skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Certainly, that is true. Unemployment would drop a great deal if the price of low wage labor were allowed to decline to where demand would equal supply. But that's illegal.

And its not just wage that must be considered. There are hidden costs of hiring and possibly having to fire an employee, all of which have gone up in recent decades.

People imagine that employers can be made to do all kinds of costly things without effect on employment. Or take home pay. And in good times, it may seem like there are no such effects.

But its in the bad times that consequences are felt, long after the legislation has been passed. If an employer cannot make money hiring a particular worker at the minimum legal wage, the worker isn't going to be hired (legally, anyway).

This has nothing to do with technology adoption.
I wonder what would have happened if S&P dropped the rating during the trading day, and not after the markets closed. We probably would have seen another -500 point drop on the DJI.
I think the coolest part of this would be if someone were to take it and combine it with a "standard" (I really don't know how standard it is) Powerline ethernet setup. Would make for a more reliable than wifi setup in some buildings while being easily compatible with existing hardware.
How would one prove that they didn't just make the bitcoins disappear themselves, only to sell them anonymously a while later?
I second that. Reading his work has strongly influenced my parenting philosophy for my 3 young boys.
This really should be a call for both parties to start working together but it will most likely turbo charge the blame game.
.. and that was in 1918. So basically this is the first time in almost 100 years.
Error #2046
A worthwhile community-driven initiative.

However, it's notable that the community's two most popular requests – mandatory photos, and repercussion-free refusal-to-rent-for-any-reason – would each be arguably illegal for traditional landlords due to antidiscrimination rules. AirBnb may filter out the meth-heads only to have an equally-costly parade of federal regulators and attorneys-general show up.
So it begins.

A quote: "The outlook on the new U.S. credit rating is negative, S&P said in a statement, a sign that another downgrade is possible in the next 12 to 18 months."

I.e., things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.

Time to bring this back to a hacker's perspective. Is there any way to "hack" the system so as to get government finances to within commuting distance of sanity? Or have recent events already answered that question?
Do a search on Amazon for Alfie Kohn, specifically "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
I can't even begin to do credit to the causes of the French Revolution in a HN post. There are a million better sources, but I think you'll find most of them will agree that "not giving the poor enough money" is not on the list of causes. Taking excessive amounts of money from the poor (and everybody else) is closer to the mark, but you still can't ignore the political climate. The lessons of the American Revolution weren't lost on the French, who came to see Louis XVI the way we saw George III.

TL,DR: the country was bankrupted by the usual zero-sum game of runaway government greed. The common people were tired of being forced to pay for stuff like Versailles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Versailles ) and literally starved of patience.

Nothing like this is even remotely comparable to what's happening today in the US. If anything, we're heading towards feudalism rather than revolution.
> I wouldn't be too quick to write all cops off as bad. There are definitely a good number of "good" cops.

"Good" and "bad" are very complicated. Nobody is purely good or purely bad. But police corruption was universal in US police departments until 1971, when http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico became the first US policeman to testify against his colleagues, for which he got shot in the head. Up to that point, every US policeman was engaged in a cover-up operation to protect other corrupt policemen. Since then, there are a few exceptions; now, it's only nearly every US policeman who engages in such cover-ups.

But it's important to understand that the people who do this believe that what they are doing is good. The Blue Code of Silence is not merely enforced by intimidation and threats of violence. It's a matter of honor.
They wait until late friday to make big changes to give the officaldom/industry a weekend to scramble/grab parachutes. They actually didnt release today until after the SPY stopped trading.
> Without patents only wealthy people (or those with wealthy patrons) could afford to innovate, and there was little incentive for them to do so.

In 2011, this should read:

With patents only wealthy people (or those with wealthy patrons) can afford to innovate, and there is little incentive for the rest of us to do so.
If the government that produces the reserve currency can't hold up a AAA rating, what can? The idea that anything else should have a AAA rating if the US gov't doesn't seems a little ridiculous to me on face value.
I wonder if the downgrade is because the US might be unwilling to pay its debts or because they feel the people may be unwilling to bailout the banks again?
> I'd love to hook a printer up to an email server so that I could send it PDFs and it would just print.

I did that in the 1990s, except I would send it PostScript files. IIRC the printer I used was some Epson dot-matrix fan-fold thingy, but I could have used anything supported by GhostScript.
6) The educational level (or mean cognitive ability) of the US population has been decreasing just as the cognitive thresholds for gainful employment are steadily increasing. You'd say education if you were on the left and might say cognition if you were on the right.

Someone should plot the time series of BLS occupational statistics, with the minimum required education/IQ levels for each job. On the one hand the IQ profile of the US is trending down. On the other hand, anecdotally job growth tends to be focused on those areas requiring high IQ, like programming. Squaring this circle may mean job growth outside the US.
One thing to keep in mind is that many institutional investors, including those in Europe, are required to invest exclusively into triple-A instruments. This downgrade means a major sell-off of US bonds and whatnots currently held by such investors, and that could have an interesting avalanche effect.
Um, how is this fair to say?
"It is fair to say every user is worth $40.00/year."

Seems like a very unlikely assumption. I know plenty of people who use the service, none are paying, where does the $40 come from?
Which is great unless you have to deal with IE6 users :(.
We can expect this to not impact how the parties work against each in the least. The ratings agencies said up front what they were expecting to see in the debt deal and congress didn't come close.
Correct, and it's already begun:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/08/gop-tries-to-shif...
And to think that 50 years ago, everyone expected to be living in luxury as robots did all the work. <:\
Homeownership leads to longer unemployment?
Visual.ly, in San Francisco, CA

http://visual.ly

We are building a next generation data visualization platform and are looking for front-end hackers with demonstrated expertise in all or many of the following to round out our engineering team. 5+ years javascript hacking experience, we use Backbone.js, jQuery, HTML5 and SVG.

http://visually.jobscore.com/jobs/visually/lead-ui-engineer/...
New Era Caps
Our search just got faster, about 20 times as fast.
This is by far the biggest problem. I don't think anybody realizes how huge a sell-off that's going to be if the institutions apply their rules about AAA debt to US bonds (a big if, as others have noted).

A sell-off of bonds would make it more expensive for the government to borrow money, which would further accelerate the expansion of the deficit. The deficit is the primary driver of the downgrade, so an acceleration would trigger further downgrades.
I may have missed this, but it doesn't say which way the U.S. government calculations were off, does it? $2 trillion more debt is a hell of a lot worse than $2 trillion less.
It would be interesting if they make a financial vehicle that turns US AA+ debt (along with something else) into AAA.
Short dress batik
Don't mind the downvote but an explanation would be nice...
Didn't S&P maintain that Lehman Brothers had a favorable rating up until they collapsed? And in the subsequent congressional hearings the rating agencies simply responded that the rating is their opinion. Why do people put so much faith in these ratings when they have proven to be not very useful in evaluating the risk associated with investing in an institution?
Does it? Many institutional investors don't treat U.S. Treasuries as ratable bonds, but a separate category (they aren't lumped in with AAA corporates in investment strategies, for the good reason that they have quite different characteristics).

Based on the slim case studies we have so far, the S&P downgrade of Japan in 2002 had approximately zero impact on Japanese bond rates. It doesn't even show up as a small blip on the 10-year graph; was just completely ignored.
Yes, that is exactly what the article is trying to describe.
Why do you think this statement is ridiculous?

> "They do this purely to make money. The fact that they do this is clear evidence that they’re ripping you off."

It sounds pretty ironclad to me. I think it's even been established in court cases that manufacturers put chips in toner cartridges to create planned obsolescence and prevent recycling. Are you trying to invent some hairsplitting distinction between "create planned obsolescence and prevent recycling" and "ripping you off"?
This illustrates one of the risks of hostage-taking and the mistaken assumption of Republican leadership that the "hostage" (their words, not mine) wouldn't be harmed

see quote from Senate minority leader below

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-debt-deal-the-triu...

But at the Capitol, behind the four doors and the three receptionists and the police guard, McConnell said he could imagine doing this again.
"I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting," he said. "Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this - it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done."

[edit]: Interesting to see all the downvotes, but my comment had a direct quote from the GOP senate leader. Can anyone explain why they downvoted it.

As for temphn's point below. Has any Nobel laureate defended the "hostage taking" ?

Congress already controls both spending and taxation. So they can start fixing the deficit problem by cutting down on pork, cutting tax loopholes etc. Threatening to force a default is not the answer.
It doesn't necessarily double the number of flags, it doubles the number of boolean flags. And if you use a convention like joeyh mentioned then the length of your help text won't double, nor will the cognitive burden on users who have to remember the options.

A disadvantage of this system is that --no-x might not always make sense or read well so if you make it consistent it may be weird. On the other hand if you use --no-this and --without-that then you are increasing the documentation and cognitive burden on yourself and your users. For most geeks this is admittedly a pretty minor disadvantage but it's the only one I have off the top of my head.
It will be interesting to revisit this article in 5 years...let me get out my Google Calendar...
> Using this new technology shared spectrum is not limited by Shannon's law at all. They can get 10x what Shannon's law is possible. They have 10 radios working, all at the Shannon limit on the same frequency and they do not interfere with each other at all. They think they can get to 100x, 1000x, they don't know what the limit is. They can do 100x what cellular does now with the same spectrum. This means no more dead zones. No more drops.

The wireless industry is notorious for snake-oil salesmen. When you actually claim that your technology violates Shannon channel capacity, it doesn't inspire much confidence that you understand information theory.

From the description (this is just a guess), it appears that DIDO offloads channel characterization to a centralized server to reduce the computational requirements of the clients (similar to AGPS). MIMO techniques (like DIDO) do not violate Shannon capacity. They improve Eb/N0 by increasing gain through beam-forming and physical antenna diversity. In addition, DIDO appears to be using some form of asynchronous spread spectrum (even though they deny using CDMA, there are many other flavors), which allows all clients to transmit simultaneously by using orthogonal codes. Spread spectrum techniques also improve gain at the expense of bandwidth.

While they may have a good implementation, I don't see anything earth shattering here.
Scan and Digitize Papers and Books for Only $1
If you left a $100 bill, it's his.

The law says the opposite. This is "mislaid property" and he's legally required to turn it in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_pr...

Fun factoid... NYC has $89,000 in lost cash that was turned in and not yet claimed:

"The most "profitable" month last year was June, when New Yorkers turned in more than $15,000 in lost cash to the LPU (only $1,807 was claimed that month).

For all of 2010, the MTA raked in a total of $106,974. But only 16 percent of that ($17,509) was ever claimed, which means the rest of it (a cool $89,465) is still just sitting in an MTA bank account."

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/the_mta_h...
Damn you, but the boys at Goldman Sachs are probably on it, right now. Take a pile of T-bills. Siphon off the income from them into a pie. Cut the pie into tranches. The first tranch or two are guaranteed to be AAA. Just look at the math that the quants derived...

We can all lipsync this tune.
Back in the second grade, my teacher would offer extra credit math that brought your percentage over 100%. I remember competing with the other kids to get ridiculously inflated scores like 361%.

Of course, everyone who made it to 95% got an A, but the "bonus XP" aspect of going over 100% was a fun incentive to keep you trying harder.
It would be hard. Even if the disclose the wallet address that was compromised it would be hard to prove that the transfers were not done by the alleged hackers.

I wonder if this is the reason for the drop in btc price lately.
Riak is a fairly large, open source, NoSQL database, written in erlang. I've looked at its source code on occasion knowing little about its internals, and found them to be really comprehensible. Sometimes it is shocking to see how elegant the code is.

At the same time, I have gone and looked at code I wrote back when I was first looking at erlang, that does much less and is much more verbose, confusing and sprawling.

I don't think erlang lacks maintainability. I think it just requires some discipline- like any language.

It sounds like your company has a culture of python hackers and erlang was chosen because you felt you needed to choose something "serious" for this bit of work, rather than because you loved erlang and would use erlang even if you needed to write something trivial. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't see this article as revealing any hidden weaknesses in erlang.

Regarding the JSON parsing issue, erlang has excellent support for code written in other languages, specifically C, and you could wrap any C based JSON parser and use it, though I bet someone has already done this for you. I believed I was watching such a project on GitHub but can't for the life of me find it now.
Is it really imaginable that institutional investors won't just change their rules to allow an exception for US bonds? Honest question.
pretty sure that is implied, mate
Assistance when analyzing malicious PDFs
That's because Japanese debt (up to this point) has been primarily financed by its own citizens, life insurance and pension funds. These are more likely to accept sub-AAA rated bonds and support their own government than external investors are.
It's definitely going to be the blame game, especially with Obama's re-election campaign coming up.

sigh
"It is fair to say every user is worth $40.00/year"

How is it fair to say that? Is there any data that backs this up?

"Dropbox goes mobile"

They already have

"becomes a default backup/sync app on Android and iPhone"

Although this is possible, this seems like a far-fetched claim. Apple and Google already have their own backup/sync methods for their phones, it will be tough for Dropbox to become the default app.

"Dropbox becomes the place where I dump all my data, my own
API, and lets services have access to different parts depending on settings, add $1B. Dropbox becomes mainstream and reaches 100M users, add $2B, ....."

Where are these numbers coming from?
S&P downgrades U.S. credit rating
Hm, he didn't mention having a company over pay for your startup.
It would make a piss poor saving throw for the white house to point out that S&P had underestimated the debt load, wouldn't it?
It seems like the lesson here is that basically any language (Python, Ruby, ...) will perform about the same with non-blocking I/O.

Does this mean that Erlang and node.js are mostly compelling because of the prevalence of async versions of common libraries? Or are they not that compelling in web contexts in the first place?
Startup Quote: Jack Ma, Lead Founder, Alibaba
Is trusting a third party with your BTC any different than trusting an online storage company with your data?
I don't see any evidence in this article that the VP of Sales' intuition about the datasheet was actually correct. So this anecdote isn't all that useful--we're just learning what some suit's best guess is.
I wonder if they, the parachutes, will be golden this time around.
These are the same guys who rated subprime mortgage backed bonds AAA. How the rating agencies still have any credibility is completely incomprehensible to me. I hope someone in the press has the wherewithal to make this point.
Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives.

- Jack Ma

http://startupquote.com/post/8536559840
The downgrade is because the US Gov is spending far more than it's taking in. In other words, it's for the same reason that every other person / business / government gets downgraded. It's important to realize that there's no magic here.
A/B test. Use actual evidence, instead of guessing like the VP in this article.
The question is whether you believe the issue would have become an issue even if the Republicans hadn't raised it now. Many people look at this as an intervention; if the US is addicted to oil, we are even more addicted to borrowing. I suppose it really comes down to whether you find multiplier/countercyclical spending arguments persuasive or not; Nobel Laureates come down on both sides.
People put faith in them because not everyone can hire an army of experts to evaluate all possible investments. S&P supplies their ratings to life insurance companies, pensions funds and even municipal governments. These entities don't have the resources to employ that expertise in-house, so they rely on companies like S&P and Moody's to give them guidance.
You have to trust someone (even if for a very short period of time) in order to make a transaction between bitcoins and legal tender.
I drove past the accident after work, I saw the gear on top of the prius and though is that a computer car accident? I thought they only drove them in nevada.
Being intellectually curious does not, in any way, mean you are incapable of following directions to complete a task. And it actually might mean that by questioning what is the desired outcome, you complete the task a lot faster or perhaps even determine that working on task X is actually a waste of time for everyone.
This will certainly have a small impact but it isn't THAT big a deal. Some things to consider.

1. S&P Has 27 different ratings between AAA and D (there are + and - intermediaries so you have AA+, AA, AA- and so on). So put in human terms if the U.S. were a person this would mean a 21 point drop in their FICO score from 850 to 829 (Both of which are fantastic scores)

2. Regardless of what the ratings agencies say interest rates are always negotiable. If you really think individual banks are going to bully the U.S. Government into paying dramatically higher interest rates you're crazy.

3. The world still needs the U.S. economy so no one wants to see it tank. Everyone is acutely aware of what a rise in interest rates on the U.S. consumer would do and no one wants that.

4. Everyone knows S&P's demands to keep the credit rating high were unrealistic. Cut $4 trillion from the Debt in the next decade? At our current rates the U.S. will have a debt of $23 trillion by 2015. So effectively S&P was asking for a more than 50% cut in Government Debt (The added $9 trillion + $4 trillion in cuts). There's no way that could happen (as much as I personally would like to see it)

So basically this is S&P expressing its displeasure with U.S. policy. Definitely something to note but not something to put too much worry into
What's the deal with not liking Boost? I've used several of its components off and on over the years.
Took those lazy rating agencies a while.

- 1.6 Trillion budget deficit

- 14 Trillion national debt

- 55 Trillion US total debt

- 115 Trillion Unfunded liabilities

- 17% U6 unemployment

- 45.8 Million Americans on Food Stamps

- 52 Million Americans without health insurance

- 1/2 of mortgages are underwater

- 63% labor participation rate, lowest since early 80s

- -5% in Real medium household income in the last 10 years

- 25% of US households have zero or negative net worth

- 1 out of every 45 households was hit with foreclosure

- average length of unemployment is now 40 weeks
You misunderstand. Ignacio's anti-patents wiki was internal-only and meant to discourage other NVIDIA employees from filing patents for ideas he had already discovered. He was the main (and for a long time the only) software guy working on the tessellation architecture and associated algorithms for DirectX 11 and NVIDIA's Fermi chip. Thus he was something of a vanguard; other internal researchers working on the same front would be likely to make very similar discoveries even if working independently. After all, that's the nature of the overwhelming majority of patents and perhaps the single biggest reason they're a bad idea in practice even if you have no issue with them in principle.
What about China bailing. How bad does it need to get before they decide to pull out?
That's one of the MAJOR implications of this, if I'm not mistaken. Of course, bonds denoted in Euro's or other currencies wouldn't be affected.
Ask HN: Best way to browse websites via mobile?
Having to zoom in and out is amnoying for thise sites without a mobile version. Is there a better way?
RSS feed reader?
In the most recent Planet Money podcast they claimed that a downgrade from AAA to AA would have no effect on investors. This is way out of my area of expertise but they seemed quite certain on this point.
The S&P rating is only an assessment of risk in the US Treasury bonds, not a general rating of entire US economy.