skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference between the two policies is ideology. ALP wants everyone to have same speeds regional/city, rich/poor, home/business. ALP wants fairness - this is their guiding ideology as a party in general. This obviously comes at an additional cost, scope and risk (lack of competition, cost-blowouts, etc.).

NLP is just less concerned with fairness and more concerned with cost/benefit even if that means that some people will not have access to the fastest possible internet.

Life is not fair. Look at private/public with respect to schools, uni, health insurance, taxation, etc. Top 25% earners pay 60% of tax. Some children will never be able to attend a private school. Some will never have access to certain treatments or medication. Some will never be able to afford the things they want.

Some people are okay with this, others are not. Both parties will work towards measurable outcomes but in the large areas of grey they fall back to their ideologies.

Yes, the benefits of FTTH are fantastic, but its important not to get swept up in thinking we must do something at all costs.

There are very sensitive assumptions that underpin the cost of the NBN which would change the cost of it substantially such as how many people sign up, how much they will be prepared to pay, etc. There are plenty of risks to the project and even more so considering the involvement of the government. These are just some reasons to be very considerate about the cost.

The ALP worries less about wasteful spending than the LNP. This is easy to do because its only in the long-term where we have to make tough spending decisions because of past wasteful spending.

In the same way you can't fathom the opportunities brought about by the NBN, you also can't fathom the future challenges to the country - ageing population, world population growth, climate change, war, etc.

The frustration the author feels about having a focus on cost/benefit and risk will only become apparent with time. I could argue for anything too if I didn't have to address how much it costs.
This has been around for a little while, hasn't it? Like, a year or two at least? I'm reasonably sure I've seen this website before...

Not to say it's not interesting / not a valuable submission. I love the idea, and it seems like it might help me read faster, which is always cool. Just wondering if my memory is correct.
That is how your bosses look at you, IT workers are a cost center - whether you are a programmer or sys-admin or db.

The simple fact is the MBA dude hates you.
This reads like The Secret: Women In Tech edition.
Thanks for the refresher -- I recall being taught this in HS physics but I've never repeated it because I didn't want to look like an idiot trying to explain how "electrons" don't move at the speed of light.
Don't think of discrimination as an active force of evil. Think of discrimination as a byproduct of personal recommendations, networking, and hiring people based on fit.
Living in Japan, I have to deal with Line but I don't like it. My major complaint is that Line encourages you to spam your friends advertising their games. For example, Line Pop artifically limits the number of times you can play the game, but you can easily nag your friends to send you more 'hearts' so you can continue. Pretty sure Line Play gives you in game currency for inviting anyone to play it, whether they are your friends or not, so I have tons of people I don't know send me requests.
This stuff was so spammy I had turn off Line notifications, so I prefer to use normal text messages whenever possible.
I could see other users get sick of it the same way I did.
Hence why zmmmmm was incorrect about the speeds: electricity in the copper wires is travelling faster than light in the fibre optic cables. zmmmmm didn't mention drift velocity, but that wasn't really related to his point.
You are awesome and we need more people like you. I've gotten so sick of all the rants lately about how unfair women in tech are treated, it's great to read one that's actually encouraging people instead of trying to convince them everyone is out to get them.
I am so sick of this obsession with cost/benefit analysis.

How can you possibly quantify the future benefits of the NBN ? Nobody could have predicted that when the copper lines were installed that one day it would be primarily used for the internet. And the historic changes to the world economy it has caused. So why even attempt to do it ? Or why not just say it will cost $50 billion but result in $500 trillion worth of benefits.
Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevii bond at Burning Man
Plato is mostly dialogues and it is only hard in the sense that I have to extract the philosophy out of the text, plus Socrates goes around and around. Epictetus is ok as well, the text is simple to read, and I found myself taking many notes and comparing his text to others. Modern interpretation of the Quran with commentary is helpful, the thing about it being that each chapter is somewhat separated from the rest. Bible, I picked than put it back down with humility because I just knew I could not grasp it. Aquinas is hard to follow, imo he is a logician before a theologian and I know nothing of the first and very little of the second science. However I am very interested in the subject of his writing. I agree it is "accidentally" mechanical reading although my goal is "understanding." I just started to read heavily the past 2 years and this is my beginner's eagerness.
Also, if you mention the existence of ISP broadband caps, on/off peak traffic caps, shaping, overage fees, etc. to someone in the US, they'll probably look at you like you're crazy.

Although then they have to deal with secret caps on "unlimited" plans which you aren't told about until you hit them and the ISP berates you for it and cuts off your service -- Google "Comcast caps".
Nope... If his target audience was supposed to be average consumer then may be this will be an interesting move. But looks like his target audience is sufficiently sophisticated users. Those people will now realize that it is actually much easier to crack the trial software by themselves instead of getting from elsewhere. BTW, this software cost couple of grands PER user PER year. However I remain to be skeptical who wants this thing because (1) it requires social engineering and (2) there are much better and powerful and safer open source alternatives to run exploits.
How can you compare corporate greed to union greed? The best paid union workers were autoworkers and longshore workers, and the companies they worked for were still huge and profitable. So as "greedy" as these well paid workers were (and I mean "were," because autoworkers make a lot less today) they weren't greedy enough to destroy the company.

If it weren't for this so-called "greed" there wouldn't have been a middle class at all. And now that unions are shrinking to almost irrelevance, the middle class is vanishing.

The old attitude of companies holding onto workers was created by unions making demands. Now that unions are few, and in many sectors, were never present, the "fend for yourself" at-will contract is the standard.

The unions made those "good old days". The labor strife of the 20s and 30s set the conditions for the middle class of the 50s and 60s.
The book: "The Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon has a similar theme to your question (but deals with autism, not downs syndrome).
Duopoly? Who, besides Telstra, owns pipes? Optus?
The real question; Can we automate the job of corporate officer? The cost savings would be enormous...
What if the software requires an internet connection to dial back home & verify the software authenticity .. say once every 30 days? Is that too annoying for users?
I think it began with David Marcus becoming CEO and president.
I think I got something more harmful than radiation after reading this article.
I'm not aware of eye tracking setups that are reasonably priced and that accurate, but I like the idea quite a bit :) I'll have to test it out some time - should be relatively fake-able by just moving a marker up/down with keys.
Not having widespread access to firearms in a society doesn't imply that its citizens are defenceless. I.e. some societies skew towards longer-term strategies like reducing desperation or increasing self-control.

There is a cost to having a society saturated with firearms. The vivid, individualistic, but rarely used benefit of personal defence has to be weighed against the boring, common case of excessive violence and escalation due to access to and glamorization of firearms.
China Telecom Suggests Apple's New iPhone 5S, 5C Will Go on Sale in China Soon
The problem with the NBN is that Labor has, like so many other of their policies, sold it beyond terribly.

It's about 2 things, and neither are raw download speed.

1) It's about upload speed. That's the major upgrade that we don't see right now. As the net moves towards more and more user-generated content (youtube, dropbox file relocation, etc.) it's going to be upload speeds that are the Achilles heel of these technologies working.

2) Related to #1 and perhaps even more importantly, it's about leveling the playing field. Right now, if you design an online service you have to assume someone has DSL at 1.5Mb/sec down, as that's the minimum guaranteed DSL connection.

You can't assume people can stream HD. You can't assume people can move multiple GB of data down in a reasonable time, or even hundreds of MB up in a reasonable time. All of these assumptions play a crucial role in what online services can deliver in this country.

It would be as if some new technology came along for our road network that allowed people to drive safely at 500km/hr but there's also a cheaper alternative that allowed travelling at 200km/hr, then focusing on whether we need to be able to drive at 500km/hr or 200km/hr over our existing road network to get to work or not. That's completely missing the point. The thing that a 500km/hr road network allows you to do is completely change how and where towns are constructed.

Suddenly, traveling from Sydney to Melbourne by road is trivial, rather than a plane trip as it currently is. People can live in Newcastle (for non-AU people, a small industrial satellite town of Sydney) but work quite conveniently in Sydney, changing the game for the real estate pricing problems Sydney presently faces.

The problem is that people are extrapolating present-day experiences to this new tech and that is completely missing the point. Doing what we currently do, only faster, is about 1% of the puzzle. The overwhelming majority of the advantage comes about from completely changing the landscape on what online services can do, what they can assume, and how they will go on to affect what will undoubtedly be a huge array of facets of our day-to-day life.

When we upgraded from 56k dial-up to DSL, it wasn't about loading animated spinning wireframe skull gifs from Geocities faster. It was about being able to stream audio and (eventually) video. The landscape changed and suddenly Netflix/YouTube/etc. became possible.
To be fair, the LNP has a reputation for concern re: cost/benefit analyses, but that has not carried over to their VDSL proposition. The ARPU (average revenue per user) possible on a VDSL network is far less than on a FTTP network (no multiplay, a cap on higher speeds, etc) and this lesser ARPU is not commensurate with the marginally cheaper LNP proposal.

If the ratio of ARPU to rollout costs were equal, it would be an issue. The issue is that a VDSL network would not be able to recoup the construction cost proposed by the LNP.
I wonder if they considered a partnership with New Relic instead of building this in-house.
Singapore-based Newkia wants to bring Nokia back
Also it is important to remember that nuclear radiation (ionizing radiation) is what people normally think of as "radioactive". Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation, which we mostly experience as heat or light -- not what we would call "radioactive".

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/ionize_nonionize.htm...
There's PIPE Pacific Cable (PPC-1), independent of Telstra[1].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Pacific_Cable
Why does it have to be a discrimination ? I'm no US resident so my observations can be incorrect, but it seems to me that working in tech require some pretty high level education, which is, especially in the US, only available to upper classes. I don't know for Indians, but Mexican people are usually poor.

Same for women vs men. In western culture at least, computer / tech is not appealing to most women. It's pictured as a geek / nerd thing.

Do you know a lot of men interested by midwifing ? (sorry for the stereotype) No, because in our culture it's a women thing.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor that there is no discrimination at all, but IHMO it's more a consequence than a root cause of the lack of women in tech.
I have to ask: is that a 草泥马 wearing that shirt?
It echoes the first coast-to-coast trip by H. Jackson and S Crocker[1] in 1903, except Musk is starting from LA instead of San Francisco.

[1] http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/exhibition/exhibition_7_2....
A new survey fails to ask about trade-offs and confuses private with anonymous
The problem is due to history.

Configuration systems have historically looked at config as bits-on-a-disk.

Supervisor systems look at bits-in-memory.

And they emerged and evolved independently. So there's pain points and impedance mismatches regardless of which one you start with.

What's needed is a system that sees that configuration and supervision are the same problem: you have a directed graph of what a system can look like, plus a compare-and-repair mechanism to drag the system to that state frequently.

I've personally looked at Chef, Puppet and Cfengine, none of which really does all of them the way I would like.

http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...
> John LaForge, who writes for Nukewatch, correctly notes that there is no "safe" level of exposure to radioactivity.

We don't know that. Not only there may be a safe level of exposure, there may be a beneficial level[1]. Any rigorous experiment would be obviously unethical so we're just guessing here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Can you go on strike with your coworkers?
Most surveyed want tax breaks, lenient judicial punishments.

What fraction want other internet users to be anonymous? Including those suspected of very scary crimes?
> "can convey 80% of your daily emotions"

how do you navigate through the stickers?
Quick refresher on what the word "shortage" actually means.

SHORTAGE: Below market rent-controls. If more people want housing than there are apartments, and the price can't adjust, that's a shortage.

SHORTAGE: An oil supply shock as in the 1970s, and gas stations choose to ration fuel rather than profiteering by jacking up prices. More people want gas at that price point than there is gas. That's a shortage.

NOT A SHORTAGE: The lack of first-class flights from London to Chicago for $1,000. That ain't a shortage, it's a market-clearing price I don't want to pay.

I like the BCG quote: "Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates is not a skills gap."
That's assuming a lot of things about the present level of productivity of everyone working. Also, your number sounds like "household income" and I'm making my assumptions based on GDP per capita[0].

Generally though, yes, I'd assume most people would end up working ~20 hours a week. I'd assume most employers would prefer this, and would also optimize the use of their employees' time.

I think your understanding of Soviet economic policy is probably a bit naive, but for a high level overview of my philosophy, I'd recommend Russell's In Praise of Idleness[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Probably because the people dealing with PayPal aren't used to dealing with merchant accounts, and are used to dealing with savings accounts.
Because without some rudimentary numbers like the ones he's talking about, everyone involved can escape accountability -- the politicians, the contractors, the public (since they can claim to have been "misled" and not feel guilty later), ... But mainly because it's an invitation to corruption, for people known to be highly corruptible.

You're right that cost/benefit analysis is hard for transformative things like this, but the citizens throwing their hands up and saying "I don't care WHAT it costs" is like Pavlov's bell to politicians.
By greed, I mean the failure of unions to adapt. They relied wholly on seniority even when senior members became settled and were no longer contributing as they should. Seniority as the sole measure of contribution was a huge hit to how unions were perceived -- be it autoworkers, teachers, etc. This is where I mean greed comes in. A refusal to self evaluate what was working and what wasn't.
This analogy is weak. When I watch TV, I am anonymous. So why is non-anonymity required for Internet ads? I think it isn't, really. (Besides: NSA stuff is definitely not just about ads.)
Seems fair. Some quick maths says that 200 billion dollars (just you watch it blow out) / 30 million people = roughly $6600 per man, woman and child living in Australia. Probably $12k per taxpayer. Seems fair to make the user pay for a bit of that rather than dump the debt on the next generation. I know people don't like to let little things like numbers intrude on their socialist utopia, but this is real money I'm afraid...
I am incapable of discussing this rationally, obviously, but this feels silly.

Why do these 100 executives who wrote an open letter to Obama care so much? Obviously they don't want to pay the prices they're paying, but would they be campaigning so hard if the work wasn't important? Ok, so the work is important; they also can't just hire someone off the street, because the skill requirement is high. Sounds like a normal market to me - your demand is high relative to the supply, so the cost rises.

Again, being in this field, I'm wildly partial...but I have very little sympathy for an executive who wants to pay below-market rate for business-critical work. Why not cut your own salary if you are so concerned with profitability? OH, that's different; you _deserve_ it.
Nice! Can BeeLine be made to work with MagicScroll? Currenly if i click one bookmarklet the other one breaks.
No. According to the article, the investors kicked out the founder in 2011 and brought in a new CEO with a history of getting companies acquired.
From an economist's perspective, STEM workers are still just labour. 'Bankers' represent investment, and their compensation is based mainly on the fact that they take on risk by allocating money...

Compensation is based on supply (which itself is based on many factors, including education and demographics), demand (number of businesses in a market, demand for the products created by those businesses), and risk. Assuming no government meddling, an efficient market will properly price workers wages.

What Greenspan is suggesting makes sense from a macro perspective, but of course on a personal, human level, isn't ideal for many people.
Snowden allegedly stole high level NSA credentials to gather info
Absolutely right. Vivek Wadhwa has this long-ish piece in which he writes about this and the part that touched me the most was this

"During the interview, I relayed my own experience in building a tech company in the Deep South of the US. When I was looking for funding for my second start-up, local VCs wouldn’t even return my phone calls, despite the fact I had previously helped build a public company with $120m in revenue. In Silicon Valley, an entrepreneur with credentials like mine would have had dozens of VCs knocking on his door. But the advice other successful Indians gave me was to have “a white guy” on my management team to deal with the VCs. So that’s exactly what I did. I went on to raise millions in venture capital."

On one hand you see the drive that ultimately made Wadhwa a successful man, but you also see the compromises that he had to take to get there that are completely abominable to certain groups (American born minorities specifically).

Even more important is this point which goes directly to Chloe's disdain for Sandberg's call for women to come together as a group

"When we researched why Indians had been successful, we learned that they had gained significant benefits from the social and professional networks they had formed. These helped to mobilise the information, know-how, skills and capital needed to start technology firms. The Indian networking organisations were among the most vibrant and active professional associations in the region, with memberships ranging from several hundred in the newer associations to over one thousand in the established organisations."

This method of forming niche groups to support gender and ethnic minorities has proven to be successful, which is why I was so disappointed to see Chloe dump on it.
> At which point the Bitcoin enthusiasts will say "but you can use a third party escrow service," which is true, and puts us right back into the same situation we are with PayPal.

Bitcoin escrow doesn't work that way. Escrow cannot decide by itself to freeze your money. There are three parties in the transaction and you'd need the consensus of at least two of them to move the money. It's either the buyer and seller (in ideal transaction), or the escrow and seller or the escrow and buyer in a situation where transaction is disputed. The bitcoin escrow cannot behave like paypal do in this case.
I can play this game too:

Are bankers, lawyers, and doctors overpaid?

Well, it depends on what you want to pay people for -- what if we argued for the value they added to society on average? What about the banking industry during the financial crisis? What about the price of lawyers in California staying stable even though the supply has increased multi-fold in the past few decades? What about the people who design, validate, and erect the buildings in which these guys work? The people who created the private jets in which the questionably wealthy have always flown? The internet through which information became significantly more accessible (aka affordable)?

The people who truly enable the good parts of modern life? I know where my vote is going.
Thats is a really hard problem. How do we define priorities and goals? There is certainly an argument for a company where the only goal is to make money and there is no overriding authority between divisions but there is so much sociopathic behavior in companies already.
This "SSL Locksmith" software isn't really a top-secret NSA tool: http://www.accessdata.com/products/cyber-security/ssl-locksm...

It's a MITM solution that injects fake certificates, i.e. nothing groundbreaking and equivalent to compromised/corrupt CAs (which, as we know, exist and are able and willing to hand out fake intermediate certs etc. to rogue entities). The Whole CA ecosystem is broken and basically snake oil and pretty much everyone knows it.
Well in my case, currently having exactly 0 houses a drop in the market would be welcome.
These STEM salary stories seem empty. They are all price and no value. What is the price elasticity curve for engineers? How much of the salary loss would be offset by increased prosperity from more workers?
Banks, not bankers.
I don't understand why you put 'bankers' in 'quotes' like that.

Saying bankers represent investment isn't exactly non-controversial.[0] Perhaps that's exactly what you're saying?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_aftermath_of_the_repeal_of...
As a relatively recent arrival to Australia I'm surprised that that there isn't more skepticism about the long term wisdom of granting wholesale internet access for the entire country to a single government funded monopoly.

It's absurd to hear politicians argue about how networks should be built. IMO that is the role of a competitive market.
Google doesn't support .odt, .opd or .odf.