skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given that I really don't have any practical experience using whenever.js (it's literally days old) my "argument", is that jQuery tends to be very syntax heavy.

eg. jQuery('a#click-me').click(function(){ $(this).text('Clicked!') })

... there's a lot of cognitive work going on here. Not only am I parsing javascript, as a coder, I'm parsing the CSS of the selector, and creating a mental model of the anonymous function. It's not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing, just that there's a lot of extra syntax to handle.

whenever("Click Me!").is('clicked').then('change it to "clicked"')

...reads without all of the extra syntax, but it still remains valid javascript.

> you'd have to look at three different places to understand what the code is _actually_ doing

This is a fair point, but I would argue that for most code you read, there's typically nowhere to go to find out the _intent_, which for me is really the most important thing. I think it's fascinating to be able to have "executable intent" ...

... but since I don't really have any real world experience using this, I can't really back up my arguments with any real data ... just the motivations I had to write this!
"does help generate inflation, though, which helps keep labor costs (our pay) down by effectively handing workers a little pay cut every year"

You do realize that wages are adjusted for cost of living changes over time? (This is a gross simplification of the actual process, but the fact remains that wages are not constant in the face of inflation.)

Take a look at this please (using median wage here to make this more clear):

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+occupations+median+...

However, here is median wage too:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+occupations+mean+wa...

It is also worth noting that the average wage back in the '70s was roughly $8,000.00.

Edited in Response to Downvoting:

Inflation is caused by rising prices, and wages are one of these prices. Your wage is simply the price of your labor. In the long-run, wages are flexible just like all of the other prices. Admittedly wolfram|alpha does not have extensive historical graphs available, but I am not trying to write a book here.

If you are down-voting because you have not received a pay increase lately, then you should be aware of the fact that wages are usually a bit more sticky than other prices in the short run.

If you are down-voting this, I would appreciate engaging you in honest discussion about the point that I made above.

The parent post said that inflation gives workers a little pay cut every year. Painting this wonderful image of a worker sliding into poverty. This is demonstrably false. Yes, a 1% or a 2% rise in inflation will impact your real earnings, but wages are not a static process and they do reflect the actual costs of living changes that take place over time.

As an economist, I am constantly amazed by how poorly the press discusses inflation and how little most people know about what inflation is and how it interacts with other variables within an economy. Please read this pdf for some discussion on wages and price inflation:

https://www.clevelandfed.org/research/policydis/pd1.PDF

It is an academic piece, but it is one of my favorites for illustrating the interaction between wages and the greater macroeconomy.
As it jumps, the magnet in your hand grows heavier. Your arm does the work.
Part of the solution to the problem is we need more tech savy people working on capitol hill--party preferences regardless. The federal government usually lags several years behind the industry standards for information technology and the people writing or reviewing proposed policies for technology regulation are much more likely to have a BA in Government or Poli Sci than a BS in engineering or CS.

If I go to a friends' house and watch a movie and that movie happened to be pirated (and I was not aware) could the law logically be extended so the government could arrest me for viewing pirated content even if I didn't know it was pirated? Or what about the "viral" video defense where companies will release promos or "restricted" content under false names to drum up interest in a product. I could see a defense attorney arguing the uploading account could be used by someone in AA industries to create interest in a product and there was no way their client could have known.
thank you, i appreciate it :). In my understanding, meat eating is just a stage in the species development. I.e. eating meat, as a more efficient energy source, allowed a bunch of species move to the state of mental development we can observe among the advanced predators, ie. likes of wolves, cats, apes/humans, etc...

I think humans have exhausted how far the _extensive_ (ie. size increasing) brain development of meat eating species can go - it seems we're near the biomechanical limits - the brain consumes ~25% of our body energy. The further development seems to require to "shrink the die" of our brain and/or increase/improving of the energy intake.

"Shrinking the die" is biological evolutionary process that will take time on the scale of several generations at least (Einstein's brain, smaller, yet more densely packed and having more energy generating cells than the average human's brain, shows that it is a viable, in principle, option)

Wrt. improving of the energy intake - i think we're on the brink (ie. in the next few decades) of bio-engineering of the meat-comparable and, this is much more important, more effective-than-meat energy carrying and generating proteins (or whatever compounds it will result in) for human consumption, and in result - move of the humans past the meat (as meat eating would be an artificial dumbing down of yourself) and we'll see the world in the new light. Meat consumption would become just an ugly habit of the past, like torturous executions (ie. burning at stake, disemboweling, quartering...) that were an enjoyable public spectacle just few hundreds years ago.
Random speculation: Maybe pi was chosen because the symbol for tau (τ) is hard to distinguish from a ‘T’ when hand-written?

BTW, I don't mean to take anything away from your comment; that link was awesome.
There are .coms that sell for millions, so $185k for a .whatever domain seems reasonable (well, not really, but it's reasonable to expect people will pay for it). I wonder who can legitimately claim .food, or .cars, though.

Great idea by ICANN, though. They've successfully just turned domains into beanie babies and magic TG cards.
Wow, an incredibly vapid piece by techcrunch. I didn't learn much and it seems to play on your feelings more than anything else. It reminds me why I dislike techcrunch...
Apologies for the downvote then.
"I fail to see how a Greece debt restructuring would negatively impact the US economy"

Is $41 billion at risk insignificant?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/greece-poses-41-billion-ris...
IMO it is time to move to "PR 2.0", which is not based on controlling the message.
That makes no sense.

http://apple/ might make sense.

But what would .pantene do? blonde.prov.pantene? They are not going to subdomain them under .pg.
Fair point, I do get emotional.

I get angry with people who hijack legitimate scientific enquiries to manipulate others into doing their bidding. And I get frustrated with people who argue conjecture and theory as fact.

There is great science in climatology. Its fascinating and we learn new things every day. None of it suggests that any actions humans take will change the fact that the earth's climate is changing. Just like you can't simulatenously both believe in the science of evolution and that it no longer is a factor in humans.

So its scientific to say that our models show that CO2, as a green house gas, has a significant influence on climate. Its not scientific to say if humans make less CO2 the climate will stop changing. It is perfectly reasonable to say that if humans reduce their CO2 generation it will change the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere.

A great web site which focuses on the science is Skeptical Science [1]. I like it because they are pretty aggressive at seeking out all the journal articles and papers and seem to be pretty good about even talking about papers they don't agree with.

A recent article they posted talked about the PETM extinction event [2]. In that event, where there were no humans present, CO2 levels on the planet shot up, the planet warmed and lots of things died off. The study is great, the science is sound, and I'm sure the paper is cited often. Unfortunately nobody has yet figured out why the CO2 shot up.

So when you read this, on the one hand you can say "Look it doesn't matter why, human activity is causing a similar jump in CO2 and it killed lots of stuff then we need to address this." I don't disagree with that statement at all.

I disagree with the non-scientific statement "if we address human CO2 generation this won't happen." Is that a subtle difference? I don't think so. What ever caused CO2 to spike without human help could happen again, and if it does we're in a world of hurt. So people who approach this issue less emotionally talk about both changing how much CO2 (or any other green house gases) we liberate into the atmosphere and ways to survive climate changes. When people try to tell me that if I do what they say it will "help stop climate change" I get irritated with them.

[1] http:://skepticalscience.com/

[2] http://skepticalscience.com/co2-rising-ten-times-faster-than...
Cocaine Unwrapped
Happy to accept a pull request that adds semi-colons. I'm not particularly fussed!
> The irony of Greenspan worrying about Federal debt when he was pushing to NOT pay it off a decade ago.

Some might argue that there's a qualitative difference between $160B/year when you owe $10T and $1.6T/year when you owe $14T.

> -- tax cuts solved that.

Did they? How much less revenue was collected?

Never confuse tax rates with tax revenues. The latter pays for things while the former has only a tenuous relationship with the latter. For example, the US got far more from rich people with low rates than it ever got with high rates.
One example of great success is Penny Arcade - started off doing nothing but producing content, and basically leveraged it into a fucking empire - store selling merchandise, multiple conventions per year, and a children's charity.
Don't be so mean. If they report his age, they're likely to get at least one fact correct in the article.
MG has got to be my favorite TechCrunch writer.
Here's what you can do without using whenever that addresses your issue, and possibly others'. As far as I can tell what people don't like is the inlined function. You can get rid of that and be descriptive about what's going on, all without the use of whenever:

whenever("Click Me!").is('clicked').then('change it to "clicked"')

turns into:

var cbs = {};
cbs.setClickedText = function() { $(this).text('Clicked!'); };

$('a#click-me').click(cbs.setClickedText);
Intel Supervisor Mode Execution Protection: From Slides to Silicon in 3 years
Jack Eisenmann builds entire 8-bit computer from scratch
ADA is needed because the number of disabled people in the US isn't large enough for the free market/competition process to play out as you suggest. It will never be economically efficient for private enterprise to look after the needs of some groups, hence legislation is needed to ensure their needs are met.
Isn't YubiKey a fail-closed mechanism? Are you okay with trading a little extra protection from voyers with the possibility of losing access to the portion of your personal data that you deemed important enough to encrypt and vital enough still keep around as opposed to wiping it clean?
College Humor: The Hardly Working Startup Guys
Mozilla VP Mike Shaver responds to Microsoft's WebGL security concerns
> US problems have nothing to do with Greece.

The argument is that US banks hold a fair amount of european bank paper and that european banks hold a lot of greek debt. If the greeks default, then those european banks are in trouble, which puts the US banks in trouble.

We saw a variation on this at the beginning of the "great recession". US banks held too much Fannie and Freddie stock because the regulators gave it special status. When fannie and freddie went down, those banks became technically insolvent.

I don't know what triggered Lehmann Bros' specific problems, but when it went under, that caused problems for its counterparties.
Compared to the size of the USA bond sector, yes $41 billion is insignificant.

Compared to my personal holdings, I'd be willing to consider even half of that amount significant. Send my bailout as a check or money order, please.
At least in the short term. But, that's definitely not the foundation for any functional society.
Powerful cosmic blast as black hole shreds star
Photos: Can tech change your behaviour? The Open University investigates
We're All Mutants: The Average Human Has 60 New Genetic Mutations
I think it's more, "You don't choose your passions. You will randomly do many things in your life and some of those things will interest you so much that you feel compelled to keep doing them."

It's not as pithy, though.
And broadly discontinued.
Well, maybe people will start shooting hackers. I volunteer Lulz to be first against the wall.
I've never heard any claims that the 41 billion will just disappear. The worst I've heard is that they will restructure the loans to extend pay back dates.

Also, from the article, the banks have a drop in the bucket exposure to these loans, which isn't even reporting in their annual reports as a risk. The highest exposure bank seems to be half a billion on BoA's balance sheets, and like I said, it isn't like that debt obligation is just going to disappear.

There's a lot of FUD around Greece "defaulting", and like I said, I think the main impact area will be the stock market, not necessarily bank balance sheets or the economy at large.
I think something could be two units long. Two is discrete, and at a microscopic level, things can be exactly discrete values (i.e. two angstroms...). I think asking if something could be exactly pi long is a different question.
Encryption was a munition and it was outlawed for individuals to have it..see PGP history for details
Maybe purchasers from Asia and Europe weigh more in the average at that time (due to U.S. being asleep), and they spend less money?
We all grow old. That's what I mean when I say being able-bodied is only temporary.
Thank you for the example.

Still, it seems to have taken a lot of convincing of people and companies before it started to work.
This. A million times this. I don't understand the push that's been made on the web wherein content that would be perfectly usable as normal plaintext & images becomes videos. It is really easy for me to move freely spatially and really difficult for me to move freely temporally and this is no different on the web. Moreover, it is really easy for me to randomly access a single sentence of text and actually pretty damn difficult for me to do the same with a sentence of spoken word (and this is before you account for my minor hearing difficulties).
>Pi is the wrong constant.

Seems a bit pedantic. The post was about illustrating pi after all. I do enjoy the argument for tau though.
Except the banks holding the bag have taken TARP funds, and are still struggling.

Plus the $41 billion number is just an estimate; the real total won't be known until all the derivative contracts are unwound.

Either way, it would be a mistake to dismiss a Greek default as irrelevant to us.
Greenspan says default because he doesn't think the Greek government will pay.

The Euro is in fine shape because investors don't expect to lose money on their Greek bonds.

What is the difference? Investors (and probably Greenspan) expect the Germans to bail out the Greeks and pay off their debts. So the Greeks will default and the investors will still keep their money.

The main problem in the whole situation is hiding the deal from German voters and taxpayers. Nobody wants to take responsibility for TARP.
I did exactly that; I had a "secure" engineering job through college and for a short period after, but have since quit to co-found a tech company.

For the same reason one might go to school, you'll rarely be disappointed if you invest in yourself. My advice to graduates interested in startups is to work in their field of interest until their learning slows down, then to move on to bigger and better things. By starting a tech business, your skills in business and technology will grow tremendously, and will continue to pay dividends.

Obviously not the only way, though.
Hey, HNers,

Here's something I would pay money for and maybe other publishers, as well.

Through WindyCitizen.com, I get about 40-50 press releases a day trying to get one our writers to cover some event or celebrity appearance in Chicago.

This is absurd considering our site is all user-generated content. But we're on lists somewhere and so the PR industrial complex thinks we want to hear about all their fake news. It's really annoying.

I would pay money for a gmail plugin that lets me specify the e-mail addresses of X PR people, and then responds to their press releases automatically with an e-mail from me telling them what it will cost them to buy advertising on our site that promotes the event they're touting.

If they're going to spam me, I would like to be able to spam them.

Most of them will just ignore the e-mails, but they'll get the picture eventually.

Meanwhile, some of them will convert into advertisers. If I pick up $1500/month worth of advertising from this tool, I would gladly pay $30-40/month maybe more for a service that lets me do it.

It could be free for one e-mail address, $29/month for up to 50, and so on and so on.

This way, the indie bloggers out there who can't sell an ad to save their lives but who get bombarded with PR pitches in their inbox all day can automate their sales process a bit AND get the satisfaction of annoying the crap out of the PR people bugging them.
Quite true. Socrates is often saving young people from either being practicality oriented people who can't think like Cephalus, or philosophers who don't matter or are evil like the sophists.
Oh, of course. I completely forgot that there are some crazy people out there who browse without javascript. I was just jumping at the idea of reducing PCI compliance issues - I've had to deal with them and it's a huge project.
:(.

Using Whenever and Whenever (ruby cron gem) together will make my head pop.
Or perhaps article spam filters like HN will become more popular?
Well Hacker News doesn't make any revenue and acts as a community project of a company, not a profit-aiming brand.
Puredyne: pure creativity
Value is Perception:  Tragic Mispricing in the Art Market
"I've never heard any claims that the 41 billion will just disappear."

What do you think default means?

It has happened before, most recently with Argentina in 2002, and with Russia in 1998, which triggered the LTCM crisis.

"The worst I've heard is that they will restructure the loans to extend pay back dates."

That is just default in everything but name.

The reason the so-called seven year Vienna plan has so much resistance is that ECB members know they'll never get paid back.
I work for a small company that runs content sites, profitably
Charting Twilio’s Growth Over The Last Year (And The Price Drops That Helped)
Interesting, thank you.

So what would be the security implications of allowing Nitro to create code dynamically within a sandboxed process? AFAIK, only compiled code (ObjC,C,C++) can call private APIs, and the app review process guards against that; so what could a Nitro process do that compiled code couldn't?
When π was "invented" it could have been 2 x 3.141. The author makes a case for tau because it is too late to redefine π
Why SSDs are worth the money
Right, to get money out of the rich its easiest to set the tax rate below the cost of a tax lawyer.
That just pushes the problem back to whether perfect circles can exist in reality.
As someone who has been here long, I can say for certain that HN would only benefit from politeness similar to F_J_H.
I am talking with a friend about writing software to market to people in the law market so your post caught my eye. It sounds like a lawyer would find your service really useful and could save money by cutting back personnel whose job it is to currently do this. Nice job. Few thoughts/suggestions:

- I think $30/mo is too low

- Are the documents sensitive in nature (hence the one-time-link)? If
yes, what kind of security do you have to protect these documents from
unauthorized access? Highlight this on the site.

- Can they export their meeting schedule from your site to google
calendar? outlook? iCal? etc? They probably already have a calendaring
program in use and may not want to check multiple places for their
meeting schedule. If I were them, I would definitely consolidate my
meetings into a calendaring solution that was already working for me
instead of using yet another calendaring application.
No matter how much you improve it, there will be a never ending supply of end users that won't install the proper updates.
Average-ish salaries with much higher than average work expectations. Basically the only perk of the job is that you're working on Reddit, but it seems obvious that there's a lot of extra stress involved.
It's that fearmongering that keeps greece from officially defaulting though, eventhough it's officially incapable of paying its debt for a year now. It's kind of irrational fear, too. I mean, japan's earthquake alone cost ~300 billion and there was no new crisis.
Student loans, child support/alimony, tax debts, criminal penalties, civil penalties, and tax witholding for other people will all follow you even past bankruptcy.

Pretty much all you can get rid of is unsecured consumer debt. A modern bankruptcy is just a way to get out from under your credit cards (or health care debts).
Except most of the banks have paid back TARP. Most major banks are back to 10+ % profit margins (only one lower I found was BAC).

Out of the 700 billion TARP fund, only 51 billion remains outstanding (as of September last year), which is larger then the 41 billion number you were floating around:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870343160457552...

I'm not saying all banks will be fine if Greece "defaults" (remember in this case "defaulting" implies restructed debt), but causing a US recession? Highly highly unlikely.
All measurements in the real world come with error bars. Indeed, at a certain scale the thing you're measuring generally becomes ill-defined. The length of a piece of string to tenths of an inch is pretty easy to define. If you magnify it so the end is rough, it's harder. Zoom in to subatomic, and things get really difficult to define, let alone measure.

Given that any error bar contains some rational numbers, the case can be made that rationals are all you'll ever need for measurements in the real world. Nothing can ever be measured so precisely that it has a definitively irrational length.

However, irrational numbers do serve as a useful abstraction when dealing with the real world, since one is often working in different scales. A rational approximation of pi that works in one context -- say, construction paper projects -- might not be good enough in another -- say, orbital mechanics. Identifying the abstract, transcendental value has the practical application that you can use a rational approximation appropriate to the scale.
Although it shares most of a title with an old blog post of mine, this is actually a new hour-long presentation that I did at Microconf this year, with slides and textual accompaniment. Comments are appreciated as always.
The FUD "defaulting" means they won't pay you back. The real "defaulting" in this case means they will restructure the debt.

It is a credit agency's definition of "default", but it won't be as adverse as the money disappearing from balance sheets.