skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything you said about the post WW2 recovery is accurate I believe. Keynesians at the time were convinced the depression would resume once the war ended.

It is interesting to note that the modern Keynesians have turned on FDR. They always are unhappy with his trying to balance the budget after years of New Deal policy failed. They have turned on Hoover because he gave up as well after his version of the New Deal failed. They seem to forget that Keynes himself approved of what Hoover was doing. Their instance on the notion that a stimulus program is never large enough to explain their failures is a pretty old one.
gradubation...lol
Money is the original point system.
Or an hour's labor. After taxes.
More accurate is to say that Apple is the only major consumer electronics company who actually checked up on their suppliers and had the balls to publicly state the problems they found.

Every company who manufactures in East Asia is culpable for sitting on their hands about this.
I really like some of the pages they show at the end of the video. They reminded me of thesixtyone's new design.
1) wow, that is seriously awesome

2) hey, maybe we can get the music and film industry associations to mandate ECC as part of the license requirements for their next big DRM scheme
Ars Technica had an article a while ago on how to deploy standalone Python applications written using PyQt: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/guides/2009/03/how-to-dep...

That's probably your best bet for cross-platform Python applications if you need a GUI.
This is just an honest, curious question as a CS undergrad right now: what jobs are there for english majors?

As much as I might love reading and writing, and as much as I believe that a lot of literature is an overall human good, even writers & scholars need to feed and clothe themselves, right?
Reagan arrived in Washington with a full head of steam, vowing, as he put it in the major economic speech of his 1980 campaign, "to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending."...To help compensate for the tax cut, his first budget called for slashing $41.4 billion from 83 federal programs, only the first round in a planned series of cuts. And Reagan himself made known his desire to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, and to scale back what his first budget director David Stockman called the "closet socialism" of Social Security and Medicaid....At the start of his administration, with Social Security teetering on the brink of insolvency, Reagan attempted to push through immediate draconian cuts to the program. But the Senate unanimously rebuked his plan, and the GOP lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm elections, largely as a result of this overreach. The following year, Reagan made one of the greatest ideological about-faces in the history of the presidency, agreeing to a $165 billion bailout of Social Security.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0301.green.ht...
Doing your own tests is good, but I think the username/password is too simple to benefit from the madlibs style. I also thought the wording was unusual, "I'd like to use this word ...... as my password." It could be that the strange wording was what caused the drop-off.
You're grumpy.
I looked at D. But it is lacking good "batteries" -- standard libraries (Phobos? Tango?).

For a language to be useful it has to have a very good standard library. Preferable one good standard library. That is probably the main reason why Python and Java became popular.

I picked Python over Ruby because it had a better standard library. Using Java after years of using C++ with various standard and not-so-standard libraries, was a breath of fresh air.

I liked D as a language, but I didn't like its librar(y|ies) so I discarded it.
Learn how to create animated logo using Flash
In this tutorial, you will learn how to animate your logo using action script 3.0 and Flash.
Unfortunately that's yesterday's chivalry. In today's, you position yourself so that you're between the lady and the most likely location of an assailant, which is generally not the street side.
CSS Test: *7 Hack
The Nordic countries are ethnically homogeneous with rooted communities. They have high average IQs and very low crime. I'd read a lot more into that than anything to do with economic or healthcare policy. The somewhat nordic Minnesota is also fairly "happy" despite its American economic system. Maybe you should be advocating policies that steer the country to being homogeneously white, middle class, and immobile? Somehow I doubt it.
Ask HN: Best way to bring a hardware idea to production?
I have an idea for an iPad accessory. Anyone have any experience getting something from idea/mock-up to actually getting it manufactured? Aside from googling "contract manufacturing," not sure where to start.
Let's look at this rationally, despite child labour laws in western countries our governments gladly allow minors to take care of their disabled or infirm parents or siblings instead of covering the cost of care workers. This is the most ungodly form of exploitation in western countries, no child is going to refuse caring for their parents because they have no knowledge that they're unlikely to graduate high school and will have employment problems their entire life. Even if they did know, they're incapable of making that choice and will likely always choose to care for their family, but our governments have configured our labour laws to allow this to take place and readily admit they have no intention of changing the laws. Most western countries even give out awards for 'young carers'. These are children exploited 24/365, with overtime pay this work would easily be 6-figure income on minimum wage, and children as young as a few years old are regularly doing things they shouldn't have to.

Beyond that, we readily allow our children to babysit, mow the lawn, rake the leaves, and a whole host of tasks that exploit children for reduced expenses, and we readily allow this in our own homes. Yet we complain about child labour in third world countries, why? Because the poverty level is so high in these countries that the children need to work to help provide for their families.

The main, and often only cause, of child labour is parental poverty. If you solve parental poverty, you solve child labour. Once the parents can support themselves be it by better wages, unemployment or disability insurances, then those very parents will be free to exploit their own children like we do our own. Once the parents can support their families, their children will be voluntarily babysitting and doing chores.

If we don't evaluate babysitting as child exploitation in a first world country, then we have to seriously re-evaluate what child exploitation means in a third world economy. I'm certain the majority of these children are doing it exclusively to provide for their family, and forcing them out of legal employment will force them to illegal employment. This means forcing underage children into criminal organizations that will allow them to get money. For many children this will quite literally come down to a child working in a factory vs working in a gang or working as a child prostitute.

I don't particularly want children working in factories, even if the conditions are vastly better than what my great-grandfather went through. However, in my opinion, even if it prevents only a single girl from working as a prostitute, it's a moral fucking victory. However, it's likely to prevent thousands of young girls from working as prostitutes, and thousands of boys from joining gangs and dealing drugs.
"I mean, isn't it pretty arrogant to declare someone else, um, pretty arrogant? :)"

Isn't it then also pretty arrogant to mean that it is pretty arrogant to declare someone else pretty arrogant? ;)
The madlibs form has a "sign in as guest" link, while the original sign-in form does not. The article doesn't specify whether a guest sign-in is counted as a conversion or not.
See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1155960 for a less sensational point of view...
And on the other side:

Bob: Heya Tom, it's Bob from the office down the hall! Good to see you, buddy... how've ya been? Look at my awesome iPhone. It can read email and stream Pandora at the same time.

Tom: Uh, no it can't.

Bob: Yeah, well look at this boob app.

Tom: Again, not possible.

Bob: Oh yeah. Because of Apple's strange policies towards the app store, I can't run two applications at once or make my own decisions on what content I find appropriate. And what is and is not appropriate can change without any advanced notice to me, meaning that if an inappropriate app has a bug in it, the developer will never be allowed to fix it for me.

Tom: So why did you buy that piece of junk again?

Bob: Because it was cheaper than the Nexus One.

Tom: You get what you pay for.

Being a playwright is fun.
I agree. There are a lot of things just simply wrong in the Ruby documentation but it's such a hassle to patch it that I haven't put in the effort to fix them. :(
It would probably be several paragraphs long, at the shortest. Depending on accent and cultural upbringing, a person varies how they'd pronounce a phoneme depending on nearby sounds, words, or even sentences.
Your version of the madlibs form also looks much worse than your usual signup form. I don't know how much that affects user signup percentage, but personally I'd have an easier time trusting your standard form because if it's design, not because of the "style"
Debian breaks Suhosin Security Feature
Unless you plan on teaching the subject, a lot of places don't care what your major was, so long as you have the piece of paper that says you graduated. My dad is a Mech. E. with a music education degree, for example. He still makes music, and knows music theory better than anyone I know. A major in English would likely be valuable in almost any field, so long as you could use it to play up your communications skills. Grammar, written and verbal communication are skills that are often found lacking in today's technical work force.
Running tests is definitely good advice. But execution definitely matters in these things. Just looking at the two forms tested side by side, the original looks more well spaced out and balanced. The madlibs has the two text fields actually touching. Compare that to the original madlibs form (http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1007) and you'll see that the original madlibs form just looks a lot better.
No, because I know absolutely nothing about Haskell. I do know that if there was a silver-bullet language that was 100% "secure", everyone would be using it.

This attack is x86 machine-code-native, so Haskell in a VM is not vulnerable to the exact same problems, but to assume it's completely invulnerable is myopic.
P.S. If you have good eyes you’ll spot the other A/B test ongoing on this page. I’m using the traditional way of mitigating cross-test interaction… ignoring the possibility of it

Both forms have a 50/50 chance of having the guest link on them, and guests don't count as trial conversions (because I have several months of stats that suggests they give me money infrequently and they cause more support issues than all trialers and paying customers put together). The thrust of that A/B test is to see whether aggregate sales go down if the guests option is taken away. If they don't, I will drop it.
If coal supply was really becoming limited you would see most extraction locations receiving huge profit as they reduce supply just like oil due to lack of completion. (It's a simple question of discounted future cash flows and competition.) However, the price of coal is still dominated by the cost of extraction and shipment across the board.

Fossil fuels are really mindbogglingly cheap, but you still see completion such as: Ethanol fuel in Brazil, nuclear power France, and by looking at the subsidies it takes to adopt wind power you can see how close it is to coal.
Al Gore: We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
Isn't it a bit early to call it a fad? I only saw one website try this (the one you gave the link to). Perhaps I missed some, but still...
how does a 'couple hundred billion' = nearly free energy. It clearly isn't nearly free if you are paying a couple hundred billion.
If US gdp is 14 trillion, a few hundred billion for access to energy is a fairly significant number.
Map Reduce for Idiots (by Pete Warden)
Nordic countries tend to be happier

It's all a ruse. The Nordics simply have deep-rooted cultural proclivities to lie about how happy they are.
No. You Can’t Pick My Brain.
If you haven't worked in government contracting read this:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/who-killed-the-v...
Can all designers exit the room for a moment?

I am skeptical that "looks pretty" drives conversions. I think customers pretty much don't care, based on "ugly" versions winning in many, many of my tests. Remember: the customer doesn't get to see the pretty alternative laid out side by side with the ugly alternative.

Example: form submit buttons in your Internet browser of choice look fairly pretty, right? (Or at least comfortingly familiar.) I would not describe http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/bcc.net/next-step.png as pretty -- it is what I could throw together in ten minutes. But it clocks "pretty" buttons with the same text on it.

You're welcome to try it yourself if you think pixel-perfect alignment will make a difference. Please post results.
Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical
Let's say the energy cost of building a new bridge is $500,000 worth of hydrocarbons. Now, let's compare that to non-hydrocarbon energy sources. Historically, this might be steam from burning wood, or a team of mules. What I am saying is that $500,000 worth of wood or mules is so much less energy than $500,000 worth of oil, that the oil is nearly free in comparison.

Think about it: what other fuel is just sitting around, storing millions of years of solar energy, and waiting to be extracted and burned???

This is a key economic concept that must be understood when discussing oil.
I believe the median applicant is now a less risk-taking sort of person, because YC now seems a lot less risky of an option.

It may well be that the first cohort will be the most successful, but I believe that was a fluke due to small sample size.
I don't follow your line about huge profits. The simple fact is coal, when measured in terms of energy content, is getting scarcer and more expensive.

You can't look at state supported industries and come to any meaningful conclusions. All those examples have government driving them. Nuclear fission power would not even exist without government: the plants and businesses are uninsurable in the free market. No private insurance company to date has concluded the lifetime risks of a nuclear power plant are acceptably quantifiable.
We're not that organized. It's all based on the individuals. E.g. "They'll probably bail and go back to college in the fall, but they seem really smart, so let's risk it."
The Value of Venture Capital
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http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/al_gore_gets_a_po...

A great visual at the end of this article.
I buy a new computer ohhh every 3-5 years or so. They typically cost about $2000. I have no problem whatsoever paying more if I can help ensure the human beings that built it are treated humanely and have acceptable working conditions. Is it really worth it?
It would be interesting to see what a comparison of the obfuscation techniques of Continuum, Kazaa, and Skype would look like.
IMO, an achievement is "real" when your actions are what separates a reasonable chance of failure and success. Thus the classic MMO grind fest, or a slot machine could be called fake achievements, but most PVP kills are actually fairly complex achievements.
I get asked a lot to chat with people about their new payments startup. I'm generally interested in new ideas, so I am definitely interested. But the conversation won't last too long unless there is genuine innovation there (which isn't usually the case for them - yet), or the company understands that it needs to be mutually beneficial.

Some folks just don't know better. Others basically want every piece of data from Tipjoy for free. The former is excusable, and the latter is maddening.

I try to get pretty quickly and transparently to talk about becoming an advisor, but I don't think I've found my groove yet.
In particular, my impression is that outside of technical majors (CS, math, sciences, and engineering) the classic liberal-arts degrees can often be more valuable than one tied to the particular job. I've heard lots of places hiring for nominally "business" type jobs actually skeptical of people with BAs in Business, for example.
Didn't the same thing happen with the issue of leaving one's laptop plugged in?
The VASIMR technology is quite frankly amazing. The fuel efficiency is amazing, a single engine is expected to be capable of station keeping the ISS while vastly reducing the expenses and beyond Mars VASIMR engines hold a real possibility for manned exploration of the outer solar system.

VASIMR is to space what the Internal Combustion Engine has been to land. Quite literally it only takes minor modifications to the VASIMR design to attain a faster engine or a stronger engine for a variety of tasks.

In the future these engines will be being used for everything from travel between planets, to moving asteroids for mining. They're really quite incredible.
It's obvious government spending had to decrease and that's what should happen after the country is somewhat back on track and growing. But did WWII and (thus deficit spending) not get us out of the great depression? It's obvious the quality of life wasn't great when you had people forgoing resources to fund an important war.

The growth after the great depression came as a result of the Cold War when the US started spending on nuclear technology, missile defense, what have you. The US also invested on its citizens and education with the GI Bill among others, etc. This does not refute my point--and that is, to clarify, perhaps, that the problem isn't government spending, it's what it gets spent on.

Only the market can evaluate the true cost of things? This assumes markets have all the information or that someone is willing to invest the money to obtain it--otherwise you have an inefficient market. Here's where for the good of all, some central body like a government, can put in the cost to find out or to avoid a market collapse. For example, what would have been the cost of letting AIG and major banks fail? The markets wouldn't care since every individual would be concerned with their losses in the panic. That is, the markets aren't always as rational as people make them out to be--you know this. To argue otherwise is as idealistic as well, you name it. In fact, your last point validates this point. The cost of not passing TARP and the Recovery act would have been passed on to us--and some argue, and I believe, such cost would be greater... also, assuming you can control spending when the country is back on track (due to debt). So either way, we're paying... might as well, then, ensure our financial system is stable and that we can continue to invest in education and green technology instead of risking an entire system collapse as we ensure our economy grows.

When interest rates are at 0% and the country isn't growing, something has to give. Cutting government spending is stupid. If you're running a business how's a tax break going to help you? Will you keep people employed? Not very likely. So as employment continues to rise, more people freak out, and more people are let go. Is that the kind of downard spiral we want? This is when a government needs to step in and say, no.. we're keeping these jobs, we're creating some here, otherwise, who's going to take the risk? There's a psychology to this, I think, that often gets lost in "market analysis." People who are uncertain about the economy will stop spending, so how do you promote spending? By giving them a few hundred dollars without ensuring that their job isn't going to be there a year or two from now?
http://www.picloud.com/pyapi/packages/weblist/python/
Rogers/Fido up here in Canada doesn't charge extra for tethering. Mind you, I don't have an unlimited data plan, so I guess they don't care how I use my bandwidth since I'm paying for it.
That would explain why the nordic populations in the upper mid-west are similarly "happy"...
Could There Have Been Venture Capitalists In The Garden of Eden?
Thomas, have you seen or heard of any real life exploits utilizing return oriented programming? Its a really really cool idea, but it seems that once you've got memory corruption, there are easier ways to get arbitrary code execution than return oriented programming.
I am a native English speaker and an American. I would never major in English because the grades are too subjective. I would not want to put my future outside of my own hands.

I prefer my grades to be based on quantifiable data, not subjective gobbledy-gook.
I usually flag all of the climate change stuff here, but this one got an upvote.

While I've not been excited about Kerry, Hilary or Obama, every time I read something from Gore, I feel like the US missed out on being able to count him among its presidents. This article exemplifies why: he's taken an issue that is central to our times and approaching it with reason and passion.
Nicole's points seem to waver between / be both:

- Don't give ideas away, they're valuable, and your creative skills should be as valued as much as a lawyer's legal skills.

and

- Giving ideas to people when they're not going to give you anything if they do well with them is letting yourself be taken advantage of.

I'll leave the former to others, but I think the latter, especially, really misses the point that getting compensation isn't the only way to benefit from helping people. Nicole talks about the tendency of women "(and compassionate people)" to like to help, but not value their help enough to ask for compensation.

I think a related tendency, especially when women feel that they have to project an image of being ultra-capable / self-sufficient within the startup world, is to not ask for others to give / reciprocate favors. It's not a bad thing to ask for people you've helped in the past to help you.
I'm not sure there's a right answer on the whole. I wouldn't let some for-profit startup take up lots of my time on what amounts to free consulting, but you can err the other way easily. A lot of people overvalue their ideas, and while some are really a killer idea that maybe they should keep to themselves, I think on the whole "ideas are cheap". There are thousands of these idea-popcorn-machines. Hundreds of them are even bloggers, giving those ideas away for free--- and despite giving them away to anyone, most still won't pan out.

It's not quite the same thing, but it's a common bit of advice given to junior faculty to basically give away as many ideas as possible. People sometimes think they have one or two great ideas that will make their career, but if you're at all plugged in you soon have literally hundreds of potentially great ideas, and the bottleneck is doing the work to see if they pan out. Nobody is going to pay you just for the raw ideas; it actually goes the other way, you have to pay people to try them out (which is why postdocs and research scientists get paid).