skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't you find it telling that critics of Mises and Austrian economics rely on ad hominem (personal attacks), appeal to the majority, and appeal to authority as their main argument forms - all of which are fallacious?

Considering that the track record of mainstream economist predictions about the economy are horrid (just try trading their predictions), we should consider plausible, alternative points of view.
CVC 21654: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/d11/vc21654.htm
Dust Bowl
>Young people today will most likely become the first generation in US history not to surpass their parents' living standards."

I'm pretty sure that was Generation X. Myself at 35 being on the tail end of that group; we're hardly "the young".
I believe I have the answer.

There is no way to convert between energy and matter. Thinking that E=mc^2 is an "exchange rate" between energy and matter is a common misconception.

The meaning of E=mc^2 is not that you can exchange E amount of energy for mc^2 amount of mass. The meaning of E=mc^2 is that in every system, the total kinetic energy is equal to the the total mass times the speed of light squared.

The common belief is: When you cause nuclear fission in an atom, that very small mass gets converted into energy, and because the exchange ratio is c^2 (which is enormous), the lost mass turns into a huge amount of energy, which is the nuclear explosion.

This is wrong. The correct explanation is: Because of E=mc^2, we know that even in a small atom there is a huge amount of energy. That energy then gets converted using fission into a more useful form (the explosion.) The mass of the whole system stays constant through the whole process.
I'm amazed at how fast computers are. For instance I recently wrote a query on a medium sized database with several thousand records in a few tables joined together. The query took about 2 seconds, which was frustrating to me as I'm trying to get it under a second... but even 2 seconds is actually really impressive when you think about what you are doing. This machine can do more math in less than a second, then I could do with a pencil and paper over a year.
i thought it was sub-optimal when someone used the word 'boomerang' in a tweet mentioning me, and next thing i know heykiki (which i had not heard of before) @'ed me with a non-relevant link to a search results page for boomerang-throwing classes. i would not do this.
"If anything, the power of witches has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/think). Fortune Magazine tracks the life of the average Fortune 500 witch and it's been in steady decline. The dominance of any individual witch is far from permanent and made even less so with continually falling barriers to entry." ;)

Of course, you meant the grandparent post. That means that you're saying that because witchcraft was seen as a threat to society in the Early Modern period (but _not_ the Medieval period, when the Papal Inquisition regarded witchcraft as a superstition, and referred anyone who brought them a witchcraft charge to Ye Olde Psychyatryste), and the witches were not a threat (although there were real witches -- Kieckhefer, Richard, _Magic in the Middle Ages_ (200)) -- again, because the witches (and the enormous number of innocents who were falsely killed as witches) were not a threat in the 17th Century, anything that anyone sees as a threat at the present day is similarly not a threat.

The right thing to do is to ask whether this particular possible threat is in fact a threat. I agree with your conclusion -- I think that the parent post is right, corporations are no longer the cohesive bloc that they were as late as the 1980s -- but I think you're doing it a disservice by using such a weak argument for it.
Microsoft responds to Dick Brass: 'We measure our work by its broad impact'
Facebook Begins Rolling Out Latest Redesign (Pics)
How do you achieve that, realistically?

Remember, there will always be thugs, and thieves, and swindlers out there. There will be hostile nations. And there will be freeloaders; people who try to take advantage of any sort of public or semi-public works or institutions, such as roads, schools, hospitals, and the like without paying.

Do you have a (realistic, please no Ayn Rand power fantasies) proposal for dealing with all of these problems without a government? Or do you have a proposal for selecting that government fairly, justly, and well without democratic elections?
The Best Cameras for $300 or Less
Xfinity? Great, a new name's sure to solve all of Comcast's woes.
Agreed. I read "Laws dictating the minimum wage and regulating child labor play a significant role in preventing young people from finding jobs" and rolled my eyes a little.
Older brother- I have a few questions-about- Scarcity.

"why would you care about any individual woman if you have access to a lot of them?" Why not? This question makes me think of a completely faithless relationship filled with cheating and manipulation just because caring is not an issue.

I understand your social proof point, and I know quite well how you deal with everything: "I just acted naturally, without tweaking", but I find this statement misplaced, "It’s more honest, and non-manipulative, which is something I think we could all strive for." for why would one strive for non-manipulation and honestly when one can get any girl without them -when there are just so many fish in the sea.

Other than that, I enjoyed the post =]

Oh, and by the way, next time you argue one of my philosophies, I'm going to quote you. I tend to describe myself as philosophically immature for good reason.
Five Myths of HTML5 (vs. Adobe Flash)
I'm very hopeful for Letters, a project just taking off under the leadership of some pretty big names: Gruber, Rands, Brent Simmons. They're hoping to collectively create a "lean and programmable IMAP email client, with plugin and automation APIs, designed for developers and power users." While still sparse and very early-stage, their vision document is ambitious: http://pastie.org/785269 If something comes from this, it'll definitely be a step forward to modernize email clients.

Project wiki: http://letters-wiki.heroku.com/
Very helpful!

Other tools that helps find such people (influencers), if I may add, are:
Topsy, wefollow, bit.ly, mylikes!
Sportsvite tried to tackle this for physical activities but didn't really get any traction. Not sure about its numbers but I don't know anybody using it.

sidenote:
Not a good name though if you try to get into the Philippine market. The last four letters of the name refers to a part of the female anatomy in Filipino.
I think the site might be down at the moment. Here's the link to the google cached page:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ra7632stXRsJ:sfreporter...
The major public choice critique of popular democracies is that they have the incentive to pass legislation with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. This will be true as long as the people receiving concentrated benefits from legislation (corporations, unions, other interest groups) can come up with any way to influence decision makers.

The Fair Elections Now Act may make a little change at the margin, but something tells me it still won't produce 51 senators that will vote against billion dollar farm subsidies or more money for the public education monopoly. The big agricorps and unions have billions of dollars on the line. Greed will find a way.
Google Asks Spy Agency for Help With Inquiry Into Cyberattacks
Oddly enough, the post-WWII generation did much better than the present generation without being notable for risk taking.

I mean, declining education levels, deteriorating infrastructure, and many other causes might be pointed to for the decline of America. Considering that, as you say, only a minority is ever going to risk-inclined, the decline of America can't be chalked up to risk-aversion.

And also, when the health care system declines, the risk of catastrophic becomes something that an individual isn't very capable of managing.
Doesn't really matter what evangelicals say. This has been widely discussed in many Hebrew speaking universities by very able individuals.

Not sure what good it does to try to interpret the English version.
This is a collection of the author's favourite technologies/gripes, not a useful proposal. A large number of errors can be found by considering that it'll have to talk SMTP on the back end.

I'll only point to some "highlights".

OAuth isn't nearly secure enough (http://hueniverse.com/2009/04/explaining-the-oauth-session-f...) for your e-mail (which, don't forget, gives access to everything via password resets). Let's just ignore the part about third-party access.

Encoding everything as UTF-8 is nice, but breaks the first time some idiot mail client puts Shift-JIS encoded Japanese in the Subject: field. Without any charset marker, obviously. (This goes right back to the "where does the mail come from?" issue.)

IMAP has a THREAD extension (solving #4), a SEARCH extension (solving #9 and parts of others), and all sensible servers support IDLE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE). It also supports downloading MIME parts separately, solving the part of #7 that can actually be solved (again, you'll have to accept mail.)
The Bible is a collection of texts that has at times been revised and updated by committees. This kind of artefact is unremarkable.
Simple answer, no.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/06/71022

When the writer asked a vendor of eavesdropping equipment about the legality of his products, the response ...

"Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."
Yes, that extends to US-manufacturers as well as the Chinese.

If you are dealing with sensitive information then you should be doing some security audit of all the software, hardware and personnel that touch that information. This article adds nothing new and is close to being hysterical about Chinese manufacturers. I don't deal with sensitive information so I have less to worry about when it comes to where my USB key is made.
Ruby's syntax is hardly extensible at all. All you're doing is changing the default scope with instance_eval and producing objects with the right intermediate behaviors. You can make some neat little DSLs with this trick, but it's not a real extension to the language.

Whatever. The fact is that in Ruby you can easily write a DSL that looks as if it was custom rolled for the domain and task at hand. In fact, you can do it so transparently that people begin learning the DSL without learning Ruby (cf. Rails). If that doesn't mean Ruby's syntax is extensible, I don't know what does. (And, yes, I get the difference between Ruby's implementation of DSL support and True Lisp Macros; it's just unclear that the difference matters in any significant semantic way.)

I thought we were past trying to praise Lisp's features over Ruby's simply by calling Lisp's "real" (where "real" means exactly the same as Lisp's down to the backquotes and preprocessor). That argument is tautological: no language could ever possibly measure up to Lisp with that kind of criteria.

For example try making the classic anaphoric if in ruby. Can't be done without resulting to cheap excuses like "Well it's a block argument."

Raganwald et al seem to have managed just fine.

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-09-2...

And deriding the brackets is just as meaningless as someone deriding the parentheses in Lisp. Speaking of which:

It also frustrates me that people have thousands of objections to the pros people put forward for lisp, but no real objections except for an argument about parenthesis that's not even really true anymore. Prefix notion maybe? Oh no your arithmetic is slightly jumbled, everything else is exactly as you use it.

Not my issue. Heck, I like Lisp! That said, I think Lisp evangelists are failing to make a case for it over, say, Ruby for precisely the reasons discussed ad nauseam in this thread.
Regrettably, I am still not enlightened. Isn't remote meter reading a form of communication over a network?
Some people don't need evidence when their mind is already made up.
Well, San Francisco had to contract out to Korea to fix the Bay Bridge, so it's quite possible that nothing we make in America will be worth anything in forty years. But there's quite a bit of useful forty year stuff.
I've never seen someone who didn't know how to pluralize words until watching the pitch at the bottom. If I heard someone like that pitching me without a concept of "more than one" or past tense, no way I'd give them my money.

Nor would I fund a business plan with typos all through it. Clean up your act first, then pitch. At least practice. Why hasn't someone told that poor lady that she doesn't speak right? That's a red flag to me.

It's odd that a pitch about pitches would put that pitch down as an example on the page. It's horrible -- great business or not.
Libertarians have always been vehemently against not only the war in Iraq ...

Certainly not all of them though. ESR is the prototypical Libertarian in my mind, and has written about how awesome he thinks the Iraq was is/was (for example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=651).
Well, no, that's not the answer. It's not important how the mass is transformed into energy, nor how much. He's just saying that if it's possible to transform x kg of something into y energy and back again (the second part being the real challenge), could I make a machine that "creates" energy?
Dammit; how are we supposed to get people to learn FP techniques now without the "we're going to be running on a hundred medium-speed CPUs in five years" problem?
I get why Cuban feels the need to respond here but I think this is just an example of blogs playing the traffic game. Saying "Mark Cuban is a hypocrite" draws a lot more traffic than "Mark Cuban said X at random conference Y". So that's what several of the "big name" sites did.
Wish I had the cojones - here are the 3 least favourite responses I'd expect:

1. Sure, but bartenders have people skills

2. According to last month's data, our pool of potential employees has 10.5% unemployment, and you can afford to live on food stamps?

3. There are many talented and desperate ways to reject your application, but you've probably heard them all.
The idea that the patient was exhausted came to my mind as well.

Imagine being locked-in for so many years, and then suddenly being asked to imagine things. It's not as easy as it sounds: Imagining something in such a strict order over such a long period of time is actually quite exhausting.
Review HN: SyncFu - Group Buying Component
Hi everyone! I've been playing around with the idea of group purchasing, and I'd appreciate your comments.

http://www.syncfu.com

SyncFu is a tiny js extension for websites, allowing group purchasing through reservations. Reservations are paid (micropayments) via cell/cc, ensuring some reliability for sellers.

The concept is very simple, demand forecasting. Discount codes are generated for each reservation and item, so after the item meets a deadline, that can be reused within a shopping cart for instance.

To a seller, this means volume sales, while for customers - lower prices.

I see this as a versatile tool, most likely used in promotions, organizations, pre-ordering etc. Got some ideas?

It works over http/https, hosted on heroku. If you wish to test https:

https://syncfu.heroku.com
Lobbying the government is fine; lobbying is just asking the government to consider your point of view. This is what Lessig says in his essay; he never asks for restriction of speech.

Lessig isn't talking about speech, but money. Money paid directly to campaigns. Money paid to congressmen and their staff as soon as they leave congress, providing an incentive to support those interests that are most likely to hire them afterwards. This is not an issue of free speech; this is an issue of buying laws. Whether you believe in a large or a small government, if established interests can buy laws, they can control congress, and those laws that they buy aren't going to do do anything about making the government that they've paid for smaller and less effective.

How are you going to reduce the size of the government without getting rid of the influence of those who benefit directly from government largesse, or from government regulations increasing the cost of mounting effective competition?
And the speed of light isn't finite...
Odd; the last change Wayback recorded for my site was on 8/22/08 too (but no Google troubles here).
This has been widely discussed in many Hebrew speaking universities by very able individuals.

Well then. Does Genesis 2 put the creation of animals after Adam, or what?

Not sure what good it does to try to interpret the English version.

First you tell people to read the passages, then you tell them not to.
He's just saying that if it's possible to transform x kg of something into y energy

It's not possible. That's what I'm saying. That's the wrong assumption.
I started using this new "mail on the server" protocol way back in 2000, but back then we called it SSH. :)
Well, that's too bad. I would happily pay 100'000 for a machine that "produces" energy. I mean, you build a few, connect them to the grid, sell the electricity and you've got you're money back in no time.
oh, that's all?

it'll require an RFC or some other kind of standard, which will take a long time to finalize. then someone will have to write a reference spec server and client, then "real" versions in "real" languages, then get them both to the stability, security, and scalability of current imap clients and servers. then once big email providers (isps, google, etc.) start supporting it on the server end (gotta factor in all those different operating systems, authentication systems, storage systems, etc.), popular clients can support it. then work out all of the minor implementation details that some servers or clients get wrong (i think almost every smtp and pop3 server has hacks in it to support the stupid things outlook express does wrong), and then once everyone complains long enough, the iphone will finally get support for it (while a small but vocal minority shouts that android already supports it).

there is a reason why smtp, imap, pop3, dns, http, and all of the other core internet protocols are still around after 20 years and it's not because there aren't any faults in any of them.
click: http://www.syncfu.com
It's worth noting that your final concern doesn't apply to this proposed amendment. That would in no way be a financial contribution. The linked site itself asserts that restrictions on corporate speech are unnecessary. The proposal isn't intended to prevent corporate speech(although I support it doesn't exactly prohibit restricting it in the last 60 days), but rather to reduce the importance of campaign fundraising for politicians.
Foursquare move to Scala/Lift
Yes, you provide a very valid point. The website prides itself on its exclusivity. I suspect a decline in the number of unique users is something in fact desired by its users - if they feel that the website is not giving them a "special" and "secret" service they may be less inclined to use it.

On an interesting side note - the author of the article appears to be quite an active user of asmallworld.net.
Amazingly, I also went 1, 2 and 3 (and have stayed here for two years without progressing my entrepreneurial path much at all).

Am now ordering a copy of Four steps to the Epiphany; it may be the missing link between having Mixergy and Andrew Warner bookmarked, and actually using them to change my life.
Is Google’s One Trick Pony About To Be Euthanized by Microsoft?
lol, it's called thermodynamics and if you didn't take it in college you can get a textbook pretty easily and check the math yourself. you can also do simple experiments at home to confirm the basic laws of thermodynamics. there is no "Science" that only men in important looking buildings wearing lab coats do. that's what distinguishes it from faith.
This is correct if you consider "better standard of living" to mean "better standard of living relative to rest of the world". In terms of actual consumption and productivity, young people in America will have far richer lives then their parents, because the exponential increase in technology we see every day is creating wealth at a ridiculous pace. Our parents did not have iPods, cell phones, e-mail or social networks (facebook, hacker news). Try living without any of these for a day to see how "rich" your parents were at your age; who knows what will be around 20 years from now?

We take these things for granted and don't consider them "making us richer" because they are widely accessible, and people have a tendency to consider themselves rich only when they are richer then their neighbors.
If not designed very carefully, though, it can reduce the user's ability to view things as they like them. With the current status quo of mailservers not handling message threading and such, I can choose a client that handles it how I want. If the server is doing it, it had better either do it how I want it, or provide some way to customize what it's doing.

(For example, I don't like gmail's flat "conversation" view; I much prefer a "threaded conversation" view, like classic Usenet readers, or HN discussions.)
From the sound of it, everyone loves him so much it might even help him to get laid!
He could really use a professional clear plastic binder too
A republic is a kind of democracy; it is a form of representative democracy, as opposed to a direct democracy. "Democracy. n. 1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/democracy
This is a new idea. The current generation is the first generation that everybody thinks will not do as well as the preceding one.

During all of the economic problems of the past, polls consistently shown that people, as bad as things were, expected their kids to have a better financial life than their own. This is no longer true.
I'm not sure whether you're trying to be sarcastic or not.
touché!
Additionally, he is making the implicit assumption that low parental income causes low adult income, and therefore hard work doesn't matter. But that's nonsense.

It's also equally possible that some heritable (not necessarily genetic) trait causes both low parental and low child income.

One plausible alternative explanation: lazy parents tend to have lazy children and lazy people tend to be poor. This causes a correlation between parent and child income, in spite of the fact that hard work is the way out of poverty.