skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats on jumping from sales at a large multi-national to a startup. I've move into progressively smaller companies (Now running a very small startup) and the smaller they are the more full of life they have seemed to be. This is the way it should be.

Although I cringed at reading a couple of the lines here, specifically the book on sales and clearly defining roles. I have tried something similar in my past and I consider it to be one of my mistakes. I like creating structure around chaos but I've found these methodologies to be the bane of a startup or small company's culture and ability to move forward. They're like poison. Do they work in larger corporations? I think so. Maybe. I've used some of them successfully (Also consider this to be among my many mistakes). But everyone you deal with is much more apathetic, they're willing to tolerate more and/or will just ignore it. In a startup everything is much more sensitive and I find that excessive structure and process kills, well, everything.

I have spent a fair bit of time in sales at different levels (Retail to long cycle million dollar B2B) and I cringe at these books and training seminars. Going on the road and selling with someone good in real-time is far more valuable than any book or seminar. The good reps that I've seen already do the things they teach at some level naturally and few of them have read books or gone to a ton of seminars (I have witnessed one or two cases where a well performing rep followed these things religiously but seemed successful in spite of them not because of them).

Now that I've effectively ragged on your approach (Which I really can't tell exactly what it is from this simple blog post, I'm hinging it all on two things I read - I apologize if it's not an accurate representation of your approach), you may be right and I may be wrong. There doesn't seem to be one right way...
Don't think it this really matters. The US still has the strongest economy of pretty much anyone (even with recession).

There isn't going to be a massive dumping of US bonds.

The AAA credit rating is helpful, but is only used by certain investors, and those big enough to make a real difference have their own assessors of risk.

I think the cutoff for the smaller guys to be legal to invest in is something like AA-. We aren't in danger of that. We'll probably be like AA+ or something.

Hopefully the US will quit spending so much on military and raise taxes on the ultra-rich to even things out, but who knows.
I mostly agree with this; I think a reasonable degree of intellectual curiosity is necessary to do well, but that the most successful range is "a moderate amount". Read some, but not too much, and get quite skilled at some in-demand skill, while staying flexible enough to adapt it and pick up related skills. Having too much intellectual curiosity can reduce focus (harder to be content with a fairly limited job, even if well-paying), can cause angst if you do too much digging-into-foundations (i.e. don't just excel within the parameters of your task, but try to understand why it exists or is set up the way it is in the first place), etc.

Not that that means intellectual curiosity is bad, I'm just not sure it's income-maximizing or good-employee-maximizing, at least in the normal case.
Thank you. Now I don't have to hate people who leave blank pages without the customary "This page intentionally left blank".
Yes, about 70% of it.
Ask HN: When do you "make it official" and form an LLC/corp?
I am of two minds on this. Do more people 1) create the business entity side early, to operate under, or 2) keep arrangements informal until your project is matured?
A lot of the languages will probably perform similar on non-blocking I/O because they are all leveraging epoll (or select or kqueue) underneath it all. There is great variation however, on how the green threads are exposed. Node.js has callbacks, Python has yields, and Erlang has messages. Some of these approaches are easy to reason about and maintain than others.

I always found Haskell's take on parallelism interesting, and maybe it is faster. In Haskell you create a unit of work called a 'spark'. You can have billions of these, they get mapped to lightweight Haskell threads (powered by epoll) and those get mapped onto OS threads.
Wouldn't the rational decision for this scenario be to participate in the credit bubble and use the money to buy food storage and become more self-reliant?
So there are three adjustments to this accounting method that make it different from normal operating profits:

1. Online Marketing -- They excluded about $180mm of their $208mm Q2'11 advertising budget. Ostensibly because this cost should be capitalized as an investment in customer acquisition. This isn't entirely insane, but is abnormal. I would have broken it out into a sort of lifetime customer value section, so that investors could understand why these costs are justified. As it stands, we don't get a good idea of whether these marketing costs will pay off.

2. Stock Compensation -- This should absolutely NOT be excluded. Even though stock based compensation is a non-cash transaction, it is still an expense for services delivered in this quarter. There was ~$18mm excluded here.

3. Aquisition Related -- This isn't well explained in the filing. It's related to the loss Groupon had to take because of the earn-out conditions of one of their acquisitions. At first glance, this appears to be a one-time, ~$200mm cost applicable to 2010 only and might be reasonable to exclude (but it's still a warning flag, considering the outright BS in point 2).

In short: be wary of companies that fudge their numbers. There's already plenty of ways to tweak their finances under GAAP, and in this case, it looks like Groupon got caught trying to take a few too many cookies out of the jar.
One thing to note, I think the strength of our currency is at least partly based on the large amount of military power behind it, and the promise of stability that it brings.

Basically, it went from being backed by gold to being backed by power and promise of restraint in printing more. I guess we've largely given up on the restraint side, though.
You could, for example, move your money to Canadian treasuries, which are AAA rated, couldn't you?

I am admittedly learning much of this as I read, but it seems to me that a large concern would be the amount of money that might simply shift out of our economy to economies with better (safer) credit ratings.
Ratings are a factor in financial-industry regulations and in internal policies at financial institutions. But almost all of these regulations and policies treat a AAA rating the same as a AA rating. So a downgrade from AAA to AA would trigger little or no forced selling, Arora said. An official at Vanguard, the big mutual fund company, told me this week that "a downgrade from AAA would not trigger any events inside our funds."

From Planet Money's blog, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/27/138738198/3-reason...

The full podcast, "Would a downgrade matter?", is an excellent listen: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/28/138721364/the-tues...
It's a little more complicated than that. Treasury bonds are actively traded on secondary markets. The 'price goes down, yield goes up' generally refers to secondary markets. The concern for the U.S. govt isn't the secondary market. It is the primary market where they auction off bonds to raise money to fund operations. In the primary market, the U.S. treasury issues a certain number of bonds in order to raise a specified amount of money. Investors bid on the bonds, and the best bid (i.e. lowest interest rate) wins. With a credit rating downgrade, there will be a lot fewer bidders, hence higher interest rates.
I just got a NYTimes news alert that S&P is in fact holding off on downgrading the US based on the math error that was discovered.

Did anyone else see that come through? Is NYT just behind a little?
"Given China's rise, its wise long-term to keep a presence in the region."

Why?

China will surpass the United States in soft and hard power eventually. This is demographically and economically inevitable. Even sooner, if not already, China will become an unshakable hegemon over all of Asia. So why fight it in the most expensive and futile ways possible, i.e., by maintaining the fiction that we will be able to exercise any sort of long-term military power in Asia?

It's time we focused on our economic power, and not our military power. The former is a necessary precondition of the latter, and we're acting as though it's not.
Boeing announces plans to send its own astronauts into space
You are assuming that enough people have an actual interest in letting the U.S. remain in the position it is now or that a recession in the U.S. will affect the rest of the world enough to matter.

While that may have been true a couple of years or may be even months ago, I'd say that this is anything but certain. There are a lot of people and government through out the world who would like to see the U.S. weakened.
Exactly. The difference is whether the assessment is seen as feedback or an evaluation/judgement by the students (and the teacher). In the case of marking 100% on homework -- that's bound to be seen as an evaluation and hence an extrinsic motivator -- not good.

Assessing for the sake of gaining feedback on where the students are (for the teacher) and providing feedback to the students on where they are (for the students) is the way to promote intrinsic motivation.
The Medicare portion of FICA isn't capped, only social security is.
Exactly. The big banks do their own research, so what S&P thinks is largely irrelevant. We have an entire division devoted only to US treasuries.
This is only true if the queue isn't the bottle neck. If the queue can only handle 2,500 req/s and the Python program can send at 3,000 req/s, what use is it writing a C program that sends at 12,000 req/s?
I think we have two different conceptions of "business reasons". I was thinking more along the lines of "I'm pimping myself out to get hired/sell a product/find investors, why wouldn't I want to use my real name?"

I still see a problem even in your PR example. Taking one of the concerns of some privacy people around, suppose you get a job in PR but you're also part of the small minority where your real name can cause problems for whatever reason(s). Maybe "you shouldn't be in PR", but I don't see why a company can't allow you to use a pseudonym instead. Of course they may want to hire someone who already has established a reputation with either their real name or their pseudonym, but if they wouldn't even give me that option I'd be concerned. I like your company's approach of "half a name", and I'd imagine if you asked "Can I make my account Company Bob instead of Company Frank [because of such and such]?" they'd let you. I don't see why a PR person being interviewed for a magazine or whatever couldn't use a pseudonym. Unless there's some law somewhere requiring a government-certified-name ("real name") be given in a journal interview for employees of big corps? I'd be surprised to see one.

I mean "big issue" in the sense of it continuously popping up on HN, Slashdot, etc. and people being outraged over it. If it's just to "raise awareness", fine, then the G+/Facebook/whatever membership that requires real names won't drop, and since doing nothing is easier than doing something nothing changes even if a PR person from Google says "we recognize the importance of hidden names." If it starts affecting their membership, they'll change or something better will come along.
I think the original joke was a million dollars not a billion dollars, but I guess with inflation...
There's a lot that doesn't make any sense. As you say, interest rates are low. Plenty of people are out of work. To me, that says, "perfect time to build and repair infrastructure!"

Whether you believe FDR's New Deal helped or hindered recovery from the Great Depression, the simple, business-oriented financials of it would seem to indicate that right now is the time to be building roads, trains, dams, nuclear plants, etc.

Instead, we cut funding to things which may pay off later in order to funnel money into which have an inevitable negative rate of return, like imprisoning people, security theater, and killing people on the other side of the globe.
The War on Web Anonymity
Most straight men are still offended at "being mistaken for a gay man."

I'll note that this even happens with freewheeling Discordians who pretend to flirt with men and pantomime kissing them for lulz. Sure, they can flirt with you and everyone else in some outrageous, campy way, and brag about doing anything on two legs with a hole, but then you extrapolate that to mean they're bisexual (omnisexual?) -- and you get genuine and incongruously out-of-character offense.
This all makes good sense and would make a great political party's campaign.

The problem is, it wouldn't work. The economy, as small as any small country, isn't a piece of programming. You don't audit and refactor, or rewrite parts and plug it all in. It's made of generations of flesh and bones, all of which have worked their guts out to get whatever it is you're trying to take from them.

In a tyranny, maybe. In democracy, you have no chance of getting anywhere which such an overhaul.
Stupid judge. He has no idea what happens when you lose a domain: you need to pay money for a new one, alert your customers, pay for new ads, and possibly modify your site with the new code.
I used to be interested primarily in socializing with women. This had nothing to do with sex at the time, because my sex life at the time was nonexistent.
Social Security is supposed to be a pension program, not an income redistribution program. So you are making "contributions", not paying taxes, in the official lingo.

Of course the program is most regressive for younger workers, who pay the most and will get the least in return.

Social Security is in serious trouble, by the way, although it is not the driver of the current budget crisis. In just a couple of years the program goes into the red, and increasingly so as more boomers retire. The unfunded liability is around $8 trillion. That's serious money.
Piers Morgan implicated in phone hacking by own admission
I was under the impression that there were funds that were legally required to not anything lower than a certain value, but those values were much lower than AAA (AA or AA-).

Which funds cannot hold anything lower than AAA, and are they really big enough to dump enough US bonds to make a difference?
"Put another way, the Federal Reserve says that the nation’s net wealth is about $57 trillion. That figure would have to be $18 trillion larger to generate enough additional G.D.P. to pay Social Security benefits without making anyone worse off in the future through higher taxes or lower benefits."

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/the-real-social...
"This is demographically and economically inevitable."

Oh, no it's not. First China has to hold together over that time frame. This is feasible... this is not inevitable. There's a lot of tensions over there. Then even if they pass that test, there's other things they're going to have to deal with.

Right now, there isn't a single world power that's looking to be "inevitably powerful" in the next 50 years, it's really "anybody's game".
1- I am a free user, but I would pay for a $5.00/month plan.

2- All the numbers are arbitrary but imo not far fetched.
I also found mybtc unresponsive to mail -- I made a Python interface, whose source I had planned on releasing, to their SCI and needed help with one portion of it, sent a mail asking about it, and received no reply. Disappointing. :(
Not true. I've always had fantastic grades despite despising our education and grading system. That being said, I've always tried to make a conscious effort to not let grades interfere with my education.
JSLint complained when I had two `var` statements; it wanted me to merge the two into one. I repeat `var`, so this annoyed me. (Of course, it wasn't hard to fix, but the examples didn't show any multi-`var` usage so it may be a problem for someone new to the language or programming in general.)
I was tasked with finding a compute cluster for a small gov contractor research lab. I spoke with IBM, Sun, SGI, Dell you name it. None could inform me more than their brochures. Then I filled a form on LinuxHPC website. Quotes from smaller vendors started coming, most just VARs for the big boys. Except one shop in the midwest: those guys didn't waste any time, the entire team dialed us in and we could ask each specialist about the product. Even the cabinet maker dude who made the rugged, wheeled storage units for DoD; some other guy who could water-proof computers to stupid levels, etc.

Sigh, I'll miss the days when America made stuff :-|
Perhaps; it depends on whether investors have rules about percentage of foreign holdings (many do). You'd also need to find countries with AAA ratings that still have big enough outstanding debts that the markets are sufficiently liquid even for large transactions. For example, Canada has $550 billion in total outstanding bonds, so you couldn't easily move $50 billion there, since that'd require buying up 10% of the entire market. Even moving $5 billion there is buying up 1%, which the liquidity may or may not support.
Really?

http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2011/07/31/...

[EDIT] Sorry, read the original statement wrong. I was thinking the parent said 70% was held foreign, not vice-versa.
Wait. Don't make my mistake. It really needs 3 or 4 patch releases to fix stability and performance issues.
Some funds strictly cannot hold anything lower than AAA, but most have "investment grade" requirement which is BBB (Baa in moody's ratings)

That type of downgrade is very unlikely
I think at least one of the issues is that other AAA countries/entities simply don't produce enough debt. It' not just that we're AAA, it's that we produce so much AAA paper. The AAA bond market gets so much smaller is the issue. That's my understanding, but I'm no expert.

I think that is largely why this won't have that much of an effect, there isn't a replacement for that much money that is AAA. The "cure" (crowding into what is left) would be more painful to the bond market than the "disease" (us).
I don't think de-invest is an actual word, but I will role with you on this. Investors treat U.S. Treasury bonds like cash. A lot of financial transactions are actually done with Treasury notes, because they are considered extremely safe and reliable, and unlike cash, they generate interest payments. If investors don't like the downgrade, then they will sell off their bonds for cash. Cash is theoretically the safest asset you can hold (some would argue that gold is, but that is a different topic). Cash never decreases in value (relative to itself at least, it can change value when compared to other countries currency, and inflation can take it's toll, but once again, this is a different topic), whereas treasury bonds can.
That's exactly what I thought the response would have been. Cheap money, low employment - hire lots of people to do stuff. But it seems like the public opinion is that this debt is bad, and I'm don't understand why entirely. I mean, I see a lot of comparisons to credit card debt, so is it just lack of education/understanding?
Get your product in front of as large a number of real users as you can and let them decide whether you're on the right track or not.
What constitutes defense spending nowadays?

Is it largely salary payments to current troops? Wouldn't we have to deal with a large unemployment problem in case we laid off a bunch of military employees and told them to go find a job somewhere else?

Or is it payment to defense contractors, such as Valley's own Lockheed Martin? Wouldn't this cause a large number of people to be unemployed, contributing to recession?
But there's no reason to leave a quarter of a million dollars in BitCoins in an untrusted 3rd party's hands. Unless you're lazy or naive. It takes almost no effort to transfer them to your own wallet which can be trivially encrypted or stored on a device unconnected to the Internet.
S&P's report is here: http://www.standardandpoors.com/servlet/BlobServer?blobheade...
Thanks. I have no refutations to any of your comments. I know exactly what you mean.

One interesting thing about your first statement, "At the end of the Cold War, other conservatives were making the same noises that you're making now". A few years ago I had the opportunity to hear Francis Fukuyama speak. He was the author of The End of History and a later follow up book. I never knew it before then, but he was one of the founding members of the Neo-conservative movement. It was originally started by him and a group of like-minded sorts around a cafeteria table in some ivy-league college (Princeton maybe?). He went on to talk about how the ideals of what they founded were adopted and warped beyond recognition by the Evangelical Christian community in the U.S. and by other conservatives. What was remarkable about the talk was that at the end, he essentially repudiated everything he had originally written in The End of History.

I remember stories my grandparents told of growing up during the Great Depression. I also remember stories from my mom's family of 7 kids growing up poor in Rochester, NY in the post-war era. Perhaps I've inherited an attitude of bite-down and deal with reality from their history.
I'm having problems with USB devices and didn't have any with snow leopard. Hopefully after the first patch things will be much better ;)
I've found this whole argument strange from both sides, but I couldn't quite put a finger on why until now. You reminded me:

> I thought Google understood Privacy when they built Google Plus

G+ has this thing called "circles." It was all very hyped-up when it came out. It allows different groups of people to see different facets of you, and basically treat you as the subset of "you" that you want each group to see.

Now, the argument we've all been having, is that different groups of people call you by different names. Your family likely call you by your "real" (birth certificate) name. Your friends might call you something else. Strangers—and if you're an online celebrity, you know a lot of them—know you by yet a third name. See what this is suggesting?

Your name should be a property of a circle, not of your identity. In fact, almost all your attributes should be circle-attached, rather than profile-attached. Remember the spat about people who wanted to not share their gender online? What if you could be genderless to most folks, male to business contacts, and a female-to-male transsexual to friends?

(Of course, it gets a bit more complicated for the people you've put in multiple circles when you share something with both of those groups—I imagine there should then be a "circle precedence order" where metadata from circle X overrides metadata from circle Y when both are available. But sheesh, these are problems Google engineers should be eating for breakfast.)

Your "public" persona, then, is just metadata attached to the lowest-precedence, virtual "universe of discourse" circle that encircles everyone you don't actually have any relationship with. Your personal settings for what G+ should refer to you as are just the metadata of a highest-precedence circle that just contains you. And so on.
The iPhone 5 Frenzy & Galaxy Tab Detention | MacOS KenDensed | The Mac Observer
But banks offer better protection for my money than can be afforded in a home settings. Quite the opposite with BitCoins. My TrueCrypt volume with keyfiles that I keep on my person and in a safebox with my BitCoins inside is far superior to... well... ANY internet-connected service.