skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many countries (for instance the US) currently have massive debt and budget deficits. They have three ways out of it:
1. Increasing taxes.
2. Lowering expenditure.
3. Printing money.

From a political point of view #3 is by far the easiest route. I therefore fear that many countries will "default through inflation". In other words, we will see massive inflation, possible even hyper-inflation. This will be a huge hit to the middle-class. Because people with job but no savings are affected the most by massive inflation.

I'd recommend everyone to watch this short-clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
and this film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECi6WJpbzE
I guess if Facebook uses their huge valuation to buy startups which use Facebook's API, they don't have to invent their own products, and thus they make income by buying those startups which DO turn a profit.
Exactly. They would be considered by some (or all?) to have a leftwing slant and therefore be tainted somehow. They are considerably to the left of most American papers for example.
Thanks :)

I am a convert - from an eternal pessimist to a nouveau-optimist. But, even that does not spare me from being very pessimistic about the eventual fate of Twitter.

The company, apparently (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_t...), grew 3x in terms of volume of messaging in the past 12-months, but it is very unlikely that their revenue has grown 3x.

If that assumption is right, they are on a limited timeframe where their burn rate will eclipse their average possible spends (funds brought in via investments + revenue).

In effect, they have a very short time frame to get this story right - irrespective of whether they piss off the developer ecosystem or not.

I don't like "dead future" stories, but I don't think this is going to wind up with a different fate.
The most important point about Android is that apps can be installed from third-party sources just by toggling a switch in the settings on the stock firmware.

While Google probably technically could use the remote uninstall function on an app not installed via their Market, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that they would. And as you suggest, there already exists CyanogenMod and other third-party firmwares; it's fairly easy to strip Android of any connection to Google if you so desire.
U.S. Families Slice Debt to Lowest In 6 Years
a bit ago i started a javascript osc environment [1] for fun. a copy of touchosc, but in the browser and you can edit your controls live.

i didn't have any intentions to share it, but this seems to be an appropriate venue. it's not nearly as cool as anything else in the thread :). pretty proof of concept, but maybe will get some ideas going. the relevance is that it's easy to execute arbitrary code [2] to control any program that supports osc/midi.

[1] https://github.com/catshirt/backbone-osc

[2] https://github.com/catshirt/backbone-osc/blob/master/static/...
Sorry the server is on fire right now... got a tweet from smashing magazine. Working to bring it back up.
Yeah, I've written a number of very long, very gruelling scripts that ultimately were all replaced by denyhosts.

On the flip side, denyhosts only works on sshd (to my knowledge) -- so the scripts I wrote to monitor tornado log files and block all the random attack vectors is still worth having around.
"Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions."

Oops. That's called confirmation bias.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/c/confirmation_bias.htm

http://www.skepdic.com/confirmbias.html

Did they also look for evidence that cast doubt on their notions? Looking for both kinds of evidence, and evaluating them fairly, would lead to a more robust conclusion.
The Fukushima plant produces 4.7GW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant

The total nuclear production of energy in Japan is 47GW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

Nuclear is 28.9% of Japan's energy source (same Wikipedia-article as above).

It doesn't add up. Where does the number 20% come from? 2% is closer to the truth.
Wow, that never occurred to me. User installs malicious app, app roots phone and disables killswitch, user is none the wiser. Game over.
1 barrel of oil produces about 20 gallons of gasoline.
Nuclear accidents are not members of the set of "things that are at all likely to actually hurt you or anybody you know". Sedentary lifestyles and tobacco smoke are in that set, but they lack the novelty and sensationalism that gives nuclear accidents their cachet.
(Ok, you also have to disconnect when you hit a listening socket. Oops.)
When i was in dubai last year, we took a tour with a nice (afghan? dont remember) tour guide. We were all europeans in the bus, and he had worked in Germany before, so he could compare. He was telling us how many of the migrant workers work there: Many owe money to the agent who gets them a visa to work there, essentially being indebted from the moment they step foot in uae. Their passports are withheld from their bosses. They cannot buy property there (nobody can) , and the locals keep the rents artificially high (even though there are literally millions of empty apts) so that most migrant workers cannot afford to rent and have to rent in Sharjah, a different emirate. And when their visa ends, they cannot get a new one for 6 months (so they need to get back home)

Money governs dubai, and that is not even close to what you call "reasonably well-governed". Mass atrocities, neglect , decay etc. is everywhere, even in dubai, no matter how well they try to hide it.

UAE citizens enjoy free housing (with pool+ garage) in a specially allocated part of the city, virtually all the businesses are run by foreigners. Locals go to their own native-only exclusive nightclubs where you need an ID card. The locals own lots of money and businesses (mostly trade) and compete with each other over who has the biggest skyscraper (the land is very cheap since it's a desert). Showing off your wealth (by building exorbitantly expensive mansions , skyscrapers, islands etc) is practically their native sport.

And they are right about the culture thing. I was supposed to be visiting an arab country but you never meet arabs - everything is run by foreigners. Tourism isn't just about leisure time. Most everything feels artificial, plastic, empty, from the driverless trains, to the huge but empty skyscraper regions, the pointlessly long roads (who lives at the end of the road? still nobody), to the artificial islands full of beaches where it's always too hot to swim. And then the heat, when you feel your brain will boil if you stay outside a taxi for more than a few seconds. In all, dubai feels like plastic - odorless, cheap, flexible, disposable and eco-unfriendly

That being said, VanityFair would not have written this article back in 2005 when thousands of western engineers were making millions in the world's largest tax-free construction site.
no problem, thanks for the update!
This article seemed to end a little abruptly, I thought it was an error. I'm off to dubai in 2 months (stop over only), just to see the mirage before it completely dies.
Lack of technical excellence doesn't mean technical incompetence.
Getting a minimal distro also gives you the possibility to install only the things which are needed, instead of uninstalling a lot of stuff which came in by default.

Additionally - if you are serious about monitoring, you should ship the logs to some external host in realtime, so they can't be deleted / changed.

Running services in jails is definitely a good idea. Additionally configuring Apparmor and Selinux could be a good idea too. Or even switching to a grsec kernel. For the consistency checking, I prefer Samhain.
Sure: dcom, corba, rpc, soap. The lesson I learned is that you can't abstract away the network barrier; to the contrary - that barrier must be the central point of the design of storage and communication components of the app.
This could feel like "Rails for Realtime" even though it's backend isn't in Ruby. Very useful if you are writing real-time web applications.

What we really need to clinch native development is a common protocol to device's user notification streams. Imagine if mobile Safari and Android both surfaced their notification mechanisms through a standard Javascript API. Technologies like Node.js and frameworks like NowJS are primed for platform independent integration as soon as "tabs" or Javascript environments can run in the background.
10%?

The thing is like, you're talking a profit of like 114K on the stock options and you're going to be doing like, insane amounts of work. 100K is fairly typical, normal developer salary, right? Unless I misread the deal, I'd never do this, you could go for a 120K job and not be gambling on options at all and start having a good lifestyle right now or you could take a regular developer job and some contract on the weekends and probably work less hours in either case...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316005
So, typically there's a split between creative, project-based leadership and productive, people-based management. In games these creative leaders are (in the west) lead designers, Microsoft calls them "program managers," movies call them directors, and so on. Sometimes it's called "matrix management" and rigidly structured. Whereas at Blizzard, project management is just clearly set up so that the design staff are in complete creative control of the project's direction.

Anyway, I don't really see that separation of roles in evidence within the scope of this article. How does it work at Google? Also, is there some good analysis on this general subject someone can point me to?
As a European I always had the impression (from what I've read) that at most US-based IT companies there's not really a work-life balance. I currently work 40 hours a week and get 5 weeks of holiday per year (+ public holidays + sickdays) and that's already something where I think that the "life" part of the work-life balance is somewhat low.

So home much time do you have for your "life" if you start at, e.g., at a valley based company/startup?
At the risk of being labeled an Android fanboy - I've bought three Viewsonic G tablets after owning an iPad 1 for a few months. There's this thing out on the web called "Flash" that quite a few sites seem to use that the Froyo on the G-Tab supports. With Dolphin HD I also have integrated Password and Bookmark sync with my desktop computers using LastPass and Xmarks. In Android I am able to do some very nice things with Live Wallpapers to keep me updated on weather, and give me a nice animation of the current conditions. Since the G-Tab uses a Tegra 2 it has similar CPU and GPU ratings (Fruit Ninja HD looks positively lovely). Oh, and it's WiFi, comes with 16 GB of RAM, a Micro SD slot, a USB connection (external keyboard or USB stick) and costs $359.

So, there might be a FEW reasons to check out the competitors...
I was thinking of the parallel "article":

The guy who wrote the "article" and I use it in quotes because it means different things to different people, actual journalists spend time and effort crafting a story and thinking about the various sides, where as this sort of "article" is spit out partially considered with an expected lifetime of minutes, never to provide another insight later on ...

More experienced folks seem to grasp that business creation is good. They also understand that businesses start and then evolve in response to market forces. And lets not forget that businesses are the expression of the people who it employs.
The Keith Jarrett style was amazing - I really felt the analogy between playing a live instrument and changing the code in real-time, and it sounded very good.

I had visions of a large symphony hall with people dressed very sharply watching a master 'player' create and manipulate this piece in real-time... I think there may be a possibility. Interesting thought anyway.
Get is right, "Sun, we're the dot in oracle.com" :-)
A nice middle class family. Oh, wait, ...
Interesting, I wonder what this means for the naming scheme for Java classes.
It really depends on the scenario. Are you using one server? Do you manage a bunch of servers here and there for various clients? Are you responsible for corporate servers? All of them have different acceptable approaches to security.

On my on personal servers? Single-packet or port knocking or whatever, it's fun to play around - that's how you learn.
At the enterprise? The internet can't ssh to anything - you need VPN access, and not just any but the correct VPN access, and the right credentials on audited machines. There's nothing for outsiders to knock on (except maybe the VPN - but that has auto-lockout and password rotation tied into the enterprise auth system)

If someone wanted to do port knocking or similar for enterprise stuff I think that'd be a staunch "Umm, no"
I would start with the "Getting Started" sample application:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#referencelibrary/Get...

Probably also a good idea to learn the Objective-C programming language:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/...

(This is also available as a free e-book on the iPad.)

For Android, I'd start with the Tutorials:

http://developer.android.com/resources/browser.html?tag=tuto...
I'm not criticizing Fyodor for writing nmap in C!
Two islands in a lake on an island in a lake
Another fairy just died.

These "articles" bear no meaning whatsoever. TFA is nothing more than a concoction of technical gibberish copy-pasted from the NowJS website, for the mere purpose of having another piece of content to publish.
Give them a problem set for which the solution is explainable without the need to know a programming language and which would be solvable within the hour if not interrupted.

Experiencing the problem will be more convincing and powerful than listening to an explanation of why something is a problem.
A clinical epistemologist?

(He's a psychiatrist.)
The more order you have, the more you can predict into the future and feel comfortable making longer term investments.
Short Hair Styles
Everything on short hairstyles including latest trends, popular styles, styling tips, and more.
How Government Data Can Improve Lives (Richard H. Thaler)
it's important to say that Bill Gates doesn't give charity his own taxed income... by moving his equity into his foundation, he is essentially avoiding capital gains tax and dividend tax. I'm not saying that taxes are good but we all have to pay them. super-rich have all these smart schemes to pay in taxes as little as possible.

As long as Bill Gates foundation spends 5% of his equity on charity annually, you can't call him philanthropist since 5% rate is exactly what IRS requires charities to do as long as they want to keep their tax exempt status. When Bill Gates starts giving to charity more than he is legally required, then I'll change my opinion.
It seems to me that part of what he is complaining about is that startups are basically designed with scaling in mind. In other words, he is bitching about the fact that there are now 6 billion or so people on the planet, so if some service of a particular sort does well, good god, it needs to be fed like a growing baby whale on steroids -- something a couple of guys in a garage probably can't pull off by themselves without some of infrastructure you see in the form of YC, venture capital, et al.

PS: Really hideous website, offensively so given the title (or whatever it is) "The Difference between good and great web design".

PPS: Sentence #2, which starts with the word "this", I think you mean "think". Think hard about that for a minute.
The Bosnian airport shooting saga comes to mind. However in this case, there would seem to be little to be gained by fudging the issue.
That was a pretty dense read, at least for me. I particularly liked two parts, though they may not add up to the meat of the paper:

1. "If you find a genie bottle that gives you three wishes, it's probably a good idea to seal the genie bottle in a locked safety box under your bed, unless the genie pays attention to your volition, not just your decision." Nice. Grown up version of some cartoon plots.

2. The description of spread, muddle, and distance. Very relevant to political theory.

If you are able to compose a tl;dr of the entire paper, that'd be awesome.
I have not been able to explain this to my project manager either.
The thousands of startups today that are pitching...
Disagreed, seems like Joel is being his usual self and claiming that competitors products are useless.

I have found a lot of useful answers on yahoo answers on a range and depth of topics that do not exist within SE sites.
This article is a little older but offers an incredible perspective of the separation in class/race, the state of poverty vs tourism in Dubai.

"The dark side of Dubai"

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-har...
Your checks sure as hell better clear

And they will, as long as Abu Dhabi is willing to pick up the tab. Dubai made a massively leveraged bet, and now Abu has them by the short and curlies, but the UAE is still looking okay.

Dubai is not going to be fine.

In the long run, no probably not, but they (the UAE, not Dubai alone) have a decade, maybe two to get it together. They probably won't, and when it goes to hell it'll make Libya look like a tea party, but if they went to a Singaporean model with the guest workers they could be okay. Given that there are third generation guest workers they're probabably hosed, but something as simple as having a maximum residency of five years for pure labourers and recruiting men from one country for one sector and women for another from a nother country would go a loooong way to preventing people from forming real attachments.
Joel's really vocal about Yahoo!Answers, which is not fair to Yahoo!Answers. It's a huge site that caters to a broad base of users: take this question from a user

Why do universities cost more than community colleges?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AukI2XODG.mO_QE...

It's just a question, picked from the front page.

It's a legitimate inquiry. I don't see a "what do penguins eat?"

More important question is what is Joel Smoking? What are his investors smoking? To let him make such off the wall assumptions.
In making the pro-Dubai argument you seem to consistently do so by letting it clear fairly low hurdles. (paraphrasing) "More liberal - relative to the middle east", "its better governed - then Laos".

Trying to just be better then the absolute worst is a rapid path to mediocrity. Perhaps, considering Dubai's lofty goals, its fair to compare it (as the author does) to something a bit more progressive?
Notice the following "AMD says it maintains a start-up mentality even though it's a large company".

This is becoming a trend now, hardly the only company touting this. My current company is doing the same. My old company approached me recently and told me are going to start working in start-up mode in California, and this is an old and rigid company.

I'm holding Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky and others accountable for this. They have glamourized start-ups so much that these big and established companies have started feeling bad about themselves. Or maybe they have finally realized that big organizations and rigid processes don't work very well.

There are probably upsides to this. But the downsides are killing me. Obviously for large company working in start-up mode means that engineers work even harder, are more accountable and have to deliver to even more ridiculous schedules. And the result is even more chaos and avoidance of work and responsibility, more panic in QA, and so forth.

Personally I don't like this trend. If I want to work start-up hard, I will join a start-up and potentially become rich in the process. Working in start-up mode in a big company has so far meant that I work through weekends and don't get paid for that.
Do you have a contact email? I can show you a quick preview of something I have...it's very rudimentary, but it works.
The code starts around this slide:

http://www.chromakode.com/misc/waves/pow.html#34
"Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money." I actually loved this quote, I never would have thought of it that way.

Really, if you're fueled by ambition like I am and I suspect 99% of the people who read HN are, what would be worse than having nothing to win?
Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.
I think that people (self included) are generally more accepting of risk if it's control is within their own hands. Dying of tobacco related illnesses or obesity is mostly within my own control. Dying because a a nuclear reactor leak is pretty much 100% out of my control.
True, but Google started as a single product: a search engine.
And you would be absolutely right! Marx was a Young Hegelian and applied it political thinking and his theories of society.
I agree. I use it. Sometimes good, sometimes crap, but I use it. This is getting annoying though... Everyone lately has been just spouting what should and should not be in google's results based on what they consider good content. Come on.
Maybe you could compare it to surgery? I mean, what would happen if a kid ran in and tugged on the surgeons arm? You are talking the entire team has to re-scrub and there is enormous work involved in making sure this doesn't kill the patient...etc.

Or introduce her to a game like Master of Magic? I frequently start over and don't bother to finish playing a game if I have left it too long. Too much needs to be held in your head at one time and losing your place can ruin the whole thing. If you can stop at a good stopping point -- ie a planned, chosen stopping point, not a randomly interrupted place -- sometimes you can pick back up where you left off. But I very frequently just delete old games and start over rather than try to figure out where the hell I was, mentally, after having put a couple of hours or more of continuous play into it and having a complex set of goals and problems in mind. I often just can't return to juggling it all. If the juggler steps away, all the balls hit the floor and, no, you can't just step back and keep juggling like you never missed a beat.

HTH.
The dunes of the beach there are impressive:

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&q=Do%C3%B1a+An...
Buying profitable startups requires lot of money. Just buying them and living off their profits, wont be sustainable.
I don't claim OP's design is perfect, but it's one of the very few sites that don't make me want to click on readability bookmarklet.
"It is only when thermal energy is not equal to gravitational work that the cloud either expands and cools or contracts and warms, a process that continues until equilibrium is reached."

Gosh, I want pants like that!
That's probably true in developed countries where everyone knows the dangers of smoking. However, people in a lot of undeveloped countries are actually still unaware of how dangerous it is to smoke.

On a related note, I found this black cigarette package, Death ™, quite cool. They're honest at least:
http://www.sadanduseless.com/2009/08/black-death-cigarettes/

"DEATH™ is a responsible way to market a legally available consumer product which kills people when used exactly as intended"