skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very rare that a sovreign nation defaults because of outright inability to pay. I mean if you think about it, we could probably pay down our debt by raising taxes to an exorbitantly high rate and limiting spending to just the military and police. One former Soviet nation that was deeply in debt got out by forcing its people to work slavishly for little pay.

However, most well-intentioned leaders don't have the stomach for these measures (and the bad ones at least know they'll be the target of a coup if they try them), so they default. And the reality is that oftentimes, that's the rational choice.

So more than likely, willingness to pay was the only thing under consideration. And with elections nearing next year, I think they may be holding out for political change before they downgrade us further.

In all, I don't like the credit agencies or what the downgrade represents, but I can't disagree with it.
The whole show is mean and unnecessary. That's why we love it.
If that's the case, then the compression tool isn't parsing the Javascript correctly.
I still question a scale where it is possible to get the highest note while have 70+% of the GDP in debts and that this proportion is raising.

A country who would reduce its debts should in theory be a better bet but this scale does not allow for that.
"With the sorts of people running the show, we demonstrated that we were cavalier enough to nearly get to a point where we couldn't pay our bills."

s/couldn't/wouldn't

Our ability to pay our bills at present was never in question. The issue was whether we would merely decide not to pay. That induces a certain queasiness in the upper deck cabins on the ship of state.
Thanks, you can actually search using the URL, for example http://whatportis.com/80 or http://whatportis.com/http, just need to edit the page so it passes the variable like this, not through the usual GET syntax like it is at the moment.

A few of the things I know need doing are:

- More content for the users and also the search engines as they dont appear to index much of the site, may be even remove the javascript tabs and have distinct pages to help the search engines a bit more...

- Edit the search page to pass variables through the URL (cleanly)

- Some how improve the search system, very basic search at the moment and probably returns too many results for some parameters.

I do agree the statistics page defiantly needs some work doing to it, such as there is the same port listed a few times in the top 5 as there is so many records for it.

Really like the 'this port is open on my computer' although dont want to look like I am attacking all of my users with port scans, so might make that a manual click to check.
Yukihiro Matsumoto and Guido van Rossum come to mind.
I don't understand your first point. My "upon my death" file provides credentials.

Your second point is interesting but I think this discussion is about personal information and, at least as far as I can see, people don't DRM that.
Would You Like a Smile With That? The importance of customer service
You know, I'm not against people downvoting me, but I'd like to know why. I'd like people to tell me why they disagree so I can at least learn from my mistakes.
any eta for 10.7.1?
We hit the debt ceiling back in May. We've managed to stay afloat due to some accounting tricks at the Treasury.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/16/federal-gove...
It is a good hypothesis but the Iraqi government puts a hole in it. A lot of Americans assumed that the Iraqis would be greatful and offer US oil companies a sweetheart deal. They turned around and gave the oil contracts to China and Russia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/29/world/middleeast/29iraq.ht...

And our allies, the Kurds, have been busy as well. Selling oil to the Iranians.
A broken clock is right twice a day. I hate the ratings agencies, but that doesn't make the downgrade wrong.
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$2 trillion mistake, according to these guys (2001)
S&P's response to the supposed Mistake:

Standard & Poor’s Clarifies Assumption Used On Discretionary Spending Growth

New York, Aug. 6, 2011. In response to questions, Standard & Poor’s today said that the ratings decision to
lower the long-term rating to AA+ from AAA was not affected by the change of assumptions regarding the
pace of discretionary spending growth. In the near term horizon to 2015, the U.S. net general government
debt is projected to be $14.5 trillion (79% of 2015 GDP) versus $14.7 trillion (81% of 2015 GDP) with the
initial assumption.

We used the Alternative Fiscal Scenario of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which
includes an assumption that government discretionary appropriations will grow at the same rate as nominal
GDP. In further discussions between Standard & Poor’s and Treasury, we determined that the CBO’s
Baseline Scenario, which assumes discretionary appropriations grow at a lower rate, would be more
consistent with CBO assessment of the savings set out by the Budget Control Act of 2011.

Our ratings are determined primarily using a 3-5 year time horizon.

In the near term horizon, by 2015, the U.S. net general government debt with the new assumptions were
projected to be $14.5 trillion (79% of 2015 GDP) versus $14.7 trillion (81% of 2015 GDP) with the initial
assumption – a difference of $345 billion.

In taking a longer term horizon of 10 years, the U.S. net general government debt level with the current
assumptions would be $20.1 trillion (85% of 2021 GDP). With the original assumptions, the debt level was
projected to be $22.1 trillion (93% of 2021 GDP).

The primary focus remained on the current level of debt, the trajectory of debt as a share of the economy,
and the lack of apparent willingness of elected officials as a group to deal with the U.S. medium term fiscal
outlook. None of these key factors was meaningfully affected by the assumption revisions to the assumed
growth of discretionary outlays and thus had no impact on the rating decision.
Also worth nothing: the typical 4MB WRT54G router doesn't have enough room for OpenVPN if you use the stock OpenWRT images.

I've got a stripped down .config and image that does include OpenVPN, if anyone's interested.
It is worse than that.

In the original guidance that S&P gave, their target level of deficits for the USA was exactly what the real plan, without their mistake, was. So the government actually is achieving exactly what S&P wanted them to achieve.

For better or for worse I believe that the reason for S&P's downgrade is that they gave guidance of $4 trillion, they didn't see a $4 trillion deal, and they would be embarrassed if they failed to downgrade given how publicly they said that they would if they didn't see $4 trillion.
All I know is that I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Hilux if I needed a truck.
Does Flash makes all MBP hot or just my older one?
The End of the Job maybe a Good Thing
Add Twitter & Facebook to Google Plus
G++ outshines the previously viewed extension in two ways; it isn’t just for Chrome, there’s also one for Firefox and the new extension doesn’t have a lag time before it can show your Twitter feed like in the previously reviewed one. You can toggle between feeds by simply checking or unchecking the boxes integrated in the Google Plus interface. The extension lets you see incoming news items from Facebook and allows you to like, comment and share items, it also lets you see your Twitter timeline and lets you reply/retweet from Google+.
In general, DWIM (Do What I Mean) is evil. We're better off being forced to say exactly what we mean than having the machine try to figure it out for us. This lesson has been learned repeatedly over the years by programming language designers -- though clearly, alas, not by everyone.
I believe that the US government has an obligation under current law to make payments to Medicare and SS recipients. It's not a voluntary donation. I don't think the government can simply stop making those payments tomorrow without violating current law.

You see, it is this entire attitude of political parties negotiating in the 11th hour about whether or not to honor this or that obligation that isn't exactly encouraging. This is just not a responsible way to deal with political differences over government spending.

I also doubt the quality of the solutions coming out of that kind of process.
What Happened to Obama?
S&P Downgrade: Competence and Consequences
Those "powerful investors" are just fools looking to sell to greater fools. Of course they didn't realize that no, this actually isn't 1999 and you can't just dupe the public into buying your overpriced IPO again. Rich people make mistakes too, all the time, and lose LOTS of money doing it. Never forget that.
At first I somehow missed this archive page, it's linked from the page, but just in case: http://archive.assembly.org/2011
Why are writers afraid of not capitalizing the first word of sentences in English but don't care in Korean?

Won't you consider it? Less line noise, you know?
Startup M&A availability bias and what to do about it
I didn't downvote you, but your comment isn't very relevant to the topic. I'm guessing that's why.
In the USA the printing of currency has also been offloaded to an external entity (the Fed), and the amount of currency to circulate has been fixed by Congress. Thus while in theory it is possible to just print money, in practice it is a lot more difficult than that.
Stopped reading at first typo in the abstract.
The other 2 left the rating at AAA, but gave it a negative outlook. Which means that they anticipate better than even odds of a downgrade within a year or so.
"Revolutions" in the industry are often not the result of a big bang, but more frequently of mere accumulation of little steps. GNU+Linux has not changed anything in the industry when initially released. It was years (decades?) behind current techs at this time (but has fast taken leadership in many areas), and at first only used by hobbyist, then only used for applications with simple needs on simple hardware as a cost reduction measure, then used in more areas and so over.

And I'm far from sure that the decisions good for the long term development of Linux would be done by bigcorps if Linus went missing anyway (especially not Google). Bigcorps have bad habits (with high impedance mismatch in the context of the Linux project), like development behind closed doors, and not only time-to-the-market centered but even for some of them time-to-the-market weighting 95% in their choices. Because of that, bigcorps were the cause of the arm branch mess in the first place. Bigcorps often lead big projects that fails big. And Linux is not lead by bigcorps anyway, it's lead by peoples.

Also, the same argument could be applied to lot of people in leadership positions anyway. Maybe Apple would not be Apple without Steve Jobs, but the CEO does not matter more in lots of big companies than Linus matters for Linux. Maybe it would be very equivalent with somebody else, or maybe not, but in the meantime they are in charge, and when they do a good job, they are the ones who matter.
What does it mean for it to be a 64k demo. That all the code required to produce the video fits in 64k? Can they call external libraries? How do they talk to graphics hardware?
Oh man, a scam app being copied! This is pretty hilarious..
The VPN locations are places with easy access to cheap bandwidth, the Proxy plan includes locations like South Africa, Columbia, and New Zealand where the cost of maintaining a presence is significantly higher. We're considering including the VPN locations (London, San Antonio) in the Proxy plan free of charge.
Readability. Python, Ruby, and CoffeeScript are more readable for their parsimonious approach to punctuation, aren't they? We like those languages, right?
So what was the actual math error? If it was mentioned in the article, I missed it.
I guess I will have to work then. Pity I looked forward to a week of TED talks.
S&P's guidance was based on an analysis that made the $2.1T mistake. So $2T+ in cuts plus $2.1T error puts us exactly where we would have been if they were originally right and then we cut $4T.
Your suggestion that US would be able to print it's way out of debt is incorrect, the devaluation of the currency caused would be consider a default and lower the rating of the debt to junk status.

Your suggestion of fixating the rating of the dent to AAA is even immoral, I understand that you are basing that on the premise that US can pay all obligations through devaluing the currency, but even then, if a credit rating agency were to unilaterally decide to apply a good standard to ratings... well a new level of corruption would have been reached, that's for sure.
You should read some of the reviews for the app: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2855656
"We can pay back our debt since it's denominated in dollars" is a meme thrown around online blogs, but it is misguided. If the way the debt is paid back is through currency devaluation, it's safe to say that the investors were not truly paid back--i.e. there was a loss of principal measured in purchasing power.

So while it's true that the US can always pay back the full dollar amount of how much it owes, it's less true that it'll pay back the total "purchasing power" that the bondholder gave up to buy US bonds. Therefore, there's additional risk even if you will get your money back.

However, in that light all dollar-denominated debts should be downgraded for the same reason that US treasury bonds are--for the additional currency risk should the government choose to "default" by devaluation.
Html5 Piano sequencer
Actually I don't think this is the case. The US uses treasury bonds like you or I would use a credit card, they sell bonds take the money and pay bills. They pay them off by exchanging them for cash at a later date. So essentially when we're at the debt ceiling we nominally can't sell any more t-bills so the only money the government has available is money from revenues coming in. Pretty much instantly forced to live without your credit card.

Now since the current budget actually spends more than is expected in receipts, that means things that were already approved and budgeted would not have the funding to pay for them. But in the unlikely event that the debt ceiling had not been raised the government would switch to a priority system of paying (effectively cutting spending).

Its my understanding that at no time has the US ever been at risk of 'default' in the sense that a bank wants its money and the holder of the note can't pay. But it might have been in danger of suddenly withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. Since at 2 B$/day (one estimate I've heard) that is over 700B$/yr of money we would probably prioitize not to spend.
I am mostly interested in replacing bi-directional TLS. There are things that need to be encrypted — authentication, any authorized operations, fetching authorized content — however the majority of content that application uses is public, so the encryption is very much redundant.

Unfortunately I can't just bootstrap the application over secure channel and fetch any content over not secure channels, as it'd be trivial to then poison the application using the unencrypted communication. Take a Hacker News-like application: Let's say that news and comments can be accessed over unsecure channel and voting and authentication are performed over TLS. Even though the authorized operations are safe, the data could be poisoned over unsecure channel — for example the user-id could be manipulated and the user would end up voting securely for someone else's post. To mitigate it, all data would have to be fetched over secure channel. However currently this is all or nothing, by fetching public data over TLS, one has to pay the encryption tax — in both CPU time, as well as in disabling any caching middleware.

Of course singing HTTP messages wouldn't be just TLS-light, since the messages could be stored and kept as an evidence that the webserver has produced such a message, which is different to TLS session-based guarantees, but it should be fine for what I need. This is why I was interested to know if such an approach would not degrade the security of the web application below what bi-directional TLS could offer.

I suppose this is not the most exciting use for client-side cryptography right now…

I think the web-application are increasingly going in the direction of reinventing Java applets anyway. There are few components that are needed for that and that will be gradually introduced: 1) Application that can be installed and launched locally (e.g. more sophisticated version of Chrome Webappstore). Once you have that, you basically have RPM in browser. 2) Capabilities system that controls what and how an application can access. All the pieces are already in there: web extensions, mobile apps, etc. 3) Pluggable storage to eliminate the need for storing data on the remote server. There is LocalStorage and IndexedDB already, now it's just a matter of time till Chrome adds Google Storage, Apple adds iCloud, Ubuntu adds UbuntuOne etc.

Once you have that, the Java[Script] applets are basically back. With NaCL in the mix you could even actually run the JVM in the browser once again. So yeah, I think in the long run the client cryptography will come around. But for now I just wanted to make use of what's currently available.
They see traffic again on a list published back in 2006. Thats the target. Not to publish accurate stories.
I agree that it's always more a matter of willingness in the case of sovereigns. But willingness depends on the extent of hardship a government would have to ask their people to endure (as you correctly point out). So if a country can pay its debt by printing money that hardship is greatly reduced or spread over a much longer period of time.
It's more than a hypothesis. Paul O'Neill, Teasury Sec under President George W. Bush describes the plans to parcel out the Iraqi oil-fields, already created in 2000/2001.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-01-11-oneill-ir...
>Suskind, also interviewed on 60 Minutes, said the Bush administration had already begun planning for an invasion of Iraq in January 2001 — eight months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. The planning, Suskind said, involved discussions of war crimes tribunals, peacekeeping troops and questions about how to divide Iraq's oil wealth.

Don't let Rumsfeld's mishandling of the invasion and aftermath detract from the essential issue.
Just because people overuse it doesn't mean it isn't true sometimes. I don't know if there's a name for that fallacy, but it definitely is one.
Yeah, one of the many nice things about fish(the Friendly Interactive SHell) is that it does that automatically.
Ben Horowitz:  There'a Fine Line Between Fear and Courage
The treasury's argument is fatally flawed.

"The baseline in which discretionary spending grows with nominal GDP is substantially higher because CBO assumes that nominal GDP grows by just under 5 percent a year on average, while inflation is around 2.5 percent a year on average."

GDP is not growing by nearly 5 percent a year and should not be projected to grow at that pace. Real GDP growth is significantly smaller. Additionally, with our monetary policy (QE 1,2,..,x), inflation is higher than 2.5%. The treasury's math is fictitious.
In several years of PL/I programming, the compiler correctly inserted a semi-colon exactly once and then aborted the compile. I remember because it was such a surprise.
佳能数码相机报价
clickable: http://whatportis.com
Yes, the likelihood of the US not paying its debt is basically 0 -- what they are really concerned about the US printing money (something that's already started under QE2).

Printing money is basically a way to default without calling it a default -- and as a bond holder it can be disastrous.
What I learned from Lunch with Dan Shipper
That's exactly what I said. The keyword is "nominal obligations".
The full rules and description of categories are here: http://www.assembly.org/summer11/compos/realtime
I disagreed with the guy I was replying to, but yeah, I do see that what I said wasn't relevant to the OP. Thanks for at least explaining. :)
How large is the risk of an offline attack if I choose a 16 character mixed case alphanumeric randomly generated password? Is there much of an exposure in that case?
S&P said 2 trillions is irrelevant anyway given that their error margins on estimates was +/- 10trillions

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/sp-explains-why-2-trillion-err...
> This would be like a student pointing out that the teacher incorrectly graded his paper; and after acknowledging that fact, the teacher maintains the same grade.

Way back when I was a university undergrad, I got a 0 for a proof on a statistics exam, but the proof was correct. When I showed this to the professor, she agreed, but said it wasn't the proof she was "looking for", and so the 0 stayed. Maybe she's working for S&P now.
Nice tool. I would love access to the API once its public to write a bash script that allows you to search from terminal.

Suggestion:
- statistics: top 5 ports show only 2 distinct ports. it would be better IMO to show 5 distinct ports
i stand in awe whenever i see a Carmack keynote. it almost feels like he breathes in once at the start, and delivers a coherent and easy to follow (and i am no game programmer) stream-of-conscience speech for 90-180 minutes without a single pause or the aid of a slide deck.

if ever there was a genius (not throwing it out lightly) who knew what he was talking about...
They need to produce an .exe below 64kb in size that can run on clean versions of Windows and display the demo. That 64kb includes everything (textures, models, music, code etc). I think most modern demos use DirectX.

http://www.assembly.org/summer11/compos/realtime/desktop-pla...
You are whining.

There are lots of legitimate reasons to complain about teachers. You gave one legit (changing course requirements midway), and lots of illegitimate ones. You do not have a respectful tone.

Plus, the fact that you would have only gotten a D makes you look retarded in the eyes of most on HN. It's hard to get sympathy from an intellectually snobby group by bragging about your failure to excel.

In short, this is not how a polite student who deserved an A but received a B/C would have responded.
>>voted in favor of default

It was framed this way by some involved parties, but it's a second independent decision to let that happen.

The other option was for the Treasury to stop issuing checks at a rate higher than than it's inflows.

This is similar to what many of us might have done at some point (college might be one), riding as close to your limit as possible, but making minimum payments and reducing spending as needed.

I'm sure they have a playbook somewhere that sets priorities of payments. Actually defaulting on a tranche (does that term apply here?) of bonds would spike the rate so much, they'd avoid it for all but paying themselves, probably.
I understand that it was relative to baseline. But the bottom line we cut 2.1T out of the budget and S&P had advised 4T. This does highlight the issue of how cutting is done, though. The budget had a trajectory of 10T in spending increases over the next decade and now it will be 2.1T less than that. So we will increase our spending by 7.9T and call it a "cut". :)
I think Congressmen and women who recently voted in favor of default on external debt.

US internal debt to GDP ratio is 78%
US external debt to GDP ratio is 100%