skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They shouldn't keep the money, they should return the excess back to the taxpayers or they should convert it into on-balance-sheet debt to reflect the fact that an IOU to yourself does not really represent an asset.

Treasury debt is certainly the safest interest-bearing investment on the planet from the perspective that if the instrument says you will get X number of dollars every few months and Y dollars at maturity, then that is exactly what will happen. The problem comes in due to the fact that the Fed has a great deal of control over the real value of those future dollars and they might not be worth as much as you hoped when you eventually receive them. When it comes right down to it, the people in charge when the debt gets too big to manage would have to be galactically stupid to choose explicit default/repudiation over inflation.

Given that the government must already borrow from sources outside the Social Security trust fund in order to meet its expenses, what do you think will happen when social security outflows exceed payroll tax inflows? The following answers seem to cover all cases as far as I can tell:
1. Raise payroll taxes to cover the excess.
2. Raise general taxes and use the extra money to redeem the special treasury bonds from the trust fund.
3. Cut spending in the rest of the government and use the excess to redeem trust fund bonds.
4. Borrow money from external sources to redeem trust fund bonds.
5. Cut benefits down to a level at which they are covered by payroll tax inflows.

Any way you slice it, the trust fund is an accounting fiction and eventually taxes will need to be raised, more money borrowed, or spending or benefits cut.
Good find; I'm sure everyone here either likes the Big Lebowski, likes criticizing post-modernist academic writing, or both.
so, if i understand right, you think it's better to implement it as a separate language to stop people doing things that you don't think they should do, or think they don't need?

apart from stopping people from doing things, are there any what you might call "positive" reasons - advantages - to doing it your way?
This has to be influenced by The Wire.

CSI teaches murders how to not get caught. The Wire shows how drugs can be run like a serious business.

In the show the top dealers from all the different neighbourhoods meet up in hotel conference rooms to organize deals and prevent turf wars.
Using a API means you are working for whomever is on the other side. Ebay ran with the store concept and profited by it. YouTube should create a store "model" to license to share profits from use of any API. Large companies usually cut their own throat by thinking they can out maneuver smaller companies.
AOL may be thought of as a loser, insofar as their business model no longer continues to be profitable. But they brought millions of people onto the Internet, myself included, and even if those users no longer use AOL, nothing can take that away. We'll always have Town Square 349.
"The French may feel relatively less pain during recessions, but that’s only because they don't have it so great normally. The rigid labour market results in high rates of unemployment."

That's an important point often forgotten in discussions of the current worldwide recession.
I found this essay of the author's to be more interesting: The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm (http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html). In it he discusses how it's no longer high tax/high services vs. low tax/low services.
I think it takes some getting used to but with a touch of practice the swipe can be done easily. I am sure if you have a very slick surface though the mouse will move no matter what. I really like the mouse for it's scrolling. Especially the side to side movements and the weighted scroll. I dislike not having a middle click and the right and left click are dependent on one another. I need the right and left click to be independent for rocker gestures.
I thought the NYT article wasn't very interesting, so I won't upvote the OP, but I must point out that I'm part of the Lebowski cult and I appreciate the intend in posting this.
Announcing the 2010 Singularity Institute Research Challenge ($100k matching)
California seems to be incapable of living within its means. Whatever money it sends to D.C. is simply not germane to the question of it balancing its budget.
Browsers care about how html looks. We should think of html and css as the assembly language--generated by some server-side process.
You're right that there needs to be a distinction between community projects and loose pieces of code. They're completely different in nature, and that's why it's so important to make clear which is which.
If you say you'll help someone out, then you better show up. Otherwise, you'll leave the other guy worse off than if you hadn't offered to help in the first place.

So, yes, it is better to release nothing than something buggy and unsupported. The former doesn't waste everyone's time pretending to be a solution.
I would say failed bureaucracy, not failed state.
I have been reading tmonews for a while, you should probably take this with a grain of salt.
Both also. I find it quick and easy to develop with.
Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?
If your code is meant to be an experiment, a headstart for someone else to build on, then that needs to be explicit. There's enough open source code out there. The problem is quality. All projects that are making an impact are doing so because they are actively backed and developed.

It's great that this guy works on JQuery, but I think the minimum that should be expected is to properly tie up loose ends: Fix broken links, make sure it's clearly stated that the code in question is considered done (feature complete, unmaintained, etc). Officially hand it off to someone else if possible.
Why Adobe’s mobile strategy is fundamentally flawed
Politicians in charge of employees? The possible abuses boggle the mind
On the same topic, this response is pretty good: http://flashmobile.scottjanousek.com/2009/12/26/commentary-o...
http://www.tubemogul.com/
I think "Getting Real"(http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php) is an excellent book.

I can't remember another one, but as someone previously said, articles, posts and discussions are better resources of information about it.
This reminds me simultaneously of Dr. Dre ("The Day the Niggaz Took Over" from The Chronic [1]) and a recent report stating that the average Afghan makes more money siding with the Taliban than they do with the U.S.-backed Karzai government [2].

[1] http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

[2] http://washingtonindependent.com/70114/we-pay-afghan-soldier...
What the article says is TiO (a molecule aka superatom) mimics Ni (an atom). The group is trying to add another layer of molecules (superatoms) over the 2D periodic table.

Disclosure: I was a graduate student of Dr. Castleman.
I think this is about as much of a third rail as exists in human civilization. The corporations would never allow us to outlaw corporate personhood.
Http://www.mbt-shoes-sale.com/mbtmwalkred-p-9637.html
John Skeet (the author) has an impressive array of knowledge. Anyone working with C# coudld benefit from reading through his site.

(I just learnt something from #1. I assumed inerhited members were treated as first class members of the class. Apparently not!)
Kim Peek, Inspiration for ‘Rain Man,’ Dies at 58
The superatoms share all the same properties than the original atom? I've plutonium & uranium in mind...
Totally pwned by the money quote:

He and his co-editor "immediately cut out all the papers celebrating the Dude as a hippie hero in a postmodern landscape." That’s a sober choice. Admirers of the Dude are already dangerously close to becoming Internet-age versions of Parrotheads, the weekend-warrior Jimmy Buffett fans who tip back margaritas -- and embarrass their children -- while wearing flip-flops, board shorts, Hawaiian shirts and coconut bras.
The Dude doesn't not care. The Dude abides. There is a world of difference.
The problem the author finds with pure functional programming is very well known and is one reason people never use a pure functional language, sticking instead to practical functional languages such as Erlang (that has processes), ML dialects (that have references), Haskell (that has IORefs and unsafePerformIO), Scheme and Common Lisp (that have full support for imperative programming), Clojure (that has Vars, Refs, Agents and Atoms), etc.

I think the culture surrounding each of those languages does look down on using the mutation features (and for good reasons), but it's not like the message is "never use them", but rather "don't use them if you don't have to".

Maybe the fact that he doesn't emphasize that his gripe is with pure functional programming and calls it plain "functional programming" is a little misleading.
The value it provides to users is immaterial. It uses Google's finite, expensive bandwidth resources without providing any form of compensation. This is very different from what Google does, which is to rehost snippets and direct traffic to content providers. They do not use the content providers' finite resources, and they do compensate providers by sending traffic.

There's nothing wrong with what Toltol is doing as long as Google allows it. But the TOS is very much like a robots.txt file. To complain about a website roboting you out when your usage is detrimental (or at any other time, for that matter) is just silly. Using a site does not create an obligation where that site's maintainers must continue to provide you service. They are more than justified to cut you off for any reason or no reason at all.
I think when Adobe Flash Builder can compile to native iPhone and utilize true iPhone UIKit (UITableView, UITabBar)so that you can't tell the iPhone app was written in ActionScript 3 - that will allow Adobe to at least have a foothold for it's core customer base, in the form of enterprise / business iPhone apps.

Slider is a step in the right direction.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/mobile/
I live in a city with extremely tough anti-smoking laws. I came here from a city where smoking indoors was also illegal, but many bars found ways around it or disobeyed the law.

I think it's more fair for the employees, which is why I support it; I don't find cigarettes to smell particularly bad. The only places where I miss it are little dives where cigarettes smell nicer than stale beer.

Anyway, to each his own. I do think smokers should be courteous in public even if most people don't find the smell offensive; waving a flaming stick around carelessly in a crowded place is dangerous.
his points are definitely commendable, but i'm wondering how he can more effectively convey them to a wider (read: low-brow) audience. WSJ readers are (hopefully) not the same people leaving abusive remarks on youtube or 4chan comments :)
i dont really care what hn is about: i found it cute and pointless. maybe thats what the discussions on hn's purpose really are about? whether a story is 'important', 'informative', or purely entertaining. i see no reason not to include all of them. but perhaps a way to separate them would allow some to focus on the generic category they prefer. just my two cents.
I've read the guidelines before. It really is too bad there's nothing about intellectual dishonesty on there.
It's really great to see 2 projects come together like this. Throwing up your hands in frustration and just designing a new web framework seems to be the way things are done these days. Actually working together to improve something that is already deployed and popular is harder, but the pay off is going to be great from the look of it. Major kudos to everyone involved.
Libcpu
I think that puzzle is dumb because it's a gimmick, not anything to do with the geometry of the situation.
The best budgetary policy is to run a deficit during recessions. The fact that this is difficult in is a mistake.

If you want trust the citizen voters (and I don't) I would suggest an independent California Reserve should set property and income tax rates based on spending and the economic cycle.
No.

But since most chemical properties of an atom are set by the outer valence shell, there is a good chance that the superatom will share many chemical properties with the mimiced atom.
Why is balancing a budget important? If it is, then why focus on one state's budget when the Federal deficit is massive and orders of magnitude more costly to the nation (and to California) than California's own state budget issues?

Also, if even 10% of the money sent to DC were used to cover CA's expenses, there would be no budget problem.
A failed state that would be the world's 8th biggest economy if it were its own country..
Yes - given a choice between dealing with idiots who are damned and determined to get on an airplane with me with PETN stitched into their underwear and a liquid detonator, I'll take the bodyscan. Particularly as it actually makes things more convenient than the time-consuming pat-down that you need to go through now when flying into the US.

#1 - that's not to say that, for the privacy sensitive individuals, appropriate safeguards should not be taken. Penalties against displaying the information, no ability to save it, faces blurred. These types of scans can be made as secure as medical records - and those are far more sensitive than a faceless body-scan.

#2 - I'm interested in hearing about alternative ways to defend against the PETN in the underwear + Liquid Detonator. It seems to me to be the most straightforward attack vector possible on an airplane right now. I recognize we can't forsake all our privacy for a small amount of security, but neither can we forsake all our security for a small amount of privacy.

#3 - for those really opposed to the bodyscan, they can always subject themselves to a full pat-down. That has always seemed more intrusive to me, and less effective as well - as they sensitive areas (Groin, Chest) are never searched and would seem to me to be ideal locations for explosives.

#4 - I really don't consider Body Scans to be much of a privacy issue - Any nudist or burning man attendee will tell you that real-actual-nudity, even in person, really loses any excitement for the viewer after being in its presence for about 90 seconds. The people working a shift scanning will not be getting any visceral enjoyment from eyeballing scan after scan. (Particularly as they will probably be monitoring several dozen scanners over all the terminals simultaneously)

#5 This is all moot anyways - BodyScanning/X-Ray scanning is going to be a prime candidate for automation. I'm guessing within five-seven years, no human alive will be as effective at spotting issues on a Luggage X-Ray/Body scan as software, and so you will basically either sail on through under the observation of software (which only the most extreme privacy advocates would have an issue with), or be flagged and subjected to a pat-down/luggage search.
Short: Just another phone.
It's at least somewhat germane. California is, I believe, one of many states that sends more to the federal gov't in taxes than its citizens receive in federal benefits. If some of that federal money were turned back to the state, they'd be able to implement their progressive policies without exceeding their budget or raising taxes. Alternatively, if the fed spent more on progressive stuff instead of elective foreign wars, California could scale back their own spending on similar programs and once again be within budget while still retaining the progressive policies they seem to desire.
INDoNeSiaN DeFaCeR aRCHiVes
IM NEWBIE
Perhaps these street gangs have learned from their drug suppliers?

When drug cartel planes out of Colombia started getting shot down as a result of anti-drug operations, the cartels started pooling cocaine shipments together in airplanes as a means of sharing the risk amongst each other.
I wonder how they chose $1. This seems more valuable than that.
Not in the US so I don't really know how the plans are like but this seems expensive:
"- If you want it subsidized, you’ll have to sign up for a 2 year mandatory contract
- There’s only one rate plan: $39.99 Even More + Text + Web for $79.99 total". It would seem that if you want the phone that badly it would be cheaper just to cough up the $530.

Incidentally, given that we sort of know what the pricing is (I suppose they could be aggressive about dropping the price later), what's the strategy here for Google? Just worried about cannibalizing sales of other firms that use Android? Why even bother putting out their own phone or being so involved with Motorola in the development of the iDroid?
The Simpsons Seasons 1-20 DVD Boxset
Great app, very useful for managing Heroku deployments.
That doesn't sound like a great idea. If you're one of 10 cartels, it seems like your chances of being shot down are 1/10. (Not really, but let's just posit that the gov't can shoot down one plane a day.) If you pool everything together on one plane, suddenly your odds of making some deer and coyotes very jittery shoot up by 10.
Fair enough. I certainly don't disagree; I was just interested in the reasoning behind it.
Yeah, if these docs are true, I'm sticking with Verizon and my BlackBerry; not that I have any special love for either one of them. $80/mo? That's what I pay Verizon. $180 for a subsidized, non-Apple smartphone? Keep your ten percent.

There goes my post-christmas geek present to myself. Without the massive cost savings that had been rumored, I have zero incentive to pay out of my Verizon contract.
PayPal Ripe For A Fall; Here's How To Topple Them
PayPal is, and long has been, the 800-pound gorilla of sending money online. This is actually surprising when you consider that there is plenty of competition and PayPal's customer management is quite poor.

In the last 36 months, the BBB (Better Business Bureau) has received 7236 complaints related to PayPal (http://sanjose.bbb.org/Business-Report/PayPal-Inc-210387). More than half of these (3822 complaints), PayPal resolved by agreeing to live up to their contact. Approximately 15% (1168) are listed on the BBB site as "Unassigned", so the resolution is unclear. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of Americans who feel wronged by a company do not make a complaint to the BBB and it is very unlikely that anyone outside the USA would do so, this is a bad showing indeed.

The customers in question would probably say that that first 50% had a positive outcome--after all, they got what they wanted--but these numbers actually show a remarkably poor track record, as a company should not need to be prodded in order to live up to its own TOS.

There is plenty of competition--Google Checkout, Obopay, etc. The main stumbling block seems to be that both sender and recipient must be signed up for whatever service is going to exchange the money.

Better would be a company where only the sender needs to be signed up. The recipient would be specified via a mobile phone number and the money would be sent as a credit on their phone bill.

Best would be if neither party needed to be signed up, and the whole deal could be dealt with via mobile--I SMS the service in question, they bill my carrier (who passes the charge back to me) and send the money to the recipient's carrier (who credits it to their account).

Hopefully, someone will take that and run with it, because I'm sick of dealing with PayPal.
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When smoking a cigar or pipe most smokers don't inhale deeply like one does with a cigarette. There are still health risks for heavy cigar smokers like mouth cancer, IIRC.
It's not hard for a relatively big name event to sell out of $500-$1,000 tickets. Many companies buy tickets for employees, to either learn or to hawk their product.
I find these numbers to be more meaningful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_...
Micro electronic cigarette
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Exactly what I did to get my G1 here in Australia. Bought it outright for around $600 and then went on a $5/month plan with calls and data that are cheap enough ($15/GB).

As far as I can see, buying outright always works out cheaper than a hefty plan with all the trimmings included
You don't know what's an experiment and what's a massively successful library until you release it. JQuery was initially intended to be the experiment; presumably he had other projects he was working on at the time that were supposed to be his "real" work.

There're a bunch of counterexamples to the "all projects that are making an impact are doing so because they are actively backed and developed." Markdown is one obvious one. The Internet Explorer team was disbanded from 2002-2005, even though it was the most popular browser on the market. Several Google projects that are used by millions of people a day are completely de-staffed.

And there are many more projects that are actively backed and developed and yet are not making an impact. We'd be much better off if their developers quit what they were doing and found something else to do.
How about this one:

int i = 1;
Object.ReferenceEquals(i, i);

What does it return?
I was surprised to find that pg also says "where there's muck there's brass" http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html, as does Joel.
Great story. A real life 'To Catch a Thief'. To relate it to HN, I think it shows the power of dominating a niche by obsessive attention to not just planning but execution.

"He leaned back and sighed. I began to think that perhaps it wasn't the stealing that was the thrill for Nordahl so much as the escaping. He said, "If you were being chased by a bear, your adrenaline's going to be pumping, you know what I mean? Later, you might not really say, 'Gee, that was fun.' But, at the same time, if nothing else really was going on, it might have added flavor to the day. As long as you got away from the bear. But, of course, if you got caught by the bear, you know, it's another story."
Okay, I'm curious. How do you defend an airplane from someone with PETN stiched into their underwear carrying a liquid detonator in their (small) shampoo bottle without a Body Scan or Pat Down?

This attacker screwed up and got tackled before the detonator was able to set off the PETN - the next one will likely be smart enough to set off a bomb in the bathroom.

I actually am very interested in hearing what alternative approaches there are out there.