skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If so, why doesn't printing more money fix Zimbabwe?

Zimbabwe has deep problems unrelated to money supply. If you build a successful business in Zimbabwe Mugabe's thugs will kill you and steal it (or allow you to escape the country with the clothes on your back, if you're lucky). In a culture where everyone has to either be a part of the gang that runs the place, or pay for the privilege of mere existence, business cannot grow. The incentives are simply wrong for business to exist. There is no incentive to work hard, build something new, take risks on new ideas, or provide a service (to anyone other than the thugs in charge). If you had no hope of becoming successful would you start a new business? Would you bother working every day to maintain an existing one? Everyone who has the capacity to build products, grow food, and provide knowledge services, has either fled the country or been killed or imprisoned by the government. Of course the economy of Zimbabwe is a shithole.

So, I don't have any answers to any of your other question. I'm by no means an expert on the subject. But the causes of the economic failure of Zimbabwe seems pretty obvious to me. And, the more the US looked like Zimbabwe, politically speaking, the more our economy would look like the economy of Zimbabwe. Luckily, we have a long way to fall to be in quite the same kind of mess as Zimbabwe. But, I do think a bailout without serious oversight and some accountability for the people that caused the problem, would be a big step in the wrong direction.
Google releases Google Update Engine for MacOS X
Yeah, it's like taking a dump with a mask on knowing you can never get caught.
In their infinite wisdom, Congress decided to wipe out $1.2 trillion in market capitalization by not passing the plan, thus costing the economy $500 billion more than the bailout would have -- assuming the bailout would have no effect at all. Brilliant.
'Respectable business people of note' have just overcooked the world economy and driven it up the embankment, through the hedge and are currently rolling it ass-over-teakettle through the nearest field, hoping desperately that someone built some bloody airbags into it somewhere.

Anyway, if people want transparency/privacy enough to pay for it then 'theoretical leftist concerns' will suddenly become noteworthy and start appearing. As they already do with online ordering and banking and virtual private networks and so on.
I agree with Jason on his points on "Why Angel Investing In the Enterprise/SaaS Space Isn’t 'Hot'".

But I believe that getting a foothold in the market would also require an 800 number with people who understand the product very well on the end of it.

Also I think the most important point he makes is this:

"Focus on User Experience"

I can't tell you how hard it has been for me to use some business apps in the past! I personally believe the application should really be an extension of their routine, not an entirely new routine.

I'd bet this is the key to success in the enterprise space, make people do less work and they will appreciate it.

Taking a picture of a business card and save the info automatically instead of saving, putting it in a rolodex and also manually entering the info into your phone and/or outlook.

Click to call buttons so that they dont have to dial a number.

Having word docs/pdfs templated so they can be filled in automatically using the persons info instead of having to fill it in manually.

Make the format easily exportable for re-use in another system (salesforce to basecamp or salesforce to calyx or basecamp to blinksale or harvest to less accounting).

These are all things that can be done but arent available to the mainstream SaaS user.
I've done both the "work and start a start-up" and the "quit and start a start-up" thing, and I wouldn't ever do the double work thing again.

When you're first starting a tech start-up you need to go through an intensely creative period to help you figure out what exactly you're going to do at the beginning. After that you need to put a ton of time into making things happen.

In my experience, your day job will suck so much life out of you that your start-up will pay a huge price during this crucial early period.
the point is that there is quite a bit ($1.2 trillion) less wealth in the world today than there was yesterday. There are a lot of clueless folks who think when 1.2 tril is lost, someone else made 1.2 tril. It's possible a few people made money today, but the losses greatly outweighed any gains (short-selling, puts, etc).
Be sure to check out the "Microsoft needs wizards" post.
I see; Thank you for your thoughts.
Bears are godless killing machines.
Yeah, it was said tongue in cheek. It truly is a hilarious read though.
Does it matter who has the idea?

I know people filter ideas based upon the authority figures that approve it, but that kind of lazy evaluation should only be applied by people who do not really care and the thoughts of such people do not really matter as it is at most something they mention in conversation.

Those who do care should judge the idea on it's own merits conducting whatever research is necessary rather than calling to authority to beg for answers.

Of course, this means I agree with you! His ideas should be treated like any layman's, it's just that so should everyone else's.
They grow up so fast.
Professors teach robot to play ball
I think you'll be constrained by the inserts - even if you use bulk insert.

You are probably better off using a bulk loader to get the data in - SQL*Loader on Oracle. I believe MySQL has an equivalent.

You could use Hadoop to process the data into whatever intermediate format (SQL or Bulk Data), but my instinct would be that getting the data loaded/inserted will be the slowest part by far.
Now, now, he's not just a misogynist. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, he opined that the real problem was that we weren't torturing enough brown people, because that's the only language they understand. http://mediagirl.org/node/485
GNU Founder: Cloud Computing is “Worse than Stupidity”
It might be PC on Hacker News, but it's certainly not even in the state of CA. Leave CA and the opposite view is the prevalent one.

Leave da bubble! (And also vote no on Prop 8. kthx.)
If this is the September CTP rather than, say, a v1.0 release, then it's not really an unveiling - there have been previous CTPs for months / year(s).

I thought my download/install/say oooh/delete was cursory, but whoo, he really does kick the tyres, doesn't he?

"One of the first things I noticed is the use of the let keyword to assign variables"

No no no! They're not variables because they don't vary!

(and the shell doesn't work without compilation, it does on-the-fly compilation - or it wouldn't work. And you don't need to wait to find out about it's efficiency, it's been benchmarked loads, it runs on the .Net VM taking advantage of all that it provides. Pattern matching lends itself to data analysis? How vague and useless is that claim? And you don't need to force it on a client, it's a .net language, hello? It runs on the .net framework! "The previous sample demonstrates output via the printfn function" hello redundant commenting that tells you exactly what the code tells you! Gah!)

;_;
Missed the "Jakob Nielsen" part. Eyes now burning from the extremely poor design of his site.
that's a poor example. it's called depreciation and is accounted for in the books and taxes, and subsequently market fundamentals
Carmack's cars:
http://www.automotivehelper.com/topic85593.htm

See links in the comments for pictures.
The housing market is a distraction guys. The problems are with derivatives.
Nothing you've said amounts to anything near a citation for his claim.
John Carmack's Contributions (Gameography), talk about prolific
Why is your AuthDomain "gmail.com"?
Indeed, you can buy Linux support from Red Hat and other companies. But this rings hollow - they do not provide the level of support that Sun or Microsoft does - try getting them or anyone else to fix an obscure bug in the GNU linker, especially if you're not using their distro (even if you want to pay). If you think you're going to convince the likes of prickly GNU toolchain developers to prioritise the development or release of a patch your company depends on, guess again.

And those support contracts cost money, just like Sun/MS support contracts. And as soon as you start relying on software that isn't in their distro, you rapidly run into uncharted territory. The Linux meme of 'you can get support', is, I think, promoted mostly by people who haven't worked on critical IT systems, or have done so without understanding their responsibility.

That's not to say Sun's engineering is better than OSS (after all, we got their compiler to segfault as well as gcc, and my BSD/Apache shared hosting has had better uptime than my landline and TV for the last few years, and I'm sure many people want to set fire to the source code for NFS). Linux and other OSS provide the bulk of features that most people use. And you're probably better off with an unsupported apache server than some of the hideous commercial webservers that used to be around.

The bottom line is Sun charges a lot of money to mitigate somewhat nebulous risks that are hard to understand and communicate, and their OS has no killer features. They have also mastered the art of alienating potential enthusiasts. All of which put them on shaky ground. It is a shame, because platform diversity is one of the best defences of the internet as a whole.

(If you have access to dtrace, learn it. Understanding what it does and being able to use it will make you a better and probably richer developer).
Please discipline codegirl and make her code very difficult AJAX
Haha -

"Would you turn on the A/C? Tonight is a very important for me..."
Thanks for asking :)

Adding the brackets greatly simplifies things for the implementation of the command dispatcher/suggester. In addition, in some situations it can be difficult tell what part of the command is an input and what isn't.

For example, let's say a user intends to use the command:
translate [text] to [language]

They type:

translate hey buddy! i found this neat guide to japanese

There are two ways to interpret this, both of which are valid:

1. The user typed a full command.

Bracketed version:

translate [hey buddy! i found this neat guide] to [japanese]

2. The user isn't finished writing the text to be translated, and should get a list of suggestions.

Bracketed version:

translate [hey buddy! i found this neat guide to japanese]

I made this app because traditional command lines are often tricky to use. I don't enjoy looking up documentation for each and every command argument.

With this method, you get suggestions at every step of the way (try typing "films starring [").
On writing Python one-liners
That's an insane reality of US legislation. Was it always like this?

How can you trust a body that operates like that. Imagine running a company like that.
As a Canadian, I would be awfully surprised to see Canada up there with the US. Note that religion hasn't been a factor in Canadian elections for several decades.
I was surprised RMS wasn't on their list.
To be clear, I don't suspect those countries would be on par with the US, merely that they would be outlying points showing a less perfect distribution.

Beyond that though, wow. I'm amazed that a poor article on something so far from Hacker News got upvoted so many times.
In my experience engineering salaries plateau around $100K.

Investment banks and hedge funds offer more than this (some of them are doing quite well, and still hiring).
Pragmatic Programmers iPhone SDK book latest casualty of NDA
Taxpayers and the Treasury are likely to come out ahead (about the failed bailout bill)
I bet it's great, only it's almost utterly unusable in WebKit/Safari.
It's an appengine app
I wasn't going to read it, but now I can't resist.
I think I unwittingly participated in this study whilst trying out the mechanical turk.
It would be helpful if you had, at minimum, at least a fraction of the 12k+ commands already available at YubNub.

http://yubnub.org/
There is no good alternative. The bail out is a band aid. It will keep markets and consumers "happy" and blinded for a short period of time. If that bill passed you would have saw the stock market go up today. Thus restoring temporary faith in the market and economic system. Then we will have to fix the underlying problem or you will see it fall right back to where it was and keep falling.

I'm not in favor of footing the bill for mistakes these financial institutions made. But if we don't help them out it will continue to trickle and things will get worse. But we may help them out and things may get worse anyways. We are in some big trouble and its not even close to over.
TextMate reigns supreme with ‘Ack in Project’
My feelings on this subject were less jaundiced before I'd been working with large customers for a few years. The first year or so was much easier - you're hitting all the easy sales, the ones that are geographically close, and the technically-sophisticated early adopters. After a while you've plucked the low-hanging fruit and each sale becomes progressively more difficult and expensive. Meanwhile, the support costs for existing customers accumulate and competitors proliferate.

As a startup, it's easy to differentiate yourself from competitors by offering better-quality service. The difficulty lies in scaling up to a large number of customers.
it isn't California where vote accountability will be needed.
Buffett bought callable preferred stock and warrants.

Differences: preferred stock only pays a dividend when Goldman makes a profit. In a bankruptcy, preferred is ahead of common, but behind creditors. At any time, Goldman can pay Buffett a 10% premium to the issue price, and get the preferred back. If Buffett exercises his warrants, he will still own the preferred.
hmm..well in any case PG should perhaps avoid taking nature walks in this guys forest.

"Vanjoki, who hunts bear in his spare time"
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0929_most_influentia...
Please try it before bad mouthing a very clever and working project.

They don't forbid you from storing things things locally. And it isn't just for passwords. This is for anything really. Watch their presentations at least.
It looks to me like it matches every string composed of only letters and numbers.
eh? Daniel and Le Bernardin are pretty damn good -- both have more than one michelin star
Tax rates are negative, zero, or nominal for most people. There are perhaps 100 million people who pay a substantial amount of income taxes in the US (I am fudging around various numbers to make the math easier, here; see http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/1410.html for information on how many people simply don't pay taxes). So that's an average of $7000 per serious taxpayer. $7000 is 5% of $140,000. Do you think a typical 40 year-old taxpayer has a $140,000 equity portfolio?
Two South County cities sue Capistrano Unified over busing
At the first pass, it would mean that possibilities would add up correctly.

Here's one example: give every investment, stocks, bonds, cash, commodities, etc. a distribution of possible returns. Then, every holding company also has a distribution of possible returns, obtained by adding up and scaling the distributions of the stock respectively held. So long as the market changes at a rate substantially faster than the holdings change, this is a self-consistent model of stocks in that the total amount of expected stock value remains the same. One can then examine the distribution of possible returns of a given investment and assess one's own position of risk.

The problem with this is how limited it is. It does not, for example, account for hedge fund pricing well at all, since in hedge funds the holdings change nearly as fast as the market does. It doesn't account well for the wiles of any particular, fast trading investor. It does, however, lend itself to a fairly simple model for static futures, forwards, options, and swaps.

Why is this line of reasoning interesting? The credit systems we used to have couldn't handle the complexity of the derivatives that were being created. By one method or another, bad investments, especially mortgages, were being added up, and in the process the market found it difficult to track how risky the summed investments were. Credit rating agencies don't even make publicly known what their credit ratings represent! An investor is compelled to then blindly believe them, which, in this case, spectacularly failed.
Dawkins is a biologist, not a sociologist or an economist

Thinking is thinking.
Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending - 1999
I'm not necessarily representing my view. But a view:

Economics is far from a fundamental science. Very far. It is really more of a description of what happens via all sorts of analogies that usually hold true & help to explain the things that we see happening. Some parts of economics are stronger then others because they are based on manipulating tautologies of various sorts. But others are really more along the lines of: 'If we put a dog here, the sheep will go there'.

As with most non fundamental sciences, economics can break down in extreme circumstances. Neuton's Mechanics is not as fundamental as relativity. It breaks down in extreme cases. That only seems strange because physics is very fundamental. But with Zoology, Sociaology, Phsychology or other "downstream" sciences, this is expected. No one's surprised when techniques break down during psychoanalysis of a woman raised by wolves.

Psychology is explained by Biology, explained by chemistry, explained by physics. And each of those words is just really a number of links in this chain in themselves.
Economics is two or three links up that chain. So here's how we go back to the topic:

If a supermarket chain that supplied 85% of food in a region goes out of business, leaving it empty of competitors, what happens? The rules still apply. Consumers seek alternative. Small shops, mail order shopping, markets become very lucrative. Consumers spend more on food or get 'less' for a period. Eventually, a new equilibrium is found.

But what happens if the equivalent food producers go out of business? Wheat doesn't get sown. Coke doesn't get bottled. Sure it's a great opportunity for boutique vegie growers. But the same rules no longer apply. 20% of the food supply means there isn't enough for everyone to eat right. Maybe people sell off Apartments to buy houses with backyards (to grow food). Maybe they take time off work to plant. Maybe things are too volatile for boutique farmers to get investment to grow.

I'm not saying this is a close analogy. I'm certainly not saying the 'bailout' should've happened. If I were American, I'd be as suspicious as SwellJoe of a bill that's called "tax breaks for Peace Corps & stuff" which gives unreal sums to big companies while the salesman-like proponents chants 'This is too complicated for you to understand', 'You need to decide now' & 'Apocalypse is coming so pick mine.' But I am saying that relying on high level economic principles here is not like relying on gravity. Not at all. At best it's like relying on wolves attacking a calf over a bull. It makes sense. It usually happens. But who know what happens to traumatised wolves from a a circus during a thunderstorm.
Agent based simulations would probably be a very excellent approach. Unfortunately, the system is highly nonlinear and quite chaotic, so you'd have to do some work into engineering dissipation into the system to keep it from fluctuating wildly.
It's not always useful, and I don't have full control over it - although I can somewhat tell the level of concentration I have to be in to enter that state, I don't have any control over whether or not I enter it past not focusing extremely hard. It tends to happen when I concentrate on one "thing" in an abstract manner for too long.

It has been useful for visualizing overarching design - if I know what an unwritten application needs to do I might visualize how the "parts" should fit together (not in any magic sense, just faster than I would without being in that state). Sometimes it's good for solving logic problems, riddles, etc.

Sometimes it's not good for anything at all. Most of the time that it is really useful, it's by coincidence.

It's not a physically draining thing for me at all, just a bit disorienting.
I'm no great fan of religion because most require the suspension of inquiry into their core principles when really that's exactly what they should encourage.

I agree here. Religion encourages you to stop looking for answers and to just believe what you're told. Where did the Universe come from? "God made it." Where did God come from? "He has always been."

Those answers aren't good enough for me.
Jaclyn:
jjussif at kforce.com
Posner on the 700 Billion Dollar bailout...
And note that the vast majority of sites requiring any sort of identity are pseudonymous.

If I make an offensive comment on HN or reddit, my exposure is limited to downmods. A site which requires a real name and affiliation exposes me to considerably higher risk.
No B.S. Reviews on Internet Marketing Gurus
I was researching an MLM company I was thinking of joining when I came across opportunityreviewer.com. The owner actually answered the phone and helped me with my questions which I thought was pretty cool. Knows his Internet stuff too.
Steve Jobs is not Sick - He wants Immortality
Another missing rule: Ignore self-appointed "experts" who make assertions but offer no evidence.
I did. No offence, but it's a poor explanation. Actually I think it's flat wrong.

There's a crucial link in the chain she is missing.
Not sure if user experience really matters that much in the enterprise. I say that because, in the enterprise, person making the purchasing decision isn't the person using the software. I would say they are more concerned about security, compliance, and integration with existing systems.

My last enterprise job was with a large shipping company (that drove brown trucks). Their internal software for call centers was far from easy to use. I offered to write apps internally but could never get anything green-lighted.

I'm not discounting user experience-I just don't think an enterprise startup can win on that alone.
"... I don't see what are the significant barriers? ... If whatever you say has merit, then nobody will care what your score is in the hacker news game ..."

I think rantfoil is saying it is easy to get "tripped-up" on the unwritten or obscure rules. I guess the "Turing-like" test to participation is understanding how "hackers" think.
The Proposed 700 Billion Dollar Bailout Compared to Other Items in the US Budget
The Botox Bailout Q&A (Mark Cuban)
I get your point. I guess I mean SaaS offerings in general. Because small businesses use them as well.
The Bailout Question That Must Be Asked Before Passage
This was brilliant; I've pimped it to so many of my Wall Street friends.
correct. its not a wealth transfer. its a wealth revaluation.

or since most ppl assumed they had that money and spent other money on that assumption, it could also be called 'wealth destruction'
"... It would be helpful if ..."

Of course yubnub couldn't be improved or made easier? Having said that it does claim to be a CLI.
the single most important quality of a founder is having the discipline to do work "beneath" them. at auctomatic we had two oxford grads figuring out what sizes of t-shirt to buy and decorating stalls at ebay live.
But businesses that are having a hard time getting credit now will be asking themselves "do I really NEED to buy new computers?" Anyone dependent on Macs already has them.
Is Google a growth company anymore? Where do you see their growth coming from?

They're looking fairly mature these days.
Step in the right direction though. If it works in California and is cost effective it'll spread to other states.

Shouldn't have a negative attitude against something just because it's used in a non-ideal environment. I imagine most things wouldn't have been created or invented without the first experimentation steps.