skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Disclaimer: I'm a proud founder at http://ducksboard.com)

1) It's pretty transparent because we're a small team (of 3) :) We have a large 37' screen with general information (leads, support tickets, milestones, active users...) and also all of us are using it individually for tracking other metrics (f.i. I'm tracking mainly marketing metrics, while Jan is an addict to PostgreSQL performance).

2) We have a set of predefined widgets, but we mainly push data through a REST API. It's so easy to set up, that even a VC can do it :P

Next week we'll open up the invites floodgates (a.k.a. "public beta"). If you want to try it, please sign up for an account in our site and then sent me an email (diego_at_ducksboard.com) saying that you read this comment on HN. There's a priority line for HN users :)
The only ones I can find that are strictly AAA are either all-corporate to begin with, or explicitly say that they invest in "AAA-rated U.S. Treasury and agency securities" or similar language. Which is awkward if there is no such thing, but it's not clear it'd require them to sell off, since there's nothing eligible to move to.
Japan is a nation of savers and has a massive domestic pool of savings. Also, Japan will drop below investment grade within the next ten years as those savers retire.

America, on the other hand, needs to borrow internationally.
Which is why the US was founded as a federal republic.
End of the day, these are the same jokers who were rating junk assets as AAA and completely missed every problem in this financial crisis.

And the fact that moody's still maintains Aaa means that there's a nonzero chance it will have no effect. I hope.
The startup you want to work at the most is your own
People mention that a lot, but what specific institutions have that requirement? And haven't they developed some more coherent requirements ever since subprime mortgage bonds proved the system could be gamed?
Possible shorter version of events:

People left their money with some guy on the internet.

He promised them he wouldn't steal it.

But then he stole it.
Is it the government's job to keep people employed for the sake of employing them? No!

There are times in history where government spending can help, like during the Great Depression. The government spent a lot of money on public works projects to help put some people back to work. But this didn't do much to actually end the depression. It was the onset of WWII and the subsequent ramp-up to a war economy that really ended the Depression.
Yeah, the US deserves a downgrade. What pisses me off is that my wife and I have savings, live within our means, and if you believe Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff (which I do), there is going to be 5% to 10% yearly inflation for a good while that takes money from savers and basically gives it to debtors.

I am actually sympathetic to some debt forgiveness - it is not the people in need that I am pissed off at. Anyway, it is a mess, and everyone who is worth less than many millions of dollars is going to feel some pain.

I expected this economic collapse to happen after the 2030s - suddenly, after a few years of W. Bush's presidency I realized that the grand plan was to cause the collapse to happen much sooner.
Yet they still have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 225%
Yeah, I'm not at all arguing that intellectual curiosity is bad, just that it's not always right, where what's "right" is parameterized on the inputs: your task, the expected output, the deadline, etc.
That is an excellent question. I'm too lazy to search for the answer, but, with our luck, I'd say that the Defense budget is about evenly split betwixt personnel and hardware. Therefore, cuts to defense spending will cause unemployment for both defense contractor engineers as well as veteran grunts.
Now that being said, I have no idea how this would work in practice.

That's the problem. No one else knows either. Monday is not going to be a good day.
If you follow the Single Responsibility Principle well enough, you're going to end up with most of your code in model classes most of the time. My point is that it's possible (but still a bad idea) to have tons of tiny controllers, each of them still doing stuff that's better served by a model.
There is a lot of hope in your post.
Investors will just move money to another country and there are enough who have much better grow rates. (China / India).
Or entities who will bet on the downfall of the U.S and there will be countries who have a high interest in this.

On Monday you can short every major company the downfall will be significant.
This will be very interesting to watch the next world recession is on our doorsteps.

Money does not care who you are or what you do.
Or perhaps the drop happened because a lot of the big banks knew that the downgrade was coming. Is it insider trading if everyone knows?
Paul Krugman on S&P and the USA "It’s a strange situation."
The only reason the healthcare issue seems so complicated is the massive amount of propaganda we're subjected to in the U.S. media about it. You're on the right track to figuring out an answer. Just look at what all the other industrialized countries do. Then do that.

Nice little overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_health_care

This is of course beyond the pale of rational discussion in U.S. political discourse. Just whisper "socialism" and it's off the table, instantly.
IANAL as well, but as far as I understand it's completely legal to say "I don't want to hire women". Yay freedom of speech. However, If I am hiring people (which I'm not and never done) and reject a woman based on the fact that she is a woman, and she can somehow prove it, then yes.. I risk being sued.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
Checked on BB. It looks like $80B of invested assets across bond funds with any reported information would be affected (which is paltry, considering the full run of US treasuries far exceeds $10T)
There has been a complete lack of leadership from the Congressional Democrats on this issue. They haven't produced a budget plan in nearly three years, while borrowing 40 cents of every dollar spent during that time.

I'm not a partisan-- George Bush's runaway spending contributed a great deal to the current predicament. But the basic Congressional oversight and operating under a budget hasn't happened the last couple of years.
Yeah, I think so. So now you have to wire your house with a wired network, and when you want to watch TV or use your computer you have to turn the lights in all the rooms on.
More discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2852380
You cannot compare 'person' and 'business' with government. The government has the ability to print money, whereas the other two do not. The only reason they don't print money to pay off all their debts is because it will result in massive inflation.

The reason the European debt crises is so serious is because the adoption of the euro means that no individual contry can print their own money to avoid default.
but there's no reason to do it all at once. if you are trading 1 btc for money there should be an automated way to do the transfer in increasing steps, after each of which the other party would reply - so transfer 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01 etc. til you are done. You wouldn't lose much, and you could vary the rate depending on how much you trusted the other party.
Theoretically, this problem can easily be solved: keep sending them paychecks. At least, they could be working on something productive like finding jobs or starting businesses.
Beyond that, I'm not sure why any of these agencies has any real credibility anymore, since they were giving AAA ratings to the "toxic" CDOs up until they collapsed.
Grades have this affect because they become psychologically tied to your self-worth. Where does it start? I don't think small children care or are even aware of the significance of having good grades (what 5-8yr old is gunning for Harvard?), but they can certainly sense which end of the spectrum is desirable if they seek to maximize love, affection, and acceptance from adults and peers.

You take the organic process of knowledge acquisition and now you've added game mechanics to it. For children the prize is acceptance, and for college students its social status, employment prospects, and respect. Now you have scores and outcomes, and critically, the outcomes do not have to be tied to any intrinsic motivation for the thing you are trying to learn.

So children might do things not because they're interested in them, but because it makes them look smart. People will chase lucrative jobs in fields they don't particularly care for, or want to join particular institutions just for the prestige, and a wide range of other behavior thats driven by rewards of performance and not of one's real interests. Learning for learnings sake takes a back seat to all of this.
Problem is that, especially during the bush era, there were a lot of no-bid contracts to firms such as Halliburton. And we are obliged to make those payments.
That's wrong, the GDP and expected GDP is a big part of the rating-- known as the "capacity to repay".
Redundancy and majority-vote decisions are not much use if you're relying on 3 instances of the same subverted hardware.

(A similar problem applies to non-malicious uses, where multiple systems (even with N-version programming, clean room implementations, etc) interpret the specification incorrectly and the majority vote the wrong way.)

Second sourcing and strict requirements for different hardware implementations would cut a lot of the risk, especially if, as you say, one of them is a trusted, domestic manufacturer.

The level of global production processes for high technology used in weapons would make for an interesting
additional dynamic to military foreign policy. You can't really go attacking the guy who makes the widgets for your laser guided bombs unless you've got either a really big stockpile (and risk economic problems and obsolescence), or you can build them domestically if necessary.

The statistic quoted in the article:

"The Pentagon now buys 1 percent of all the world’s integrated circuit production"

is pretty scary. I can't seem to find any reasonable source for the total IC production available. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1200970 looks interesting, but I don't have access, so I've gone with the Ars summary on it: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/02/adding-up-the-wo...

Assuming they're in it purely for GPU power, 1% of the estimated 10E12 MIPS is 100 Billion MIPS for the US defence establishment. Of course, 90% of it will be custom fabbed stuff for embedded systems, but the sheer scale of it is mind-blowing.
China's defense spending is less than half of the US. This is not an inevitability. Learn the facts before you go spouting off nonsense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
NASA's Rocket Booster Cam Video
Huh? Why $40/year? A $10B valuation means that investors value the current 25M users $400 each, or potentially 100M future users $100 each, etc. You get the idea.
"The reason the European debt crises is so serious is because the adoption of the euro means that no individual contry can print their own money to avoid default."

It's more because each individual country issues bonds. The ECB can't issue debt.
Yes, really. Did you actually add the numbers up? The non-foreign components are nearly 70%.
This is a completely bullshit way of thinking. Its also just another example of the defeatist attitude so many people in this country have. "Oh, the problem is too big to handle" or "Welp, that's just the way it is".

You ABSOLUTELY audit and refactor a society. Every time the country has gotten a bit more free with a new law or court decision, that's a refactor that improves the system.

Sometimes people have added parts to the system or revised bits that end up for the worse. Examples include Prohibition, Jim Crow laws, Defense of Marriage Act, software patents, etc.

One thing that would help society out a lot would be societal unit tests. Set baselines as to what works and doesn't, and if some new changes breaks the tests you go back and refactor again.
The real problem is that the republicans are zealots of the church of voodoo economics.

The reality is that demand-side economics has stronger and more intelligent underpinnings (give money to individuals --> they spend --> increase demand --> hiring). Giving more cash to companies doesn't induce hiring; demand for products induces hiring.
That's a good news and a wake up call.
> would go a long way to balancing the Federal budget

> as reducing the deficit goes, I have less insight into this

Balancing the budget is exactly reducing the deficit. It's the debt I suspect you have less insight into.

Frankly it's an embarrassment that they could only agree lower the deficit by less than 10%. They are a long way from addressing the debt.
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I love to hear them tell it like it is, all matter-of-fact like that. S&P ought to run as a 3rd-party presidential candidate in 2012.

It's about time somebody brought down the cluebat.
Poll: Do you know what the Milgram Experiment is?
I've seen this linked around here a lot, how many HN viewers seriously haven't heard of this yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
WhatsTheUSCreditRating.com
WWII and the rampup was still a public works project.

What really turned the economy for good imo was not WWII but the result of WWII -- all of our competitors on the international stage having large parts of their population and infrastructure destroyed. A few year grace period while the rest of the world rebuilt turned into 50 years of global corporate hegemony.
There's a huge gap between isolationism and, you know, not occupying TWO countries on the other side of the planet.

I stopped reading your comment after that sentence with the assumption that all of your other points would be equally dumb.
Ah, followup. Here's the link to the talk I referenced if anyone cares to take a listen. http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jun/28/the-end-of-history-...
When Fukuyama was talking about the Evangelical Christians, I think that he meant their doctrine of "The Rapture" and how it motivates their support for Israel. It's scary just how much of their politics rotate around that. Seriously, Christopher Hitchens (yes, that Christopher Hitchens, the atheist) can get published in National Review because of his support for Israel and for wars to bring democracy to the Middle East. Meanwhile, the paleoconservatives (the guys who opposed these wars) have been airbrushed out of the conservative movement; vaporized, in the Orwellian sense.

It's downright eerie.

And it's gotten to the point where "extreme" right-wingers like Pat Buchanan are saying that the bankers and corporate executives are ruining America. Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary at the Treasury under Reagan for crying out loud, the guy who helped implement supply-side economics, sounds more like Noam Chomsky than George W. Bush, these days.

It's a topsy-turvy world.
no, i don't know what that is.
Gives new meaning to a programmer "going dark."

Well, same meaning I guess. Only literal.
Yeah, but how did they turn out? ;-)
Last I checked, Charter blocks outgoing DNS to servers other than theirs. Based on searching around, it sounds like they go back on forth on that policy.
I realized this shortly before I dropped out of high school. Nobody who hired me ever asked for my grades. I appreciated teacher's critique of my work if I thought his own skill was significantly superior to mine. Yet ultimately I did not give a crap about whether I had 2.5 or 4.0 GPA.

I was surrounded by perfectionist people who would retake a class because of A-, but after a while I realized they were just playing a game I wasn't interested in.

I am interested in creating impressive graphics code/designing things that don't suck/creating things of high aesthetic value. I am interested in getting paid because it allows me to have independence and concentrate on creating those things, and not feel like a parasite. That is my game, so to speak.

I did not see a very strong correlation between grades and the above so it ended up low on my list of priorities. Just like a game of chess, it made me smarter at those things I wanted to do, but I couldn't dedicate a lot of time to chess or gaming the teachers, just because I did not give a crap about those things.

I know I'm going against the zeitgeist here but I think grade, SAT scores, or degrees don't mean a lot in life.

I recently had to work with legacy code written by a guy with the highest degree possible in US. The code was hard to read, did not use clearly superior architectures, lacked documentation, and quite frankly, I could've done a lot better. There was no empathy at all to the person who will inherit the project but the "I HAVE PHD" feeling of smugness I felt strongly.

One of the worst math instructors I knew had a graduate degree which she liked to brag about more than everybody thought was appropriate to her skill.

On the other hand, I was in touch with several professors who were clearly brilliant and well-spoken... obviously education doesn't necessarily fuck up your sense of humility and introspective self-critique.
Social security shouldn't be cut, it should be turned into a purely social program (and grandfathered in at that too). Instead of being an entitlement program, it should become like welfare and enabled for the bottom X % of the population. Specifically, the burden for retirement for the middle class should be placed on individuals rather than government.

For too long, babyboomers have relied on social security as a sort of no-interest loan. Why put that extra money in my 401K when I can rely on social security? I'll get a second car, or we'll take a yearly family vacation overseas...

Also, simplify the tax system and close loopholes, but do not directly raises taxes.
I have an easy solution. Let's make your federal income taxes look less like a bill and more like an order form. So for example some portion of your income taxes are pre-allocated for essential services (say 50%) and everything else is your choice. You get 50 points to spend and a variety of categories to choose from: education, defense, infrastructure, green energy, science research, enhanced Medicare services, NASA, deficit reduction, etc. This data is delivered to congress who must use it as a framework for 50% of the federal budget. After you filed your taxes mid-year you'd receive a detailed receipt that let you know exactly what Americans have decided to spend our money on.
> China will surpass the United States in soft and hard power eventually. This is demographically and economically inevitable.

As far as I can tell, this conclusion can only be reached via naive interpolation of current trends. I can't come up with one plausible scenario in which this actually happens. Most of China, population-wise, lives in a state of abject poverty, about which the government has done very little. The Chinese gov't itself indicates that nearly 10% of the population are migrant workers. The migration of peasants from the countryside to the city is already considered the largest migration in human history, and it's expected to grow drastically over the next decade or so.

No country can smoothly handle the kind of stresses that come with having most of the country living in abject poverty, and seeking migration to already-overpopulated cities. At some point, /something/ will snap - the magic bubble that is China's economy will pop, and we'll all realize that being gigantic is an impairment, not an advantage.

Put another way: at some point, China's ridiculously poor standards of education and health care will catch up to its economy - and the western companies that have been moving (partly) there, helping to fuel the growth, will stop doing so.

Your point about economic vs. military power is, of course, valid, and largely irrefutable. I would add that, as China does seem to be a relatively stable country - with a competent and, most importantly, sane government - they stand little to gain by way of aggressive military action. We may do well to let them police their part of the world (read: keep North Korea in line), trusting their own rational self-interest, and save ourselves the effort.
I work all the time. In fact, I'm not sure I know the difference between work and leasure.

Am I sick? :p
Yeah, but Andrew Mason got really defensive about those cookies. I suppose I would too for an extra $100 or $200 million.
Sure there's a difference between isolationism and occupying multiple nations across the globe. You know that. I know that. Try telling that to the neocons and watch your reputation get ruined.

The neocons are not nice people. They will call you names for all kinds of silly and/or evil reasons. And they will demand that you think of them as the Righteous Good Guys every step of the way.
Beginner Programming Mistakes
Probably most would not start businesses or seriously seek employment with a steady paycheck unfortunately.
> What pisses me off is that my wife and I have savings, live within our means, and... inflation ... takes money from savers and basically gives it to debtors.

Well, it takes money from lenders (or cash holders) and gives it to debtors. If you don't like that, stop being a lender or cash holder: move out of cash and bonds into, say, stocks, commodities, or real estate. If you're really confident that that inflation is going to happen, go short cash: build up a huge credit card balance at the current low interest rate, while pouring all of your earnings into non-cash holdings. (Danger: if you go short and you're wrong, you're fucked.)
Even if you tax the hell out of the rich, it still leaves this country TRILLIONS in debt.

It's a fact - you don't tax your way out of a recession and you sure as hell don't tax people to create jobs. It simply doesn't work.

And yeah, great idea. Let's cut military funding while we're fighting a war on terror in three countries. Apparently you don't remember Clinton's military cuts which removed almost 300,000 people from the federal payroll. When you make military cuts, you're not just removing tanks and guns. You're also sending a lot of people to the unemployment line.
The thought of how this would actually lead to a better allocation of money baffles me. It sounds like the first half of the tragedy of the commons.
Does MS even support IE6 anymore? Or are people using it without the benefit of security patches? Where I work, IE7 is considered obsolete.
Problem is that most things you have described are public goods, for which you really can't allow people to attribute.
the actual step 1: admit you have a problem. the US still spends with the attitude that it is a rich country. it needs to start spending with the attitude of a country that is rapidly going broke.

of course, this can't happen because any politician who doesn't parrot the "America is the greatest country in the world" message gets ousted.
(Heard of it, but did not associate the name with the experiment.)

More interesting (to me) are the various experiments that followed, which took after Milgram in various ways. (Such as the Stanford prison experiment.)