skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a political statement. As the Gr.Grandfather comment said, our debts are denominated in dollars, and can be paid off instantly, simply by printing the money. The only reason we can't is because the interest rates on treasuries would go asymptotic if we did that, because investing in bonds denominated in a currency that has a history of doing that would be a risky thing to say the least.

If the reason for the S&P downgrade was based on the debt, it would be purely political, because along with US treasuries, every security denominated in dollars would have to be equally downgraded simultaneously to make economic sense. They understand this, so this is not the reason they gave - they graded the US on its willingness to pay its debts. I think that's a vast overestimation of the power of unpopular spoiler Republicans (edit: and anti-Chinese xenophobia), but a case can be made.

But, even with the fiscal shape of the US now, investors are buying treasuries with interest rates at historic lows, because if you're not investing in US treasuries, what are you going to invest in? The property bubble was largely a response to super low treasury rates, and since it has burst, there has been a massive run-up in precious metals as a way to store savings and get a rate that beats inflation. Investors (the only people that have to be answered to in questions of government debt) make their evaluation of US debt available in real time, and the evaluation is excellent, no matter what any individual investors/pundits say with their mouths.

The worst outcome of more money printing is that those interest rates start to rise, making the dollar less valuable with respect to other currencies, which will make imported products more expensive for domestic consumers, and make our exports cheaper abroad, stimulating a rise in domestic manufacturing and employment. If in addition, that newly printed money was used to make investments in infrastructure, or simply handed to people with low to negative savings who will immediately spend it, the domestic inflationary effect would be captured by a rise in domestic wages. To the degree that all of this happens is the degree to which the massive trade deficits we've been running since Reagan decline or reverse, and the national debt (the combination of domestic public and private debt) is an accumulation of those deficits.

(And I would point out that I can't emphasize this point enough: If we do nothing to Social Security, it will be able to pay exactly as it has until 2035, and if no fixes have been made until then, 80% of what it has been paying until the earth plunges into the sun. This 80% will go further than the 100% being paid now due to the productivity gains between now and then, unless our response to the underutilized economy of this demand crisis is to make cuts that further underutilize the economy.)

----

edit: that's what I get for not RTFA before commenting. I gave S&P a benefit of the doubt that it didn't deserve, and most of this was actually said by the treasury except for the "weak dollar is good and SS is fine" stuff. Well, a weakened dollar is good and SS is fine:)
Raise the taxes on the rich! Jesus Christ!
Interesting experiment in that the image is public with no signup/restriction to get at it. You would need to have a continuous stream of new "pay-it-forward" users to add money on the card, no? There are lots of coffee drinkers in the world... Wasn't there something in the news not too long ago about an investment firm that ran this way? :)
That's easy: buy it. It's the perfect machine to get code done.

I wouldn't use it for stress tests though. IMHO it's a task for dedicated machines anyways.
There are lots of very good and detailed examples in this article, and some very nice links for those interested in the actual low-level stuff.

But I am not sure where a lot of things he notes were ever "taught" in universities or formally to those of us who were in the trenches. Much of the hard-core low-level stuff was learned either on your own, or when you got into an environment where it was necessary to know.

There are some additional skills that are falling by the wayside as well. One is how to optimize instructions on a type 650 rotating drum computer. Or more realistically, how to program co-routines in an interrupt-driven environment. Or how to write a floating-point division routine if you are working on a 286 target that does not have a 287. Or what order to write items to a disk and where to place them to minimize arm movement in a real-time data-driven system.

I admit that some of these are actually less necessary now due to technology being replaced, or machines being ridiculously faster.

But I was around when those technologies were necessary and useful (well, not the 650, but almost). We built a real-time system in assembler that had to be seriously well-optomized, and we had to modify the operating system to remove hazardous a latency that was fogging our 2ms data sampling rate.

But you know, simultaneously with that were COBOL programmers who had to be schooled in the idea that writing backups to tape was a good idea.

So there always has been a gap--this article suggests that this is something new.

Having said all that, this is an excellent article, as it is a challenge to programmers who would be better, and has a forest of valuable links to learn more. (This site now bookmarked.)
All of these popular services can be expressed in standard ones like HTML/JSON.
While I agree with you about the editorializing within the article (choosing not to include certain details like the show's rebuttals of some of Tesla's accusations, linking in the boy racers bit that is largely irrelevant to the subject at hand) it is not the same as what Top Gear themselves have done.

The show did not just chose to only present certain facts, or just chose to ignore certain opinions/interpretations. They actively mislead. They falsified evidence.

While the line can be pretty fine, there is still a line between editorializing and bare faced deception.
I don't disagree with you. In fact, I largely after with you... That type of society is sustainable. The question is, however, how we get from our current system to that one. It does not look like it will happen naturally. Instead it looks like we're headed more toward a "the people who have the wealth now will retain it for a long time to come" future.

I don't see starting a new, successful, business, as getting easier, like you seem to.
Maybe it was downgraded due to this trade made two weeks before: http://etfdailynews.com/2011/07/25/investors-the-1-billion-a...
Which cable do you use for dual external monitors on the MBP?
My guess is that shipping costs could be reduced substantially if the number of subscribers in a country/region gets very big: send one large package and have them shipped individually from there.
Upvoted because my boss is in the picture.
The balance just went from $0 to $40 - awful nice of whoever did it. I'm a big fan of this idea - put in $5 and you can help out someone who you've probably never met!
The erosion of faith goes deeper than that, as James Galbraith discusses
in this talk from earlier in the year.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/james-galbraith-on-fr...

This is the diagnosis of an irreversible disease. The corruption and
collapse of the rule of law, in the financial sphere, is basically
irreparable. It’s not just that restoring trust takes a long
time. It’s that under the new technological order in this field, it
can not be done. The technologies are designed to sow and foster
distrust and that is the consequence of using them. The recent
experience proves this, it seems to me. And therefore there can be no
return to the way things were before. In other words, we are at the
end of the illusion of a market place in the financial sphere.
A Big Update For Cloudnode - Cloudnode Blog
Valid economically, sure. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be disastrous to investors, which is what S&P cares about.
I'm not quite a lawyer. I represented criminal defendants throughout my third year of law school. I earned my Juris Doctor in May and will hear if I passed the Maryland bar in November.
Also see Knuth telling his side of the story

http://www.webofstories.com/play/17086
Wow check out 1993 - we have come soooo far:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU

Listen to those hard drives!

Netscape Navigator didn't come out until over a year later (December 1994) and IE 1.0 another year after that. Wow.
Having seen the demo scene from its inception in the late eighties I find it fascinating that after all these years we are close to saturating our analog senses with this digitally created content. 32bit pixels saturated color perception, compressed music maxed out hearing and we are now pretty close with form and structure.

There are still nuances that we can keep chasing but looking at the big picture we are pretty close to generating a comprehensive audio visual experience.
I have to second prepared statements. You wont have to change your code too much to use them and they are way too important not to use. They can even lead to speedups if you're going to reuse queries.
This is not about requesting the content type though, it's about requesting the format of the content. If I make a request to https://api.github.com/users/dominic/gists, I'm getting back JSON, since that's all Github's API supports.

Github's custom mime types allow you to request the content of the response in a specific format. In their case, either in Github Flavored Markdown, text, html, or all of the above. They allow you to do this with an Accept header, but the same could be accomplished with a GET parameter tacked onto the request (but that's not RESTful at all!). Using HTTP headers appropriately feels like exactly the right way to handle this situation.
Better explanations?

@foo
def bar():
...

Is syntax sugar for

def bar():
...
bar = foo(bar)

That is all there is to it. It's just syntax sugar to make this particular design pattern more convenient to use.

These explanations add more confusion then they dissolve and give off the impression that this is some kind of expert python foo which is clearly isn't.
Amazon rolls out a social network for Kindle
Are developers better at predicting design outcomes?
And in case anyone was wondering the first balance he tweeted was:

jonathanscard

I got $7.91 left on me.

18 Jul
Isn't it's more like a marathon Parkour game?

You have to adapt, move with strength and all that, but you have to do that thousand of times until you hit what you're looking for.
So there are some parts of REST that make perfect sense to me. In particular, the preference for nouns w/ CRUD over verbs has many great side effects: easier caching, better logging, easier discoverability, etc. And I also get the Content-Type and Content-Language stuff, especially in terms of avoiding ".json" or ".xml" so that you can compare resource identity via a simple string compare.

But I simply do not see any value in HATEOAS outside of largely read-only datasets and generic dataset explorer type applications. Maybe it makes sense for someone like Freebase, but it's completely useless for pretty much every other API out there.

You simply cannot build a useful API client application without deep knowledge of the problem domain and the interface part of API. You're going to have API documentation and you're going to have to read it.

Now, I understand the desire to avoid IDs and manual URL construction. That's a valuable goal. And I'll admit that I never thought of using 201 and the Location header on create; clever. But just knowing the list of relative URLs from a resource is useless. It's not like a Link rel="newcomment" header is going to show up and magically you'll have comment form. Besides, you need to know which
"rel" to lookup, so you might as well just append "/comments" and avoid the indirection.

And this all breaks down yet again when you get to offline support. If you've got a web app which is going to deal with not-yet-saved objects, you're back to being unable to compare URLs, or constructing them.

Lastly, while I like working with clean URLs and GET/POST over RPC calls. I dislike the ad-hoc specifications necessary to build real applications. We've got a "RESTful" API for our app, but we keep running into situations where different views need subtly different data. For example, decorating a resource with relationship to the current user (eg. isAdmin) or joining data when returning a list of related objects (eg. members vs memberships). The query param spaghetti is growing unwieldy, subtle authorized data leak problems are an inevitability, client-side models get confusing and easily create bugs if passed around.

The only solutions to these problems are excessive discipline. Discipline is something that compilers are great at providing, which is why you see things like ProtoBufs and Thift. There's no arguing over HATEOAS or RESTfulness or GET/POST or Content-Type or any of that. The message definition files act as a baseline API documentation, which are enforced programmatically. The designers of these tools had things to do and didn't have time to deal with this nonsense.

Stop the pontificating and get back to work.
No, C+Ds usually contain threats of CIVIL action, not threats to report criminal behavior to the government.
Cat is useless in that line:

$ grep " 80/tcp" /etc/services
http 80/tcp www www-http # WorldWideWeb HTTP

http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat
Well, the idea is that listeners are the customer. You may be right that it may initially get more traction as a free newsletter. But then it would basically be another mp3 blog, and that wasn't the idea.
Another shameless plug here... We provide a cheap (39.95$/year) unmetered VPN service at https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

We support all devices (OpenVPN, PPTP, IPSEC/L2TP) and have servers in US west/midwest/east, UK, and Switzerland.
`return` may be a valid statement but an object literal is not.

A standalone object literal would likely be interpreted as a block and would throw a syntax error unless it were a simple identifier and a statement `{ foo: <statement> }`, in which case it would not interpret it as an object but exactly what it is, a label and a statement.

This is why JSON parsers which use eval must first wrap the object literal with parens, to make it an expression rather than a statement.
So VPN by someone who knows nothing about security. Fail.
Power outage?

Interesting -- Linode also went down today because of power outage: http://status.linode.com/2011/08/outage-in-fremont-facility....
This is crazy, Treasury is shooting the messenger and damaging their own credibility with this line of attack.

Out-year budgeting is very complex, and there are a lot of bullshit assumptions about various "promised" spending cuts and tax increases. By jumping all over S&P for a mistake that has nothing to do with the massive, ongoing deficits this year and next, Treasury shows it is in a strange state of denial.

It is past time for Sec. Geithner to resign.
yeah, if only apple would be cool with that. (and lodsys)
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure....

...for the Han van Meegeren version of it.
Arbitrage with BitCoin? Surely you joke!
It would be cool if something like this could be done for cheap microprocessor boards so people who can't afford to start with embedded development can be helped by others.
Figuring out who would be able to deal with 150 kilometers (or so) of range would actually be a very interesting social science study.

I really do suspect that the numbers would be quite high, at least in many European cities. High density and reliable rail networks reduce the need for long ranged cars and when it’s down to one or two trips per year, renting becomes very viable.
There's $46.88 now, it fluctuates a lot.
Just fyi, all your non-HTTP Flash traffic (Flash sockets) is probably not being proxied at all. Even if you have a SOCKS proxy set in the browser.

The easiest way around this is VPN, but you can also do crazier stuff like use ProxyCap (for windows or OSX) or iptables redirect/transocks setup in Linux: http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/how-to-force-flash-o...
This is why I tend to leave the laptop & cell behind when attending DEF CON. Besides, it's about meeting the people there, isn't it?
This is a really cool experiment. Coffee seems like the perfect use case since it's awkward to exploit, in that you're not going to buy $100 worth of coffee, just because the card has $100 on it. But what about other physical goods, like Barnes & Nobles, HEB, Home Depot?
I wonder if the guys used a functional programming language.
Yeah, well, Hal has be diplomatic, he can't authoritatively state that the order came down from on high (perhaps above the department) that Scheme was to be totally purged from the base undergraduate curriculum, which to my knowledge was finished not long ago. That's what's behind his statement "And for random reasons we didn't [do the course in Scheme]."

That said, Hal himself does fully support the change from SICP/6.001 to 6.01 according to my sources.

And you're right that much less EE is required of of pure CS majors (6-3s), but I'm told that very few current students do that major, most do the combined EECS one....

To finish, while I don't have time right now to finish reading/skimming your very interesting interview (you do realize you are by far the best interviewer in our field?) as far as I can tell a lot of the deep stuff taught in SICP/6.001 has also been purged from the base undergraduate curriculum. Kinda reminds me of when the Boy Scouts of the USA changed their system in the '70s so that you could become an Eagle Scout without ever having camped outdoors, started a fire, etc.

(My response to that was to drop out of Boy Scouts; here, as a scientist by inclination who just happens to narrow interests in CS which are fairly EQ with SICP I don't exactly have a dog in this hunt (amusingly, my other big interest in this general field is pure software engineering, the fruits of starting out on an IBM 1130 and realizing there HAD to be a better way to do things :-). Although I do seriously wonder about the de-emphasis of functional programming at some of the top 4 in the multi-core future which is today).
I think that just having requirement that a patent actually has to be in "real production/read product" by the holder is the only modification to the law we need. (there is challenge here how to ensure that production in not fake, but it could be possible to ensure that)
It would be really fun to combine this kind of point of sale reward with games or puzzles or tasks, sort of like mechanical Turk combined with OKCupid or wufoo.

Cash prizes are less interesting for this kind of thing. (various studies)
OOP - the next generation
If as you say, a free version doesn't have a competitive advantage or differentiator over mp3 blogs, why is the service better if you charge for it?

Can you line up interesting partners, make it a community somehow, crowdsource reviews from the newsletter, etc? What is the #1 reason to subscribe to your service?
The average scene coder has always been more of a creative tinkerer than a systems programmer. There's obviously a specific skill set involved in building end-user web apps (or anything else for that matter) that must be learned, but it doesn't seem like a terrible fit. They're used to working closely with graphical artists and musicians on a shared vision while adding a lot of their own creativity to the mix. Oh, and they're used to writing terrible throw-away code. They'll fit right in. :)

Fabian is the systems programmer type. He'd hate building web apps.
Thanks. these benchmarks are very impressive. As they say in the review, the drawback is gaming which doesn't matter to me.
Please don't SHOUT; use apostrophes for emphasis.
I wouldn't want to be taught in school about low-level optimizations, I am sometimes, and generally, they teach you stuff that is 10 to 20 years old.

I think many low-level optimization tricks each generation of programmers need to find for themselves, the technology changes so much that old tricks are not as useful anymore.

Memory wasn't as slow (compared to processors) as they are today etc. Many people still count FLOPS, while memory accesses is probably the most relevant metric today, especially on GPUs.
What is your point?

The meaning of the downgrade is, if the inflation rate is 2% then there's a risk that US doesn't pay its debts. Now, if US does pay the nominal debts as you assume, then you cannot assume the inflation rate is only 2%.

If paying the nominal debt guaranteed an AAA rate regardless of inflation, then every country in the world would have an AAA rate. Argentina would just print a lot of pesos and then buy US dollars with it. Europe would just print a ton of euros and Greece et. al. would have no problems.
Designing diamond circuits for extreme environments
THANK YOU HN!!! I couldn't connect to my machine and couldn't understand what was going on... good thing I turn to HN as soon as I get online...

You'd think AWS could afford to send emails to keep us customers up to date with the problem?
If your Math professor claims you failed a midterm, then you show them they forgot to count a page's worth of marks, but they said you still the same grade because they doubted your "willingness" to pass, you'd be well within your rights to complain.
> You simply cannot build a useful API client application without deep knowledge of the problem domain and the interface part of API. You're going to have API documentation and you're going to have to read it.

That has nothing to do with HATEOAS. Of course you have to know the interface part of the API, but the interface part is the content types. Not the Content-Type, though they can match, but the content types: the shape and structure of the documents you get from the service, and send to it. And those content types tell you, among other things, where to get or send other types.

> Besides, you need to know which "rel" to lookup

Sure, see above, that's part of the content types which the consumer needs to know in any case.

> And this all breaks down yet again when you get to offline support. If you've got a web app which is going to deal with not-yet-saved objects, you're back to being unable to compare URLs, or constructing them.

I fail to see the issue. You know the data you need to send to the service, and you know the content types to traverse in order to reach where to send your data in the service. What is the issue?

> Lastly, while I like working with clean URLs

URL shape has nothing whatsoever to do with REST.

> I dislike the ad-hoc specifications necessary to build real applications.

Why would they be any more ad-hoc than with any other interface standard?

> Stop the pontificating and get back to work.

Oh irony, you're so delicious.
Such a simple and wonderful idea; it brightened my Sunday. (Edit: I wonder how soon it will take SBX to decide that this is a vulnerability in their mobile app and change something that will break this.)
Yes, I concur with your answer. Maybe start serving one location first and them expanding to others once you have a working system in place.
"I suppose the one about someone else accidentally taking my homework? I don't think I could have helped that and any reasonable teacher might have given me half credit."

If I were your teacher and you told me that story you would be lucky if I didn't accuse you of academic dishonesty on the spot and filed the relevant paperwork. In the absolute best case scenario, assuming your total honesty, it's yet another lame variation on "my dog ate my homework". You are responsible for your work, nobody else.
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As somebody else mentioned, it's unfortunate that one bad person could ruin it for everybody else.

Is it possible to restrict the card only to coffee (to prevent huge catering orders)?