skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article ignores the other possibility, which I believe to be the only real solution: default on the debt, wiping out shareholders where appropriate, convert debt to equity, thereby reducing systemic debt. Bondholders will have to take a haircut, and the sooner the better.

This would result in a sharp GDP contraction for a relatively short period, a sharp hike in unemployment, but then growth would resume fairly quickly, once the realization sinks in that we are not dead after all.

Government can do two things to make this process faster: 1) make the justice system work faster in resolving the various disputes that will inevitably arise in imposing hair-cuts on bondholders 2) Make sure no one starves, and no one freezes. These things it can do.

The present course of cutting-debt-by-borrowing has a clear destination: zombiehood without an exit strategy. Look at Japan for the best illustration of this. It is becoming increasingly clear that Japan is not going to resolve its problems without a major crisis. It should have taken that sharp GDP contraction in 1991 instead.
I use Roboform--it's cross platform/cross browser. Works well. Not free, however, if you have a lot of passwords (most geeks will cross into their paid territory pretty fast.)
Ask HN: Your thoughts on Instapaper buying Xmarks? 
I think the two go together like pb&j. It's sad to see Xmarks go, but couldn't Marco Arment possibly be interested? I think Xmarks could be combined with Instapaper and add value to both!
Defaulting on the Federal debt to China could have a wee bit of a repercussion.
The Value of a Piece of Facebook
I had a terrible experience years back (no longer with them now). If it works, it works well, but when it's down, it goes down for almost 24 hours!
"You can only read one book at once"

Well, yes, I can really only hold one book and give it my eyeballs at any given moment, but I;m usually working my through several books over any given time span.

Most of my serious reading is happening in the bathroom, and I have five different books in there. Oh, and I usually my G1 with me as well (with assorted PDFs on board).

Having a choice of what to read at any given moment is a Good Thing. If nothing else, having a Kindle might save some trouble in deciding what books to pack for a trip.
I'm unsure why you think the reserve fraction must inevitably tend towards zero.

You seem oblivious to the fact that current proposals (known as Basel III, after the city in Switzerland) requires banks to raise their tier 1 capital ratios, ie reduce their capacity for leverage. Currently central banks are acting as lenders of last resort, but once healthy growth resumes they will gradually sterilize that funding. That will be a limiting factor on growth, but one that seems preferable to a total credit freeze.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-23/ubs-credit-suisse-m...
Check out the folks at Storm on Demand and Liquid Web. They fit your budget range and provide fully managed hosting. I've very happy with them.
Used code: E34MAYXLAYFY

I'm on OS4.2 just as a note. When the app first loaded, the welcome webpage just showed up as a blank screen.

It might be nice if the note when selected (in landscape) was a little larger, a la the compose mail window in mail.

As fredleblanc said a syncing ability might be nice (maybe dropbox).

A small nitpick, add a little more space when looking at the note between the actions button and the trashcan, they're just slightly too close for my fingers when I'm not paying attention.

Overall looks good.
VC-Backed Entrepreneurs Say It’s All About the Chemistry
Interesting list. I do want to highlight this one:

Moving is a pain in the ass

It's worse than that, at some point the physical books actually affect your willingness to move - which is just wrong, books are mean to be empowering not restrictive.

Of your six down sides, at least four of them (1, 2, 3 and 6) are technological issues that I can only believe will be solved soon - it's kinda like calling a circa 1995 PDA "clunky". Sure it was, but one day the iPhone came along.

As to 4 (DRM) - I understand and espouse all the arguments, but I can't help looking at my attitude to music. 10 years ago I bought music and DRM issues really vexed me. Now I subscribe to Pandora and.... I just can't quite care as much. It's not that I don't have the same issues with DRM as I did, it's just that in a subscription model they don't get in your way. I look at Netflix and Spotify and wonder how long before the same service exists for books (yes I know it's called "a library", you know what I mean).

Can't help you with 5 - it turned out not to be a problem for me.

Disclaimer: happy e-book convert (I have a nook)
History of the Transistor
Yeah - thanks for pointing that out. It's not a true bidirectional sync though, like xmarks, right?
Now the cat's out of the bag I can share what I know. Most of this work is happening in Amazon's new Irvine, CA location (A2Z Development Center, Inc.). It started up about three months ago and I believe they're still looking for developers if anyone's interested (be prepared to work crazy hours!).

http://www.indeed.com/q-Amazon.com-l-Irvine,-CA-jobs.html
Ask HN: What's Java used for?
I just start learning it in school. We're making a game.

What can it be used for on the web, though? What big companies use it primarily?
The reason BlackBerries have decent battery life is the RIM back-end - they had true push email long before anyone else. So BBs don't have to poll the network, wasting power on a 3G connection.
But it's hardly new tech. How many event-loop-based systems are there? Erlang, Tcl, K, Twisted, Tornado, Eventmachine, etc.
Wolf didn't ignore default:

There are three mechanisms: sale; bankruptcy; and frugality. ... The second approach is mass bankruptcy. In this case, creditors are forced to write down their loans to the value of the asset. That is clearly an important part of any de-leveraging. But since highly leveraged financial intermediaries stand between the ultimate creditors (households) and the ultimate debtors (other households), mass bankruptcy is going to wipe out the capital of intermediaries. That is likely to trigger panic, as losses cascade across the financial system.

Organising such a bankruptcy procedure, to allow for a mass adjustment of claims, is indeed one of the necessary conditions for managing a financial crisis efficiently. But it is going to be politically and technically complicated. In the end, however, a substantial part of the debt and the corresponding credit should be eliminated in this way. The big policy decision is how far the state wishes to socialise the losses of creditors. The answer will certainly include some socialisation, since governments insure deposits in financial institutions.
The same code works in ruby, though without the assertion behavior:

> a = [0]
> b, = a
> b == 0
=> true
Cheers, thanks for following up.
Uhm, it has history. A great implementation.
I wondered how it would compare if you measure this from the gate level rather than the transistor level. To check this, I looked online for a Verilog file describing a 6502 core. This site has one:

http://www.birdcomputer.ca/Projects/Prj6502/bc6502_page.html

The zipped size of that file is 38 kilobytes, which is actually larger than the approximately 7 kilobytes guessed in the article for transistor level information. That is probably due to the verilog code being more verbose; you would think zipping it would make up the balance but apparently not. However, even though 38K >> 7K, I think the fact that the two are at least in the same ballpark is encouraging.
LOL, this is what we talked just an hour ago with my CTO! I'm happy one of you guys raised this up, makes me more confident :)
eDole or eDol is a good name :p
Slightly OT--but how does your product differ from just creating a survey in Google Docs for free?
Separate distribution channels have nothing to do with OS fragmentation.
"While the highly indebted and the newly “asset-poor” have good reason to spend less than before the crisis, creditor households have no reason to spend more. Indeed, the collapse in interest rates in a slump lowers their incomes and so is quite likely to make them want to cut back on their spending, too. The aggregate effect of these changes in behaviour is, of course, a rise in the desired household rate and so the desired financial surplus of the household sector."

Read this carefully, because I'm fairly certain the author is trying to disguise something. His argument is this: Households cut spending and drive down rates, therefore creditors have less income and cut spending, therefore, creditors demand higher rate and more household debt.

You can see the sleight of hand, creditors desiring a higher rate does not force a higher rate. In fact, as he already admitted, debtor payments have pushed down the rate. What the author fails to admit is that rates stay low AND debtors pay down their balances. Debtors do not need to somehow 'outsave' their creditors in order to pay down their debt. They simply pay down their debt.

There may be arguments for stimulus packages and other counter-cyclical govt spending, but the author doesn't make a fair point for them. I certainly don't see why it would be necessary for govt borrowing to offset an increase in the private savings rate.
Are there any downsides to being in Y Combinator?
Cool. I may have to give this a try.
I'm annoyed by the belief that consistency is ipso facto good. Consistency is a tool for attacking a particular type of problem. Consistency for its own sake will often make things worse.

I see this fallacious reasoning all the time in design critiques: this is inconsistent with that. Well, yes, but so what? Why is consistency desirable in this instance?
Thanks for the reply. It took me two weeks to get the material ready (demo, video, content) and continued the effort during the funding period to coordinate with blogs and forums. But yeah I definitely overestimated my ability to do more for the project while having my own wedding at the same time. So I agree, I probably should have waited until after the wedding to start the project, and a longer funding period might have been a better idea for this project as well.
if L is None then asserting `len(L)==1` throws an exception.

The `if L and` part safeguards against that.
I think it's more about writing well, which translates into designing well. My favorite quotation from Strunk & White:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

Conciseness is a universal design principle, and writing is one way of practicing it.
Pointers and references are not so different that they need separate names.

Please perform pointer arithmetic or demonstrate the pointer/array equivalence with references or write a garbage collection system which uses pointer counting.

When you've finished, demonstrate effective and type-safe autovivification with pointers.

Finally, use references (sorry, pointers) to stack-allocated variables in C and create an object system based on closures.
Hell, you can even get race conditions in Erlang. Despite a fully immutable model. Joe Armstrong makes a point of introducing them early on, so people know to watch for them.

Avoiding parallelism removes several kinds of race conditions, sure, but not all of them. You have to know how they occur, how to prevent them. You can't just use node and hope they all go away.
The government hasn't been propping up prices, and the homebuyer's tax credit expired last April. If you talk to people in the real estate biz (I too have been looking for a house), you'll find that banks have about twice as many properties sitting empty as they do out in the market, and they are trickling them out because if they put them all on the market at once prices would crater (which would incidentally trigger another wave of repossessions).

According to the banks, this is the tgovernment's fault, because the government is not throwing any money at them to invest in the future value of homes: http://www.housingwire.com/2010/09/27/bofa-analysts-call-for...

If it's the government propping up house prices, kidly explain why prices are stable when there are ~300,000 homes in various stages of foreclosure: http://www.realtytrac.com/content/press-releases/foreclosure...

Seriously, what information are you basing these conclusions on?
They have a daunting customer acquisition mountain to climb. It took OpenTable 10 years and an IPO to have the capital to scale the SMB restaurant industry. Different but the same.
Yeah -- I think the problems I'm noting are chiefly technological / price. But it's not obvious to me if they'll be solved in a year or two or five years or longer. I didn't use a PDA until I got an iPhone in 2009 -- a long time after 1995.

As for the technology, I wrote this bit with the tech issues in mind: "Note that I'm not making some kind of moral argument about whether electronic reading is good, bad, or indifferent. To me, it just is. I foresee eventually moving chiefly to electronic reading, but I'm not sure when or how that shift will happen."

It's worse than that, at some point the physical books actually affect your willingness to move - which is just wrong, books are mean to be empowering not restrictive.

Very true.
'Bloom Boxes' help power Adobe headquarters in San Jose
I think the main reason here more than anything, is the founder's are not just into it anymore.
"Looking for the list of all auto manufacturers? Or presidential libraries? Or art supply sites? A casual comparison of our results with those of the major search engines would convince you that we were on to something. We recruited a group of non-technical subjects to do a usability test, and it flopped. Sit people in front of a search box and ask them to test it, and their first query is their own name. #FAIL."

Why did they assume their primary market was going to be non-technical people? Why not build some thing like stumbleupon of 100 Million bookmarks.
Yes, this is a good point. There do exist normal cars now that have good performance and get good mileage, around 60mpg. Most of these are not available in the US due to "safety regulations" unique to the US, proposed and written by oil company lobbyists, which effectively require that cars sold in the US be very heavy.

On the electric car side, the electricity is coming from things like burning coal and oil, or natural gas which we will run out of in a few years. The cars use batteries that contain highly toxic chemicals that are somewhat difficult to extract from the earth, and are done using strip mining. And the batteries lose their capacity after a few years of use and have to be replaced with a new set costing $30-$50,000 at least every five years. But bring up any of this and there is a lot of handwaving and claims that battery technology is getting better. Sure it's getting a tiny bit better, but it's not in the direction of batteries made of air or water or harmless inexpensive materials, and the charge capacity and lifespan are not so dramatically changing that it changes any of the basic dynamics of this technology.

In short, even the super green techs don't seem so green when you start really looking at the details.

In addition, we have a fetishization of things like electric cars, when the issue of efficient public transport, or getting rid of suburbs so people don't have to commute, are completely ignored even though the gains from this would be massively higher by several orders of magnitude. No, we must have electric cars for each person to drive alone by himself 30 miles to and fro work each morning. That is the only option.

I have preferred to live close enough to walk to work and have often managed this. I am often told this is an unrealistic expectation and I need to get real or get with the program. Including by people claiming to be environmentalists, many of whom drive giant gas guzzlers because of some perceived need.

Someone walking to work each day is getting infinite miles to the gallon and is going to live longer and have fewer health problems and costs as they age.

This is universally considered a non-solution compared to toxic batteries and recharging them using non-renewable resources.
I'm interested to see what becomes of Diaspora* http://joindiaspora.com

They're featured in an article entitled "Defacebook"
http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68512/?mid=fac...
Cheap loan online
Cheap Loan Online offer cheap loan online UK, cheap loan UK and cheap personal loan online in cheap interest rate. You can apply for cheap loan even with a bad credit score.
Isn't the avionics room under the cockpit shielded to sustain operations through lightning storms, signals bouncing off the ionosphere, solar flares, etc.?

I've flown commercially with my phone left on and privately in Cessnas and I haven't experienced anything negative. My dad's a pilot too by the way and he said that there's no supporting evidence, but this is a just small rule so might as well comply.
Sometimes the smallest things make a big difference.
On shelves, the best solution I've found is the Elfa shelves from the Container Store: http://reviews.containerstore.com/1626/3/elfa-reviews/catego... . See mine here: http://jseliger.com/2009/09/07/bookshelves-offices-and-neil-... . They are better looking and more convenient in real life than in pictures. The only real way to understand how they work and which ones you want is to call the Container Store (they're insanely helpful) or walk into one.
So you think you know pointers?
If you think that RIM is in any way copying or fanboying Apple, you have probably never used a RIM product.
it is strange that this link have made it to the front page of HN.
That's because Google builds their own servers.

Rackable Systems is the company that supplies servers to a lot of the other top sites (disclaimer: no personal connection to Rackable Systems.) Most smaller companies just buy 1U servers and hire a good network admin to string 'em all together. (former managed hosting company CEO)
There's a better variable naming scheme for generic lists:

Use xs. If you have multiple lists use ys etc.

This has multiple benefits over L in terms of readability anad understandability as a single-item variable names can be made to match the list naming scheme:

for x in xs:
for y in ys:
do_some_fancy_calculation(x,y)
Even if that is so, you're not gonna have all the insights, experience, knowledge, training and divergent thinking openend to you till you have an audience, peer group, whatever, going over your thoughts. Half-jokingly, one other downside to being so intelligent is that you tend to discount all the things that obviously won't work. Some of the 'less intelligent majority' might offer something seemingly obvious but just might work. See the whole crowd outperforming single experts in certain areas research.

http://brandsplusmusic.blogspot.com/2010/04/creativity-and-1...
Same here. I added all of my contacts to this page before android came out in anticipation.
I do not see anything new here...
GoF = "gang of four". The book has four authors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns
I'm not sure if it's an intentional reference to the Gang of Four from the Chinese cultural revolution.
I believe that it should be given to a student answering perfectly to the given problem.
If you give A+ it to the best in class it would mean that a mediocre student in a class of terrible students would get away with perfect marks all the time.

Which is what happened to me until I got to the uiversity, (as the mediocre one) and I felt it was wrong all the time (though it did save me a lot of work :)
Ask HN: Which laptop should I buy?
My current laptop, an HP Pavilion, is aging poorly with fan noise problems and various minor issues. I would like to purchase a new laptop for programming activities and productivity, and I am hoping to consult the experience of the HN community to help me find a decent brand / model of laptop. I'm hoping for something under $800, but that might not be realistic.

I'm looking for three things, mainly:
1) Good casing. It needs to be durable. My current laptop is falling apart-- cracked plastic grills, wobbly monitor/lid, worn corners, etc. I also don't need or want useless ports like a 56k modem, "expansion port 3," or a remote.

2) Good power usage/long lasting battery. The battery life on my current laptop dropped to 75 minutes after a little over a year. I don't see why a laptop battery can't last 4, 6, 8 hours or more. At a minimum, I need 3 - 4, but I don't want it to go bad after a year again.

3) Decent Linux support. I don't want to end up with a laptop that can't use wifi on Linux. I'm not sure if this is still a problem now.

My laptop usage is between 6 and 14 hours a day. Light gaming occasionally, but it's not a focus. I need Visual Studio occasionally, but most of my coding (Python, JavaScript, PHP) is done most comfortably in vim. Usually I dual-boot between Windows and Ubuntu on my laptops.

Right now, I am leaning toward a non-Mac notebook. I've never used a Mac, and I'm not against them, but I'm not sure how the transition period would work for me, and the price point is a little higher than I hope for as a student.
Freelance Writer | Go Freelance Jobs
The article doesn't argue that knowledge of design patterns is what defines someone as a good programmer. It's just pointing out that very few programmers know enough about design patterns to be able to recognise the problems that they are intended to solve.

If someone knows what design patterns are then that's one piece of information to find out about them during interview and add to the overall picture of them.

I do agree that there is alot more to finding out if someone is a good programmer that one aspect such as design patterns.
Am I the only one who whould be actively turned against learning Git because of these "merit badges"? It just seems like another of those gold stars they gave you in grade school...
I don't think cultishness is inherently bad for a project, you just have to generally ignore the most enthusiastic of the followers.
Judging from some of the articles I seen on-line the answer may, in part, be plagiarism or more politely extensive copy and paste. That seems to simple of an answer though.
> I've never managed to get the Chrome sync working as it always hangs up and never finishes setting up.

Same here. I tried really hard to make Chrome sync work reliably across the multiple devices I use. Kept duplicating my bookmarks, deleting new bookmarks, and just randomly making extra folders. XMarks is just so much nicer and works across all the browsers I use.
If you really want to know the hardware specs for a given hosting operation, there are two ways to do it:

1) If large company, find out who their network admin is. Buy this person a beer and/or dinner.
2) If smaller or mid-size company, find out who their hosting company is. Buy the lead ops guy/gal at the hosting company a beer and/or dinner.
July 5th, 1776.
The Playbook's screen has about half the area of the iPad's. That will probably make a big difference in power consumption.
Apple Has Already Approved The Official Google Voice App For iPhone
Fair question.

In terms of big differences, I'd say that my app offers more ways to get feedback.

You create one survey and then get multiple choices on how to use it:

1) web-based (this is like google docs)

2) mobile (optimised for iphones)

3) website popup - check out http://goodgecko.com/tour/genie for an example

and planning to follow it up with...

4) telephone surveys - created automatically and complete with robotic synthesised voice!

5) ???

That's the philosophy. Create a survey, automatically get a bunch of different ways to use it.

Thanks for the question though! Makes me think I should explain this better on the site.
Why AngelGate Is A Good Thing
Six Themes From TechCrunch Disrupt Monday AM
You could try starting with twitter and working your way up to larger texts over time. Particularly as the 140 chars becomes annoying!