skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem isn't that the book isn't comprehensive or fails to comment on certain issues. It's that the book's logic isn't always sound because of its author's biases.

Look at the first example, "The Broken Window." The author describes a situation in which:

• Some kid breaks a baker's window.

• The crowd that gathers notes that, although unfortunate for the baker, the broken window will provide work for a glazier.

• The crowd fails to realize that the baker was planning to buy a suit, and the work provided for the glazier is counterbalanced by the work lost by the tailor. Also the baker's out a suit.

That's all well and good, but the author never considers the scenario where the baker is wealthy and losing $250 will not affect his spending habits (over at least the course of decades). Then the broken window actually results in $250 of created work for the glazier without any corresponding loss of work elsewhere (by e.g. the tailor) or loss of value (by e.g. the baker, who in the book's scenario couldn't buy a suit because of the broken window). In this scenario, the broken window is actually a net win for the community.

Nor does he consider the scenario where the baker is poor but thrifty and tends to save what he has. This is a very complex situation: in the short run the thrifty baker's spending habits will probably be unchanged by having to replace a window (or at least negligibly changed relative to the $250 that he was forced to spend), but in the long run he probably will end up spending about $250 less because of what he shelled out to the glazier, and moreover will fail to procure some items of value about $250. So then the math goes like this: because of the broken window, the glazier gains $250 dollars of work today. But some other worker loses $250 of work down the line, and the baker, in the long run, loses some items of value $250.

The thing is, spending $250 today creates more work than spending $250 next year, because the money will keep circulating, so it's not easy to demonstrate that the broken window is either helpful or harmful to the community here. (Note: spending $250 today instead of next year has a host of other effects, like increased inflation, that I obviously didn't mention. I don't mean to make a full analysis of these scenarios, just to point out that the author didn't make a full analysis of them himself.)

And a more glaring failure of logic in the second applied lesson: the author says, "No man would want to have his own property destroyed either in war or in peace. What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful or disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation."

That's just not true. (A slightly ridiculous counterexample: when a serial killer dies of a heart attack, the nation he lives in is probably bettered.)

(In spite of all this, I still kind of liked the book.)
> Whereas a higher minimum wage means some people can be dropped from the rolls entirely while others have to collect more.

You're falling prey to the fallacy that Hazlitt describes, focusing on some specific group, and for the short run, when in fact they harm the people generally and the poor substantially and indefinitely via forced unemployment.

In the minimum wage case, with people forced out of work by a policy essentially making it economically untenable to hire certain low-skill workers, or as many of them, you have fewer people engaged in productive labor. Society incurs a loss to its productive capacity, and our general level of abundance is reduced, including for those on the margin who aren't forced into unemployment.

Meanwhile, those who would be gaining skills and experience in the course of work are instead unemployed and idle. This too detracts from our human capital over time, by reducing the skills and thus earning power of the poor, the ostensible benefactors of minimum wage laws.

This isn't a judgment call, it's exactly the sort of thinking Hazlitt warns against.
An interview with physicist George Gamow (1968)
By Dvorak's logic Apple would have been crazy to ever make an iPod, let alone a phone. In fact by his logic MS might never have made Office or Windows. I agree they bungled windows for about 5-6 years but I think the one thing MS has done right is to invest in anything and everything they can.
A guy I once met pulled down $30 million with less than a minute's worth of work by buying a lottery ticket. By TechCrunch's logic, that's another killer datapoint in favor of the Powerball as an investment vehicle.
Maybe they'll watch it if a teacher forces them to. Sometimes teachers just want to relax and let a video take over for a while. (Their students will still probably find the cartoon format patronizing, but then again people used to watch Captain Planet, voluntarily.)
You're absolutely right. The cartoon only mentions qualitative factors. If the business has been doing well, and those factors are present (and other explanations are absent), then it's a reasonable bet that those factors are the reasons for the the business's success. You can then examine each of these factors in isolation and assess how likely they are to continue in future.

With these qualitative factors settled, you can look at the numbers, especially the rate of growth of profit, and assume that they will continue (taking into account how sure you are of this), and calculate what the business is worth based on extrapolating that growth. Extrapolation is easy.

As a contrast, consider companies during a boom. Explosive growth, even in profitability, but... Another contrast is high tech companies, which can be extraordinarily profitable, but their long-term success has proven hard to predict. Buffett says he won't invest in something unless he understands it - as a programmer, this is great to hear from someone who is so incredibly successful.

Now you know the secret. When your grandkids ask you how you became so rich, you can tell them: "it was all because of 10ren".

BTW: Thanks for reminding me of all this! Now is the best time to buy stocks. They're on special.
I can't add much to what others have already recommended, other than Functional Programming by Field and Harrison (out of print, I believe). It covers graph reduction, which I believe is a generalization of term rewriting.
Charlie Rose: "Screw you, Mike!"
Enjoying my blog? :-) I always like watching links propagate through the Web.
Some various complaints:

1. http://hardwarebug.org/

Mans covers a lot of incredible retardation here, particularly on ARM and PPC platforms, such as cases where GCC generates 2-3 times the number of instructions necessary for no good reason.

1b. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=62#comments

Until extremely recently, GCC's handling of multiplications of non-native types has been hilariously bad, up to and including loading the value zero into a register and multiplying by it.

2. General bugginess all over the place, particularly with non-x86 platforms. The number of failed unit tests for ffmpeg with gcc 4.4 on PPC64 was staggering.

Of course, commercial compilers are buggy as well, so this is not really exclusive to GCC; the latest ICC miscompiles large chunks of ffmpeg and Mans has been quite busy submitting bug reports for armcc.

3. Tendency to get worse with every new release; this trend was finally reversed with 4.3 and 4.4, the latter of which was the first compiler to beat 2.9.5 in performance (in ffmpeg, at least):

http://multimedia.cx/eggs/last-performance-smackdown-for-awh...

4. Tendency to declare obvious bugs to be not bugs; for example, failures in the register allocator for inline assembly in which it couldn't allocate 7 registers for the inline assembly despite 7 registers being available (but only inconsistently, on some platforms and some versions, for no apparent reason). Don't have links to the gcc bugtracker on me for these.

5. Incredibly bad optimization on non-x86 architectures. ARM is a particularly horrendous example, where we found the following happening when compiling x264:

a) In the most important DSP function in the program, SATD, GCC unrolled the loop completely. This is related to the fact that there are no loop unrolling heuristics for ARM--and instead of just disabling loop unrolling, the decision is binary ("fully unrolled" vs "not unrolled"), with the former being far too heavily weighted in favor of.

b) GCC then completely failed to allocate registers correctly, resulting in an enormous number of unnecessary loads/stores to the stack.

c) The function's speed was cut in half due to this.

Other issues include GCC's inability to consistently use the ARM's "free shift," up to and including putting shifts on register X right next to another op on register X despite the ability of even a simple peephole optimizer to merge the two instructions.

Also, GCC seems generally bad at three-operand architectures; one will find many redundant moves between registers on ARM, which generally should almost never exist in a three-operand instruction set. Here's an example similar to something I've seen (I don't recall the exact instructions):

add r0, r0, r7

mov r1, r0

mov r0, [r3]

Clearly, this example can be reduced to:

add r1, r0, r7

mov r0, [r3]
I'm a little shocked by the continued focus on aesthetics and form rather than purpose, especially from this particular audience. You guys are typically not the ignorant masses, who gives a damn what lacquer is used on your notebook, do you use it so you can sit back and stare longingly at it or so you can use the thing? Who cares what it looks like!

I recently was given the opportunity as a reward from my employer to name my next notebook, it could be anything at all, I didn't have any set price limit, I specifically got asked to just pick whatever would be the "ultimate" in computing power for me. I had a look at the mbp lines, did a few enquiries on notebookforums, and ended up with http://www.p4laptops.com.au/main/D900F_P4laptops.pdf

It looks like a big, black laptop, the vast majority of reviews I could find on it spent about 50% of the article pointing out how it was not very pretty and size and other form factor related nonsense I didn't care about, then another 25% raving on about how heavy and loud it is, and then the last 25% of the article actually examining how the tool performs for it's intended purpose! Man I hate the world at times, you people are all f*cking crazy. It's like I bought a fork and spent all my time pointing out how it wasn't very well chromed and I didn't like the way it sat in my hand, and then just toward the end there mentioned "but hell, it's really good for picking up food"

Eugh.
"has sentenced Manuel G. Arias Silva, a Peruvian national, for his role in a conspiracy to import into the U.S. protected orchid specimens,..."

Wow, just wow. The grandfather was thrown in jail for conspiracy to import flowers? Well, you heard it people, whoever wanted to have a flower importing start up maybe you should choose something else... something less fraught with danger and less tainted with the musk of criminality!
I've subscribed to online newspapers on and off for a few years. Frankly for the ones I read daily, $30-50/year isn't a big deal.

Outside that, all I'm missing is access to specific articles on other papers I don't subscribe to. Couldn't that be done with per-article fees covered by newspapers I subscribe to?

For example, say I subscribe to the NYT. With that subscription, I also got 100 article credits/year to read from the economist, wsj, etc. And visa-versa.
> [What if] the baker is wealthy and losing $250 will not affect his spending habits (over at least the course of decades)[?]

> The thing is, spending $250 today creates more work than spending $250 next year

In each of these cases, you're myopically focusing on consumption, while ignoring production. Over any period of time, society has a given productive capacity. Using up that capacity in an avoidable fashion necessarily detracts from the ability to apply that capacity to other problems. For example, if no one broke their windows, some of the glaziers may well go out of business, and engage in other, more socially beneficial (given the circumstances) courses of work, thus decreasing prices & increasing abundance in that area.

Even if the alternative is for money to be saved, rather than spent, then the problem is only changed to one of delayed consumption. And in the mean time of the delay, the baker is, by not using up productive capacity, reducing prices and increasing the availability of goods for others. The broken window is a net loss, just as Hazlitt describes.
I most point out that Regent University is considered one of the worst law "schools" in the nation. It's a "Christian" school that teaches "God's law", not the law of the United States as it actually exists. Take anything that comes out of that school with a huge, heaping grain of salt. (Example: The most memorable statement is about Honduran law -- but Honduran law lacks the scienter requirement that forms the basis of US criminal liability.)

Also, state police will not report you to the federal police (except for immigration violations, and drugs in most states). State police fucking hate federal police agencies b/c the federal agencies utterly disrespect local law enforcement.

Finally, federal law only applies to interstate activities (usually, connected in some way to commerce). Without that crucial nexus, the federal government can prosecute you all it wants, but every court in the nation (except maybe in Texas and the Deep South) will throw out the case, with prejudice, and possibly even sanction the prosecutor for malicious prosecution.
I'm not convinced that courage has much to do with it, but rather an understanding on the part of a jury of their duty and function in the legal process. Nor am I convinced that the concept of nullification should be more widely known, and have no reason to believe that if it were, say, a legally-protected right, that it would do more good than harm.
In Praise of Morning
Ooooh, must not get banned. Just stick it up your ass you little nazi twirp.
Monopoly is not required for antitrust violations. Indeed, most companies found liable for antitrust did not have a monopoly in said market.

The key issue is whether the company in question had significant market power and used that power for non-competitive purposes. Price-fixing is a classic example, but it's only one of several.
Jury nullification is technically not a choice. It's just an inevitable flaw in the design of the judicial system...sort of like Neo in the Matrix (sequels).

On the other hand, it can be seen as a check on the balance of the executive police powers (specifically, the enforcement powers), which are not otherwise subject to political control.
What's with all this fluff on the front page?
There are specific circumstances given in the actual law. The article conveniently ignores those circumstances.

For starters, "dangerous materials" is very strictly defined -- it's stuff like toxic chemicals, radioactive materials, and other things that are so inherently dangerous that only a criminal would simply abandon them without taking safeguards.
These aren't your run-of-the-mill household are commercial goods -- these are, at a minimum, industrial-strength shit.
David Simon needs to read "The Innovator's Dillemma." This sort of approach is exactly what dooms most established companies to bankruptcy in the fact of disruptive innovation.

Information, particularly mass information is now cheap, and those high margins are completely and irreversibly gone. Money is still there to be made, as the many full-time bloggers can tell you. But it won't be enough to staff the newsroom floor. That work will be distributed.
They are treated differently. The maximum penalties for dumping toxins in a water source are significantly higher -- and the dumping crime also allows for prosecution for other crimes as well, such as assault, homicide/manslaughter, etc.
PHP Object Relational Mapper - Doctrine
Corporations cannot be held criminally liable for their conduct. Only natural legal persons can be held liable for criminal conduct, b/c nearly all crimes in American require the element of scienter (intent), which a fictional entity cannot possess.

However, executives can be held criminally liable for corporate misconduct b/c they're the ones who ordered/ratified/approved the conduct.

Note too, that criminal liability is not the same thing as tort liability -- corporations can be held liable for their torts, b/c intent is rarely a element in such actions.
Yeah, it's bull, which is why you can't find any info on it.

Edit: It's bull b/c most nations laws conflict -- it's impossible to obey any one such law without violating the law of another nation. Plus, it would cost too much to US businesses, and do you really think they'd let such a law pass or remain on the books if it actually existed?
Every time copyright and patent laws have been revised, they've revised the protection length upwards.

If the sunset-provision had applied in the past, right now, the copyright/patent periods would be rapidly approaching infinity.
So as a vendor what I should do is force my own customers not to force me to support their needs?
> For example, if no one broke their windows, some of the glaziers may well go out of business, and engage in other, more socially beneficial (given the circumstances) courses of work

Or they could go out of business and engage in less socially beneficial courses of work, like highway robbery. It is always possible to think up a pathological scenario where breaking the window helps/hurts the economy. I think the original framing of the analogy is the most general, but it usually helps to consider the actual case at hand without resorting to analogies at all.
Foreign species invasion has had crippling effects on North American ecosystems. So this could actually be a pretty big deal.

Also, most crimes of "danger" are state-level crimes, not federal level crimes. Federal crimes, by and large, are the boring crimes you don't see on Law&Order or CSI.
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"I think Palm Pre is concerned more about its users"

I don't. Really, the more I think about this the more I'm convinced it's just a manipulative marketing tactic. Whether it will be a successful manipulative marketing tactic, I don't know yet.

Syncing music and data from a Mac doesn't seem to be that hard. Plenty of mobile device makers do it, and Apple even happily advertises and points people to the software used to do it (see, for example, Nokia's Mac transfer support). If you're concerned about supporting your users and ensuring they have a reliable good experience with your product, that's what you should be doing.

But Palm is knowingly doing something that's not only unsupported, but designed from the ground up to get Apple to take actions which hurt Palm's customers. This is literally the opposite of being concerned about your users.

The only reason I can think of for doing this is that Palm has seen how much press coverage you can get for your product if you can turn it into an anti-Apple story, because the tech press will eat out of your hand if you can give them a multi-million-page-view Apple controversy. And that's precisely what Palm is getting: the coverage of the Pre's syncing has effectively been a massive worldwide advertising campaign building up a sympathetic view of the Pre in the minds of potential customers. And best of all, it hasn't cost Palm so much as a single dime; it's all coming for free.
Also, if our company receives a service call, we regard it as a failure of our product to address our customer's needs. If a 'commercial' open source company receives that same call, they regard it as money earned from a support ticket.

Given that difference, which software product would you prefer to run in your business?

Since you and the followup are both wondering why you're being downvoted, I thought I would call this out, and point out that this part of your comment is why you're being downvoted. Because you're assuming that the Open Source support business model is to build shoddy software in order to get more support calls. This is FUD that is frequently used by proprietary vendors to try to discredit Open Source solutions. Open Source developers rightly take offense to being told they are not only building crap, but that they are doing it in order to fleece customers out of their money.

Proprietary software does not have a monopoly on quality software, and never has.
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Wow, didn't think people were still distributing this.

Having worked with Jon on both open source (PyMusique) and commercial (we worked at the same startup for a while) projects, I will say this: He made some stupid mistakes around DeCSS, and since has done great things for the open source community and the anti-DRM crusade in general. Before he's crucified for his anti-Linux remarks and license mishaps, bear in mind that he was all of 16 when DeCSS was released, and he's since done a lot of fully original work (alone and in teams) that's freely available.
pay you for software upgrades [iPod touch] !

I'm pretty sure it's been established at this point that the fees for iPod Touch software updates are due to Apple (after various scandals, including one in which they were involved) being extremely paranoid about accounting practices.
When everybody thinks like that, only bureaucrats define standards. Lack of standards let to many problem: I´m just thinking about the amount of power supplies i have to carry. A power supply for the company mobile, a power supply for the iPhone (or at least the USB cable), a power supply for the notebook. I have three small switches from three vendors needing three separate voltages (a standard would be nice here, for example for a central power supply feeding all this stuff). My USB hard drives have their own power supply. The 1.5 TB Maxtor from the special offer have a different one than the 2 1TB Fujitsu-Siemens drives. Standards are bureaucratic, but they help ... but we have to work on them, to enable them to serve us. And at the end it´s the same at power supplies as with Unix standards.
Also, look at all the cool things MS Research is doing.

Which will never see the light of day as products nor will any of that stuff seep into existing products...
R we f#¢$ed? Why We Don't Understand Risk, and How it Dooms Us All