skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All this technology should be lowering the cost of living. Instead, constant inflation in the money supply, via the money multiplier effect, quantitative easing and continuously falling interest rates, eats up all the benefits of increased technology and transfers them to the financial sector and their clients. If there wasn't this huge parasite of debt , which is getting paid to somebody, somewhere who doesn't have to work, thank you very much, it would be dirt cheap to live and people would be able to get by very easily with most of the population not having to work.
DNS management very often sucks, whether with GoDaddy or any other I've tried.

I founded a cloud management company for EC2 (and later other infrastructure clouds), and one of the first things we included was decent dns record management. It's integrated into your apache vhosts and whatnot, but the value is really just keeping your sanity when all you need to do is add an MX record.
The bad thing about this news is that now I don't want to start an app with Play 1.2.3 anymore.
I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key-Systems and RrpProxy.net (http://key-systems.net/). They also run Domain Discount 24 (http://dd24.com/) and are a fairly large registrar.
You're not wrong. In one prison, for example, cans of Mackerel served as an internal currency precisely because they had no inherent value. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122290720439096481.html
'where everyone was eligible or provided with the same'

Provided with the same...what? Certainly not housing, food, imported goods, freedom to travel, etc...

Those all varied dramatically with your station and connections.
Ask HN: Any simple alternatives to the getsatisfaction.com widget?
Are there any simple implementations of widgets that can be used which provide the basic [idea,question,problem,comment] feedback for small websites - ideally similar to the Feedback sidebar button.

getsatisfaction.com seems like a great product but it's too much complexity for a small webapp. I don't have a brand, nor a company, but a simple small webapp which I'm trying to build a user base for. Is there something like this out there or should I roll up my sleeves and do it myself?
Mr. Rushkoff wants to "organize society around employment", but he ought to reflect that it's going to be organized around _something_. There is going to be a distribution of power, it's an inevitable feature of society. Do we wanted organized around what each of us can do for the benefit of others, as measured freely by those others? Or do we want it organized around what everyone else thinks of us? I can do a lot more about my worries about getting a job than I can about worries about the opinion of my local commissar.
Deflation doesn't remove all incentive to invest, but it does destroy the "gotta keep ahead of inflation" one. I meant to be more explicit about that when I said, "you could still try to invest some of it to try to outperform the gain you get from deflation."
Javascript that you need to know but might not
Agreed. Couple more points that may not be obvious:

7. Even if Bitcoin is not a useful currency today, not only is it a novel tech invention but it is also a useful medium of exchange (akin to credit cards). You can buy coins temporarily just so you can buy something from Amazon.com and have it shipped to Africa (as one Bitcoin startup does international shipping for many US-only retailers).

8. Bitcoin could be a useful currency someday, but it might take 200 years. What most people don't realize is that all the properties of Bitcoin (such as the maximum supply or its present growth) can be adjusted with a new genesis block at any point (effectively forking the currency). If the majority of the network clients agrees with this fork, Bitcoin continues under the same name. Side note: I remember hearing that Gavin was going to start a non-profit to help guide (read: sort-of regulate) the official Bitcoin fork. Not sure if this happened, I've been out of the loop.

9. There is no way Bitcoin as it is today could reach any kind of significant scale, purely from the perspective of the protocol. Bitcoin was built with the intention of evolving further down the line. This is part of what makes the technology really interesting.
http://hackermonthly.com/ focuses on all of hacker news, and is a little pricy, but a very nice publication, and will cover programming, but also other topics HN (and possibly you) would be interested in.
Thanks, that really means a lot to me.

That said - You ain't read nothin yet. There is plenty more ridiculousness still left to come.

Pass it along to anyone who might be interested, I'd love to get more feedback (positive or negative) on how people feel about the story and the writing.
> for some idiotic reason

Selling more costly licenses is not idiotic from their point-of-view.
I don't think there is any reason to encourage saving money. Living within your means, yes, investing, yes, but saving under your pillow, especially if you had a non-inflating currency, isn't good for the economy.

Even if it should be encouraged, it doesn't matter the logic of it, people won't accept making less and less money over time. Non-fiat currency + population increase makes that inevitable.
As you commented to someone else in an earlier branch, carry that out a few steps; why might healthcare costs rise so much faster than any reasonable measure of the output which funds both education and healthcare?. I don't know the answer. I think the point is that "health care" cannot be pointed out as the root cause, much as "markets" cannot be pointed out as the only solution.
Anyone interested in this may care to read the discussion from 3 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2604921

To be honest, I still have a hard time figuring out how, where or why I would ever use this. Maybe I'm just too old, too disconnected, or too stupid to understand what it's all about, but in short, I just don't.

I'd love a single, simple, concrete example of a relevant problem this solves.

Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt it's very cool and very clever. I just really don't get it.
As a SVN user who is not afraid to use feature branches, this "no branching" workflow of many git users amuses me to no end.
Nope, we surveyed around and 10 out of 11 of are big funnel analysis customers liked a greyscale version of the horizontal funnels.

This had nothing to do with removing objections =)
Oops. I missed the canary part. You're right.
I read through the article waiting for the explanation of the "Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge?" line but unfortunately it wasn't explained. Git didn't become any simpler after all. :(
Ask HN: How to hire an awesome Contract Developer
Our startup needs help on our tech team immediately. We have an Oct 31st deadline for a site overhaul; we've just lost one developer for personal reasons; and without an exceptional front end guy, we're going to be up a creek.

{If you want to send a resume, it's in the LAMP Stack + jQuery + extensive drag and drop functionality; email in my profile}

I don't have a lot of experience hiring, but I've been scouring the web, posted on Careers2.0 and Sensational Jobs, and to my shock and horror, haven't even received any impressive resumes. Read through all the JoelOnSoftware stuff and at this point time is a huge issue.

We're down to crunch time, thinking of contracting a developer as opposed to taking on a full time hire.

Please help. Any and all suggestions welcome
Yes. My very average house today is a huge luxury compared to the very average house my grandparents bought in the 60s.

I have a cable bill, an iPhone bill, an internet bill, a netflix bill, and too many various SaaS subscriptions. My grandparents had none of those.

I also have a much higher power bill to pay for all my consumer electronics and air conditioning, a higher health insurance bill to pay for drastically better health care, an extra car insurance policy.

That's in addition to all the extra stuff I have lying around. 2 cars, not one, both of which are vastly superior and more expensive than what my grandparents had. Superior home appliances. And 1 metric tonne of electronics.

I have so much more material wealth than all but the very richest did just 50 years ago. How could I complain that I'm not better off?
Check out Hubspot's blog (http://bit.ly/nDZyos ) - they have really good stuff on lead gen.

Also check out this video by Jason Fried of 37 Signals. Great explanation on how they were able to grow their business with minimal marketing spend: http://bit.ly/ooclky.
Libertarianism Makes You Stupid
Another operation to avoid is map/reduce over a whole bucket (so called "bucket scans"). It is extremely heavy and can often be replaced with a more clever schema.
Squad: Real-time Pair Programming
People kept spending because there were investments available (housing) which outperformed bank interest rates, 401k's, and pretty much everything else. There was no incentive to save because they were saving merely by owning their homes. This happens when there are bubbles. I don't see how the Bitcoin economy is immune to them, so you wouldn't have actually avoided what happened merely by using a different currency.
How HTML5 will bring Nintendo classics to the iPad
"Where is that revenue supposed to come from?"

Smart people with that much attention flowing through their systems will figure out the details: which ad formats, which promotions, which virtual/real goods, which novel payment mechanisms. Or maybe someone outside Facebook will figure it out, but then with Facebook's attentional monopoly, Facebook will make it work best. (See also: Overture vs. AdWords.)

And the 'Like' game isn't a threat to Facebook, it's a trump card. They control which 'Likes' get broadcast into friends' daily activity. You could just as well say of Google SERPS vs. AdWords: "The best ads are no ads -- playing the SEO game is cheaper, and more authentic for advertisers." In fact, getting into the prime attentional real-estate that Facebook's algorithms and policies control will be exactly as expensive as Facebook wants it to be.
nope none at at...
Pulling out a specific nit:

"America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working."

And from an old college textbook on the definition of economics - Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources.

Here it the hard nut in the thesis, what mechanism, process, or theory, could manage determining who works and who doesn't in a society?

We currently have a system where the wealthiest tax payers pay a grossly disproportionate share of the total tax receipts. Some fraction of those receipts are used to fund the lives of the least wealthy individuals. It doesn't seem to work as well as we would like.

Consider a more communist flavored theory, if Bob's education, skills, and work ethic allow him to generate gross domestic product which would support 5 average citizens. Do we make Bob and his four comrades equal consumers of the GDP that Bob has generated? Would Bob continue to produce at that rate?

Enlightened self interest is a powerful thing. But taking away the 'fruits of one's labor' to redistribute it amongst the less fortunate doesn't motivate the high performers or the low performers to higher economic output.

I am always interested in systems which might replace capitalism as an organizing principle. But until we have such a system we won't be able to manage the disparity of productivity in a socially acceptable way.
When the high P/Es are pointed out about Facebook, the defenders nearly always point out that the platform is immature and/or they haven't monetized yet (this last one is a huge one for Twitter defenders too).

To this I say: you're missing the point and you're basically wrong.

Ads on Facebook are basically spam. They are not things people want to see, not related to anything they're doing, they are at best crude attempts to convert likes into an audience. But they are as welcome as ads on TV are.

Not that advertising isn't (and can't be) effective but there is a time and a place.

On Ebay, if you're looking on Ebay you want to buy or sell something. The intent of an Ebay user is about by definition: you almost certainly want to transact something.

On Google of course you have the intent of search (disclaimer: I work for Google), which is huge.

But on Facebook? Most people just want to share photos, send messages and send updates. Ads are an intrusion.

Probably the most important sentence in this piece is:

> It was not clear what portion of Facebook's $1.6 billion in revenue in the first half of the year came from advertising sales.

Bingo.

Within probably 6 months Facebook will have filed an S1 for IPO. At that point we'll get a far better picture of the sources of their revenue. If the $1.6 billion 2011H1 figure is true I suspect a huge portion of that comes from virtual goods. That's bad.

While I believe that Facebook is a very valuable property I also believe that it comes with huge risks. A few years ago Facebook was scared at the (then) meteoric rise of Twitter. Social networks seem to be incredibly fickle, possibly even generational (as Myspace was). Even with 700+ million users there is always the risk of users abandoning Facebook for the next thing (IMHO).

Also, the games thing is a risk too. Facebook faces the risk of games going elsewhere (eventually as they have an exclusive on many Zynga properties but Zynga doesn't want to be dependent on Facebook long term) or simply new platforms and paradigms emerging, particularly mobile games.

What will be interesting to see is whether Facebook enters the search space in coming years.
Sure, "low traffic" sites. But if you are running a startup (as in, a business, and not a little hobby project), you should never use shared hosting.

If your "startup" is really just a hobby, then you shouldn't be making generalizations like "startups should...".
Feel like I'm going to get in trouble checking this out at work ;) All anyone has to do now it filter by .xxx
"There’s not really any reason why you shouldn’t submit your App to Amazon’s alternative App Store."

There are a ton of reasons to think twice about whether you want to be in the Amazon app store in the developer contract.
It may also be possible they may be able to get more revenue per user. Even a $0.01 increase in revenue per user is substancial given their numbers.
I hate to be a negative Nancy, but if STM was going to take off it would have by now. Is there something I am missing?
They could have bundled it into a higher cost SKU of Windows 7, it would have almost certainly made them more money.
If a bitcoin clone were to spin-off where inflation was controlled by a set algorithm, would we still consider it to have a limited supply?
"The Bitter End" - Feat Jimi Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower
Rhetorical question, I suppose, but I 'lived' in Vietnam (backpacking) for about a month and spent less than ten dollars a day (significantly more than I would have if I lived there for say a year and cooked my own meals, and had rent instead of staying in guest houses). Probably around $3 a day for a middle class person would suffice, or $4,000 a year for a middle class family of four. Hard to compete with that!
The other piece of the puzzle is that companies often interview based on projected or possible needs, e.g. next quarter's potential staff increase or in preparation for the acceptance of a proposal. Therefore, an actual decision about "the position" may be months off when the project is a go or may never occur should the project be cancelled.

I will add that companies also will interview people simply out of a general interest in the candidate, a relationship with the recruiter, or because they are someone's girlfriend even when there is no intent of hiring the person anytime soon.
Any way to see what's there besides visiting the link? (no WebGL) - like picture or video?
More Emacs - a better eshell
But isn't one rule of money that it should at least hold it's value? Isn't that the main reason gold was used before? What is the point of using something as money if it keeps decreasing in value?
NTP in Node.js - synchronize your node applications temporally
What Google App Engine Price Changes Say About The Future Of Web Architecture
Yes, that's why I chose that example. The thing is, currencies are and have always been a commodity with many traders. Bitcoin being treated as a commodity does not prevent it from being a currency.
We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

So...nobody creates value (or performs work, for that matter) growing the food or building the shelters, right? Riiiiight...

Magical thinking at it's best.
Citation for this?
What the Post Office needs is an end to the legislation that has caused this mess. The Post Office is the only entity in the entire country that is mandated by public law to pay 100% towards the future cost of a potential retirees benefits. Not of current retires, not of the guy that will retire in a year, but of every single person that maybe someday, even if it's 30 years away, cold retire from the Post Office. This is the payment that they would default on.
Healthcare costs have risen for decades for _all_ industries. Most of them have realized productivity gains and quality improvements. Education hasn't.

And the higher cost / pupil ratio in poorly performing urban districts is a pretty important counterfactual to the spending / quality correlation.

EDIT
Downvoted, with someone making the same argument a moment after I did. At least the downvoter is _consistently_ childish.
Problem is, the traffic designations make the grid non-uniform-cost.
Edit: But you could probably remove the possibility of traffic zones if this was implemented.
I actually find this structured approach to be quite interesting, despite the cynical, money-minting glee with which it will no doubt be executed. How far the industry has come since the days of faxing in my passport to register a .com.

Allow me to translate, for those that were lulled into a hypnotic trance by the Patrick Stewart sound alike:

Sunrise A: Additional adult domain cost! Your existing domain strategy just got more expensive to maintain unless you want your SEO to get nuked.

Sunrise B: Brand Blackmail, early period. Otherwise known as "That's a nice non-adult themed brand you have, it would terrible to see something happen to it."

Landrush: Laughing all the way to the bank. 18 days? Try 18 hours.

General Availability: Gone, all the good names are.
Super-efficient delta-compressed packfiles of zip files are not, in fact, super-efficient.
20 years is way too soon for this to happen, and long before it does a Gattaca type situation would have arisen.
I feel desensitized by the countless number of TLDs that have come out recently. I guess I should be excited by .XXX, but I just am not.
Come Fight Me Bro
From a bloomberg (business more than tech) point of view, Apple may be just another "global brand."

Apple created the first successful personal computer, and personal computing has since come to define the the we live in. That's slightly harder to replicate.

There's more to Apple than their present bottom line.
It precisely explains why we're spending more and more and getting less and less.

No.

Healthcare costs are up for everyone, everywhere, in every industry. The same increases that education has to pay for, every other employer does as well.

If other industries are not spending 15% compounded, and delivering less, then why is it happening in education?
One could make a case that moderate inflation isn't a bad thing. Inflation generally happens when the economy is producing close to its capacity (think of a factory working overtime to meet a lot of demand - at some point they make the same amount of money in fewer hours simply by raising their prices). This means that you'd also expect pretty decent employment, etc. You certainly don't want runaway inflation, but a healthy economy would have some.
You are indeed correct. That's kind of how it worked in my head (about 12x change) but I didn't type it that way for some reason.
I like Saturday delivery when my package doesn't arrive on Friday. Congress wants their mail. ;)
Huge difference between the title of the article and the title of the post. I'd argue that inspiration comes from outside, and motivation comes from within. Inspirational events can motivate you, but only motivation is going to actually help you accomplish anything.
There's something difficult about saying "hey go to mypornsite dot x-x-x", it's 3 syllables over the conventional "dot com", "dot net" or "dot org."
As the friction of the transaction decreases, the "jobs" are the less the "classified owners/workers" and now people who can make their living buying/selling on the far-more-fluid craigslist.
I've read a couple of stories like these and still wonder if thieves tend to format the hard-drive or not.

To avoid that, I created a "honeypot" account which is automatically logged in on my machines (OS X), so at least the machine seems usable without reformatting (and Prey remains effective).

Any other similar tips or things to take care of to secure a Mac in particular?
Wow, love love love this idea. It's like Automator for the Mac for the web, but on steriods. Perfect for people using well known apps but for a specific repeatable purpose.
Is it just me or does this look EXACTLY like Kissmetrics? It seems like it is a complete replica down to minute details, like how it's shaded, where dropdowns are placed, etc.

For reference: Kissmetrics UI (this is slightly old, mixpanel actually looks more like it now): http://s3.amazonaws.com/entp-tender-production/assets/0a7aa9...

Mixpanel:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/7o.png

EDIT: wow, thanks for the downvotes... care to explain?
I'm with you, and they know this too. That's why they produced such a happy-sounding threat letter video.
There has always been countries with lower wages than China, so this can not be the issue.

China has better infrastructure and lower levels of graft than other low-cost countries, this is what has kept it competitive.

Not sure what the point of China needing to create '10,000 apples' is. If manufacturing jobs are needed better to work for the existing Apple, maybe?

Or maybe the point is that China needs to create global brands to stay competitive? This may or may not be true but without metrics it is just one person's opinion.

And China has already started creating global brands.

"In 2010 the Haier brand had the world's largest market share in white goods, with 6.1 per cent"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haier

"In Q2 2011, Lenovo was the third largest vendor of personal computers in the world."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo

... etc
The scale should go from 1 to Robert Scoble
I love Riak. The one minor complaint that I have is having a small development/test cluster is pretty painful. If you have <N nodes, you end up with duplicated data in memory and on disk. Sucks for developers who would like a local instance to test with on their virtualized dev boxes.
But on Facebook? Most people just want to share photos, send messages and send updates.

So why is Google so much desperate to enter into social space?