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While open borders is an ultimate goal, it would be a bit perilous to allow 'everyone who wanted to' to enter a given country, as things stand.

First, I think we should seek bilateral treaties such that we can enter their country as much as they can enter ours and that both parties have reciprocal rights. This should allow all parties entering an agreement to slowly stabilize, or reach some kind of equilibrium.

One of the downsides is that this adds to globalization and homogeneity of culture, language, etc. Although personally, I don't think that's a big problem --it's mostly an emotional issue rather than actual, but it's still an issue given how people cry 'globalization', 'imperialism', 'monoculture', 'mainstream', etc.

From Europe, where people share some culture, they never the less still experience integration issues where locals resent foreign populations, example France and polish workers, or Germany and Serbs or Turks, or Spaniards.

Maybe grant larger quotas based on population would be fairer and then harden the borders, else the closer neighbor has an unfair advantage. So say Italy booms, quotas would make living in Croatia no better than new Zealand or south Africa in terms of odds of getting into Italy (or Canada the US or Nigeria.) But politics would never allow a fair quota system to work.
A few years ago, I made this histogram for a friend (I'm not American myself), who was interested in the modal income for the US, instead of the median income. The modal income is when you pick a US citizen at random, the expected value for their income, which can be seen as the location of the peak in this histogram:

http://i.imgur.com/euPugla.png

Note that the data is from 2008, and only counts employed citizens.

I compiled the data from an official US government data/demographics/census website (I forget which one, sorry). I noticed I could query the average income for all counties split over many "occupation groups". This gave me relatively fine-grained buckets (it doesn't really matter what they were, just that they were small-ish), weighted by the number of people in it, allowing me to plot the histogram. The really proper way to build this histogram would be to bucket an actual list of income for each individual US citizen. But that list is not available, for obvious reasons.
You mean, to be more specific, that all power is nuclear fusion power. Actually, yes. When fusion reactors are available they'll cut out the middleman again -- and this middleman will be solar.

But to be fair, the sun will remain the largest fusion reactor humans can access for quite some time so solar may continue to be relevant while we are close to it.
My problem with all of this is that, as renewables get cheaper, people use less fossil fuels. But this drives the price of fossil fuels down. Eventually all you're extracting is the low-hanging fruit that can be pulled out of the ground very cheaply and running tight margins on it. So you have kind of a vicious cycle. Meanwhile most people just assume that fossil fuel prices will increase inexorably. I doubt it.

In other words, absent regulation keeping fossil fuel costs high (carbon tax!), I think the shift to renewables will take longer than the optimists think.
18.543 reviews in 5 days? (19th-23th June) That's a lot.

The customer reviews section was previously hidden during the closed beta test, though the review section was accessible with the right URL and just a few weeks ago there were only 4 mixed reviews.

I wonder how many amazon customers got a free sample as one wrote: "SO happy we got to sample one of these playtoys, first! What a disappointment!"
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eMMC is not the same as SSD, in general it is slower and less reliable (and it's one of the reason the laptop is cheap).

I agree with the sentiment, though, carrying around a lightweight laptop without having to worry about theft/accidental damage is priceless.
Not the GP: One of these advertises 'always listening'. The other one doesn't.

One is an established device to actually talk to (usually) one other person, of your choice. The other one records you to send the information ~elsewhere~.

One is - in theory, let's leave the three letter stuff out - protected by quite a lot of battle-tested laws. The other one is so much harder to judge.
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I feel like I need to get with the times. I have an aversion to talking to computers. Though when I try using it once in a while to dictate a text, I'm always surprised and amazed at how well it works.
"Smart tv's have already beaten this one to the punch by a few years now."

Yes, but no technologically clueful or savvy person is buying or using a "smart tv". Those are "grandma devices" that get sold to the demographic still shopping at Best Buy (whatever that is).

The HN crowd thoughtfully buys computer monitors that don't connect to networks. Like an NEC commercial (airport) display.

Right ?
There's one benefit to having both Echo/Alexa. When I have guests over and their fascinated by Echo it's much easier to have a conversation about it using the word "Echo" - otherwise they'd trigger Alexa using the wake word every other sentence..

It's also handy when Alexa is accidentally triggered (like one time when I was watching a youtube video). I whisper to my wife "Don't talk Echo is listening!" :)
I'm wondering if 'cloud cookies' are tracking the device, or tracking me. E.g. if I enter my name and address, it fills in the rest from the cloud. Maybe that wriggles through because there's no device tracking.
How would they not know it? The device interaction is through voice/sound.
A cautionary tale: Echo starts recording when it hears the "wake" word ('Alexa' or 'Amazon'), but it can mistake other words or parts of speech for a wake word (for example, consider how close the phrase "he likes her" is to "Alexa"). Browsing through the history I have found snippets of conversations that Echo had no business listening to, and which the recorded subjects certainly did not wish to send to Amazon.
He's referring to america... and I have to disagree.

What's so important about an ethnicity that it has to be kept at all costs? Culture is probably worth preserving, but often culture is simply "the way it's always been" -- I'd argue the opposite, bringing different cultures together, if done right, will promote creating new culture that make more sense for today's reality, and not some 19th century status quo. Creation of culture is more important, imo, than maintaining culture -- as the latter can be done with history books while the former is a real policy that might enrich the lives of citizens.
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It seems to me that labor is at a significant disadvantage when capital can move from country to country and is welcomed with open arms wherever it goes, but workers are locked into whatever situation they were born into.
Typically royalties aren't tied to revenue; they're tied to plays. Play a song, pay out. That's how the system tends to work.

Apple wasn't planning on doing that much, and now they are. So I think "nothing here to suggest Apple treats artists more fairly than anyone else" is an apt observation. Unless the details come to light, it's unclear if they're doing better or worse for artists than anyone.
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"Surround yourself with people who are both uninformed and hold opinions far from the median voter and you'll be convinced it's not just broken, but manipulated."

Are you saying it's not broken and manipulated?

I have an epic speech ready to prove you wrong if so.
> Spotify has over 25% paid users (and is losing money paying out 70% of revenues).

Isn't that the big thing here? Apple is coming into a market where the established players are losing money and throwing around all their surplus cash from their hardware business to establish their own music service. Is this good for the artists in the short run? Maybe. Is it good for artists in the long run, if Apple manages to put all the other streaming services out of business? I'm not sure it is.
I can see how that is confusing. I was only confirming that boto3 has been in the making for a while. Boto3 is a replacement to Boto, so you will probably start to notice support for Boto slow down. Boto3 will be maintained and supported.
I would agree with and extend your remarks that humans tend to be slightly more adaptable than they are usually given credit.

A century ago it was utterly unthinkable that people would drink milk in any format other than quart glass jars delivered daily to a little airlock on the side of the house. My neighbors ancient brick house still has their milk delivery door! Now a days people get their gallon of antibiotics and growth hormones in plastic gallon jugs that last a week or so. Turned out to not be a big deal. Humans adapt, its just what we do.

Can't run a grid at night? Well, then don't. Or more likely a KWh at noon will be a 100th the cost of a KWh at midnight, maybe less. Not being able to run my clothes dryer at 3am sounds a lot like the astroturfers who claim the universe will end if they can't drive their SUV 800 miles daily so no one should be permitted to buy electric cars.
Very strange for me to see an example thesis in latex without any mathematics in it!
The problem with this is that once we've reached a "perilous level of global warming", it is quite possible that there is no way back.

The 2 degrees target seems to be already out of reach and everything beyond that gets closer and closer to being unpredictable. Of course no one knows what exactly will happen anyway. But as an example: If the arctic permafrost starts to melt methane gets released into the atmosphere which further accelerates everything [1].

I would not hope on some not-yet-existing or not-yet-usable technologies to fix everything we're messing up now. The "eventually" when finally everyone stops using fossil fuels because other kinds of energy are cheaper might be just too late.

[1] http://grist.org/climate-change/2011-12-05-the-brutal-logic-...
@s73v3r, Self-knowledge can be tremendously rewarding too.

Smartphones aren't going anywhere, but their value proposition is not the only one available. If we were to jump-start our creativity through tight constraints like the X-prize idea, I expect that we'd end up combining the best of our current technology with the best of the new. Or maybe the worst of both...
What cell phone?

Of course, given that a lot of the HN crowd currently derives their income from surveillance and/or walled-garden based business models ("analytics", "big data", "software as a service", etc), I expect to be down-voted for suggesting that it is a bad idea to trade your future for a few shiny (and sometimes useful) toys.

I hope everybody that uses Amazon's microphone - or, as you say, a cell phone - realize that you're creating the surveillance state. Right now there is a large effort to normalize surveillance socially, and instead of fighting for you right to privacy, we have a threat full of people talking about how wonderful the bait tastes.
Did we just move from "What is control? How do I get control?" to "Linux is probably insurmountable so we don't even have to try"?
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I'm not clear why this comment was downvoted either, except perhaps that you mentioned being downvoted, which is a downvote magnet.

But I think you're right: I think it's desirable that prosecutors let go of most cases in which they're not confident of a win. That's called "prosecutorial discretion". If caseloads are high, we want them working on the clearest-cut violations --- maybe with some public policy stretch cases sprinkled in.
> Process the whole Wikidata in 7 minutes with your laptop

Wikidata is several magnitudes smaller than Freebase (closed by Google in May) and it won't fit in your RAM (laptop).
Is it much easier in the EU? For example, can I go to Switzerland or France and easily get permanent residency?
Right, Swift had one very specific and timely request for a new product. That's not comparable to, "There's a bunch of stuff that's needed fixing for years."
The callq/retq ratio means most functions have... apparently, about 8 calls to others, after inlining. It has nothing to do with libc, per se, there's no reason in general to expect a 1-to-1 call/ret ratio.
My brother does - or at least, I assume you're talking about the different apps that come installed on TVs these days. For example my brother uses it to watch Netflix, BBC iPlayer and another VoD service that I don't remember the name of. He also uses an Apple TV, but most of the time he just uses the television's interface.
Not sure why my comment got down voted.

Here is a blog post from a highly awarded Principle in NY describing the exact teacher evaluation process using Common Core testing as a component and how "every high-school teacher will be incentivized to push weaker students out of challenging classes like Advanced Algebra, Physics and Chemistry"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/...
Oil is constantly underestimated. Underestimated hopefully in most cases but underestimated nonetheless.

A - Demand for oil is notoriously inelastic.
If demand drops a little, a big shift in price will "compensate." If solar starts genuinely digging into oil's market share the oil prices will drop by a lot, fast until almost the same amount of oil gets bought as before. Whatever you are assuming is the "cheaper than oil" flip point, is very likely to be too optimistic. It is likely to just be cheaper than the most expensive marginal 5%.

This is inherently speculative because economics and because real marginal costs of oil production are closely guarded secrets, but over the last 50+ years this has usually been correct. This isn't disruptive tech land where the cheaper-worser becomes the cheaper-better and wins total victory. This is substitutable commodity land where prices drop like rocks but total volume produced barely moves.

^Much cheaper power for slightly less carbon is still a good thing, but more on the prosperity front than the climate change front.

B - There is a lot of oil down there. Even "dry" wells are usually only slightly drier than they were when we started drilling them. We just got the easy oil out and then stopped. FInding oil really means finding "accessible" oil. Our methods of finding and our methods of accessing are technology too. It's advancing, like solar tech is.

This is what "fraking" is. It's a new way of accessing.

C - Speaking of fraking… It's only just begun, probably. It's happening in the states because that's where it happens to have been invented. There is no reason to think that it is not equally applicable in Russia, S. America, the Persian Gulf or anywhere else with oil.

I like the elegance of solar though, and I hope it succeeds. Decentralization seems like it can take a big part of the residential market. In rich countries, a lot of people can afford it and with between incentives, people's general interest and the real estate value (people like investing in their home), it seems like it will have a good run.

In poor and/or dysfunctional places, going off grid is always a favored option. Solar power can do what mobile phone did. Anything that relies on less infrastructure is more suitable for these places. This is an especially attractive idea. Mobile phones/modems mean that phone infrastructure is much easier to come by. Solar + battery could mean the same for electricity. Add in rainwater + home purification systems (progress here too) and all we'll need is hover cars to deal with potholes.
It's a major problem for Scandinavian countries right now, if you read the local news, its a big problem that many immigrants have a higher and satisfactory conditions of living on welfare compared to where they were from. They have little incentive to work when they are provided what they consider a high standard of living with no effort. It's caused quite a bit of backlash and "racism" in their otherwise progressive countries.

So no, sterilization isn't really an issue because what is considered high standards for living by the second generation go up, but for those based on the old standard, they end up leeching off the system where there is an unspoken social contract for natives that you contribute or always try to do better than the bare minimum and improve one's self. You can't assume that cultural value is instilled in immigrants from other countries, especially when the society has an honor system more or less based on that principal.

http://www.thelocal.se/20120907/43078
http://www.thelocal.se/20140829/reinfeldtrefugee-focus-puts-...
http://www.thelocal.se/20131224/13060
http://fashion-year.com/fashion-mens-beard-2015-year.html

You must have seen those beards.
That sounds like an outdated observation. Those specialized cards were proprietary and also way ahead of their time.

Most SSDs, like Intel's series, are instantly available. They cost little power to keep running all the time, so there's no need to power them down, and they'll be operational by the time your system POSTs.
Canada (and I believe some other countries, like Australia) has a points based system. You can fill in a PR (equivalent to US Green Card) application from the comfort of your home country. When you are filling up the application, you can tally the points and know for sure whether you meet the cut-off to have your application be granted - i.e. you don't need to submit if you aren't going to make it. Points are given for your age (younger is better), education (masters is better than just bachelors) and your language proficiency (in English and French), among others.

Then, you wait a while and once the application is granted, you directly get PR. You have a period of time - say 1 yr - to move to Canada, and another period within which you should find a job.

i.e. - when you apply for a job, you are already a permanent resident.

Now that's what I would call a humane immigration system that also manages to attract 'desirable' immigrants. If Canada had America's weather, I would have never moved to the US.
Can you please elaborate on what application would basically kill an SSD in a month? It is my understanding that the Crucial M500 drives support something like 72TB of writes.

Please don't take any offense, I'm just interested in how you were using the drive.
True but with a lack of certainty in demand few companies will invest to extract those reserves.
There's no strong lobby against more high-skilled immigration. But as sometimes happens in US politics, the uncontroversial reform is held hostage to the controversial one.

In particular, lobbying groups for and against having an official status for the millions of currently undocumented Mexicans in the US have opposed any immigration bill that doesn't include what they want.

Lawmaking does not allow cherry-picking bugfixes.
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I haven't used shaving cream in decades. I exclusively use a small amount of regular conditioner. I don't need a foamy mess all over my face, just need the smooth glide the conditioner offers.
Hydrogen goes boom, and ethanol is already straining the corn market to the limits. I can't see us turning every square section of arable land into ethanol production.
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@cwyers has Apple ever used its main business to support loss-making entries into other markets? Microsoft has done stuff like give away major products (e.g. Access, Internet Explorer) to kill competitors. If you have evidence Apple is doing this I'd love to see it.
(Disclosure: I work on competing NLP)

I ended up putting mine in the bedroom. The only commands that I've found weekly+ uses for are:

- Turn the lights on/off

- What time is it

And that's pretty much it. Only the latter works reliably.

I would have definitely have used the home automation more, but the Amazon recommended WeMo switch that works perfectly from the WeMo app only works half the time from Echo.

It's a fun toy though. Guests always get a kick out of "Alexa, tell me a joke" and "Alexa, play some party music", and I still enjoy the occasional futuristic feeling when I e.g. listen to something interesting on NPR in my car and have Echo take over when I get home.

However, as much as I enjoy NLP and early adoption, I really struggle to find practical, non-gimmick uses for it.
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I think this is the key difference between it and the iPhone: Siri is one of the ways that people interact with an iPhone, not the only. In fact, Siri is probably a minority means to use an iPhone. (I know it is not for me.)

But Alexa is the way people will interact with Echo, after setting it up. So it makes less sense to keep the two ideas separate.
Every case a prosecutor takes and fails to convict is an instance in which the state inflicted harm on a citizen that was later proven to have been unjustified.

Sometimes that's a risk worth taking, but not often. Acquittals are a bad thing.
GitHub issues, for me, is way better. You can opt-in and opt-out of notifications per thread, so you can drop out of something that turns into a total fracas.

I still get email notifications for things I'm subscribed to, or when I'm mentioned. It's exceptionally handy.

Subscribing to even a single mailing list tends to flood my email client with junk. Unless you go through the trouble of filtering these things, which is a total nightmare to do across multiple devices, you're just going to have to read through every single message.
You make an excellent argument for a carbon tax.
Read the article. The author mentions that he repeatedly requested his employer to sponsor his GC. They made him wait and eventually declined. He tried to change employers at that stage because he knew he needed a path to GC, but was unlucky and got screwed at that stage.

There is not much more he could have done.
Isn't that kind of an irrelevant distinction if Echo is mainly designed around that one feature/gateway to features?
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Only for some types of fossil fuels. Saudi light crude costs very little to extract -- a few dollars a barrel -- whereas shale oil has an extraction cost of around $70-$90.

You're right in that the Saudis will likely never stop extracting. But there are much larger deposits in the Americas that we quite likely will never develop if solar brings down the price of energy.
It's my cooking timer now. Shouting out "Alexa, set a timer for 9 minutes" when putting chicken on the grill is far simpler than walking all the way to the kitchen and using a food timer.
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Saying that you would prefer fusion is lovely, but it is not currently on the table.
A question for one of you build-it types.

For large scale energy storage, what's wrong with pumping water up high and then making electricity on the way down. IE, make a dam. Make electricity at night. Refill the top part during the day.
Have you tried KPLU? They are the other local NPR and are a bit better. Still have local programming, for instance. They do go to jazz during the day (though some of us think that's not a downside).
I just got my wife a Surface Pro 3 and now she doesn't use her iPad anymore. She rents movies, reads books, uses RSS via Flipboard, edits photos, installs apps and experiments with things. She also takes notes with the stylus, rips songs from YouTube and has Adblock installed in Chrome (edit: and after all that, she can throw it in the docking station connected to a 2nd large touch screen, keyboard and mouse) - things she could never do on an iPad.

So yeah, mobile is limiting but it doesn't have to be. Once you venture outside of Apple's cold embrace, many things are possible.
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