skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* The government buying it back (by paying down the debt) takes that quasi-cash out of circulation, deflating the money supply. *

We aren't talking about paying down the debt. We are talking about borrowing less money this month than we did last month because we just sold our shares in Citibank and so we've got a few billion in cool cash lying around. The total debt continues to go up, just at a slower rate.

From the credit market's point of view, the US govenment just sold a few billion less in bonds this month (as compared to last month) and so that means that the creditors have a few billion more to invest elsewhere.
Small YC startup in Palo Alto. Would be happy to speak with potential interns (local). jobs@opzi.com
You should change "total" to "subtotal", and have the full total include how much extra you'd have to pay in order offset the deficit. Then at the bottom, "balance outstanding": your share of the public debt.
The only black swan connection I see is Taleb's point about "the graveyard of silent evidence". Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We didn't see all the planes returning that had catastrophic failures in the known bullet-holed areas and never returned.
Can stock Windows boot from a USB drive? That'd be super convenient.
It has nothing to do with being ripped off or disagreeing. Michael Porter would say that the format and presentation of a PDF has little competitive advantage over a list of links on a web page.
I am using dwm with the bottomstack, gridmode and pertag patches and my own modifications.

Currently I am using a notebook in front of an external display and I added a function to dwm with which I can essentially "push" all clients (windows) to the external display, which in turn sends all its clients to my notebook's display (or in other words it swaps all clients of one display with all clients of the other).

When I am coding I am always using bstack mode with vim on top and one or two terminals at the bottom. The external monitor is displaying documentation. If I have to look something up I just have to push vim + terminals away. If I am finished I pull them back. So my notebook display becomes my working display.
Sorry about the confusion. =) Didn't mean to.

As for your first point, screwing over the customers: I've never known an insurance company to not screw over customers to some degree.

Anyways, this is all besides the point, because regardless of the insurance company you patronize, their is someone making a decision on your insurance claim. Whether it's the government, or some private agency, their is still someone who has to sign off.

So yeah, someone can just Beta instead of Acme, and it won't change a thing.

Edit: And the final straw, you assume insurance companies will insure you. It's not just about choosing your insurance plan. You have to be allowed to take the plan as well.
Literally two days ago, I launched the first pass of a side project for this very purpose: http://qrk.co/

It's ugly, only has been tested in one browser, doesn't support user accounts/per-user encodings . . .

But it does do a geolocation query as part of the redirect. Seems like useful data.
We are. We're a young but cash-flow positive SaaS startup in Redwood City, CA on the lookout for smart & driven folks for a part-time or internship position (both paid). Here's the req: http://bit.ly/9p6RJj

-nikita
Treasurys are "safe" in the sense that the US will never default, since the government can simply print dollars as needed to cover the debt. So yes, you're guaranteed to get your 1% interest in nominal dollars... the question is, how much are those dollars really worth?

The dollar may not enter a hyperinflationary death spiral as some believe it will, but its days as the default world reserve currency appear to be fading fast.
Mountain View, CA. RethinkDB (http://www.rethinkdb.com/jobs).

Hard systems problems. Fun people. Good pay. Internships year round. Join us, together we will rule the [database] universe.

This is everything we stand for: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1747713
That is not a "review" so much as it is Lessig expressing hero-worship of Mark Zuckerberg and attempting to minimize the numerous substantive charges of unethical behavior that have been directed at Zuckerberg. The summation paragraph begins "Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time. I want my kids to admire him." I don't have an opinion about the movie (haven't seen it), but reading this review has greatly reduced my opinion of Lawrence Lessig.
I lost at the game.
I didn't even realize awesome wasn't in the Arch Linux repositories any more. I installed it from there a month ago.
Microsoft doesn't have a history of patent trolling. Nor are they patent trolling now. Patent trolling is when an entity that neither invented nor practices the patent in suit obtained the rights to the patent and is enforcing it. When the plaintiff is the inventor and/or is practicing the patent, then by definition it is not patent trolling.
Emacs Org mode and publishing a weekly review
I've often wondered what the result would be if budgets were determined by something like that.

Just the line items of potential things to spend money on, and citizens indicating their preferences, without any emotive rhetoric to color their choices.

Since my personal discussions with people end up with a lot of agreement on how much one should be allocating to things like education, R&D, infrastructure and healthcare, but it all seems to go pear shaped when it reaches the voting floor, due to the large role external, non-voting actors can play in shaping those decisions.

I don't want a hundred million here and there to go to rubbish projects as a sop to a politician with a certain amount of influence who just received a donation to add an extension to his house.

Of course, now you have the problem of how things end up on the list to vote on :)
I'll third a vote for Xmonad. To be honest though, I consider it a failure if I find myself interacting with X Windows at all.
Two down.

Maybe this thread needs a warning sign...
In what way are you planning on distinguishing yourself from the rest of the learning platforms? What type of learning will your platform be geared towards?
Be Good != Be Good Technically.

You should be good at what your business is going to be.
I am. I'm in SF (working out of my apartment in the Haight).

I'm building Quirk ( http://www.getaquirk.com/ ) and I've got a related side project, a QR/URL-shortener - http://qrk.co/

Quirk is Rails on Heroku. qrk.co is Sinatra on Heroku.

Cofounders could come in a few forms. I'm a developer, but somewhat new to web dev. So someone with a deep technical background for web development with prior startup experience would work. Alternatively, someone with a really strong UX/design vision and some skills to drive the frontend would be great, too. I've been learning the necessary skills as I go.

There's contact info in my profile.
Which specific Covered Specifications do you think are involved in this suit?

The pledge you cite (which is legally binding, BTW) is for people implementing specific specifications that Microsoft has listed under specific circumstances.
Another vote for Awesome WM. Like you, it was my first (and, so far, only) foray into tiling WMs, and I'm using it on dual 21" monitors.

I usually have Chrome on my right screen, several tabs worth of terminals on my left screen, and Komodo Edit will float back and forth between the two, depending on what I'm doing.
More than 100 arrests, as FBI uncovers cyber crime ring
What Can We Do in Our Spare Time? | Socyberty
Ok, I am a solid PHP developer, pretty advanced with Ruby, and can do front end code and JQuery with my eyes closed.

Should I be interested in Perl? Is there any reason to learn it if I know these other languages? I am genuinely curious
Sergei Magnitsky death: a move to ban perpertrators from entering America
PHP Dark Arts: Semaphores
How did you read and understand 9 patents in under an hour? That is a feat that would be quite impressive for a seasoned patent attorney familiar with the technology covered by the patents.
no harm intended, but this is really just 3 well used css3 properties (ok, so one's a function)
I find that dwm always gets dismissed by users of awesome or xmonad. I've run all three for long periods of time and always go back to dwm, most likely due to my hatred of "bloat". It's stable, small (28kb binary), fun to hack and nice and snappy.

http://suckless.org has some other really cool stuff as well.

ii is a FIFO based IRC client, slock, wmii etc...

http://hg.suckless.org/ is their HG repo.
Learning programming fundamentals (flow control, common data structures, object-oriented programming, etc.) may be more useful than learning several different languages. I know Python isn't on your list of available courses, but I do like the Python tutorial (http://docs.python.org/tutorial/) as an introduction to programming fundamentals.

Having a project like a web app is a goal is a great idea; there's really no substitute for experience.

Good luck!
If you had told random people in the 1950s and 1960s that this was happening, you would have been branded a nutcase.

What are the "nutcases" telling us now, that we will find out about 50 years on?
High resolution moth images
It's using a new feature in iOS 4. Technically, you don't need this service to do the direct web-to-device ad-hoc installation, but I'm in the beta and it's a great product that makes things easy and smooth.
This is possibly the single best blog post about entrepreneurship I've read in the last...I can't even remember. Thanks.
In Waterloo, Canada: http://mycampus.cyphontech.com/

We're building mobile technology for universities and colleges in North America. The company is completely bootstrapped and consists of a group of close friends. We are motivated, have a working demo we're pitching already, and looking for a talented Java/PHP/browser programmer to join us!

Contact: karan.bhangui@cyphontech.com
Entrepreneur is a great example of a word, to quote George Trow, that is an "abandoned shell." It used to have great meaning as being an entrepreneur was incredibly difficult and rare and then technological changes came along and made it mean something totally different. The reason people are so attracted to [self-descriptively] using it is because they get the status of the old meaning with the lower barrier to entry of the new changes. You can't really fault other people for wanting the best of both worlds...but you can resist the temptation to delude yourself with it. At least that's my opinion.
I agree with the general thrust of your statement, but at the same time, the "that's what they said about Google" argument is becoming a bit tired in startup circles, don't you think?

Not every startup has the potential to be the next Google, that's just a fact of life.
DoubleDutch (http://www.doubledutch.me) has three internship positions open: bizdev, engineering, marketing. Based in the Mission District of San Francisco, close to Bart.
Thanks for posting this -- just signed up for the Half Marathon Beginner which starts on Oct 17 and ends on Mar 27. Who is joining me? Just have to find a half marathon somewhere in Silicon Valley.
The author doesn't seem to understand that the purpose of a trademark is to protect the use of a mark as an identifier of a product or service. He offers no argument that a piece of music cannot function this way, and offers no argument as to why it would be good to allow other people to use the same work to misrepresent their produce or service as being that of the original.
"If you think you're an entrepreneur, most likely, you are one and nobody can tell you differently." ...which is exactly why people like it so much. It's an unassailable self-description. I think it's best to steer clear of anything that puts you in that position because its pretty easy to spin off the planet.
I stopped reading here, when numbers started being pulled out of orifices:

> Out of those 200,000 followers, you’d easily get 10,000 to pay $1 to get the premium app to stay “in the first circle of friends” of their idol
The Iranian regime is now stoned. How happy I am with Stuxnet.
Sorry but I have to disagree with many of the points Jessica pointed out.

Regarding consulting, How would you pay your bills when your company is not profitable. I mean, see Twitter. Their valuation is way high but they don’t make money. So the only option to pay your bills and rent is to do consulting on the side or VC money (which I personally don’t believe in).

During school you have time to network, take advice from your professors (many of them are entrepreneurs themselves), and you have enough time to learn if your idea will work or not. I don’t say you will have tons of time to build a facebook while in school but you can build a prototype (version 0.1) and see if that will work.

I really like this idea “Join an early stage accelerator program like YCombinator or TechStars” because here you meet people who are also in the same state of mind as you are. You meet good mentors (probably best in industry). You get enough money to rent apartment. These programs are best for fresh college graduates. Try for 6 months. If it works, it excellent. if it doesn’t, no big deal. You learned something.
The (lack of) design patterns in Python
Well, if you are advanced with Ruby then you're probably set.

However, Perl is still an excellent language for building scalable web systems in no time.

With 'Modern Perl' you get 'Ruby on Rails' style of programming in Perl, and with Perl you get the tons of libraries in CPAN.

I wouldn't recommend learning Perl if you already know Ruby. For the same reason I wouldn't learn Python or Ruby because I know Perl. I'd learn something different like Erlang.
On the one hand, I tend to think that learning a new language or tool kit is always a valuable experience. On the other hand I switched from Perl to Ruby as my go-to scripting language about 6 years ago and haven't felt like there were any niches which Perl serviced that Ruby failed to, for my uses.

Still, I'd say try it out for a few small things; you might find that Perl better fits the way you think, and if not, at least you can say you know a bit of Perl if anyone ever asks.
I like Perl. Given what you have said above it would be hard for me to say "Yes, give Perl a try" except to say "You should give Perl a try."

The reason I say that is because a programming language is just like a religion. You will like it or you will not (even with its quirks).
>PDF was really pretty and I loved passing it around in a package

GP was emailing them to their friends. That's quality referral.
SF, CA

Quizlet is a study platform for high school and college students. We're one of the few web companies that's gotten lots of traction in education -- 2M uniques a month and growing.

We're looking for PHP/JS developers who are excited about making an impact in education.

http://quizlet.com/jobs/
http://quizlet.com/testimonials/
Confused - this looks suspiciously like the craigslist ad that says this is a 3-6 month contract. I'm also getting calls from headhunters saying this is a 6 month contract.

Well I sent you my resume twice and a bulleted list of how there might be a good fit, which in my experience would at least get some response, but I've gotten nothing, so either I'm not up to your standards, which is perfectly reasonable, or you have faulty lines of communication you might want to look into.
I would say, If you have money to pay your rent and bills for the time you need to get first version of your product out, go for it.

Also, have a good cofounder. You might have heard this many times but this is true. A good cofounder will take away some burden from your shoulders and you will keep you motivated.

If your idea works out, its good. If it doesn't, not a big deal. You will have learned alot along the period of time which will help you get better job than you would have got when you graduated.
I only see direct discussion links, not article links.
In New York:

Digital Production and Outsourcing Sales Manager
http://bit.ly/cuISWC

In Buenos Aires:

Tech PM - http://bit.ly/doiY3f
Web Devs - http://bit.ly/cTquHE

And a bunch of other positions.
From reading your about page, it sounds like you guys should buy these guys: http://www.xmarks.com (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733941) :)
Perhaps the parent could find a lower bound on the percentage of people with AIDS whereupon more sex does equal safer sex. That would certainly answer the parent's question.
I would suggest you to find somewhere in Palo Alto area than SFO.
Chicago, IL (willing to work with someone virtually as well)

GeekStack is an online trading card game where players become the heroes of science and technology. It's also a platform that can host any trading card game.

I've been working on it nights and weekends for a year and change. I have a working game engine and I'm coding the web server and front end now. Bootstrapped, incorporated, etc. Looking to launch this fall.

My ideal cofounder would be someone with illustration, graphic design, and creative direction skills. A web programmer (I'm using Ruby on Rails/Heroku/EventMachine/PubNub) with some sysadmin skills would also be great. Love gaming and education, of course.

If interested, email peter@geekstack.com

http://geekstack.com
I'm sad to see so little love for ion and ratpoison. Ion2 ftw.
i use ratpoison on a thinkpad x301. they must go well together.
Of course, none of this changes one ironclad rule:

No sex is the safest kind of sex.

Not sarcastic and not that I am celibate- but if you personally really wish to avoid STD's, there is a very clear solution.

Also, I'm not quite humanitarian enough to raise my personal risk exposure for the sake of lowering society's risk exposure.
I'm with you on this. I don't understand why companies limit themselves to people with degrees. It's not like half the good (a relative term, I know) developers haven't dropped out to do awesome things anyhow.

I'm pretty happy my company - SeatGeek, we're hiring full-time devs, see jack7890's post - is understanding of my wish to complete my education. Hopefully you can find a similar placement somewhere :)
I found this enlightening: http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

It's a treatise against interaction as the fundamental paradigm of information software. Presenting your information well means not needing to interact with it much to gain value from it. Lots of pretty examples, also.
That typically means there is a monetary component. I don't think that's the intended purpose.
devartis - Buenos Aires, Argentina (no telecommute)

A small, fast growing, software factory looking for ninja engineers (mobile & web)
http://www.devartis.com/jobs
I set up web distribution for ad hoc builds today. I found this: http://github.com/wbroek/IPA-Distrubution

Check their example.php -- you still need to manage a provisioning profile with device ids, but from there you just do Build and Archive and put the .ipa and .mobileprovision file alongside the above scripts. Their code extracts application info, including thumbnail, and builds a nice iPhone-formatted HTML interface. Any iOS4 device can visit your URL and install the app (assuming their UDID is in your profile).
Thank you for the confirmation regarding why I prefer to live in SF rather than Daly City. Different strokes, I guess.
The ultimate goal is to construe any arbitrary sequence of taps as a coherent message, grammatical and correctly spelled, and thus with no possible hint of error for the recipient.

Ideally, it would also use information about the recipient, including relation, past interactions, interests, social network etc to construe a believable meaning.
I never knew you were around here. Small world.
Did the idea for this come from Linode's Stackscripts?
Yes. We had rolled out a Devpay-backed product called "Cloud Gear" about a year ago and ended up pulling it off the shelf due primarily to two irreconcilable issues:
1. their accounting process appeared to have some fundamental innacuracies at the time. We tracked the launching of instances and our numbers did not match up with theirs. There was anomalous usage behavior and Amazon eventually admitted there had been tracking glitches on their end - difficult to deliver a service if the underlying accounting can't be trusted. Note: this may have been (likely has been) remedied since but it was problematic around January '10.
2. As another commenter noted, the signup process for a newcomer was too much to ask of someone who didn't already happen to have an AWS account. And even for those who did it was still a cumbersome hamster maze to put them through and undoubtedly hurt the adoption numbers.

#1 has likely been resolved. #2 is inherent to this type of on-behalf-of arrangement. It is an interesting model and could definitely enable some innovative services. We just found it not ready for primetime when we had tested it back in late '09-early'10.
how do customers feel about you changing the pricing without their input?

I would assume they feel the same way anyone who has ever had phone, cable, or internet service feels. Outside of a contract, prices go up over time. You send out an email 30 days in advance, tell them it's going to happen, and then do it. If they want to cancel and get a refund, ok, no big deal.

Virtually everyone is familier with recurring billing so I think offering it is entirely for the customer's convenience and in no way a bait and switch or any other kind of attempt to rip-off a customer.
Start now.

Start a start up or go execute an idea or help somebody else execute an idea and use that as a tool for learning relevant stuff that is required to successfully execute an idea. Whatever reason you are not able to execute it, thats an indication of where you have to plug holes in your skill set, either by learning yourself or developing relationships with somebody who is strong in that area.

If you keep executing and keep plugging the holes in your skill set, you will have the fastest learning curve that no college education can provide by itself.

Do complete your college education, it does teach a lot of good basics on different useful stuff and its a great backup in case things don't work out with the business end by the time you complete education. But thats what it gives - basics, useful basics, basics that are not enough for anything but an entry level job.

College education + loads of experience by the time you complete education = killer resume.

This is from a guy who has done his fair share of education and waited too long to go after his dream ( of course, not too long to let the dream die or go after it now :))

Good luck.

(edit: If you start the action part now, you will also attract a network of friends and teachers who appreciate a person like you and can probably help you. That network you start building now can be a deal maker or breaker for succes later. )
Ask HN: can one post to a blog without opening a browser?
Right now I post mostly by email, but sometimes I don't want to open up a browser and wait for Gmail. Is there a way to a blog directly from the desktop?
By and large, I've had the opposite problem making a lasting switch from Perl to Ruby.

I know Perl better than most other languages in my toolbox, and it's my default prototyping and one-off utility language. I don't find a lot of niches (for my typical uses, of course) that are served better by Ruby, so it's been really difficult to switch away from Perl.
It does, but in both cases the products are something that need to be executed right or risk losing customer data. So a bit harder to release a database more often if your not just tinkering with new concepts and want to be taken seriously.
On MacOS X, I used to use a program called MarsEdit. See http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
I'd be interested in how many postings in these hacker news job threads end up in hires, or at least candidates applying.
i'd rather ?action be part of the method than the query string. in case they're reading.
Comment section is good read also.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/august-5-1914,10615/