a greater share of the wealth generated by their businesses.

With the opening of US borders to foreign trade (NAFTA was a part of this trend, but I mark its beginning with President Nixon's visit to China), elimination of most tariffs, and lower worldwide shipping costs due to improved logistics and technology, manufacturing became fungible between countries. So manufacturers largely relocated to other countries like China or Mexico with lower wages and laxer regulations.

I grew up in a manufacturing-heavy area that was economically devastated by these changes, and only now, decades later, is starting to recover. So I was exposed to the anti-free-trade position quite a bit, and I'm familiar with all its arguments; they sound convincing. And free trade's results look awfully poor.

So can anyone explain to me the incentives of free trade agreements from the US's point of view? Or if there aren't any, the political or strategic reasons they've gotten signed regardless of their drawbacks?
I'm in Perth, Western Australia (my ISP is iiNet):

202.146.213.3 - 65ms

106.187.98.41 - 169ms

50.116.56.20 - 286ms
It's not that it's underrated, it's mostly unknown.
My Observations Of Startup Cities
AKA the "Billion Dollar Javascript" - http://www.branded3.com/blogs/billion-dollar-javascript/
I have seen outsourcing done many times. I have never seen even a partial success.
"The problem is that how drugs are used is almost entirely dependent on the public policy surrounding them"

Policy seeks to move from where we are forward. Nutt advocates "forward" be measured in minimising aggregate, actual harm. The logic is that since we do not know precisely how biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and policy interact we can start by observing the entire system and seeing where problems are bubbling up.

"It's only the opinions of a bunch of random people about these things. How is this supposed to be more accurate than getting actual data?"

Experts who have looked at the data are coming to a different consensus than our policy makers. That is powerful. I don't know how to integrate data including bioavailability, legal availability, neurotoxicity, safety ratio, etc. But having toxicologists' opinions juxtaposed with policy makers' signals that I should start looking deeper.

Characterising the 2010 paper as "the opinions of a bunch of random people" is disingenuous - a panel of experts weights factors including safety ratio and probability of physical dependence in producing their conclusion. We should not fault the use of estimates with appropriate error margins in lieu of perfect data.
Retin.us - A new way to consume RSS
Several Flaws Discovered in ZRTPCPP Library Used in Apps like Silent Circle
Acrylamide is found in foods, like potato chips, that have been produced by certain high-temperature cooking techniques such as frying.

To suggest that a potato (or three) carries with it the same cancer risk as alcohol, which is considered a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization, is disingenuous.
I have no idea what the NATO has to do with it. As an Austrian, NATO was never there to protect us.

Your argument is at best ignorant, and at worst willfully distracting from the cause.

America was admired for setting an example as a great nation where people can live freely. The policing activities after WW2 (for which Europe has to be thankful) were mostly ill conceived (with the low points being Vitnam and Iraq).
Exactly. Most Germans accept nearly everything, except if it comes to their privacy.
And I'd strongly support such a move.
because that startup has to be the only one of its type they invest in.

That's surprising. Would anyone mind explaining why that's the case? YC has no such restriction, and it seems to work out ok. Why wouldn't later stage investors do deals with multiple startups in the same space?
> I suspect the comparison to Symbolics Genera would be the analog of comparing a GUI desktop environment to a console-based one

Huh? The MIT-class Lisp Machines also had GUIs from the beginning. Clunky by modern standards, as you say, but definitely graphical.

Maybe I just don't get what analogy you're trying to draw.
>What you mean is that their elected representatives have sold out their country.

Yes.
I'm not sure where you got the 3-5 years figure, but my understanding was that the fed has issued a lot of money that has not entered the money supply yet. According to [1], there has been a 259% increase in the monetary base, but only a 35% increase in the money supply. This is obviously really scary, since it implies that the dollar is likely to suffer massive inflation at some point.

[1]http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article40113.html
> He had a great plan, and should have stuck with it.

Yes, everything is simple and easy from where you sit.

> Wikileaks is using him for their own goals, which appear to be to snub the united states.

Snowden asked WL for help, and they came to his aid. It may not work out, since their enemy is the most powerful government on earth. I hope you can forgive them if it doesn't go perfectly.

This is the most credible effort toward confronting the most crucial issues that has ever happened in my life. The ship is leaving, and you're making noise about how you don't like its paint job. I feel sorry for you that you have such a bad case of bikeshedding disease.
The top students still mostly go to large companies. Compared to the number of top students going to companies like Google (who hired something like 6,000 people last year), grad school, quantitative finance companies, and several other options, the number of top students going to YC or otherwise starting companies is not a large number.

Among my own acquaintances it seems to have more to do with people's strengths and lifestyle interests. People who are strong techies but entirely uninterested in business would rather go to Google, or even to somewhere like NASA or Boeing or IBM or Intel. People who are a bit more into entrepreneurship, and/or don't like having a boss, would rather go into starting a business. Depends on the specific technology as well: a lot more web-tech people go the startup route than hardware engineers, and certainly compared to aerospace engineers.
This is a big defect in the American justice system imho.
Paid via Card, Workers Feel Sting of Fees
Fun fact: Bitcoin's proof-of-work algorithm is based on Hashcash, which was an anti-spam measure along those lines: a message contains a partial hash brute-force that takes the sender about a second of CPU time to compute (and depends on the recipient). But it didn't take off, and is problematic when spammers have vast amounts of CPU resources in the form of botnets.
First: what does this have to do with technology? Second: damn right Germany shouldn't trust us, because the world doesn't trust Germany and hopefully it never will. It doesn't bother me in the least that we're keeping an eye on them, I'd be nervous if we weren't.
VC's won't invest in competitors - how would you give advice/counsel? It would cause all sorts of weird dynamics in the firm (e.g. partners competing) that are likely to be pretty detrimental.

In terms of why YC can get away with this, companies are so early that it's not clear what they will ultimately be doing in the end. Many of the internal competitors ended up that way by accident. Moreover, YC doesn't make singular large bets, while later stage investors do. As a result, they aren't nearly as diversified as YC is and so a duplicate represents a much greater overall risk (essentially guaranteeing a loss before you even start).
There are still a lot of people who'd make great founders who never end up starting a company. You can see that from how randomly some of the most successful startups got started. So many of the biggest startups almost didn't happen that there must be a lot of equally good startups that actually didn't happen.

This is also true of a lot of writers; I wrote some about it here (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/links-the-time-for-...), and will quote from Tim Parks’s “Does Money Make Us Write Better?“:

When they are starting out writers rarely make anything at all for what they do. I wrote seven novels over a period of six years before one was accepted for publication. Rejected by some twenty publishers that seventh eventually earned me an advance of £1,000 for world rights. Evidently, I wasn’t working for money. What then? Pleasure? I don’t think so; I remember I was on the point of giving up when that book was accepted. I’d had enough. However much I enjoyed trying to get the world into words, the rejections were disheartening; and the writing habit was keeping me from a “proper” career elsewhere.

John Barth and William Goldman almost quit too and have written about it. How many anonymous but important artists got within a hair of success but couldn't make it over that line, who, instead of being artists who "almost didn't happen," didn't happen? The Internet is enabling a much more direct way of judging artists, much as it does startups, and I'm struck by the comparisons between artists and startup founders that run throughout pg's essays.
3 Reasons Every Business Should Hire A Freelance Copywriter
I see it more as a case of PG observing that gravity will pull the industry in that general direction and that smart money will move downhill along with it.
Unfortunately, someone being a "nice person" doesn't mean they're immune to being corrupted by power. If I had known Obama before he was elected, I'm sure I'd have thought of him as a nice guy. As this last month shows, that's no protection against abuses.

Given that the corruption is minor - petty abuses like not returning emails or stealing a few percent equity or inserting terms at the last minute - and the amount of power so large (giving tens of millions to people who are often broke, with zero appeal or oversight), I'd be surprised if it didn't happen.
ubuntu 13.04 is ruby 1.9.3p194 which i believe was the default for 12.10 as well
>This is an incredibly fanciful interpretation of language. If these reports are correct then Google is simply outright lying.

A huge corporation? Lying? About doing stuff that's harmful to their image -- stuff that they would have been pressured to lie about and deny them anyway?

Please. Next thing you'll tell us that there's no Santa Claus!
And those laws were debated by Germans, about how much they should know about each other. If they had all truly decided that everyone should be open, and that they could vote it away later, then everything's good.

Having Americans spy on everyday Germans, that's completely different.

It's one thing for an American on the street to see a German and size him up to see if he's a threat. Does he have a weapon, is he of sound mind, etc. It's completely another to follow him home, peek through the windows, poke through his phone, computer, trash, and then say you're only defending yourself and that everyone does it. The level of intrusion is unreasonable.
VC's won't invest in competitors - how would you give advice/counsel?

Hmm. YC does, and it seems to work ok. Why wouldn't it work for later stage VCs? Or rather, why does it work for YC?
Your description of the protocol is basically right. All metadata is shared in a torrent called a "meta torrent", which you get via other users as a signed infohash. After querying for the torrent over the DHT network, you begin downloading the files.

You are right that the update checking system is pretty crude right now. I definitely plan on eventually updating over I2P. I will probably wait until I have implemented generic file-sharing and just piggy-back on that functionality to distribute updates.

I plan on adding a welcome message that explains how to use the interface. I already have that in the Android version, but for whatever reason I skipped over it this time.

I think on Windows and OS X, you can just double-click a JAR file and it will launch it with Java. Hopefully most users won't have to drop to the command line to run it.

Right now it's quite slow to get an update -- especially when you are getting their metadata for the first time, which can take 5 minutes or more sometimes. I plan on working really hard to speed this up over the next few months.
> Former ID thief here.

Hilarious. Former victim of ID theft here.
"Disable Javascript" option removed in Firefox 23
Though I'd agree that non-US persons have reasons to be concerned, you moved the goal posts. It may not be particularly difficult for the NSA to get your data from Google services if they decide to target you specifically, but Google has explicitly denied broadly sending over data from some significant fraction of users, as you suggested in your previous post:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
I also probably had a lot more testosterone in my body back then... but if I was still starving, then maybe. I guess I won't know, since there's the internet now...
I don't find that taking a drug is any different than eating food or drinking water. You get hungry, so you eat and gain energy and feel fullness on your stomach, which leads you to drowsiness. Of course, conventionally, taking drugs(like smoking weed or taking MDMA) is done for different reasons than just survival.
babelfish.altavista.com was also the translate.google.com of its time
Total surveillance has nothing to do with the security of the average citizen...

If you really mean this, you are beyond reason. I don't disagree about the slow transformation you describe, but it's hard to believe that no NSA operatives are working towards preventing terrorism.

One of the problems is that surveillance can be used for both purposes.

However neither of your statements are an actual attempt to answer my question.
Armadillo - Fast Linear Maths
all the mechanics over here disagree - incl. the statistics about failures. modern VWs, BMWs, Audis, etc. all have more issues with their advanced diesel models. talk to mechanics and they have a list of engines to avoid. part of the reason are the new emission standards, leading to ever higher injection pressure and higher temperatures.

your counterpoints seem strange, of course all modern diesels have turbos. i am not talking about the TDIs of yore, my 2004 volvo D5 engine is awesome. it's the post 2008 generation that has started the issue trend. common rail engines, over-engineered to the brim.
Atlassian Crowd unpatched 'symmetric backdoor' remote XML exploit [pdf]
I miss altavista every single day.

Every time I search for a collection of terms, and then click the links, and page-search for one of those terms, and it's not in the page.

Google wastes my time like this 3-4 times per day.
That's amazing. So powerful. They have this information on all of us.
Conflict of interest. If you're advising startup X in the "deliver food to people at lunchtime" space, it could very well be a conflict to do the same to startup Y in the same space, as they'd be competitors.
If there is sufficient economic competition then free-trade agreements have limited economic impact, however the non-economic benefits are numerous. I'm not going to debate the legitimacy of 'monopoly pricing' and unions because that debate will degenerate quickly.

In addition to elimination of tariffs, import quotas, and preferential sourcing of goods and services, FTAs enforce/encourage open-border policies that enable the free movement of people between different jurisdictions. FTAs are a step towards greater integration with other nations.
Here's an enterprising journalist!

"Surreal 21 hour adventure of reporter who deliberately got sequestered at Moscow airport in the hope of finding Edward Snowden"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2351686/Trapped-tran...
This seems like a great time to plug RequestPolicy:

"ReuestPolicy is a Firefox extension that improves the privacy and security of your browsing by giving you control over when cross-site requests are allowed by webpages you visit."[1]

It is even better if you pair it with NoScript.[2] Whenever I toy with the idea of switching to Chrome I am always end up sticking with iceweasel because of the lack of equivalent RP+NS functionality in Chrome. If you are currently using ghostery I highly suggest you switch to RP+NS.

[1] https://www.requestpolicy.com/index.html

[2] http://noscript.net/
Any bets on when/if the Russians trade Snowden for one of their own?
That's a good move to make considering the numerous JavaScript-dependent web applications present today!
You may say you've never done any 'drugs'. But you've certainly gone through changes of consciousness. That's the author's point.
I love how security expert Bruce Schneier (https://www.schneier.com) has implemented it. This also gives you an ability to see how popular an article is (based on the sharing numbers) if you want, which is another purpose these widgets serve.
Love this. As a novice developer, I think I spend 90% of my time dealing with problems I have because of the OS I'm running or other things I have installed.

A solution like this is the perfect environment for someone who is trying to learn to program.
Here's a graphical representation of that radio sphere you talked about: http://www.geekosystem.com/human-radio-broadcasts/
Nobody is reducing the problem to developers. It's a problem most of the youth have.
There's plenty of uses for Raspberry Pi that doesn't need video output. Install a SSH server and run it headless.

Alternatively use composite video out. Raspberry Pis are cheap, so getting another Model B (or Model A) for HD video output isn't a big deal..
...and find your click rates plummet.

Which is fine if you're OK with that cost. But a lot of users aren't going to notice those links, let alone select them, copy them and paste them.

If I already have to copy and paste a link, why not the actual page URL?
it seems incredibly unlikely that the Russian government hasn't been able to get their hands on all the classified material and laptops he took with him

Most likely they built a special-purpose $5 machine to decrypt all his information. And that's why we haven't seen any photos of him since he left HK.

It looks like a foolish mistake to have left China at all instead of applying for asylum there. China would be a good place for someone like Snowden to hide out from US authorities and live a good, full life. Ecuador and Russia are both very likely to exploit him themselves or turn him over to the US when the next administration comes in.

But maybe he has something up his sleeve. I would not be surprised to hear that he's not in Moscow at all.
How much oil did the US get out of the obvious oil grab?
This line of argument has never concerned me, because it is a tautology: If people expose parts of their identity in Nightweb, then parts of their identity will be exposed on Nightweb. There is no reason your relationships in Nightweb have to align with your offline relationships.
This became an issue when I applied for a mortgage recently. I needed my father to cosign to make it go through. I make more than him, and I currently have 3 paying clients so I can't be more than 1/3 fired at a time, but apparently I am greater risk.
Helpful, practical tips.
Thanks PG for this essay. Some of the issue with the various mythologies (and more often than not, bromides) around seed/angel/VC is that they're based on historical conclusions (that seem to have been arrived at in the late 90s early 00s), rather than a more forward-looking approach to what's changing (infrastructure costs, tech eating the world, etc.). As an angel, it seems pretty obvious to me the shape of the investing world is shifting, so it's nice to see it put so well.
Has anybody experimented with a pico projector? I've been thinking that a HUD would be a fantastic application since some (most?) pico's have infinite focus. Some of the newer ones are pretty bright too - especially if you only need to illuminate a couple of square inches instead of a couple of square feet.
This is a very serious remote exploitation of the Crowd service, looks like version 2.6.3 is the only fully patched and safe version.

Abstract:

This advisory examines a critical vulnerability in Atlassian Crowd a software package marketed as a turnkey solution for enterprise scale single sign­on and secure user authentication. The vulnerability is remotely accessible, does not require authentication, and is easily exploited. Recommendations for securing affected systems are provided and special mention is made of an unpatched weakness in the product that could be classified as a symmetric backdoor.
1. You're right: it isn't metabolized the same way as other foods. If you want to get really technical, you should look at the impact of alcohol on fat oxidation. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3280601. The term "beer belly" is not a misnomer.

2. The study you cited looked at people above the age of 55. There was another similar study published in 2009 that also looked at alcohol consumption above the age of 55. It too found a correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and longevity, but after factoring for disability and socioeconomic status, the correlation dropped substantially. It was still significant, but the researchers noted that other factors not considered could fully explain the correlation. So to suggest that drinking a glass or two of wine a day is a "perfectly healthy" activity that will lengthen your life is quite premature. On the other hand, the evidence showing that regular consumption of fruits, vegetables, fish, etc. is beneficial to health is pretty conclusive.
Microsoft as well. They required no outside capital, and Gates & Allen put in a modest sum (equal to maybe $10,000 today). Their customers funded the business.
You can use "intext:blah" to make sure "blah" actually occurs in the page body itself: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
I want to make anonymous networking so transparent and simple that people use it even if they don't care about it. They may still expose their identity through the information they share, but we will all benefit from anonymity being the default instead of the exception.
This joke sucks!
Not necessarily.

Plenty of 1-man "professional services" businesses are functioning as middlemen between big companies, or big companies and government. They have low overhead, but usually have a fixed, immovable deadline for paying their downstream companies. As long as the good times roll and the customers pay in time, life is grand.
If my memory serves me AltaVista had good newsgroup support too. It was even possible to manually uudecode binary files from the search results.
Another reason why going to Russia might not have been the best idea.
Mmm, I've been in situations before where marketing absolutely insist on packing the page full of sharing widgets, and it has a horrible impact on clientside performance.
I like this! The option is still there for power users (who most likely _know_ why they want to disable Javascript) and normal users can't accidentally disable it. Win-win!
Inside The Most Expensive Science Experiment Ever
A better alternative to printing would probably be to hand-cut (or CNC) the shape of the sole out of a thin sheet of whatever plastic is appropriate.