skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it send inflation skyrocketing the way that the stimulus sent inflation skyrocketing? :P

Because if you look at the data, current inflation doesn't seem to be out of line with inflation prior to the 2009 economic collapse:

http://www.fintrend.com/inflation/inflation_rate/CurrentInfl...

More to the point, the whole point of borrowing to invest, is that if done successfully, your business grows in a sustainable manner, and you can continue to pay that person money for the business you have built.

This is how business loans are supposed to work. You start with nothing, you get a pile of money, you build something that will earn that money back, and hopefully have built a stable company in the mean time that will continue generating wealth even after the terms of the loan come due.

This shouldn't seem foreign on a startup and entrepreneurship site.
I like this idea, I think pushing the boundaries of tech can create more opportunities in the long run past just the prizes aspect. I think the key to the prizes is also that they should be in areas that could realistically be economically viable going forward.
For me it's a volume/time issue.

Responding to every email simply isn't scalable for one person. So either you hire someone, or you stop responding to every email. 25-50 emails/day sounds manageable, but is it manageable with 100 emails, 300 emails?
My 2 cents...

What is more likely to create a company built to last?
1) A firm starved for cash, but with boadloads of the best talent
or
2) A firm starved for talent, but with boatloads of cash

In situation 1, a great leader can create gold. In situation 2, all a leader can do is line their pockets.

In 2002 and 2008 there were fantastic people that were unemployed through no fault of their own. People who just aren't visible in normal times. In many cases, these top performers already have money, so they can take a risk. Better to invest sweat in the dark days than cash in the bright ones.
I think this is eerily synonymous to the good old "we should just throw out the codebase and rewrite from scratch" scenario.

Just as tempting and probably just as reckless, I think.
This is exactly the type of thing that has always made me think compass and straightedge constructions were even sillier than a lot of very obviously contrived mathematics.

/math major
HKEx - Hong Kong stock exchange Hacked ~ THN
Charges Filed Against Man Who Sold Gizmodo the iPhone 4 Prototype
I like Price Theory by David D. Friedman (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_ToC...) and
Human Action by Ludwig von Mises (http://mises.org/resources/3250).
Contratz. I tried to buy it, but I need 4.3 and was waiting for 5 to upgrade only once (slow Internet).

I'm sure it will not work on my iPod but I'll buy it to support your work. Good luck with your job.
Inspiring Lead Generation Quotes
Collection of inspiring marketing and lead generation quotes.
Seem HK Exchange don't expect such DDoS for the simple document hosting platform.
Social Bookmarking seems like a meaningless term in this context. Digg and Delicious have only superficially similar characteristics, uses and communities.

It would be like categorizing MySpace and Yahoo Mail together because they both have messaging features.
What distinguishes this from waiter.com? So far it sounds like the primary distinction is "you don't get to directly choose what you get every day", which is a big loss.
Hungry Hackers website hacked by CyberMind ~ THN
Visualizing your email box using R
They don't have the FTP password, either. Help them generate an SSH key.
I could see the government getting around this by regulating HTTPS or making encryption for the purposes of subverting censorship a crime.
True, but then how do you expect to be reached via email if your account is public and everyone knows to email you there? The way I keep it manageable is by keeping my personal email private (for the most part) and putting a business email out there for everyone else to send an email to.
It's not incoherent, it's making a judgment call: Hard protections against ripoffs are not worth the negative effects involved.
There is no conflict there. I am both the things you describe.

I've had one of my games cloned so badly that, in their launch forum thread, about 80% of the posts were saying 'uh you just copied [my game]'.

It pissed me off quite a lot, but I in no way believe I should have been able to respond legally. Protecting me from being ripped off wholesale would be preventing everyone from being able to cross pollinate ideas, which is what gaming - and software development in general - is founded on.
I'm just completely at a loss as to what this says.

Companies are flush with cash. The government can't figure out how to spend money productively. So, we're going to have the government borrow more money to give it to companies that don't need it, using its incredible inability to allocate capital to decide which of these companies to allocate capital to?

If the government can't productively allocate capital and companies have enough, why, in the terms of this post, exactly is it such a bad idea to have the government stop borrowing all the available capital and let the companies start allocating it instead?

(I italicize some words to emphasize that it is the internal issues with the logic of the post I am questioning. I may strongly disagree with it, but I am well aware of the liturgy for Keynesianism.)
Funds like this already exist. New York City has the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund: http://www.nycedc.com/FinancingIncentives/Financing/NYCEF
Burn Notice Season 5 Episode 8
In the news reported by The Guardian, Monday, in the message even said, "We do not go bankrupt, but who's to say there was no free food. No matter the police arrived because we have ignored it. As you see on TV, they are not involved in this . They gathered at 07.00 in the Stratford Park and let's get rich. "
From your link, emphasis added: Created by order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the WPA was funded by Congress with passage of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 on April 8, 1935.

funding seems like a sort of crucial detail to me.
I think it is wonderful that many are generously giving others free coffee.

But... how many of them really believe in karma?
Vedio games accessories
Fukime, Leaky and now "Munch On Me"?

Seriously? Is there a way to have a "ask your mom/dad/sister/girlfriend/wife what they think of your name" class before domains are registered?

Branding matters.
Find missing people
Find missing people it pays to advantage both online and offline resources. Although the Internet provides admission to a huge bulk of advice don't discount the basal offline strategies as well. There are some ways to find missing people like ads in newspaper, post to relevant bulletin bords and contact to the friends and relatives.
1) The government is literally awash in cheap credit. Good businesses, when credit is cheap, borrow and invest. If you think this is a bad idea, please explain if it is because you do not believe the government should act as a business does (and for what reasons), or because you think that you should not borrow when your interest rates are low.

2) If you dislike Cuban's target for investment (fixing unemployment, the purported goal of the Tea Party and GOP), then please, by all means, pick a different avenue by which the government could make a return on investment.
Not to mention that both sites have individual, specific reasons for losing traffic: Digg had a gradual decline in quality of posts and a disastrous redesign. It was leaked that Delicious was going to be shut down. It would only be news if they didn't lose traffic.
Joel's post is really about levels of abstraction (well that, and being snarky.) At a high enough level of abstraction, what he's saying is precisely true (iamwill points this out in a more aesthetically pleasing way[1])

Some people complain: "Images are not text!" But at a high enough level of abstraction, images are text, but interpreted in a special way by special software that someone else wrote.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2867214
There are two unwritten assumptions in this post:

1 - The company focuses on people as appreciable assets, as opposed to costs to be minimized.

2 - There is not diminishing returns for chasing the best.

Where this is true and recognized, companies don't nickel and dime employees. It is usually true in the best recruiter of each talent focused industry. Like them or not, this is in part why Goldman Sachs and McKinsey succeed, as well as top software firms.

Once you view people as costs to be minimized (think the auto industry) or there is diminishing returns on individual excellence (think Wal-mart) then this system breaks down.
I've played with these and I think they're interesting. Currently, they suffer from the problem that the games on there are only really engaging for the first 30 minutes or so and then you feel no need to ever come back. They're in a tough spot right now, being both a hardware company and a games developer. They're launching an API and hoping 3rd party devs get on board but we'll see if they can get enough of an ecosystem to have it really thrive.

My hope is that they'll get the price down low enough that hardware hackers will do to it what they did to the kinect and it'll end up being used for all sorts of non-game purposes. It's got a high dpi screen, proximity sensors, tilt sensors, wireless capabilities and a single button input in a tiny package that could be used for all sorts of things.

Green Goose is another promising startup that's trying to attack that space: http://www.greengoose.com/
Chinese smugglers use crossbow and zip-line for iPad/iPhone “shipments”
That happens in nearly every language which is famous and widely used. I have seen awful Python code in the past. So bad that it would have led me to hate Python, so bad that it would have forced me to believe Python as a language sucks.

But by now I am mature enough to understand that if you hire bad programmers you get bad code irrespective of the language its written in. You can use any tool you want, if you use it badly the result is going to be bad. These are days of Python and Ruby fanboyism so very obviously everything is going to look ugly in front of it. Code bases in other languages will be declared legacy and the same thing will be translated to the new shiny language and called the 'modernized' code bases. Your RDBMS use cases will be shoe horned to NoSQL databases and declared designed for the web. This will go on and on for anther few years...

Until we get to see page long blog posts another few years from now describing how many bad Python + Django examples can be found on the net. Or how bad Python and Ruby Legacy codebases are. How framework dependency with Django, Rails or Twisted sucks. Or how someone had to spend huge engineering effort migrating from Python 2 series to 3 series. Or how they had to rewrite a large part of SQL logic to work with NoSQL databases.

This trend repeats every few years, every few years a set of tools get trolled badly.
If the client allows you to transfer files to them via SSH, easy! If they don't, break out the clue-by-four.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I think you're providing a useful service. I just hope that people will start a conversation about FTP's problems and alternatives before turning to 1FTP to mitigate the problems.
I don't think i'm clear on what you mean.

What sort of processes do produce good solutions to complex problems?

And if you can outline such a process, what prevents a government, or a polity (i'm more than happy for citizens to do stuff rather than the government) from performing the processes that do produce good solutions?
Computer cable
Ipad 2 accessories
Car Racing Games
yeah we're already doing that
Rimu VPS back up after 12 hours.
As there is a rather large cohort of regular and past cannabis smokers entering into prime Alzheimer years we are going to see if this is true within the decade and do not even need to fund a study. If the Alzheimer rate starts to drop then this is worth further research, but if not I will begin to suspect some people are blowing some rather fragrant smoke on this issue...
"The Republican/ Tea-Party approach to job creation is to cut taxes. The theory being that more money in the pocket of individuals will cause people to spend more money in the economy thereby creating more jobs. Nope. Not happening. Why ? Because individuals have too much debt. Any money they get goes to pay credit cards, student loans and for the smart and fortunate into savings.

Individuals now have debt = to about 119pct of income vs historical levels of .17pct in the 40s, 55pct in the 50s , 65pct in the 60s and a high of 133pct in 2007)."

This is clearly wrong. Never mind cutting taxes, that's much too indirect. New plan - the government borrows as much as it can at negative real interest rates until it bids those rates back down to 0. Then it just mails checks to every American. Some will spend the money (probably with great efficiency! They know what they need!), but most will use it to pay down debts. This is a feature, not a bug. The debts that Americans owe have positive, and in some cases substantial, real interest rates. Bam! You have just accomplished to biggest interest rate arbitrage play in history.
I think it is to do with the format of the video. Many video sites convert the format to a mobile version so that it can work on devices...others however, may leave it in the format it was uploaded which may not work on some devices..
>pick a different avenue by which the government could make a return on investment.

A WPA-type program to improve transportation, energy and communications infrastructure. Lot's of jobs across many sectors, from professional to artistic to skilled & unskilled labor, most of which can be in the private sector (contractors/contracting firms).
Sportsnews: Saina in third round of World Badminton
Ha. Indeed. I don't even know how my account got hijacked. Pretty unsettling.
The Loss of Distinction
Does Windows allow easy setup of webdav over https?

That wouldn't solve the shared account credential problem that 1FTP tackles, but it would improve security.
If the author had searched, he would have come across Google Sketchup. I downloaded and used the same, although I had to read a couple of tutorials before hitting the road. And it served the purpose of designing my new apartment.

Not sure if the iPad app the author used was intuitive enough to use, because I did feel overhelmed by the vast options in Sketchup.
TechStars documentary coming to Bloomberg TV
BTC Merit List – Uttar Pradesh SCERT BTC Results
>Only then will there truly be changes.

I suspect that the changes you would see under your scenario are closer to 1789 than 1787.
The government should not act as a business does, because per Cuban's words, "The problem for the Democrats is that the government hasn’t shown that they can earn a positive or even a break even return on their spending." If a business can not break even, then the proper thing for them to do is to liquidate while they are still worth something and disburse the proceeds of the liquidation to their shareholders.

Yes, I think perhaps maybe the government should not be doing what a business would do in this situation.

Again, I remind you I'm not actually trying to engage in a debate over proper economics in general (and trying very hard to carefully refrain from injecting too much of my opinion, it took me a few edits on the first message), I'm trying to work out what exactly this post is trying to say. It isn't clear to me at all how Cuban gets from the the government of today, which is incapable of allocating capital, to the government of tomorrow, which when presented with a menu of even more decisions than it has to make today, is then capable of allocating capital intelligently in an even tougher decision-making environment. Why would the government not simply fail in the ways it is failing already in the allocation of capital? What's the connecting step?
God it pisses me off how easily corporations can infect people with their propaganda. Some tax dodging assholes are lobbying corrupt politicians to let them slide on paying their taxes and now all of a sudden a bunch of people like you are talking about what a big problem it is that all these poor multinational conglomerates can't get a hold of their tax dodging money. It's sickening. Can I ask you where you were made aware of the money repatriation issue?
Now that you've mentioned this fact, I'm more interested in trying out these services.
There's plenty of those to go around...
So, my question is, did Groupon turn down Google's acquisition offer because they knew it would probably fall through in the due diligence stage? Whereas, they could then use the hype from the offer to somewhat inflate an IPO?
I can also imagine some further publications shortening it to MOM. So they'll begin: "Munch On Me (MOM), a new startup in San Francisco, has..."
Depends on the day for me, sometimes this is nice to do, sometimes I just want to spent 10 minutes having something to eat and jump straight back into what I'm doing if I have a flow going or a lot on.
Why? because the current system/society, as it stand, is dying body that cannot be healed. It is too old. Too lazy. Too morally corrupt. Too broke.

Who cares about 300 million citizens suffering through a total economic collapse, as long as The System improves? It should be encouraged, they should sacrifice themselves willingly to the idea of a better System.
When you 'forge' your own path with fellow entrepreneurs who are learning -- will you grant more weight to those who have proven to succeed?

How about those who built more successful (at least from a financial perspective) than 99.99999% of the world and have the power and resources to enact real change?

Haven't you heard, a recent article [1] gives 13 reasons there is a comeback, and it has some interesting nuggets:

- unemployment is 11.3% (not 50%)
- high tech jobs growing over 100% yoy
- ranked 46/150 for growth (opposed to 146 previously)

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/detroit-comeback-2011-3

Rents, land, & costs of living are super low -- these are all significant advantages in any competitive business landscape.
Alright, so we'll grant the government is terrible at capital allocation (because yes, that's the premiss of Cuban's post).

So, what would you do when faced with an investor who's a complete fucking idiot, but can borrow money cheaply?

What is a fail-proof investment plan for this trustifarian?

Why can't we find a plan, or demand that our government do something with this opportunity? There is a hack to be had in here. Who can we trust with this opportunity that the government can farm it out to? What would the terms have to be in order to ensure that the government can make a return?

btw, upvotes for you, thanks for the conversation :)
This is exactly right. Not many people understand the Austrian School of Economics, whatever you want to call it, "supply side", "tax cuts", not even the politicians that campaign for it. Not all tax cuts are created equal and the goal is not to get people to spend money but invest. The only tax cuts that work are across the board cuts that change long-term behavior. All these credits and "targeted" cuts don't do anything and might even hurt. The goal of tax cuts are to spur investment by lowering the required return on investment allowing capital to flow into more productive projects (manufacturing, startups, etc).
You're treating 'enough' as a fixed quantity and that's a mistake.

Just because a business is generating profit (has 'enough'?) doesn't mean that investing more into that business wouldn't make it more profitable and generate a big positive return.

In fact, investing into already successful businesses to help them grow faster (seems to be what Mark is advocating) seems like a great investment strategy if you can get hold of the cash to invest cheaply.
Zynga fends off class action lawsuit
The conversation we really should be having involves answering these three questions:

1. What work could be done that would create a better world for us?

2. Why isn't this work being done? Is it regulatory paralysis? Insufficient coordination amongst stakeholders? Are the rewards difficult to capture by the people doing the work? Are there not enough people with the requisite skills?

3. Can we stimulate or coordinate the private sector to organize labor and capital to get this work done? If not, why not?

If you've thought about these questions for a while, it is absolutely shocking to listen to the economic debate going on around us today. We have two camps who are both way off -- some people (e.g. the author of the blog post) assume that throwing money at anyone who asks for it will work, but it doesn't (they just waste it). Others think that letting people keep the money they have previously earned and staying outta the way will work, but it doesn't (they just hold on to it or waste it).

I don't know what the solution is.
Glancing at the blog's top entries, there aren't any others that sound trollish. The "Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream" post hasn't aged well, though.
David Merill is a really smart guy and had been working on Sifteo for some time. I had a long discussion when he came to Berkeley to give guest lectures on User Interface Design and Tangible User Interface. He has a great vision about the company and this could become something huge.
Spam probably isn't a HUGE concern for Twitter. I have an account without any "real" followers. They're all spam bots. But it looks good to have 73 followers even if you don't know them - makes people look/feel important.

Kevin Rose touched on this. He called it "social currency".
Bill Gross: America’s debt is not its biggest problem
I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass
Informatica Delivers Industry's First Dynamic Data Masking Solution
The OpenScience Project
> The problem for the Democrats is that the government hasn’t shown that they can earn a positive or even a break even return on their spending.

How do you calculate the return on health care for old people, or school lunches for kids, or clean water in your faucet, or adding a lane to a congested highway?
Death to the 'noreply' mailbox
Really, down voting a post that tries to explain the Austrian School of Economics. Trying to suppress a view point are we?
Apple copycat "hiPhone 5" comes calling in China
>Would it send inflation skyrocketing the way that the stimulus sent inflation skyrocketing? :P

From what I've read, inflation isn't a problem in the current economic climate because even with the increased money supply, no one is actually spending any money (or more accurately, most consumers don't have the money to spend) so there is no reason for prices rise since demand is low.

I have no idea how Cuban's idea would affect inflation.

Of course this is HN, so for all the knowledgeable people out there, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Venture Capitalists Back Away from Clean Energy
The problem with this is that older corporations will just create shell companies, funnel all their wealth through them, and then transfer it back through things like IP licensing and other immaterial fictional goods.

Tax holidays are not the solution the the US debt, or better use of the US's fiscal resources (and yes the ability to borrow money cheaply is a resource).
Scientific Process Rage
That's an odd attitude for a math major to have. When geometers in ancient times thought mechanical curves were lesser second-rank objects, that was obviously a counterproductive prejudice that for a long time retarded the development of mathematics. But if you ask me, there is nothing "obviously contrived" about studying a configuration of lines and circles, their points of intersection, the lines and circles directly constructible from those intersections, and so on, ad infinitum. It strikes me as marvelously natural and beautiful and anything but contrived. That this corresponds to studying quadratic field extensions is a confirmation of that, if there were ever any serious doubt.