skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So if your fellow citizen disagrees with you on what's fair, would you personally visit his house and extract that 50% out of his pocket?
> No it isn't. Trade is. [snip meaningless analogy]

Trade? No, trade is the foundation of any kind of economy, of any kind of organized social life. Exploitation is one of the foundational concepts of capitalism, but the same is true for all past dominant economic systems, so it's true that it's not terribly useful to define capitalism as something that is just about exploitation. The way exploitation is structured, whom and how is exploited, in capitalism is the key point.
His company is distributing an infringing work. As a head of his company he should care because he's likely about to be sued for it if he does't make the guy happy.
Yes! Good. I'd be worried if they didn't.
> the problem is that it's always the other guy or some corporation who's being unfair

Self-interest doesn't make someone incorrect. Isn't that one of the tenets of libertarianism? Also, it's not like the free market is some kind of objective tie-breaker. Outcomes in a market are highly sensitive to regulatory conditions. Before you suggest doing away with as many regulations as possible, consider that "regulatory conditions" can include things as basic as the definition of property, which is a problem that cannot be dodged in even the most libertarian of societies. Does society have a notion of intellectual property? If not, how do you propose to fund drug development? Can infrastructure be privately owned? If so, how do you stop natural monopolies from destroying competition? Should a company be allowed to buy up property surrounding your house and then ransom travel through their property off for all you are worth plus all you can borrow? The list goes on.

> I'd say it is completely unfair that a government takes a portion of my income

Whoa, there! You're assuming what you set out to prove: that the government's slice was yours to begin with. The social contract comes as a bundle deal. You "sign away" your tax dollars by being part of a society that provides services to you. Obviously no explicit consent is involved, but that's because it can't be involved. Voting is the best compromise we've been able to come up with.

Even in a libertarian society, government provides one very important service that disproportionately benefits the rich: enforcement of property law.

> Are people in the government somehow know the ultimate truth?

No, the existence of government is a compromise between a free market that has flaws and a system of absolute control that also has flaws. We delegate responsibility for the areas where one system is hopelessly flawed to the other system (which merely has to do a better job, not a flawless job). Adam Smith himself acknowledged that the free market is not suited to provide certain services (police, infrastructure, military, etc). The goverment isn't aware of any "ultimate truth" here, but they aren't going to pull the whole "box you in and take all your money" stunt either.
> HTML5 only apps are not available in the market/store

What do you mean by this? That doesn't match my understanding of the current state.
For me the chart loaded at a point the average income shrunk, and the richest actually got most of that shrinkage. Since that point there seems to have been no point at which the average income had shrunk. But, the graph goes until 2008, which was the start of the recession. Isn't the period after 2008 not the most interesting period? Didn't the average income drop? Who took the heaviest blow there?

Not that the rich would feel much if they would lose 50% of their income, but it would at least mean that some of the theory is true, and the rich really do carry more risk, and in that way protect the stability of the overall economy.
NPR's "Planet Money" podcast team decided to sell t-shirts and did a similar project where they researched and followed the production process from start to finish. Some of the interviews have been pretty interesting:

http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=19...

The NPR staff wound up working with Jockey to have the shirt made and that obviously opened up a lot of doors to the production facilities and interviews with factory workers, etc.

The Mother Jones article reminded me, I guess, that Jockey's hand in the NPR access had a non-trvial amount of P/R influence in the project.
I think the more interesting question is what changed around the 1980 time frame that caused such a dramatic increase in the share of wealth for the top 1 percent? There appears to be a slight ramp up from the early 1900's to 1970's but in 1980 the slope jumps up.
With a distrust of stories about labor exploitation? That's the wrong message to take from someone lying to you. Be less credulous about people's stories in general maybe, but restricting it to stories about labor is as reasonable as being racist because a black person bullied you in high school.
He doesn't gain rights to distribute since he was unaware of the infringement. Every poster he stuck out there, every web advert he paid for: possibly liable for damages for it.

Now that he's aware, and appears to be uncaring about the matter while distributing the infringing work further, he may be liable for even more per infringement.

The artist originally came to SL to ask him to handle this, presumably amicably and for "yeah, we'll pay you like we would have had we hired you" type levels. Now that SL is baiting the guy, he may just ignore the ad firm and go straight after SL as well.
Privacy doesn't mean "not everyone is getting everything". If FB shares my secrets with anyone without my consent, they're violoating my privacy. They don't need to make them available to everyone for that.
Nope.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not communism. Not even for Marx. It is the state before communism, in which the proletariat makes changes in society so that communism may take place.
More like,

1) When someone buys custom built hardware, they know what they want, and the specifications for it. When someone buys software, they want "something that does xyz, is just like facebook and paypal, but also has our logo." And then it turns out that the problem they're trying to solve is completely unrelated to any of those things. But you can just rewrite it to do those things too, right?

2) If there's a problem with the hardware, the customer that paid the money for custom chips will notice, and will have the technical skill to lay the blame on the vendor accurately. This means hardware manufacturers need to deliver quality, and since point #1 guarantees they actually have a specification, they can therefore engineer to it. In software, often the client takes your application, puts it on machines from the mid 90s that it won't run on, gives it to minimum wage employees to use (so management may not really care if it works), and then ask if its too late for the product to also be an app on their iphone. When they can't do anything with it 3 years later because it was written by people who have never looked at a computer before, the customer will just say "software always has bugs / always going out of date, find a new consulting company to write us a new one", as if its normal to have to build a completely new system to do the same thing over and over again every three years.
You are surprised that when you trust your coins to the anonymous operator of a drug marketplace that you get ripped off?

There's three separate reasons why you're screwed:

1) You have no recourse because you can't report the theft to police.

2) You have no recourse because you can't identify the operator, he's anonymous, which means he's also hidden from you.

3) You have no recourse because you can't undo your transaction.

As a good rule of thumb, only perform transactions in bitcoin doing legal things, that leave you at least with some recourse in case things do go wrong. And if you sat there, holding your coins, thinking "oh, I'm just gonna buy drugs with them, what could possibly go wrong", you seriously shouldn't have bitcoin, they're not good for you. Oh, and drugs are also not good for you, so please don't do them.
The are plenty of ideas and solutions that answer your questions. I wouldn't like to repeat them now as it happens in every thread when I mention some libertarian ideas. I think the important thing to understand is that a government is not some magic cure for all the problems you mentioned. If you take a simple idea that a government is a monopoly on almost all of the things that it does, then you can go from here. Monopolies are mostly not good for consumers; and a huge one with an access to an unlimited force is certainly not.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my last paragraph, so I apologize to you, but I was thinking of something that didn't fundamentally had anything to do with capitalism. This example still clings to erroneous notion that state socialism is something fundamentally different. It's not really. Of course liberal capitalism outperforms state run centrally planned parody of capitalism.
Doubtful. The balance was never 39,917BTC, it's been dropping funds in and out for almost a month now. If it was stolen, they took their time doing it.
> primarily because children lack an eye for quality
Dont worry,it's likely they get beaten if they dont "deliver"

> But I also imagine that refusing to buy such goods would do no good to said children.
You are assuming children are getting paid. they are not most of the time.
Good, Google is beginning to really frustrate me. Why can't I cut and paste from the description box on a Youtube video? Serving up a totally broken Google images page to Firefox for Android may be Firefox's fault but they should test with other browsers. It has a totally broken permissions model, notably for location access which after struggling with its nagging for a year I just gave up and now Facebook et al are all dialing in my location constantly. It has totally broken control over background apps waking up as well.

You are just a consumer on Android. The founders call Google 'the third half of your brain', and when you use Android you realise you don't control that third half, it's controlled for advertising purposes (with access granted or taken for various government agencies). Ubuntu, Jolla or Firefox need to succeed on mobile because Android is actually worse than Windows 95, XP etc for user customisation and freedom. That's stock on a Nexus too, the custom versions from handset manufacturers are a whole different train wreck.
The ability to actually enforce laws and protect girls against fraud (and rape or whatever else) is what I see as the main problem here.
It works by outsourcing manufacturing to places without unions and phasing out unionized factories on any available excuse. Did you notice how around 2008 lots of american workers got sacked and production plummeted? Funny thing is that production is back to pre-crisis levels already but noone invites the workers back. Companies are more efficient than ever. They probably bless recession for providing them the opportunity to shed off unnecessary unionized workers.
>Top-notch educational materials require a single instructor and a single camera, and no matter how much production you do it should still come out substantially less expensive than a scripted TV show.

Educational content can benefit by the use of props and effects as much as any TV sitcom; and the props are much more expensive.
> Performance is perfectly smooth for me even with the AA hack above on Windows.

Playing with it more, my performance complaints appear to actually be caused by individual elements losing my mouse when I am clicked down on them and then drag outside of their bounds. This makes it seem like I have to keep re-grabbing things, the end effect is a lot of stuttering as I release and reclick on an element to grab a hold of it ahead.

Purely perceptual, but still nasty.
We use vanilla forums for comments, and its been excellent
That misquote reminds me so much of Stroustrup's C++ (mis?)quote, and the cynical man inside me tells me that it's just that everything getting widespread use shows its dark side. Sometimes that dark side is more conspicuous and/or shows eariler, and sometimes it has more serious consequences, though. Btw, I am much more fond of C++ than capitalism, which, I guess, puts me inside a tiny minority here on HN :).

About your second line, I think that the biggest problem about capitalism and developing/underdeveloped countries is that capitalism doesn't break the existing power structures, and, worse, it may reinforce them. There, capitalism is (even) less of a sea of oportunities and more of a new source of oppression mechanisms. The vicious circle associated with poverty isn't any good for people from the lower strata.
The field the girl in a pink dress running around with the umbrella, and the framing, the type of trunk, the coloring of the internal liner of the trunk, the man climbing out of the trunk are all very similar. On top of that THEN the implication that this was the inspiration from posting the comps...I think Spike Lee and his ad agency is screwed here if they don't settle.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/designer-claims-his-o...

look at the two pictures now.
seems like redis cluster is about turning redis into riak
The Danger Of Auto Displaying Pictures On Twitter
Government is simply one way to enforce property rights. It's a monopoly on force. If you had 3 or more major players on the market (and working on the same territory) you'd have your property rights enforced alright. The problem with the government is that because it is a monopoly, it is very easy for it to abuse the force it has.
Probably because of the obvious answer: Because the CEO of Jolla thinks that Jolla's operating system is better than others, and the option to switch to something that may be better is a good thing, whether or not you choose to take it.
> this is typically the end game for capitalism and globalisation

Say what?
Why is that? For example: a number of libertarians would say that the government is stealing a part of their income. I wouldn't. And on opposite side one could argue that the owner(s) are stealing a part of the workers income.
Yes it's called capitalism. Or how my parents say it: "money makes money".

To fix this you need to remove money makes money.

Examples of money makes money that would need fixing:

To save money (i.e. by insulating your house) you need money

To get a better job, you need time/education, this also requires money up front.

To create a new big profitable company, you need money.

If your a bank you need money (unless your local law doesn't require this) to get money by the interest.

If you wish to get interest of money you need money.

To buy a house, you need money, after a 30 years, you get more money back then you invested.
Even using bitcoins for legal things leaves you little recourse - this is the whole point of bitcoin. When you avoid government regulation and oversight you also avoid the protections it gives - this should hopefully be obvious to anyone.
This is consistent with my limited experience in video. Tons of editing is required.

This makes the Khan Academy all that more impressive.
I wonder why you don't see news articles stating 'bank robbers steal $ 123000 from users of [random-bank-branch]' ... could it be because if someone hacks or robs a bank or a legitimate payment service provider such as westernunion or paypal, they are required to eat the loss, not pass it on to users?
One reason is as an industry we are terrible at planning. We do a very unthorough job of planning details or requirements. Then we allow for changes and new features mid project with no respect for budget or time.
At least over the past 25 years, the picture is fairly different for other developed countries; in the UK, over that time period, there have been significant inflation-adjusted pay increases across all wage categories:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/earnings-in-the-uk-over-t...

Inequality has increased, but the poor and the middle-income have also seen significant increases in their prosperity.
1. When a worker decides to work for an employer, he does so voluntarily. No one forces him to sign the contract.

2. When a government collects taxes, it does so threatening taxpayers with penalties and jail, even though those taxpayers never signed a contract saying they have to give a certain share of their income to the government.
Also in easier to read format: https://sites.google.com/site/michaeldgodfrey/vonneumann/vne...
Nope, it is consumer-oriented only. There's not even a remote chance a company want to use it :)

Cash flow is not an issue. While not everybody pays for 12 months in advance, I do offer that option and some people use it. The disadvantage would be that there are legitimate reasons to NOT use my service a couple months per year and come back later. So by offering a discount for 12 months up front, it might lead to more people asking for refunds or general customer dissatisfaction. I could think about a service-branch that fills these couple months off, but generally speaking, it also increases perceived complexity.

You got me thinking, but I'm reluctant, because it's not as easy as writing that email patio11 recommends :)
> Some European countries has very good regulations about supporting disabled children thus equipment is very expensive.

Regulations, at least the well intentioned ones, try to avoid accidents from ill-designed products. The downside is expensive or never made technology needed by a small number of patients.

After all, dead or injured children due to faulty machinery are very noticeable, whereas unassisted ones (because the technology doesn't exist) is just "a fact of life", and invisible to most (except their parents). "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen", again.

Same with medicines.

We need a two-tier system: 1) certified and expensive, and 2) best-effort and on your own, but cheap.

(And don't let me get started on patents)
... All the fonts are open source, you can quite literally use Google's native versions. It's not exactly rocket science. You want Droid Sans?

http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/droidsans/v...

http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/droidsans/v...

http://themes.googleusercontent.com/static/fonts/droidsans/v...
Emphasis I've never seen it. ;)

Thanks!
If by recourse you only mean chargeback, sure. But that's not the whole story.

If you have a legal entity behind something, like say, bitpay or coinbase, you can take legal steps if they screw you over. You can take them to small-claims etc.

And if you don't trust some entity, you can use escrow with bitcoins, it's possible to setup a transaction where the escrow provider has no way to get at the funds, but can just release to either of two addresses (back to you or forward to the merchant). But of course, the escrow provider would also be a legal entity, otherwise you'd have no recourse against them if you feel they unfairly resolved a dispute against you.

Bottom line is, if you engage in legal business, with legal entities, and take appropriate precautions, you are no less protected than using national currency and chargebacks. If you don't, well, you've got nobody else to blame but yourself.
Which communist theory? There are now as many communist theories as there are variations on the People's Front of Judea from Life of Brian and many of them explicitly reject state control and are closer to US libertarianism than either side would really care to admit.

edit - adding 'in the formal sense' to your post doesn't really change things. Formally, communism is supposed to be a developing theory, which is part of the reason for Marx famously saying that he wasn't a Marxist. Formally, communist theory, as envisioned by Marx, was never meant to be frozen as dogma, but rather relentlessly self-critical. Whether he was right or not is a seperate issue, but you are seriously misrepresenting his ideas.
I completely agree; it's the same thing as with entertainment/sports industry.
Football/basketball players are paid obscene amounts of money, while what they do does not have much real value.

Thanks for sharing the link.
There are plenty of drugs that are not legal and at least not bad for you, although I think the rest of your analysis is decent.
Given the popularity of Khan Academy, I don't think it is fair to say that Khan "isn't a "teacher" anymore. Also, yeah, they look pretty cheap to produce.
There are ways for those companies to reduce costs (and pass on savings) which still support low prices. Primark [1] is a case where they have no advertising spend and rely on low prices and word of mouth. Makes me wonder about the marketing budgets of other retailers.

[1] http://www.primark-ethicaltrading.co.uk/newsfaq/faqs
This sentiment seems reasonable, but it is has pernicious roots. Thrun was "led down the garden path" - he wasted time with a frivolous idea. And he did it because he was fooled by his elite background, and by implication his inability to see how that elite background biased his thinking.

In other words his failure is due to personal failings or shortcomings.

Another interpretation, one that I prefer, is that Thrun tried something bold and novel based on a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. It didn't work, he's learning and adapting. No garden paths or greek tragic flaws required.

I should say that I don't disagree with glesica's points about the difficulty of educating people who haven't been groomed for college since birth. I just think there's far too much unwarranted and barely-disguised smugness in much of the online commentary.
Bank robbers typically walk away with a few grand if they're lucky, and it'll almost certainly have a dye pack and a tracker in it. Bank robbery is a fool's business.

39k BTC is what, $39 million worth? You're right, news articles cover that differently than a $123,000 loss that's covered by insurance.
It's about as close as you can get to a slur for heterosexuals. Hardly abusive.
The issue here is that both sides want the acquisition, and it's being blocked for external reasons that have nothing to do with the fundamentals.

I'm generally pretty negative on the build-to-flip mentality. However, sometimes an acquisition is the right thing, and I also think this investor is a horrible person for blocking an acquisition that both sides clearly want, just to serve his own career goals.

Investors ought to be passive beneficiaries. Yes, their financial interests deserve respect. No, they shouldn't be the real bosses. Funding ought to be the commodity, almost like a utility; talent ought to be treated as scarce and precious (because true talent is). But in the modern Valley, it's gone the other way.
It's better to buy $4 t-shirts than $14 t-shirts. Workers get pretty much the same in both cases but their exploiters get rewarded whole $10 less. This might put some of them out of business which is a good thing.
PlentyofFish didn't and it's still the second largest after Match.com. A lot of the smaller niche dating sites you'll find started from a related website or network. Facebook, although not a dating website, afaik never created fake profiles.
You can do a perfectly seeming legal transactions with an entity that ends up being smoke and mirrors. In the case of real currency, the amount would need to be transferred through banks which can be investigated for crimes by authorities. In the case of BTC, once you send off that payment there is nothing law enforcement can do to help you if the entity who appeared legal was not so legal after all.

Feel free to talk to any fraud investigator and ask them just how common this kind of thing is. They spend their whole work day tracking these down, after all.
Japan wants to turn the moon into a giant power plant
Indeed. You can't send a message to noname brands in the same way.

I think companies like Abercrombie & Fitch are feeling the hurt as a result of this.

I'm sure there are ways of making a point to companies on both the long and short tail of fashion/clothing, though.