skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inflation is fine as long as salaries maintain an appropriate growth ratio. I see too many companies take advantage of the relative uncertainty of the last 5-7 years as an opportunity to continue to eek out profits at the expense of compensating the average worker.

More and more I am convinced that a purely capitalistic model for companies does not work.
Salvattore — A jQuery Masonry alternative with CSS-driven configuration.
If you dismiss some things the government provides as being unnatural, you are drawing a very crooked line of "naturality" if you somehow manage to include clean drinking water.
Brain training improves memory not intelligence
Usersnap supports Trello Cards now
> as fair society as possible

The problem with this line of thought is that it's never ending if you try to "fix things" for everyone. Because there's limited resources and there are choices you have to take anyway and the solutions you will implement will never end up being fair for everyone, while it will prove to be a burden for society as a whole.
Yes, that's one of the main advantages. Also an advantage is that no money is lost dealing with the corruption that is so rampant in many underdeveloped countries.

There's a great Planet Money/This American Life episode about this topic:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/08/16/212645252/episode-...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/503/i...
NPR article (and many articles you did not link) mentions the real problem - foreign tax subsidies steal contracts from the American VFX firms. How are unions going to help here?

The American VFX firms, being squeezed between unions and foreign competition suddenly will start winning contracts that they could not get because their costs were too high even without union?

Notice the quote you mentioned is not about putting some artist out of job, it's putting an entire shop out of business. How is a union going to prevent this?

In my dilettante view (I work in games and we rely on VFX even more than films) - if American VFX shops had unionized staff there had not been any American VFX shops by now.
Oooh, shiny. I'm not very familiar with how this is all tied together, thanks for the pointer. I was a bit thrown by the apparent lack of ifdefs and such in the c definition, but I see the asm-version starts out with:

#ifndef USE_AS_STPCPY
# define STRCPY strcpy
#endif

So I guess there is some logic set up in the configure-stage before building.
Hi ccozan - sorry i couldn't respond straight away, i wrote this last night but because im so new posting restrictions stopped me from sending it. Put yourself in my position just for a moment. I found this website distributing my code passing it off as their own, i send an email, hear nothing, leave a comment, hear nothing, then send a notice - only to receive the same notice back 4 hours later, a blog written a forum thread started.

I gave him the chance to change his mind by sending an email to him because i hate internet politics and i simply wanted him to remove his attribution to my code. Please read my other posts because i even gave him the benefit of doubt by suggesting perhaps a friend had "written" the plugin and he's sticking up for someone who is lieing to him. However some time later he hadn't responded to my email but he had created a response on this thread making out i was a "fake", so at that point i signed up and started to give my facts.

I have an email from him which he sent to my marketplace and host saying he wrote this plugin in May 2012, he has since updated his website to say so and then backtracked when i pointed out to him his site was cached.

Also the same effect to his donation button which he has since removed but can also be found in a cache.

My name is Kevin Steerment, i work for a company called codeworks (however this project was a personal project) and i am the original author of the code that he claimed to write. I don't have a full on profile online because I never thought I would need one, certainly not to prove who I am. I can't sit back and let that happen and then perhaps one day - this get back to me in a bad way. I have never slandered or badmouthed anyone including him, please read all my responses. I've tried to be very fair in the way I've written my responses but as you can understand I am a tad emotional about being accused of something that is simply not true. (So thats why I've defended myself, as anyone would)

I'm happy to answer any additional questions you might have. He has now taken his website offline, removed his github account - not something he needed to do. I simply wanted him to remove my plugin. If he's reading this I want him to know that I simply came on this forum to respond to the false allegation which he started, not to cause any additional problems.

It's a very strange situation because looking through his other work and projects - particularly an online photo editing tool - his skills go way beyond mine and the end result of his work is excellent, I'd even go as far as saying I'd recommend the photo editing tool. Which is why I'm so very very confused!

I hope this can be brushed under the carpet and forgotten about now because i'm sure we all have more important things to be doing.

Kevin
I don't understand how unionizing would fix the underlying problem with the VFX industry. Union employees working for a small shop that universal studios can sink by reneging on contracts or delaying payment are just as doomed as non-union employees working for a small shop that universal studios doesn't want to pay in full.
As far as I know there are still powerful people ending up in prison (at least in the US) once in a while, which seems to go against your last point. If Money equalled power then Madoff would never have landed in prison with a 150 years sentence.
I fully understand the product, because I use the Paper app. Its currently not possible to print these custom booklets without the 53 logo on the spine. I find that distasteful, personally, which is why I raised the issue. If I could put my own logo on there (and someone please correct me if there is a way to do this) then I'd be all over this ..
As far as I know the early ICs were much less reliable than circuits made from discrete components. It's the improvement made by private companies like Fairchild and others that made them practical. There's really a long path from invention to its practical application and the world benefited much from the improvements made by companies.

On the other hand scientific research is an example of a positive externality. According to economic theory the market underproduces this kind of goods. There are numerous measures to correct this including patents and public funding of science. We shouldn't dismiss the private companies nor public funding as both parts have positive contributions to science and are necessary for the science to operate effectively.
In the case of CS, replication should become a matter of 'git clone' and 'make'. (Or running a prepared virtual machine, etc.) Yes, it can be worthwhile learning by reimplementing from a high-level description -- I've done it a lot -- but that doesn't excuse making replication difficult.
(How) would AuFS fit into this? I've only come across it with Docker.io, but it sounds like it handles incremental backups?
Suggestion for title: Prefix "Ask HN:"
Yeah this is definitely a weakness in this whole scheme..
This is another foot in the mouth comment from @PMOIndia and nothing else !
"But the idea that bacteria could thrive in the acidic environment of the stomach was thought to be ridiculous." Deinococcus radiodurans can survive acid and high levels of radiation, among other things.
If SA and dev had a great cooperation from an early point, the developer would have told the SA about the platform requirements.
Qualcomm: Microsoft's Surface 2 can't compare to Nokia's Windows tablet
I'm still not using Dropbox. I absolutely detest the idea that I'm relying on a 3rd party for a feature that I consider should be built into every modern Operating System. At the point when OS vendors relinquished to the Web 2.0 Cult their responsibilities for such features as easy filesharing, the world lost something.

Absolutely, its great that people can share files this way. But absolutely, its terrible that it requires fragments of an OS feature to be distributed among multiple, external, unreliable entities.
Sometimes I up vote a couple of submissions following one I would want to down vote, but since there is no down vote, we can only try to up vote relatively all the others.
So after reading this commit:

https://github.com/ffi/ffi/commit/346c80ad6b8c0e6dc3c390b582...

and this discussion

https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568

I have the impression that no one can safely fork ruby-ffi without opening himself to legal trouble. It seems like the licensing of the project is a horrible mess.

IANAL, so I hope I am reading this wrong?
CAPTCHA's did nothing to prevent spam for us.

However simply disabling users < 3 posts being allowed to post hyperlinks got rid of 99% of spam.

We initially allowed plain text links but spammers seemed happy to just post them.

Spammers want to post hyperlinks, without that ability they can't do anything.
Elon Musk to speak at the Websummit in Dublin this week
Oh, ok. It was your last lines that made me think of cross-platform availability and sharing. Let's say SkyDrive had 100% of the windows users but only 10% of the Mac users. It would not be especially useful to me since one of the two big usecases is to share many files with others as easily as possible.
Austrians, for the most part, make no testable predictions. They essentially reject math as a tool, and insist that unless you implement their preferred systems 100%, then they won't work at all, and then explain all observed failures by claiming that it would have worked better if things had been pushed further.

Even if they're on to something, they don't give the unconvinced very much to work with. Most of their arguments push every economic dial in a single direction no matter the current state of the world, which says to me that there's no way that approach could lead to a reasonably balanced economy.

I think econ is messed up in all sorts of ways, but I don't think the Austrian school has the answers, they strike me as far too religious and unbalanced to be believable, and quite frankly I see way too many words and far too little math coming out of their camp to buy any of it. Every other science leans on math to great benefit, I refuse to believe that econ is somehow the one exception where it's not useful, especially since at its core it's about optimizing certain numbers.
sorry for the late reply... just saw your post:
http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-540-88008-0
>>> The only thing society should do is ensure everyone has the same rights in regard to the Law no matter how rich, how poor, how different you may be. Anything beyond is just a call for arms-race to make everyone the same in every aspect (and incidentally, to render everyone poor by default).

And that's just your point of view. You're just arguing over what society should be, neither of you are privileged to The One True Definition.
I think a far more insidious fact is that Dropbox fills in a gap left wide open by incompetent OS developers. Its the 21st Century - the OS should be providing such features inherently, without requiring a third party involvement. Maybe HN'ers, at that time, were somehow conscious of this fact, and thus declined to 'see the revolution' that was headed their way. Either way, since there was no other option, Dropbox was "revolutionary" enough to have gained a following.
There is usually a libertarian vein in anyone who thinks they possess a lever that can move the world. It's not necessarily a bad nor good thing.

Like all communities, we attract self-same thinkers.
True that, competent management requires attention to the balance of these components in a way that makes people both productive, and happy to be doing their jobs.
Here in the UK, Gordon Brown claims he foresaw it all. Mysteriously tho', as the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the then-4th-largest economy in the world, he did nothing whatsoever about it.
We use honeypot field and timegate trap on our site forms - so far very successfully.
Is Android OS upgradable and why am I not getting the updates?
What it needs is a very simple UI, setup process for mass adoption. It's one of those things that makes people hesitate. Instead they opt for simpler stuff like Hamachi, Tunggle, etc.

I haven't used it in ages, if I'm brutally honest.
Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage?

Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?
What about those Captcha which ask's a dumb question like "What is Red?" to differentiate an automated script from humans..
It'd be interesting to know more about this approach. In particular:

> One big difference in Vicarious’s approach, says cofounder Dileep George, is that its system can be trained with moving images rather than only static ones.

Does this imply they teach it how the shapes of numbers change, for easier detection?
Mirror: http://heeris.id.au.nyud.net/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-i...
>The private sector doesn't advance science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

He and his former research colleague, Jennifer Moyle founded a charitable company, known as Glynn Research Ltd., to promote fundamental biological research at Glynn House and they embarked on a programme of research on chemiosmotic reactions and reaction systems. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contribution to the understanding of biological energy transfer through the formulation of the chemiosmotic theory."

So, yes, the private sector does advance science, even basic science with no profit value. To claim otherwise is first-class stupid and also ignorance of history.

Josiah Gibbs, Irving Langmuir, and Robert Millikan were all American scientists who ran their research off of largely private (some for-profit as in the case of Langmuir, who did both basic and applied science under the auspices of GE; the others at predominantly non-profit educational institutes) These people are not insignificant - Gibbs rewrote the book on thermodynamics; Langmuir figured out that argon should fill lightbulbs -applied- but in basic science also invented the concept of plasma voltage, made observations describing ocean circulation, and conceived of molecular monolayers; Millikan discovered the charge of an electron). I am sure I am missing other American scientists who did their research with little or no help from public sources.

If you want another, more contemporary example, oh hey there's an entire research institute that doesn't take much (if any) in the way of federal funds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelia_Farm_Research_Campus

http://www.janelia.org/professional-opportunities/research-p...

"All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants."
It's unfair that a so widespread project gets killed with so big lack of informations; FFI implementation is essential in every mature development platform IMHO.
Abstract algebra has a tendency to reveal integers without explanation. Consider for example the exceptional Lie groups, which is an analogous problem. Lie groups, which characterize continuous groups (as in, groups with a geometry of sorts among the elements of the group), can be broken down into simple Lie groups which can then be classified into 4 infinite families and 5 exceptions.

Why five? Well, it is the number of graphs with a certain type of property (Dynkin diagrams). And beyond this, I have no good answer: it just simply is the number. You can write them all down, you can verify that there are no more (this part is hard), but I do not know of any deep insight as to why.

I should note that the 26 and the 18 for finite simple groups were not just computed numbers, either. A few attempts at a complete classification were made and failed because they were missing a few cases. If I recall, it was unclear for a time if the Monster group really was the largest sporadic group.

I also recall a story I was once told by Andrew Sutherland. He was working on what is called a local-global principle, which would show that if a property is true of elliptic curves at every prime, it is true over the rationals (with some constraints). He found, after several failed proof attempts, that something special happened at the prime 7. Why 7? Well, it is not too large and not too small...

A last connection: consider the deterministic linear-time median-finding algorithm. It begins: "break up the elements into groups of 5." In this case, the reason 5 is the size of the groups is simply that the answer must be odd; that 3 doesn't work; and that smaller is better.

Small numbers are weird.
Because, in general, this supposed consumer's paradise is actually a corporate paradise. "Consumers" aren't the driver, corporations are, and consumers are only "protected" in the sense that cattle are protected.

Why else would drugs be prohibitively expensive in the US, and the exact same drug be an almost insignificant cost to patients right next door in Canada? You might say that pharmaceutical companies need to recoup their development cost. That might even be true. But they're doing it by charging the US consumers more than other countries.

Why else would SIM cards and healthy competition not be the norm in the US cell phone market? I'd love to take the phones out of my sock drawer and use them, instead of buying a new phone when I switch carriers.

As for broadband, fundamentally they charge so much because they can. Very little competition, usually the only game in town (Comcast has the cable option in my area, with DSL available here and there.) And Congress never met a bribe they didn't like.

"US consumers are our most important resource."
Eye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Styles
I'm not just dismissive of Egalitarinism only because it's unnatural, but also because it goes against the individual's freedom in the end. There will be always be a point if you follow that line of thought where the power in place will crush your individual interests just for the sake of making your condition the same as everyone else (even on the basis of good intentions...). That, in itself, is against Human nature, where humans strive to build advantage for ourselves to improve our conditions and our odds to survival and to lead a better life. And don't tell me Humans don't do that, everyone wants their kids to be in good school and to get a better job than themselves. It's universal no matter from which culture you come from.

With Egalitarianism, you end up with policies where education is strictly controlled by one governmental body, and where Education goes to the lowest common denominator and becomes basically crap for everyone involved. You end up with public health services which are subpar, with waiting lines and mediocre equipment, because you want to treat everyone the same way while running on limited resources. And this has already happened in many countries in Europe where such policies were driven to the core of the governmental actions. In the end you create more inequalities because people who really have money have the possibility to leave the country and get better services elsewhere, while the middle-class and the poor are forever restrained to a diminished quality of life.

My point is that libertarian ideals are more respectful of individuals, because they allow for the flexibility of choosing your own course of action, maximizing your responsibility. In that sense they are closer to the natural order where one individual can create an advantage for themselves based on their action while living as part of a social group. I won't elaborate here on the principles and the philosophy behind it, it's a different subject altogether.
Maybe the most remarkable thing is how short the comment thread is -- but I suspect that is more an artefact of how much smaller the hn community was back then, than anything else.

Interesting how dropbox managed to succeed in an area with so many competitors.

Finally, I still think it's complete crap for me. But I also see how it's a great packaging and reselling of s3 -- and I'm certainly not surprised it took of (Not saying I necessarily would've bet on dropbox in 2007 -- but the sorry state of webdav in in windows left the market open for anything that offered user-friendly, secure cloud storage, and dropbox ticked (the most commercially important) two of those boxes.

edit: Ok, complete crap is too strong -- but it's a product I have extremely limited use for. While it is easy to migrate away from in the sense that it just stores files, it's not Free software (important for me for anything I use to store my files) and it has no privacy and questionable security (although dropbox+encfs patches up some of that). Still surprising that people didn't seem to see the commercial value -- I absolutely see that (much as I see how people would pay for google apps even if I never would).
Honestly, I still think the idea of dropbox is ludicrous. There are many ways to share files, and sending them to a third party to host for you is the worst one of them all. Aside from the few people that really need to multiply their bandwith by many orders of magnitude, a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine. Besides, dropbox was just yet another iteration of online file hosting (I'm pretty sure rapidshare and megaupload predated dropbox by years), so if file sharing was going to blow up, it would have already, right?

And therein lies the true genius of dropbox. The technology itself had already been done to death; the key was to convince a critical mass of people that this was the solution to their problems. Or even better, convince them of a problem they didn't realize they had. Yet again we see that many times success comes down to the better marketer than truly game-changing technology.

(to be completely fair, their syncing mechanism was the best up until then, plus their add-free freemium model was likely the missing key to success in this space)
I think the technology and its usability wasn't the problem.

The problem was, nobody thought people would be so crazy and store their stuff on the other side of the planet (performance) on the servers of complete strangers (security).

But they totally would...
Thank you very much for this explination. I need some time to go through the details and subtleties of what you are saying, but it appears to be a great example of some of the shortcomings of C# compared to Scala.
I wonder how it does on reCAPTCHA
The seller of the house can choose between X dollars, or more dollars that are worth less in purchasing power anyway. The price changes but the value is the same. You can't spend dollars for which there are no goods, nor can you sell goods for which there are no corresponding dollars, so price and value always converge.
The part about Google offering a sort of vetting service sounds quite plausible, in a "Oh, shit" kind of way. For those of us that try to be anonymous we could have further encumbrance dealing with not being "Google Verified™".
hacker news effected the site
The book he wrote about the coming crash was published by Wiley in February 2007, which means he must've been formed the idea some years before to have written it early enough for that publication date. A quick Google search turned up CNBC interviews with him in 2005 and 2006 about the topic.
> You're just arguing over what society should be, neither of you are privileged to The One True Definition.

Maybe, but I think you'll find it hard to find people who don't agree that the Law should be the same for everyone, philosophically speaking.
I think the point is that your computer connected to the internet is your cloud storage. There's no reason why that functionality needs to be farmed off to a third party.
This is also why you shouldn't interrupt yourself ;)

Turn off your e-mail client, phone, messages, internet connection, HN.