skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My take on this: yes, it is targeted at poor consumers. They're almost certainly going to receive objectively worse terms than people who are smarter, savvier, and (not unrelated to those two) richer. This happens in many, many things poor people buy.

There are a lot of folks whose actions are responsible for this state of affairs. Its interesting that while responsibility is diffuse, blame gets concentrated pretty acutely on particular participants in the value chain.

For example, I can't remember the last time someone blamed jewelry vendors for the plight of poor people. Poor people spend more as a percentage of income on jewelry than any other socio-economic group. Poor people have more of their assets tied up in jewelry than any other socio-economic group.

Its interesting to me -- and I mean that, interesting, not the passive-aggressive way of saying "y'all are stupid" -- that we go after Cash4Gold for offering $12.50 for $75 worth of gold when we don't go after Kay Jewelers for selling the $300 brooch the gold is in. Cash4Gold is seen as cheating the poor customer out of $62.50, but Kay Jewelers is just an honest businessman who made $225 off of selling the bauble in the first place.

More broadly: a portion of the attraction to jewelry for poor customers is that it is a value store and access to short-term credit for people who are unbanked. (If you own a $300 bauble from Kay's then you have a $100 line of credit at your local pawn shop which charges you APRs of $STAGGERING_PERCENT.) Jewelry is a TERRIBLE alternative to banking services.

Incidentally: jewelry is a consumption item. Don't buy it with the intention of it having resale value. Don't buy it if you can't afford it.
ah, nothing better than a bit of weeding at sunset
You Can Make Everything You Want Come True – With Maria Sipka
I think it's due to a combination of factors which all come down to a less favorable environment for factories (unions/higher wage expectations, regulations etc). However, a weaker dollar can mean more factories stay here for competing cheap labor. The trade-off is less spending power, which means our economy must shift away from being spending based. People will kick and scream when that realization hits but America simply won't continue to dominate the world economy.
Presumably because it's controversial.
Setting a user-agent isn't exactly a core language thing. HTTP is an add-on library, of which there are many to choose from.

I know you saw the title and thought "ahahaha easy time to bash Java again", but it's really ignorant to do so.
It's a question that's easy enough to answer.

Pick a product. Then go do the research and work to determine how much it would take to make it here. Then repeat that process with somewhere else.

This is the same process that companies go through. There's nothing mysterious about it.
Dell LTO-4 341-4647 Tape
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Worm holes, black holes, supernovas, big bang, the million other galaxies outside of ours — those are phenomenons.

Billionaire athletes (through endorsements) are the result of a sharp rise in consumer consumption, media saturation, and globalized market place the last 20 years. How is that a phenomenon?
Martin Fowler is an enterprise buzzword methodologist. He was into UML, refactoring and patterns and Java back in the days. Nowadays he is into agile, TDD and ruby.

He has a big respect in certain circles, and even I have the Refactoring book, which was a disappointment for me, because it was about practices that was trivial for me after two years of proferssional work, while going into the details too much.
Martin Fowler != Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob)
I agree. Does anyone have any tips on making designs work that don't involve blue?
Huge collection of CC-licensed free icons
Oops, my mistake. But the above still holds for Martin Fowler btw. And all those enterprise methodologists look the same to me: they advocate something, but you never see the code they produce, as it is some proprietary crud system at the end of the day :)
Why is it more expensive here than in, say, Germany? Is it just the unions? Can't be, 'cause Germany has trade unions too. If anything, they're bigger there - The German Confederate of Trade Unions claims 25% of the working populace as members. Is it the healthcare? Oh, wait. Is it the education? Hrm. Is it pork? Is it 'cause we've got a lot of tornados, or is it the hurricanes?

It just doesn't make much sense. What makes it cheaper to operate a chip or solar panel factory in Dresden than in, say, North Carolina?
I think I saw something like this a long time ago (pre-leopard).

I was running Little Snitch and while reading a specific email message, Little Snitch told me Mail.app was trying to connect using port 80. I denied it, but never tracked it down.

This is different than .mac addresses -- Mail.app will connect to .mac when you receive mail from someone with a .mac address (to verify if they're online, which you can disable I believe)
Great article. Lots of detail and the author doesn't get into editorializing too much.

I'm in the "want to believe" category with TDD, solely for the reason that I think there are a lot of smart people advocating it. Having said that, I haven't seen a lot of teams that use it and continue using it for a competitive advantage -- and that sets off alarm bells. The hype may very well be ahead of reality on this one. I honestly don't know.
getting the users and getting them to keep coming back are different challenges
I've had Five Finger Sprints for about a year now, and have been heavily evangelising them to my friends. Running barefoot really does feel liberating, especially going off-road through parks, fields and trails. It's like being a kid again and definitely bought the fun back into running for me. I can really hammer out the miles with them now, zero sore legs or calves. :)

It took me about a month of a few runs per week (20-30 mins) to adjust -- so not long at all. One of the mistakes I made at the start was going too far, too fast: I tried to do my usual 1h+ runs straight away in the Vibrams and was pushing-off from the ground, concentrating on staying on the balls of my feet. Bad idea.

Anyway, here's some tips from someone who has been through it:

---------------------------------

- Relax, relax, relax.

- Don't push off from the ground, rather, concentrate on lifting your thighs.

- Don't aim to balance on the balls of your feet. You're not running on tip-toes, and that's going to put insane strain on your calves. Instead, get the general area of the top half of your foot to land first, almost flat-footed is fine.

- Aim to tap the ground with your feet about 2-3 times a second, as if your feet are going in a circular motion, and passing by the ground. It's like you're incidentally propelling yourself along with gentle touches to the ground.

- Keep hips relatively low, legs relaxed, leaning slightly forward. If your calves start to hurt, then relax more.

- You will get sore calves as your feet and leg muscles get used to the new style of running. Stick with it, and don't overdo it.
Yeah, I didn't understand that either. Maybe it's because I'm a weirdo, but the main reason I go to tech conferences is to make friends, who inevitably turn into business partners and clients.
s/fuck you/goddamnit/

Apologies for the assaultiveness, the man just leaves me consternated -- I'm disappointed in him
I think you are presuming an answer (trade unions) and then arguing with yourself when the answer doesn't work.

Do the exercise. It's easy enough to pull reasons from the air and vet them, but that's just an advanced form of straw man arguments. You'll never get anywhere like that.

I know that if there is a factory making something in Germany and not one here that for some reason the economics work better in Germany. Lots of really smart people who add and subtract numbers are paid to make these decisions based on where the numbers work the best. That's their job. That's the only thing they're supposed to do well, and they're good at it. You can bet there's an economic reason somewhere.
Buy, not build - Confessions from a Telerik junkie
Refreshing code.google.com/speed
Just skimmed it but one of the big quotes "If Microsoft NT had been free from the beginning, Linux wouldn't have been created", or whatever it was, is wrong. Linux was a personal project of Linus Torvalds initially commenced for private learning purposes.

Of course, it's impossible to know how certain events would have effected certain other things, but it seems that there's not much that could have happened in the market that would have stopped Linux's actual creation.

Its domination, however, is a different story; I'm sure if Windows was an open platform there would have been relatively little attraction to Linux and it would have burned out in the same obscurity that it was born from. But, such soothsaying is silly.
Hey, this is the technology from Wag The Dog.

De Niros character is a Hollywood producer, hired to produce a fake war in Albania to distract from a sex scandal before an election. At one point, he's directing news footage by shouting something like "there's a girl in front of a village, it's on fire .. hmm, no, more smoke.. her hair is too light. Can she have a cat? Show me cats" while having a technician type in the request and watching the result appear in real time.
If people don't like the price they're getting for their gold, go somewhere else... there's nobody that forces people to do business with them
Also, "deregulation" is a buzzword intended to frame the debate and make you believe that they are reducing regulation and therefore creating some kind of free market.

Most so-called deregulation could be better termed re-regulation, it's just changing the rules to benefit different parties, not abolishing them.

(Having said that, btilly above uses deregulation in its new derogatory sense, much like the euphamism downsizing had to be replaced with rightsizing once everyone realised it still meant redundancies. Relatedly the depression was named that by people who thought it wouldn't be as bad as a proper recession, now depression means a really bad recession)
Will Google's Wave Replace E-Mail—and Facebook?
That's how big Google's vision is for its Wave social-networking/search service, which will have apps created by independent developers who sell them at a Google app store.
Gotta love the random deer in picture 5.
> Americans have become accustomed to cheap product, and gas, while at the same time turning a nose up at menial jobs

I understand that cheap gas is bad for environment, but why are the other items in your list bad? Everyone who is doing a menial job wishes they could afford to turn a nose up it, and cheap products are great. Even cheap gas is good for Americans (apart from the environmental damage) because it means freedom of movement as transportation is so affordable.
Both are good points, would definitely like to see more research on the topic. I definitely agree there is a threshold when it comes to monthly vs yearly. I know you just tossed out a number but $20/year seems a little lower than I was thinking.
It's amazing to me to still see the RDF semantic web drum beating even after its proven itself to be a failure. It's not that the idea is bad, or even that the syntax lacks sugar, but it fails on three fronts:

1) People have to use it. It is completely possible to build pretty much any modern service you want, without RDF. The only thing RDF buys you for your trouble is some vague hand waving about joining the semantic web, for which no really useful services exist as exemplars of why you'd take the time and expense of building the RDF meta-data in the first place.

2) It's easier to do it the many wrong ways than it is to do it the couple of right ways. So I bothered to build a triple that says "the sky/has the color/blue" and somebody else does "the sky/is/blue" and somebody else does "the sky/is/sky-blue" and on and on. I've quickly arrived back at the same problem that the semantic web was supposed to solve, finding information. But instead of information, now I have an infinite list of qualities of the sky to deal with.

3) On single documents, the RDF data is generally crud. Other meta-data (e.g. topics, key words, summaries, entities, etc.) are far more useful than a bunch of ham-handed XML jamming up the meta-data of my document.

The field itself lies at a certain kind of problem. The claim is "if we have enough semantically described data, we can do all kinds of great reasoning things with them". The problem is that there will never be enough semantically described data. At least not in the direction the field is going. Spending millions of man years building out triple-store databases just isn't really a terribly useful endeavor. Particularly when all I want to do is a find a web page about dancing dogs and dudes getting kicked in the nuts. The field itself describes all of its problems as "we just need more data". It's like the uncanny valley hypothesis. "These robots aren't human enough yet because we just haven't spent enough time making them real". When ultimately nobody cares if their robot house maid looks like a human, they just want it to take out the trash.

Even if, by some miracle the world went mad for a year and RDF'd all of its web output. The result will still be only marginally more useful than the search systems we have today.
Nokia 6070 Dark Grey
You can have deal of Nokia 6070 at cellhut.com which will be under your affordable price and the phone has included many more features and like VGA camera with resolution of 640×480 pixels, and video recorder. Some other basic feature of the handset are FM stereo radio
Exim, MySQL, Courier IMAP, Courier POP3 & Spamassassin
The booting of PDP-8
The UK Ministry of Defence Manual of Security has been leaked
It was the simplest thing that could possibly work, and it did.
This is a gem! It reads like a press-release...

"Now the software takes about 11 mouse clicks to install, compared to 22 before. It’s the little innovations like this that have helped the company snag 40 percent of the worldwide free antivirus software market."

Do they even read what they paste into their articles?

And what a low standard for "innovation", BTW...
Absolute right and wrong require a frame of reference that is unchanging, but there is no such frame of reference available to us. The most popular is that of a God, but if you're like me, you see God as a human construction too. Laws are made by Man; rule of law is rule of man.

I believe natural rights exist within the framework of particular philosophies, and that these philosophies can be useful as tools to analyse various problems and scenarios. But we have no oracle of truth that can anoint the One True Philosophy.

I believe torture is as close to an absolute wrong as you can get, and in particular, it's always a wrong when you take humans as they are presently constructed as your relative frame of reference. However, I also believe that in the extremely unlikely scenario of a bomb in Times Square and someone available for torture who can deliver the solution, that person will be tortured and the torturer should be rightly condemned. Part of the heroism of the torturer, to coin a very unpleasant phrase (due to the extreme improbability) should be to suffer the condemnation of committing torture for the rest of their natural lives. Torture should be wrong, condemned, even when it is necessary for the survival of large numbers of people.

The real problem with torture, though, is that the ends don't justify the means. The means of torture creates its own ends: it breeds disgust and hatred, causes your allies to leave you, gives succour to your enemies and helps them recruit. The torturer is the enemy whom it is just to fight; the country that condones torture deserves to be defeated.

I believe ends and means is a valid moral calculus, and in fact is the only calculus that matters. But it is not a simple calculus, because decisions made using it must be considered for their effect always and everywhere.

FWIW, I consider myself modern, liberal (in the classical sense) and in no particular way conservative.
Thats a novel idea to bite. I mean as is evident from the history of computer science, most work was done on how to remember things effectively. But thinking about how to forget is actually the key to remembering.
Another popular success in britain is the group of companies simply called the Co-operative:

http://www.co-operative.coop/aboutus/

Note the cool domain name: *.coop
This is quite possibly the best idea I've heard all day.
Bottom line is that he saw potential in that setting...and what potential!
very weird, still can't bring it up here.
Let's see.. here are couple of shots from post-elections protests in Minsk, Belarus, March 2006.

The night when results were announced. People look happy but really they were not, just reacting to a sarcastic joke off the stage. For whatever reason, this photo ended all over Chinese blogs in 2007, captioned as "people rejoicing New Year".
http://www.thespiderawards.com/2007presentation/photoshow/no...

Paramedics working over a protester after a clash. He was delivering a portable toilet to the tent camp encircled by riot police. Broken ribs, concussion. I was the only photographer hinted to his coming, due to good networking with protesters; however I got caught up amidst the melee, so action shots turned lousy.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/lightstalkers/images/60557/23_2_640....

Now, a less dramatic story. An agricultural fair in Orsha, Belarus. It was an old Pagan celebration of harvest, revived by the president. A dissonant mix of pseudo-folklore and 3rd world style heavy policing in classic Soviet entourage. A total insider show, where local brands and enterprises are mandated to participate (sort of a national exhibition), and with the president de-facto assuming the role of Harvest God.
http://pa.photoshelter.com/gallery-slideshow/G0000vbMKecuSr4...

So nothing groundbreaking really, but remember, we're talking hobbies here :)
Lots of UNIX tools are just plain scary at first, but if you look at them closely you would see they are so powerful once you start using them
Exercise to Reduce Breast Cancer Risk After 50
This article is wrong in many areas.

First of all getting the NT kernel and building upon is a thing you can do without getting the source code. The driver development kit of Windows is order of magnitude better in terms of documentation and ease of use (as far as kernel development is easy) than the Linux or BSD driver kit (I've worked on all of three).

You don't really need the source code of the kernel when you have all the documentation you need and a powerful API.

If you really need the source code for what you are doing, Microsoft gives access to this source code. You get a remote access via smartcard and can browse through the whole source code (remember the 2000 source code leak).

The source code availability, is really not, I think, the explanation why Windows NT doesn't dominate the server world. You don't need to recompile or tinker the kernel to administrate a Windows machine, this need simply doesn't exist.

The reason is that it took a lot of time for Windows to adopt a server philosophy. If you've played with Windows Server 2008, you realize Microsoft is getting there.

One of the things I like with Windows Server 2008 is that it doesn't install the whole universe and let you precisely pick what you want to deploy on your machine.

The addition of a more powerful shell and a more transparent administration panel helps as well.

Another problem is the very rich, but complex, ACL (access control list) system of Windows NT. Although you can deploy extremely fine grained and subtle rights and authorizations with this system, in UNIX you just type "chmod 0755" and 99.9% of the cases you're fine with it.

Last but not least, Windows carries a bad reputation in terms of reliability and security.

In terms of performance or features, NT has got nothing to envy to Linux or BSD.

The reason to me is really a "packaging" problem, the technology is capable.
If this could be extended to movies, the possibilities would be awesome. Just write a script for a movie, sketch out the different scenes and voila, a ready made rough of your new romantic comedy!

The program could be extended further to recycle old movies, and to replace the actors heads with new one.

I have to start writing a business plan for this right away. Please send me a message if you want to join in on this.
"You cannot, by accident, build an airplane that actually flies."

I guess I can use this somewhere.
Well, I think he got his karma back now. But yeah, the way some people downvote gives me a funny feeling.
The first mouse I think would look very nice on my desk right about now.
The Passing of the Polymath
probability of mis-matched images seems like it would be incredibly high

It would still be quite useful if the sketch narrowed the options to a list. Traditional point-n-click could refine/revise from there.

This innovation seems to be a shortcut mechanism based on pictographic gestures, where they also take the position, relative size into account. This is very nifty.

I cannot see how this would be faster than traditional Illustrator/Indesign workflows of selecting the elements from dropdowns, dragging to correct location and dragging the handles. If you use their sketching method, you are probably going to have to fall back to 2D drag'n'size methods post generation
"extensive government regulation and oversight and intervention throughout the economy is also unlikely to prevent major problems" - I see this recurring theme over and over again. Government vs free markets. The belief that some supernatural entity (the invisible hand on the free market) will make us all happy in the end is refuted by all human experience in the last millennia. As Karl Popper once said "Truth is not manifest". Humans will have to hack their environment continually in the face of hardship and arbitrarity - and in a democracy, the elected government is given the responsibility to execute that mission. Nature has not evolved to make humans happy, it's our task to make our world (economy) better - one hack at a time ...
Box for 'Yo Mom' needs to be bigger! ;)
Scan Your Twitter Followers to Detect Spammers. | Tricks Machine
The Burning Man festival?
When should you use C -programming language-?
Richard Stallman on Software Patents - UNSW October 2004
You know the name, but just who were the Luddites?
Amazon launches mobile payment service
One day I hope Joel eventually realizes this. Programmers who say they don’t have time to write tests are living in the stone age.

This kind of attitude really pisses me off. It's so confident in its condescension and name-calling, I have a little wonder that they might be right. In fact, it's just dogmatic abuse, unencumbered by an objective factual appraisal of the issue at hand. Probably, I should just remember that dogmatism tends to be inversely related to wisdom.

For one thing, the purpose of the code makes a tremendous difference: e.g. unit-testing is great for maintainability, but terrible for evolving an API (as in prototyping or exploratory code).

And thank goodness for Knuth.
Abebe Bikila won 1960 Olympic marathon bare-footed:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Interesting-Olympic-Moments--Abibe-B...