skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
awww bursting my tech loving bubble, of course this shows how much I know about television :)
Oil does not cause inflation. Genuine shortages could inch up prices, but there really are no shortages right now. The usual cause of inflation (and the only cause of hyperinflation) is always the same...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Components_of_the_United_...
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." - Milton Friedman
Either I'm stupid or Fed is amazingly stupid. I'm not sure which one is the case though I really hope it's me.

The reckless mortgage boom and the ensuing crisis was caused when the Fed cut rates to avoid recession and made borrowing so easy. Now to fix the mess caused by lowering interest rates, they're trying to lower interest rates?

If you're bleeding from your wrists because you slashed your wrist with a knife, you don't slash your arm higher up to stop the bleeding from the wrists. Well true, it does stop you from bleeding from the wrists but now you're bleeding from the upper arm! Of course, you can stop the bleeding there by slitting your biceps. Pretty soon you're going to have to cut off your arm to "stop" the bleeding.

How about they just let there be a recession so the organizations that were investing poorly lose money and go out of business while the investors who were smart and focussed stay in the game?
Don't be sorry. You were doing the porn model when these guys were reading Mark Twain, remember? :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101755
The Startup CEO School of Hard Knocks
They expect that now when everyone is scared to st, that they will start spending like crazy? Well I somehow doubt that, especially as they didn't fix any of the problems that created the recession. Those people should be sent to jail, the dollar will soon be worthless.

But if you agree with the FED, it should be easier now to get money for your startup... even though 1 million dollars will value about 1000 euros.
Great article, I love the references to Tomek and Snapdragon. Although classifying Snapdragon a rock star programmer seems belittling, considering all his video game, puzzle, and math achievements.
Wal-Mart nukes the magazine industry
21st century global trade wars, Honduran cotton sock edition
Interesting chart that shows the market may be worse off than expected:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v124/BCStud31/99problems_g...
Life after Google, with millions
> you just have to have the truth as your only motivation, and then no one can fault you

Larry Summers could give you a few pointers about that...
-1 for sex with a porn model; +1 for starting a bar. It's a wash
Travel Organizer Tripit Goes Social
Fed isn't finished by a long shot, economists say
The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer
Bear Market Looms
Toshiba Portege Goes Up Against Macbook Air
Banks can lend out 10 times their assets.
When they have to do a write-down, they are reducing their asset base (and the amount they can loan) Does reducing the interest rate help banks (because the way the Fed does it with T-bill purchases)?
IP Addresses Are Personal Data, E.U. Regulator Says
Yes, Tomek and SnapDragon are great, however the rest of the programmers mentioned (checked their websites and stuff) don't seem anything special, let alone rock star. I consider a rock star someone who can solve tough problems, not create a basic database-backed website in Rails over the weekend.
I'd be shocked if iamelgringo didn't have 50 ideas of products/solutions that would make nursing work easier for nurses, cheaper for hospitals, and safer/more consistent for patients. The only question is if he has the stomach to try to sell to the medical industry... (don't know if I would)
I'm getting tired of this suck-up ego parade about "how everyone sucks (except 'us')."
Origami Space Shuttle
Hacks are cooler when they don't cost that much, don't you think?
It is a weird list, but I'd never heard of SnapDragon and he barely seems to be mentioned on Wikipedia. It also appears that they got his name wrong (it's Kisman not Kinsman).

Anyone tell me where I can read more?
What I find most frustrating is that people don't talk about the importance of application-level creativity. It's all about implementation.

The secret is that implementation is not interesting nor rewarding -- whether it's done in Java or C or whatever. It only becomes interesting when you are innovating at the application level.

And so, CS as a whole is a depressing field. Most jobs are unrewarding since you are told what to implement.

It's sort of like being asked to translate a novel from one language to another or to improve its grammar. I would rather write my own novel.
Sweden to Study Belching Cows
Ok, call me stupid. I am a coder, not an accountant. Besides, I am Brazilian so I don't even know how american economy works exactly. Can someone explain what's this fuss is all about in good layman terms?
Reminds me of an axiom - if you're a jerk before you're rich, you'll probably be a jerk (in spite of and) if you become rich (excessive money amplifies your natural you like alcohol may strip your defenses). Someone saying 'when I'm rich, I'm going to start a charity and build a school... that's doesn't meaning much unless they already volunteer towards that end in some aspect...Empty words.
Interesting about the mention of a relationship between building Legos and CS. The correlation between the two has been a theory of mine for a while. At least I have not yet found a hacker who enjoys building legos (or did as a child) that sucks at or doesnt enjoy building software. I have a feeling the mindsets required for both are strongly correlated.
Why are tech stocks suffering while others are going up?
MSFT, GOOG, CSCO, YHOO, DELL, AAPL...All going down?

WMT, TGT, NKE, MS, LEH, CFC...All going up?

I'm not a seasoned investor in any sense, so does anyone have any insight as to why tech is suffering while everyone else is ok?
As much as I'd like to say I could do low-level CS, I'm honestly not that good at algorithms. Quick sort? I'm good at problem solving, which is what I think matters.

Before I knew better, I used to laugh at those people who found careers doing boring stuff with corporate applications (databases, etc.). The best part of my job is creating something from scratch - a blank screen of an IDE (when not fixing issues). And if we have excess energy after the workday/or on the weekend, we can always exert our creativity on open-source or personal projects. I love software development for the development aspect. How cool is it to say (or not say) to your friends that you could build a cool web startup (the tech is not that hard, except with exceptions)?
oddly enough I had never heard of tomek and snapdragon, but had heard of why_the_lucky_stiff.

This kinda reminds me of that old story about a famous doctor that could cure sick patients. When complimented on his skills, he replied that he was the least capable of his brothers who were also doctors, but less famous. When inquired why, he replied that he cured people after they got sick, where as his brothers prevented sickness in the first place, so people never know.
When I was a wee lad, I didn't know what software was, but I had a huge box of legos and an imagination. My parents would buy me the playsets, and I'd build them to get ideas about how "masters" built things and would proceed to immediately take them apart and build new things with the pieces and the knowledge. This also happens to be what good hackers do. Hackers are always reading code, reading about code and learning what the "masters" do. Then they piece together all that they learned and create something new. It's the same exact process, and that is why your theory is correct.
> It seems to me that you were making an assumption that didn't fit the parent poster's actual circumstances.

I wasn't referring to the poster's circumstances.

> All the really interesting architecture of recent decades has been done by architects who could think like artists and engineers.

Do you have a reference?
You must be a hiring manager at IBM. ;)
The best programmers I know are five to six times as productive as average programmers and are paid two to three times as much.
As much as I'd like to say I could do low-level CS, I'm honestly not that good at algorithms. Quick sort? I'm good at problem solving, which is what I think matters.

What's the difference between algorithms and problem solving?
One difference between being a rock star programmer and a rock star? Female groupies.
I figured out the site pretty quickly, but I prefer to be able to infer more from taglines, especially for companies/sites that aren't widely known.
Thanks. Rapleaf was based on rating buyers and sellers and based on email reputation. It did not provide much insight into the rating.

EndorseYou is more like Yelp for people in our mind if we were to come up with an analogy.
Blog of a guy who lost 31K yesterday betting on markets
>Before replying, please make extra sure that your argument works for women, but not children.

That's a very good point, one that I've made in the past. If you try it with a slightly less intelligent crowd than YC, you will get the following response:

"How dare you compare adult women to children?"
Great suggestions. Thanks.
It's a particularly difficult subset of problem solving.
Wow, I hadn't seen Tumblr before but they do have quite an awesome interface. If I was in any way interested in doing any blogging this looks like the site I'd use.
I never had enough legos to built anything creatively substantial. It was like writing a program in ASM with only ADD, JUMP, and LOAD.
I don't agree. I think the Fed should have lowered rates earlier. Lower rates lead to a better lending environment which leads to economic growth. If the Fed had cut more drastically earlier, we wouldn't be worried about a recession right now. And I'll bet the dollar would be even higher, since the world likes investing in currencies that are backed by a strong economy.

There is no need to go through a recession just to make the 'organizations that were investing poorly' pay. The market won't discriminate to that degree (ie, good investments that have nothing to do with housing and have wonderful balance sheets like Apple will also go down).

If you're going to use medical analogies, I'd say that avoiding a rate cut to punish the 'bad' companies is like committing suicide to alleviate an upset stomach....

Anyways, the problems weren't caused by lower rates alone - banks weren't very good at evaluating the risk profile of the people they were loaning money to. And repackaging mortgages to sell them to the 'bigger fool' gave them little incentive to be more vigilant - in fact, it rewarded aggressive lending practices .

I think lenders are now more aware of the problems with this line of thought, which is why they are so reticent to lend now.

Hopefully the Fed will cut again at their next meeting.
"implementation is not interesting nor rewarding"

I disagree, and I don't think I could write code for a living otherwise, 9-5 or startup.
I hope not. I agree that this would be a good exit for the NYT, and I love the NYT, but I don't get the feeling this is a good idea for either party. Google and the NYT are in pretty separate businesses, and I think it could be bad for Google's individual businesses if Google turned into a GM-style conglomerate.

On the other hand, if Google has some clever ideas to make the #1 American news source of the 20th century into a pioneer of news in the 21st century then I'll support it 100%. But this article is just some random guy speculating that it'd be a good fit.
I don't understand. It's right in front of them. "Make IE standards compliant, and your market share will sky rocket!". But instead of doing the obvious they brainstorm cluelessly to try to correct the mistakes the made in IE7. Their only option? To continue to be different, and make IE8 act more like IE6.

This is a nightmare.
Feature Request: Add a star to the threads link if there are replies to your comments?
The star would then be removed when you visited the threads section again.
I think they're barking up the wrong tree. Knowing a vast amount of theoretical CS knowledge might make you good at implementing the fastest possible algorithm, but more and more that sort of programming is only seen in applications where those sorts of optimizations pay off the most (video games, embedded programming, and core systems software come to mind). I think their use of the term "Software Engineer" is therefore inaccurate, they should really be saying "Computer Scientist" because I'm sure there are plenty of good programmers who have gotten good through hands-on experience writing code vs. reading books and attending lectures about theory. I'm not trying to say theory is useless in the real world, I am trying to say that theory is not a prerequisite in the real world.

But yes, I'm also completely tired of elitism. I think it's brought about by the perception that programmers have to constantly compete to be #1, and by extension, to be really worthwhile at all, and while this mentality helps motivate some people, I only see it leading to feelings of inadequacy and complaining about newbies to make oneself feel competent.
You clearly don't know what hyperinflation does to an economy. It's not like lowering rates is a silver bullet to economic growth. Lowering rates compromises long term growth for short term growth.
"Hopefully the Fed will cut again at their next meeting." ... ahhh, forget about it.
Google-funded firm launches DNA test in Europe
5 College Myths Debunked - Part I
Most CS students don't care about CS, and there's nothing
wrong with that.

Our society shouldn't look down on trade schools so much. There's too much of an importance placed on the prestige of graduating from a university, making everyone feel pressured to go to a university. These kids are wasting their time (and their parents' money) if they don't care about the material and are never going to use the material anyway. They're just there to get the rubber stamp from the university to impress their family, friends, and employers.

This emphasis on the college degree as a sign of prestige has a toxic side effect: the people who do care about the material get a diluted version of the material to better serve the university's goal of graduating as many people as possible.

I want to see more schools in the style of Digipen. Digipen offers a rigorous degree in "Real Time Interactive Simulation" -- in other words, Game Programming. They really do learn to code, and they really do learn the relevant mathematics for 3D graphics, physics simulation, etc. They probably don't sit through irrelevant courses on the theory of computation or programming language theory. Why aren't there similar programs for programming in general? You should be able to go to a trade school or university and get a solid and comprehensive degree in programming. And society should respect you for it.

Sidenote: I do think that it's possible to do this without devolving into a technology-specific curriculum. You can (and should) still teach at a conceptual level, with individual languages and APIs considered implementation details. I'm not advocating creating a degree in ".NET Programming" or "Ruby on Rails Programming" that'll be obsolete in 2 years.
Neat. This reminds me of 2000 all over again when the .com bubble burst.

Don't invest what you can't afford to lose. At the same time, there is no better teacher than reality.
I think it's more like having to fit your program within a 512 byte sector.
I don't think we're gonna see hyperinflation.

In fact, I'll bet you a million bucks we don't!
>Oil does not cause inflation
But increased demand often increases prices. You're talking about monetary inflation, but remember there's also price inflation. If some good, x, is more sought after and the supply doesn't increase, as with oil, the price will go up. Oil was $20/barrel five years ago and hit $100 recently.
And I would add Politics
Old, but good. I've done my own benchmarks when I noticed some of our users seeing 1-2 second delays on their custom regular expressions. It did the same complex queries in milliseconds.

I highly recommend this, especially for the next revisions of Perl, Python, etc, etc.
The bound on lookup from a hash table is O(n).
You're clearly assuming that lowering interest rates will cause hyperinflation. Back that up instead of talking down to me.

Explain how hyperinflation will occur when what is typically a person's most valuable asset (home) decreases in price. Explain how hyperinflation will occur if we're in for a recession and the associated job losses.

Lowering rates does not sacrifice long term growth. Rates were drastically lowered in 91 and 82 (83?) as well, and that didn't exactly negatively impact long term growth.

I'm serious, and I'd appreciate something concrete to help me understand why my viewpoint is incorrect.
I would pay for an Ad free version of Wired. Keeping my outlook unsoiled by ads is more important than reading their articles.

This move is a bit premature though, as electronic formats don't have the ummph of paper. That is distinctly unlike music.
Add a jump-if-zero instruction and that might actually be Turing complete (assuming your ADD instruction will eventually overflow).
Five whys
Semantics... but yes you're right. I think the perceptions that allow for abortion or infanticide are similar (though that might be something I'm "not allowed to say"). If it doesn't seem real to you, you can control and/or destroy it.

Zygotes killed by contraception are similar. Very few people consider a single-celled zygote a human.
New - Pastie
> you can predict start of a recession quite well.

If true, you should be a trillionaire.
The Tin Handcuffs of SEO
The wrist bleeding is a poor analogy, but you're right the Fed is pretty ckufing stupid.

The Forest Service used to do the same thing with forest fires. They were considered an anathema and each fire was put out the second it started until the fuel (dry brush, etc.) would accumulate to the point that a single match would give you an unprecedented, unnatural, monstrous firestorm.

We've become so afraid of an economic downturn that rates are slashed at the first chance, etc. At some point, it won't work anymore -- there's just too much fuel waiting to burn.

Put on your asbestos, kids. This one's going to get hot.
This is a pretty good explanation of the situation. At least as far as I can tell, being a coder who's recently tried to learn a lot about macroeconomics.

One detail that could use correction:

"The way the fed aim to control interest rates is via the amount of money that they issue into circulation."

It's kinda the opposite, actually. When you hear that the Fed's cut its interest rate, that means they've reduced what's called the Discount Rate -- the rate at which the Fed makes overnight loans to major banks. If you're a major bank, and you need some cash, you can get these overnight loans from the Fed or you can take money from other places, and your decision is probably based on whatever's cheapest. Since the Fed is always there as a last resort lender for banks, interest rates for other loans between banks and from banks to businesses will generally reflect changes to the Fed Discount rate. That's how the Fed rate has a rippling influence on liquidity supply throughout the banking industry.

Of course, the thing that's special about the Fed is that, unlike typical banks, it's not loaning out assets it has on deposit. It's creating new money when someone takes out a Fed loan, and it's destroying that money when the loan is repaid. Since this increases the money supply, it risks creating inflation if the economy isn't growing proportionately. High inflation is bad because it encourages spending your money now rather than investing it, and long-term growth depends on a lot of investments -- education, equipment, research, etc.
... an algorithm is a series of steps to solve a problem. If he is good at problem solving, he should have no problem with algorithms.

Now, I think a lot of people are bad at remembering every algorithm they are taught in a class. Unless you use it a few times, it's not likely you will be able to implement it off the top of your head, but that is what the internet and all those useful CS books are for.
The problem is that credit assets (all those mortgage-backed SIVs & CDOs) aren't trading.

So the Fed is doing what (little) it can to encourage the market in those assets to function again.

Ultimately, though, it cannot force people to take on risks they don't want, so even a large rate cut like this one may not make a difference in this climate.
Yeah, they're not setting a good precedent of respecting (often vulnerable) IP by copying YC.
Some of his (non-programming) achievements: http://www.the-elite.net/thehall/snap.htm

He has been long one of the very top TopCoder members (for which you need absolutely superior algorithm skills to be ranked that high), I think he has also won ACM finals one year. He is very well known in the problem-solving community.

Another guy I rank very highly is Steve Newman, he also had a rating over 3000 at TopCoder, but he is not competing anymore and has started a startup Writely (acquired by Google) - now Google Docs.

Yes, programming contests aren't everything -- but I can say I've learned almost everything I know about algorithms by competing there. And algorithms are important, if you are not doing just some simple web app.
By lowering the prime interest rate, they are making it easier to borrow dollars, which lowers the dollar's value, which causes price inflation.

If you have a strong dollar, you can lower rates. But the dollar is at an all-time low, so then to have a 75bps drop hit it, the result is essentially pushing it towards hyperinflation.
They seemed to rehash some well-known things about Fischer only to posit that his madness was a result of an inability to be evaluated by his peers, having no peers. Or something like that. I suspect he was just mentally ill in a conventional way. People love attributing madness to genius, though.

That said, maybe it's time to stop using chess as a measurement of human intelligence. Games like Go and contract bridge are still uncracked by AI.
I keep hearing the word "recession," but no one has exactly defined what that is, or if we're "in a recession" yet. Are there values that define when you can say we're in a recession?
As david927 pointed out, I should clarify that I was talking about price inflation.

Now that I think about it though, Dauntless' comment about hyperinflation was probably talking about what you say... monetary inflation (where monetary unit has less value)... so just ignore my comment.
You can affect a lot more people by using your wealth than you can by volunteering your labor, which is probably why people put more value on things they can do with money than things they can do with their labor.

I guess most people don't view the reward from volunteering their labor as exceeding the threshold that makes it worth their time.

Makes sense to me. I don't think you should call most people jerks just because they don't volunteer. Do you?
True, but, um, the folks described in this article seem to be doing good things, no?
Funny, but problems should be on the vertical axis (99 problems...) Something like "Type of problem" should be on the bottom.
Why not just make an NTSB for internet outages?
Right - I understand this part. But I think this is more than balanced by the positive effects of rate cuts on our economy. Rate cuts make it smarter to borrow than to save (for businesses and individuals), and the spending of this money means more growth. Economic growth is what will make the US dollar a more attractive investment.

I guess that given the huge drops in housing values, combined with the layoffs that will (and have) occurred in the banking and housing industries, I am more worried about deflation than inflation. $100 oil and a lower dollar don't matter as much as banks going under and people walking away from their houses.
I'm kinda sad you got buried for that... I laughed to no end... even if it is off topic.