skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One big problem I see with this: in time of war, it is often not only necessary but desireable to run a deficit. Imagine if we had been forced to run a balanced budget during WWII! I would imagine that in such dire need, members of congress would "take one for the team" and run a deficit in order to sustain the war effort, but then you have the classic "changing horses mid-stream" problem when you turn over literally the entire legislature in the middle of a war.

I think that a much more practical constitutional amendment would be to simply prohibit congress from appropriating funds in excess of revenues unless a war has been declared. There is a risk of congress declaring needless wars for the sole purpose of justifying deficits, but that would require the cooperation of both parties, and I would bet that the opposition party would see more potential gain in opposing the war and demagouging its supportors than in letting the majority party have their war of convenience.
...because the wild women of grunge can't possibly have brains too? Disingenuous, my friend. There are famous rockers with PhDs (the guy from green day comes to mind).
... no experience in the current system, that is. This proposal would change that system dramatically.

Upending congress might be tumultuous, but compared to bankrupting the nation it still counts as the lesser of two evils.
Thanks :) Actually I asked just to have a look at how this is done. I'll surely help if I can.
It would take more than a law to block reelection for sitting legislators - it would take a Constitutional amendment. I'd like to see Buffet get that done in 5 minutes.
Capital flows between groups is an interesting way to look at it, but it doesn't consider efficiency of what money is used for, invested in, spent on.

You could have identical capital inflows and outflows (i.e. money coming in to the US from the international community) but it could be wasted on things it shouldn't.

3% of GDP is very reasonable unless extreme circumstances were present. In that case, politicians might just have to resign after their term.
Be careful about who you may have just ostracized. To play devil's advocate, do you have any idea where we would be without Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper?

They are somewhat known for their public moments sounding just like this guy.

Personalities are complex. We can't just cherry pick the attributes of a person and separate those from those which we perceive to deviate from the ideal.

Whether this particular guy is a net gain for the community isn't for me to decide (though I do love emacs, and use a lot of core GNU software), but if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer.

Anecdote: many of the brilliant developers I've worked near (the major outliers, 100x productivity types) have some kind of quirk. This could be that they snap sometimes, or that they don't shower, or that they neglect their paperwork. Give them some feedback, grow a thick skin, but don't ostracize them.
I don't disagree with you, but a lot of people feel the same about marriage. A lot of people (not me, btw) feel that this is a Christian country and it's antithetical to our founders' beliefs for gays to marry and yadda yadda.

The point I'm making is that everyone has a different idea of what those core values are.
It's not really private if you are using a freemail service like Google or Yahoo.

I am more interested in the law, for those who run their own SMTP and IMAP servers.
Is it just me, or do a lot of us geeks have a small font bias? Is it because we want more information on the screen?

Personally, I like small fonts when I'm coding but larger fonts for other stuff.
It would be great if more email clients had encryption built in, and encrypted emails to people with known public keys.

Barring that, perhaps something like a peer to peer network where messages are automatically encrypted and addressed to a public key could work. Those emails could then float around the p2p network until a client with that public key joined, and downloaded that message, decrypting it with their private key obviously.
I use Padrino exclusively now; it does everything I need while also being lightweight, fast, and modular.

Since I haven't played with Rails since 3 was in beta, I'm genuinely curious: from a purely technical standpoint, for what types of projects might Rails be a better choice than Padrino?
This will most likely be fixed with high inflation, but it is a concern.
Videos about the symbols of physics and astronomy
Schmidt preaches 'deep integration' desire with Facebook, Twitter
Hey Randall, that's good advice. i've just started meeting people in my area. (Boston).

I'm not the technical guy because it's simply not my strength. I could probably code the thing in a year but someone else could do it in a few months with much better code. IN any case I'm building the prototype as solo founder right now.
Being a gifted student is no great feat in today's education system. This article is a perfect example of poor information. Just because you manage a 5-10% increase in the number of gifted students (which is arbitrarily defined), does not mean you get any sort of increase in the quality of the top students.

Some students are simply smarter than others - and I don't think that's a point anyone can argue. Some debate on different types of learning, and specialized subjects, but from my experience, the gifted students do well in every subject (music/arts an exception). By having more gifted students in a class, it is absolutely inevitable that more time will be spent teaching certain subjects, more clarification will be required, and material will probably need to be dumbed down at least a bit.

While this can create an increase in the pure number of students who reach a certain level, it is unfair to the actually gifted students who require an absolute top level of stimulation.

We've seen that economic communism doesn't work, and I'd bet an arm and a leg that intellectual communism doesn't work either.
That is a brilliant summary. Not enough people make the connection to Rome in my opinion. I know it's hip to compare the US to Rome but it is actually borne out in the history. At least in my opinion.

Great idea by Mr. Buffet. Similar to Brazil's balanced budget laws, btw.

Next up: funny ways of counting GDP ;-)
Considering a 1TB external drive costs less than a hundred dollars, and back-up software is either free, bundled with the drive, or part of the OS, there really is no excuse other than ignorance.

http://www.jungledisk.com/ is a super cheap cloud-based backup system based on S3 that has some nice client software, less n3rd than tarsnap.
Indeed; anyone with children knows how impressionable they are. I have to wonder how many educators are parents themselves.
This is my old first draft from last year. Others have been working on making it real over the past few months but the site hasn't been updated yet.
Under 30 here, it's not clean at all to me. Quite the opposite. The author ever points out that the menus are not "pixel malnourished", like... Apple.

The whole article came across as a really bad self promo pretending to be written by someone objective.
How is this different to Facebook? They're also a US company, and subject to the same laws.
The war argument for deficit spending has completely lost credibility with me. It may have been true for WWII, but this argument has been sorely abused in order to justify out of control spending during the various armed conflicts since then. Leaving war as a loophole for runaway deficit spending is a slippery slope, and one that congress clearly has no reluctance sliding down.
congrats guys, awesome project saving drudgery for web developers and testers across globe
> Yes some people do that, but VERY few.

How many TV shows present that reality? Movies? How many advertisements? Popular music? Dare I mention video games?

"Relentless" is a very accurate way to summarize the situation.

If you're interested in thinking about our culture, the correct mirror is the artifacts we produce and consume; not behavior.

An aside: Men may be more likely to be assaulted than women, but you're measuring the wrong thing again. How many men are assaulted solely because of their gender?

Our culture is quite frankly abhorrent to me in how it dehumanizes women. That's an honest opinion; not slander, and it's one formed with ample observations to back it up.
Buffett wasn't suggesting we mandate a balanced budget, simply a cap on deficit spending proportional to the nation's GDP.
Mopar Fiat 500 and Chrysler 200 Photos
The Testimonials, and the hover-text on the robots change on every reload. Try it! Hammer the site more ;)
Chrome does not run on Android.
Don't underestimate their ability to redefine GDP or 'budget deficit'. Also, if push comes to shove, there is always the option of cranking up the printing presses (Congress can wrestle control of monetary policy if the Fed is too uncooperative).
Giving away my gender is much less of a concern for me than the presentation characteristics of the profile. My gender is "noise" on my profile. I'd be better served by whitespace instead of displaying my gender. It makes Google+ profile feel at worst like a dating site and at best a random collection of facts.
FTA:

>> Our culture's relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them—men who are usually bigger, stronger, and (like any human) occasionally crazy. This feeling—often confirmed by actual experiences of harassment and assault—can lead, understandably, to a lifetime of low-level wariness and sense of vulnerability that men have trouble appreciating. <<

I want to comment on the attitude Randall is projecting in the above referenced quote. It's a commonplace attitude in the modern world today. That a woman's only protection is a man's forbearance. I feel this attitude is also toxic to our social fabric -- it really is just another form of gender bias. Attitudes like this lead to strange unintended consequences: Single, unmarried men cannot be seated next to unaccompanied minors on a plane. Men are now less likely to come to the aide of a screaming or crying child in public.

Just because some Vikings rape and pillage does not mean that all men do. Just because my grandfather was of German descent and fought in WWII should you assume he was a Nazi (he was a medic for the Allies).

Google+ is supposed to have privacy options "superior to facebook". (And considering they also have access to our search history and email, they had better be). Women online (and this is likely not their first social networking experience) have the same access to those privacy tools as everyone else. Let them block the harassers and those that objectify them.

(But still some really good points made about co-opting "Other").
The Siftables guys demoed a pouring interface for color mixing, among other things:
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_s...

Not sure if that feature made it into the commercially available version, but they definitely still have the proximity features, which are pretty cool: https://www.sifteo.com
That's a great question. My experience is that you have to REALLY like kids in order to be an educator. Most teachers are female and young, with in steady relationships and planned to have kids (at least at Temple University where I went to school).

I wasn't crazy about kids and ended up changing my major to CS. Which is why I'm here! ;)
What's sad about this is we shouldn't need to pass a law, voters could easily enforce this. There is a massive problem right now with a lack of accountability, not just for the debt but for all the horrible decisions congress makes.
of course, take away the need to satisfy the public and any fool can simply close off debate by fiat
"The American republic will endure until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money" Alexis de Tocqueville
I thought the more interesting part of the interview was when he said that social security payments should have higher priority than bond interest payments. That sounds it would result in a worse credit rating and much larger pain in the long term...
Not just you. I think you are right, it probably has something to do with information density. Which does raise an interesting question: Could font size play a role in the audience that you attract and maintain? No doubt 14pt Comic Sans would have a deleterious effect upon HN.

IMO, it could make a difference. 7pt Tahoma might be a bit too small, but I do think there is an 'intelligent aesthetic' that font size plays into.
When have we not been 'at war' in the past 40 years?
and ask.metafilter.com is a great place as well.
As much as you might like to think differently war is always negatively productive.

There might be some corner cases where the destroyed wealth is replaced by more efficient use, but they have yet to demonstrate themselves.
To Raise or Not To Raise?
Generate unique images (of robots) from any text
Ever think that people who care about the issue aren't going to use the service or going to use a "fake" photo?
And not a single fuck was given for your lack of insight.
> The Moon is almost exactly 1000x closer to the earth than Mars[3], so I wonder if I used it for my mirror array instead if I could just put a station with 500 mirrors on it to accomplish the same thing.

Plus, since the moon has synchronous rotation, the mirors would at least always be facing us. Assuming all the other massive difficulties got worked out, it'd be a good place for those mirrors.
It can get much worse.
Check out www.forlue.com --a replica of HN, only but the green theme an non-hacker focus.
Privacy exists. Just not on social networks where you share personal informational with the network provider.
See https://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google
That's the kind of revolution we're supposed to have when the government becomes corrupt. Also, it wouldn't be all at once; term overlaps ensure that there would be continuity.
0 deficit the day before elections is NOT a slippery slope. It's reasonable.
The next headline would be "permanent war declared against Oilistan" and war spending is never a boondoggle.

Governments always use a crisis to grow their power.
Why aren't Facebook friend groups generated via algorithm?
The true continents of the world
I'm not sure of the exact dates we've been at war since WW2, but I just checked and saw that we've been engaged in armed conflict continuously since at least before I was born. I don't think that rule would really work.

"No, I mean a REAL war..." Yeah.
I like the simplicity of the design! I too have a few suggestions:

1] The top screenshot is pretty "jarring", which I'm sure was you intent and works well.. However, it doesn't indicate what happens when the ssl cert is invalid & users would see this screen. I think it would be much more informative to add an arrow pointing to an email inbox or something indicting that you get alerted when this situation happens. Additionally you may want to change the site url to "www.mysite.com" or something - If I was Amazon and saw that screen, I wouldn't be very happy.

2] Email is great, but you gotta add cell phone (sms) support in some capacity. You can do this on the cheap by just offering support to the major cell providers via their email-to-sms gateway instead of using a paid service like Twilio or Tropo. It's not as clean, but it's cheap and easy. You just have to have the user put in their cell phone & provider and just send a much shorter alert notice. Here's a good list of email-to-sms gateways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

3] If I were going to use this service, it would be important for me to know how often your service is pinging my sites to verify SSL cert integrity - once ever minute, once every five mins? Couldn't find this on the page or FAQ

Otherwise this is a great idea! I can definitely see the usefulness of a service like this, and I wish you great success!
I think you did a great job, way to represent the Austin Tech scene!
Sometimes, the way in which you form paragraphs and sentences can give away an individuals gender identity. Check this out, and the accompanying paper.

Female Score: 8

Male Score: 14

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-fina...
Actually, it could get a lot worse. There may be a lot wrong with the US government, but as governments go there are not many in the world that are considerably better, and a large amount of governments that are much, much worse.
Very much this. If you want to predict behavior, look at incentives.

For example, the California state budget. There's a constitutional requirement that it be on time, but every year we were setting a new record for how late it was. Then, we pass a law saying that if it's not on time the legislators don't get paid. Mirabile dictu, the budget is now on time. Granted, the requirements for passing the budget were also lowered, but aside from that the Democrats were generally displeased with the budget they passed and I nearly certain that they would have waited around and tried to swing another 4 Republican votes rather than pass what they did.

At the federal level, there's nothing pushing the politicians to balance the budget, except for people who vote on that issue. But it's a rather abstract issue and not a lot of people vote on it compared to, say, abortion. No voting pressure, no lobbying dollars, and no legal repercussions means the problem won't get addressed. Buffet is suggesting changing the last of those three, although any of them would be enough.
fullon snark

Does anybody remember: Up to a couple years ago, the Apple stores used to use Windows CE devices to process card sales.

edit: not sure they were CE, but definitely MS Windows based, and if you asked to look at it closer, the associate would generally say they were really busy and walk away.
This line I see on the Internet with the excuse that government cannot go bankrupt is complete rubbish. This is what you are implying with differentiating the issuer with the user.

The only reason the US is able to print money is because it is a de facto world currency.

How many years do you think it takes to replace a de facto currency for international trade?

Not many. Russia and China are already trading in their own currencies instead of the USD. I'm sure Brazil wants to follow.

There are some political thinkers who theorize that the Libyan and Iraqi wars are meant to prop up the dollar. The Libyan dictator wants a gold-backed currency for Africa and Iraq and Iran want(ed) to trade in Euros. I think the Libyan connection is pretty far fetched but I am not in the know so who really knows?

If any of those transitions had happened 10 years ago, the USD would be severely diminished today, reducing the power of the US. Less countries would need the currency and I believe you would see even more real inflation.

So yes, the government of the US can effectively go bankrupt if no one wants the currency anymore.

And that includes its own people. It happened in the Great Depression because some people realized it was the money system that was a large cause of the depression.

The wild card? That the US actually embarks on the "Everyone must use USD or end up like those other guys" rampage.

For what it's worth, I hold a shitload of USD-denominated assets because I believe in the American system more than any other. But man, that belief being tested hard these days...
In defense of the cops, doing something like that is just asking for problems.
Well said. And plenty of people use avatars rather than photos.
Anyone else notice the Microsoft bot has a 7 (as in Windows 7) on its head?

http://robohash.org/microsoft
Anecdotically, none of my female friends were ever raped

So far as you know.
There absolutely should be an option to hide gender on your profile. I was lucky to get a +1 invite early but didn't create an account because of this issue.

Here's why: I'm a hacker. I do freelance work for a living. I avoid all references to my gender in anything work-related because it creates too much extra mental overhead. Instead of focusing on getting things done I end up wondering whether a disagreement on a technical issue would disappear if I was male. Or wondering if I didn't get a contract because I'm female. Or (worse) if I got a contract because of affirmative action or because a company is trying to cultivate an open forward-thinking culture, rather than for my technical ability.

It isn't that I want to hide that I am female, exactly, its just that it doesn't have any affect on the quality of my work, but disclosing the fact that I am female unfortunately can create unrelated complications that get in the way of doing my job.
A Rocket to Nowhere
Warren Buffet made a tidy profit on the bailouts. He knew who was anointed to survive and who was not.

Of course Warren loves the influence of government!
Budget deficits shouldn’t be any more of an automatic trigger for re-election than the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the number of body bags coming back from a foreign war, or any other undesirable thing.
For the use case "I want to share this, but only with people I've already told about X", what algorithm could possibly generate that group?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they It's been around for a very long time.
Simple is Marketable
First flying car approved by the DoT, no FAA license needed
This fixes the issue of "there's more to gender than male/female/other", but it doesn't fix the issue of "women might not want to get sexualized comments sent to them".
Interactive HTML5 CouchApps using node.couchapp.js
Your comments are interesting, as VB and VB.NET are distinct languages with differing (though similar) syntax and quite different paradigms.

VB.NET shares its paradigm more with C# than the classic VB. VB.NET code can be ported cleanly to C#.
"Constant sexualization and stereotyping in advertising and other media create social expectations that many people aren't comfortable with."

Look, men get to use trillions of sperm cells, which means evolution has hard-wired their brains to be magnetically attracted to anything feminine. Advertising uses this not because it is "sexualized", but because men will buy toxic waste by the barrel if you draw nice titties on it.

Women only get to use a dozen or so egg cells, and each one is very risky and resource intensive, which means evolution has hard-wired their brains to be an always-on filter for genetic quality in prospective mates. This is naturally uncomfortable, and has been since before their monkey girl ancestors came down out of the trees.

"Yes, men are sexualized as well, but not to anywhere near the same degree, ..."

Watch an advertiser sell SUVs to women: they have a big, hulking, strong look and are advertised as serving and protecting the kids. That is the masculine face of advertising. (The latest American Subaru ads have it both ways, showing the kids growing up in the vehicle, ending with a cute teenage girl getting out of a car with a ... what is that thing on the hood? ... oh yes, the air port for the turbocharger.)