skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this seems relevant:

http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/8105
"Second order effects, second order effects, second order effects. You are making the common-sense assumption that if you cut people's benefits off, they will simply have less money, and not change their behavior at all. That's not how it works. Common sense is not just wrong, it is pathologically wrong when thinking about the economy."

So what happens, then, when they're evicted, can't make a car payment, and can't feed themselves? For starters, being evicted in a lot of cities is enough to make it _extremely_ difficult to find a new place. And libertarian pixie dust doesn't pay the rent.

I have to ask: have you ever _been_ on unemployment? I have. It's enough to keep you treading water. It's substantially less than the wages I had when I was employed. Do you imagine that people _enjoy_ barely making ends meet?

Now, I'm sure there are some people who can do it. Good for them. Recognize, however, that that's a privilege. They can afford to live with approximately half of whatever they were making before! They probably don't have a family, aging parents, or medical problems, nor any substantial debt.

"Total economic collapse if we don't stop spending so much money on destroying wealth, no matter how good it makes you feel to do it."

I don't even know what this means. I mean, I think I know what it's supposed to mean. If I consult my phrasebook, "destroying wealth" is usually code for "taxing the wealthy." The implicit assumption is that most rich folks earned their wealth rather than inherited it. I don't buy it. They were largely born on third base and concluded that they hit a triple.

I have no idea what this "soft-headed spending" refers to, either— if you're talking about the stimulus, well, I'm unsympathetic. If no one else is spending, the government can run at a deficit and mitigate the problem. Business was manifestly not stepping up. And personally I agree with Krugman, et al, that the stimulus wasn't big enough.

We're in agreement that belt-tightening is disastrous, but that is precisely what animates the author's sentiment. No matter how bad everyone wishes it to be so, the jobs are gone. Punishing those who had the misfortune to be caught in the blowback from Wall Street's epic failure seems misguided and counterproductive. Expecting folks who're already in the hole to pony up thousands of dollars to retrain themselves is the height of privileged thinking.

Bottom line: you won't "fix" unemployment by pretending the unemployed don't exist.
I don't see how there is any difference between

1) Preserving high wages by stifling the availability of workers and then charging a higher tax on the employed to pay unemployment benefits.

And,

2) Letting there be more competition for available jobs, forcing wages down, but employing more people.
Chicks Who Rip: Amy Chen
Keynote: This is one of the biggest things i miss in Linux. Hopefully, the Ease project will mature soon. http://www.ease-project.org/
This would find its best use in cell phone cameras. I don't remember the last time I took a non-blurry picture with one...
It's true some successful company are the results of serious pivots. But I bet some 80% of them are the result of an initial good idea.

The successful ones that are a result of an initial good idea are a strict subset of the ones that choose a promising market.
It's worth noting that this is not a "stable" release. MongoDB releases with an odd minor version number (1.3, 1.5, 1.7) are unstable development releases, and should be treated as such. 1.8 will be the first official "stable" release with single-server durability.
I was reminded of the following excerpt in Howard Marks' book "Mr. Nice", who wanted to study Philosophy of Science in Oxford University many decades ago:

"There was a problem with respect to how my diploma course would be financed. In those days there were two main grant-giving bodies funding postgraduate study: the Department of Education and the Science Research Council. The former limited its grants to graduates in non-scientific subjects while the latter would only fund students undertaking research degrees in the pure sciences. These regulations precluded my Philosophy of Science studies being funded by either body."
"You could absolutely not say this about any two disciples taken at random."

I was talking about philosophy and other disciplines, not two disciplines taken at random.

With my statement about epistemology, I just meant that most people (incorrectly) believe things like "penicillin works, therefore the monoamine hypothesis must be correct." Of course they don't actually say this, but that's how their thinking works. Or similarly, "iPods get better every year, therefore god does not exist."

And I'm not trying to make any claims about the validity of depression or religion (at least here), rather I'm just trying to point out how broken most people's thinking is.
The "first day pop" is largely unavailable to the average person. You're right that underwriters price the IPO for this phenomenon, but it is to entice their clients to buy. The pop is from outsiders (you) buying from insiders.

If you're not dealing in big money, you won't be buying from the underwriter at the IPO price, you'll be buying at the higher price (if you put in a market order), or not at all (if you put in a limit order near the offering price).

That's not to say that investing in an IPO is a bad long-run decision.
Is the economy intelligently designed?
Programmer's Dilemma
Microsoft can't build the kind of developer community that Google and Apple have. The interface is smooth, and the Zune Pass is great, but there has to be more.
Is there anything like this for Textile?
If Greenspun had thought it through he probably wouldn't be implying a shortage of demand...

There is no longer a shortage of demand. Sales, consumption and production have more or less recovered to their pre-recession levels.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PCE

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RSAFS

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP

This would not have occurred if we had a shortage of demand. The only thing that hasn't recovered is employment - firms are meeting the same demand with fewer workers. This is why profits are up:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CP

This also suggests that it will be very difficult to solve the unemployment problem - it appears that most of the laid off workers were completely dispensable (perhaps with some changes to business processes). If they provided little of value to their former employers, it will be hard to convince a new employer that they will provide value for him/her.
> 1) I didn't know you can rename a file like that.

Yet you had no problem whining about how it's impossible to rename files on OSX. Great.

> I assumed that pressing Return would, you know, open the file.

You assumed wrong. You should stop assuming stuff like that.

> How do you open the file from the keyboard, then?

Command-O or Command-down.

> I also don't know what the Windows F2 dance is. I can right click and choose Rename from the context menu, or right click and press M, or press the stupid context key on the keyboard and then press M.

So... you like making your life harder than it should be?

> Control and command are WAY too similar,

Seriously?

> Option/Alt has two names?

Its name is "Option Key", but in non-OSX software it maps to Alt. As a result, the key is stenciled with both "alt" and the option key symbol.

> And what is what that weird symbol that represents it in the context menus?

The unicode character U+2325 called "OPTION KEY". Seems fitting isn't it?

> I didn't count Shift.

You didn't count AltGr either.

> Oh well. Windows doesn't use that Windows key in the same way.

True, Windows generally does not provide many ways to reach variants of existing actions. Which is the point of the Option key (that and AltGr's: provide supplementary character mappings on the keyboard).

> Get Info? Sure. It's a Properties window.

And one of the properties of a file is its name.

> Besides, I didn't say OS X was bad

Oh come on, your whole comment screamed it.
From when do you need evidence to bash Microsoft and get modded up? Idle speculation is good enough.
Sure, but I figure there are two classes of folks that need a text editor (not a WYSIWYG editor):

1) People who occasionally want to open/save plain text files: Gedit works just fine.

2) Programmers, who should know one of Emacs or Vim out of hand. I totally get that some folks like using TextMate all day, and that GEdit has some great programmers' features now, but if you know emacs/vim, you'll never be on a machine where you can't get an editor you know.
256, actually. :)
I thought the whole idea behind MongoDB is to deploy at scale. In other words, deploy over 100s of boxes and don't worry about RAID, or single sever durability because at that scale any single server is liable to fail so you'll need to ensure platform-wide durability via replication.

MongoDBs killer feature was/is sharding. If your deployment isn't going to require sharding from the get go, then I'm not sure why you'd be attracted to it instead of any of the other more mature alternatives.

Adding single server durability just gives MongoDB more possible use cases (e.g. small site, single server, low overhead enviroment, etc.).
47% of the world’s wealthy people are entrepreneurs
So basically, Elephant or KiokuDB, but for Ruby? I think people tend to call these "object databases" rather than ORMs.
I agree re: Facebook and Google. But to your point, both Facebook and Google could have been seen as bad ideas since, as you state:
>Both search and social networks were written off as markets when the two current leaders entered the space.

The point of this post is not "Are good ideas bad for a startup". Obviously good ideas are much better then bad ones, and great ones are much better then good ones.

The point of the post is "don't think you need the most amazing idea ever to start something. it is more important to start something and learn what the great idea is along the way".
I still love my standard XWindows fonts. My favorite is 6x13.

+No fuzzy font-smoothing edges to give you a headache.

+l's, 1', 0's, O's, and symbols are easily distinguished.

+doesn't take up too much space so I can have more code windows open

+wide Unicode support, just in case

+Works great with both programmers' editors. Yes, both. No need to fight.

+stable, proven, familiar, and established
You could always run Ubuntu in a fullscreen VM on top of a barebones OSX. That would probably work correctly.
That would have been great. But, like I said, each model was presented as the "end", and I felt like I had to un-learn things after every section.
Check out books by Stephen Few (he is a Tufte fan). Few's books are very easily read and help develop your intuition for good "businessy " infographics.
An oversimplification on both of our parts
What a lot of people don't know is that you can drag and drop a file/folder icon onto any OS X file open dialog. The dialog will then browse to that folder or select that file.

And what's more, you can drag the icons from application titlebars and it has the same effect! Try it with icons in file browser trees inside 3rd party OS X apps, AND IT STILL WORKS! Try dropping the icons directly onto textfields that are meant to contain file paths (ones bound to browse buttons) AND IT STILL WORKS!

This is what having a consistently applied collection of user interface controls, and the first party devs dogfooding them, does for an OS.
Also, if you're a LaTeX fan, Computer Modern Typewriter makes a decent editor font. (http://canopus.iacp.dvo.ru/~panov/cm-unicode/download.html).

The download link doesn't have a preview image, but you can see one here: (http://www.identifont.com/find?font=Computer+Modern+Teletype...) It's like a nicer Courier.

I used to use it for everything, but at work I've settled on 16-point Inconsolata. On a 2560x1600 display it's very easy on the eyes.
The most common reason I've heard is that the Valley is a terrible place to start a family.

I would imagine that the cost of housing plays a large part in that. Housing in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area is insanely expensive. Maybe not as bad as downtown Manhattan, but still insane by the standards of pretty much every other metropolitan area in the US.

If you're by yourself, you can get away with squeezing into a tiny apartment and making do (or getting roommates). If you're starting a family, this isn't an option.
if you need a ORM for key/value storage, you're doing it (very) wrong
You can still buy as soon as the market opens though, as long as you're fine paying a few bucks over the insider price.
That's possible, but I don't think so.

Someone e-mailed her this: “Erica, I need to know how to make money on the Internet. But I need make at least $100,000 in my first year or it won’t be worth it for me. Can you suggest something that would help me do that?"

Maybe he is a nutjob, but he felt like she could help him. I think she works super hard and is super smart. She's always been positive as well. I appreciate those things, but her website and the 'feel' of it all seem like spam and get rich quick scheme.

The content is great, if I read it in an RSS reader, maybe things would be different.

Obviously, I'm very happy for her success and ability to keep positive. Her site just isn't for me.
Does anyone else not like LinkedIn at all? It is a website that I actively don't want to use but feel enormously pressured by peers to be on.

I mean, I can't even tell these people to fuck off like I can with my friends that want me to be on Facebook.
The personal essay is the part where applicants stand out the most? I sure don't hope so...I am tired of reading all these I-almost-cured-cancer-as-a-kid type essays that people in the US seem to submit for the undergraduate application. Give me a break, seriously.

The single most important part of the Oxbridge application process is the interview. That's where you get to sit down with two professors that take you through challenging math problems (in case of Computer Science) and you are supposed to take them through your thinking process. Now, _that_ is where you can stand out. That's more like it.
As someone with a degree in philosophy and mathematics but who has earned his bread & butter doing QA, coding, network and sys admin I feel that I have a lot of inside knowledge that I can bring to this debate.

I could fill an essay myself in response to Paul's post but I'll keep it brief so as not to bore anyone.

This: "Philosophy doesn't really have a subject matter in the way math or history or most other university subjects do. There is no core of knowledge one must master. The closest you come to that is a knowledge of what various individual philosophers have said about different topics over the years. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered."

The subject matter of philosophy is the world of abstract ideas. Some call them universals, they are to be contrasted with cold hard facts, stuff we can reason scientifically about. It is not that "few were sufficiently correct" but rather (as Kant for one pointed out) that metaphysical claims like the famous "Gods exists" or the "universe is infinite" can be asserted to be true while at the same time there opposite can be asserted to be true! "God does not exist". "The universe is finite". Now, does that make everyone wrong? No, of course not, a wiser person just digs deeper.

And this: "But did studying logic teach me the importance of thinking this way, or make me any better at it? I don't know."

The thing is, as I've come to realize (from thinking about it long and hard!) is that logic is not a part of philosophy. Yes they go hand-in-hand but logic is really a cross-disciplinary tool with applications in many disciplines, mathematics, computer science, philosophy and so on. Just because it has traditionally been very closely associated with philosophy can mislead us into thinking that logic is part of philosophy. And so to blame philosophy because learning logic didn't benefit you in the way you thought it would is a category error at the very least in my opinion.

I'll stop here but I have to say, I would love if Paul were a bit more humble and a bit less arrogant and realize that there's a reason philosophy is so difficult. It's not because it's all smoke and mirrors and sophistry - though there is some of that, and you need the mental tools to sort the wheat from the chaff. You know Richard Rorty has said that philosophy is merely a branch of literature! And he was one of the leading philosophical figures of the last century! Think about that for a moment...
I went back for Alumni Weekend in September. I didn't stop by ComLab since I was busy with the port collection at Christ Church. :D
Half of .gov Web sites fail to meet DNSSEC deadline
Operator billing Response by Tim O’Reilly
>it's generally pretty hard to change courses.

I cant speak of Oxford, but I knew several people at Cambridge who changed subjects (sometimes more than once). It's not trivial, but if you want it enough then there isn't much to stop you. (Once you are there then the college's MO is to support your academic success, whatever path it takes). Take-away: don't be put-off applying by this - if you need to change, you can.
I keep a copy of The Unarchiver around for those odd formats and password-protected archives, but I still leave most things to Archive Utility. I find The Unarchiver is still too buggy for me (things like http://code.google.com/p/theunarchiver/issues/detail?id=215 ).
David Foster Wallace wrote a very similar essay about television and how it makes people depressed.

He argues that TV makes people feel lonely by showing other people having fun. At the same time, TV is a short-term cure for loneliness because the viewer gets to hang out with their friends inside the TV. Wallace calls TV a "malignant addiction", because the act of watching TV is a short-term cure for the harmful effects of TV. Alcohol is another common malignant addiction; exercise addiction is an example of a non-malignant addiction.

The essay is called E Unibus Pluram. Full text here (pdf): http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
Maybe while they are at it, they can convince their friends that crypto backdoors are bad for everyone.
The Command-T plugin [1] was a big help in switching from TextMate to vim. I have no idea how anyone can be productive in vim without it (assuming you're working on a multi-file project).

1. https://wincent.com/products/command-t
Sorry, this topic is bound to lead to a semantic merry-go-round!

Facebook and Google are examples of great ideas executed well creating huge markets, which did not exist when they set out. So how would have their founders fared if they chose to focus on a great market at the start? We would have yet another portal with banner advertising and a dating site.

I agree with the point of the post you mention here, but your post doesn't really support that.

Your advice is to focus on a great market. One of the hottest markets right now seems to be photo sharing. But I highly doubt the next great company will come out of there.

Can you give me an example of a great market today?
I mean that the Buran could (and did) land without human assistance. It basically did what the air-forces new toy did earlier this year, but back in 1988.
Not sure why this was modded down. If someone wants to work with backbone.js, why not get paid to do so.
You never "really need OSX", unless you're developing for it or for iOS.

The point of OSX, to me, is that it's a Unix which generally just works and has an interface worth using.

Oh, and it has a thriving and high-quality indie community.
What advantage do backbone.js models provide over javascript objects?

Event binding, refreshing to the server, dirty tracking, etc.

Basically, the pattern is: get JSON doc from the server, inflate it into a model, hook in a view, and then as you mutate the model, in code or the UI, the UI and server are updated. Can you write this yourself? Of course. Do you want to? That's up to you.

Personally, I find Backbone's sugar most useful for views. You make a DOM element that represents your thing, and then you program in terms of that thing, and the UI "just works". It's wonderful.

Anyway, Backbone is absolutely not overkill. It's just what many apps need, and you can use as much of it as you want.

(I should point out that I don't do server-side HTML anymore. My web apps are JSON/REST endpoints that also serve a few pieces of static HTML, JS, and CSS. Everything UI-related is done on the client side. Backbone makes this amazingly easy.)
Rand's theory of concepts is the explicit cognitive framework of induction and abstraction - both vital to comp sci endeavors. To overlook her work is a tremendous oversight, a detriment to this congruency.
My experience installing Ubuntu involved running commands and editing settings 'blind' because the graphics card driver messed up and although the machine was running, you couldn't see anything on the monitor. After counting my keystrokes for hours, the whole thing ('your grandma could install Ubuntu!') seemed like a sick joke.
:e .

or

:NERDTree
Well, there's a 30% cut of the Marketplace sales but that's not going to amount to much as well.

However, they're building out a platform and asking for profits with the first quarter of sale is too much.

Microsoft always plays for the long haul, think about initial versions of Windows, XBox. On Xbox lost a ton of money initially but now is definitely profitable and making back the money spent.

Investing in Windows Phone is better for MS than just sitting on tens of billions of cash. It's good for us because it fosters competition even if you use other platforms. With your kind of thinking, no project would even get a start.
Well, I have a couple of teenage boys...
My objection to this is that terrorist attacks are extremely rare events and there is not that much data about them so trading on this market would be very boring and you would almost always lose the boom bet. Anyway, anti-terrorism efforts seem like misplaced priorities, if you really want to save the lives of American you're better off working on ways to reduce car crashes or ways to stop people from eating cheeseburgers.
At 150m, the beam is 1.5m across (the divergence is 1.5mrad). Putting a 1cm^2 target at 150m within a 1.5m beam is not at all hard.
Your Website Should Engage Your Website Traffic
Ah interesting, I took you up wrongly but your statement was a little ambiguous in my defense. Can you explain what you mean about these logical leaps that smart people take but are wrong-headed, sounds quite intriguing, I have a feeling I know what you mean but I can't articulate it properly.