skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a collective abrogation of responsibility by the public at large, not one by individuals within it.

Ptui! How, exactly, do you think such "collective" behavior comes about? By the collective, emergent behavior of the individuals!

The constituent members of the public do not have (or feel they have) the responsibility or power to effect any sort of macroscopic change to the economy.

That's the point... The masses of individuals give it up and few take advantage by taking it up and extending their own power by manipulating people with FUDGE (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Guilt, and (the hope for self-) Enrichment).

Doesn't anyone else find it odd that the "educational" system in the US doesn't actually teach anything about how the political system really works? I.e., it's all the pablum puking pap of the simplistic notion of checks and balances and what not but doesn't actually get into how it's been gerrymandered over the centuries, how people manipulate the (non-) voters in so very many ways, and especially not how to approach, think, and act to responsibly and effectively participate? Sigh.

In that sense, it's not surprising that the public nominates someone to have that power and responsibility.

Indeed. What's surprising is that people believe they are more free and that the overwhelmingly vast numbers of the so-called "thinkers" buy into the he-said, she-said games rather than going at the underlying issues. The simplest example for this group would be the debate of Creationism "versus" Evolution.
The author consistently accuses libertarians of relying on "abstract theory," yet this article itself is a rather abstract attempt to debunk libertarianism. To even contend that libertarian economic principles have been applied prominently in the US or global economy is ridiculous, to further claim that these libertarian principles have caused the current circumstances is beyond ridiculous. The entire line of argument in this article is off base; the same line could be used to blame Hitler's atrocities on democracy or the Roman army's defeat at the Battle of the Allia on their use of the phalanx.
I worked in the SAP LinuxLab for four years where our two supported distros were Redhat (RHEL) and SuSE (SLES). Both are fine for servers.

Usually when people have problems with SuSE's package manager it's because they added non-standard repositories to YaST and the packages are broken in strange and mischievous ways. That's not to say that I've not seen stuff broken with SuSE, but not with particularly higher frequency than other distros.
Not to contradict your point, but I think there are other reasons we don't live to be 900. A human with a 900-year lifespan would be able to reproduce many more times than a human with a 90-year lifespan, so if a 900-year lifespan were easy to evolve then we would have done it by now.
I wouldn't pretend to know. I know the people I consider to be the best in their respective fields, but I would never pretend that that equates to "thinking" because frankly, "thinking" is all-too-often a bullshit phrase that means nothing.

If I had to name some people I thought were really making a mark on the world (and my list is biased immensely towards artists), that list would include:

* David Lynch, who I think deserves to be on the list for Eraserhead alone;

* Mark Z Danielewski, one of the very few writers I know who manages both to be fascinating, deep, experimental, and a good read;

* Steve Jobs, who has done more for the high-end consumer market than anybody else I know and who has seemingly unfailing instincts;

* Nobuo Uematsu, who is easily my favorite modern composer and who manages to write unique yet powerfully thematic pieces consistently; and

* Philip Glass, who is an absolute master of his style of composition.

But I wouldn't say that these people are necessarily the greatest thinkers today. They're just the ones whose work fascinates me, the ones who I feel are innovating the most honestly within their field.
What I find scarier (or more interesting) is that if all I read were Hacker News, I would have a list that would be exactly the same as the author's.

Perhaps a better question would be what do all these people have in common, other than being successful, accomplished males with reputations for being irreverent?
I'm not trolling, I'm just stating the facts here:

You are wrong factually incorrect on a lot of things. Nothing in what you just typed was even close to being right, and it has nothing to do with this this submission.
That's an emergent property of the system (which emerges or not) so how are you going to engineer that?
For one thing, the concept of 'communism' according to Marx is a stateless, classless society. Since communist states were 'states' & ruled by parties which were very similar to a ruling 'class,' I thnk we can call this grounds for appeal.

The big difference: the USSR was a "communist" country in that it was ruled by the Communist Party, its leaders went around proclaiming it was a communist country, and most outside communist-sympathising observers would have said at the time that it was communist.

The US has never been a libertarian country, in that the Libertarian party has never been in power, its leaders have never gone around proclaiming it to be a libertarian country, and foreign libertarian-sympathising observers (e.g. me) would never have said it was libertarian.

The question is: would the US/Iceland/UK have been better off under more regulated financial markets?

Actually I think the question is: would the US/Iceland/UK have been better off under differently regulated financial markets? And the answer is almost certainly yes, which leads to the question of precisely what kind of regulation is most sensible. Simply saying "we need more regulation" is a terrible idea, since many possible new regulations are likely to be useless or counterproductive.
Why This Recession Will Be a Doozy
Rather than trying to dictate/engineer a "fault tolerant" economy, I suggest thinking more along the lines of "what simple mechanisms can be put in place in how the system functions so that participants in the markets/economies can make better decisions?"

Two things that I think are critical:
* true transparency (e.g., look at the CDS fiasco ("look, it's insurance but it's not!" and the complete lack of reporting)
* rate limiters (e.g., look at how much the recent volatility is due to the frantic rushing around, the reaction to all of that franticness, etc. For the physics enthusiasts in the crowd think of the propagation of supernovae through a given volume of a galaxy)
"man clone"
Why This Storm May Stay Away From Apple
I use Ubuntu too. Great repositories, very stable, all the normal unix tools, good stuff.
Essentially a dupe.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140808
I'm dead-blazé about the Twitter "controversies". It's like an endless stream of always the same praises and complaints, questions and answers, positive and negative outlooks. Can we please move on?
Thanks for all the responses so far, guys! HN has helped me immensely already.

I should add that I am, by no means, a "newbie". I've coded and deployed many production web applications in Debian that are still running today, and although as a programmer my focus is in programming itself, not server administration, I've been sufficiently well educated to configure and launch web apps with Debian a few times already.

As of late, however, I've been looking forward to expand my knowledge and grasp a deeper understanding of Unix in general, how everything works beneath the nicer high-level tools. So when I ask what distro is the best, please note that I'm not asking what distro is the easiest. I want to know, from a engineering point of view, why so many spectacularly smart people choose, for instance, Gentoo and FreeBSD. Can any of the few who know why they want these systems name a few of the advantages they have over Debian, for instance?
Great observation. That's actually why I love entrepreneurship because business to me is basically the biggest game in the world, and the amount of cash you have in your bank account is your score.
nice artcile that gives inspiration to people like us to venture into startups at these difficult times! really an insightful one!
Re: Trust

A good book on this is Hernando de Soto's "The Mystery of Capital".

Re: Saving individual banks rather than the banking system

See the fiasco that was/is the Japanese handling of their bubble bursting.

Re: The complexity of the "toxic", complex securities

Um, er, if you can't explain your pitch in a sentence or two then you(r startup) suck(s). Oh wait. :-)

A serious failure here (which should actually be prosecuted for criminal negligence at the very least) is the fact that the various rating agencies allowed themselves to get conned into believing all of the utter bullshit spouted about these complex securities. It's their bloody job to do their own homework to rate them.

Though, of course, I should also throw in the fact that the ultimate buyers bought into blindly trusting the rating agencies instead of taking responsibility for calling BS on the ratings of things that couldn't be explained in a couple of sentences (or even a couple of pages).

Re: Central banks

Fail!
From the little I know about these kind of experiments, they're a good start and useful groundwork, but in my opinion too simple to reveal much about the real thing as a whole. I don't think real insight will be gained until we start to model and analyse large(ish) complex, dynamic systems. I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of any such attempts.
The GPL Compliance Engineering Guide
Drug dealing, actually.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=299663
yes, but hundreds of hours isn't enough when you have an advertising display that will presumably run for 24 hours a day. One thousand hours is roughly one month.
Tangentially, I find myself in the mainstream about Twitter. I tried it for a few weeks and couldn't figure out what it was for, what was actionable (my favourite word from my go-go thirties) about it. It felt like Facebook status updates with wimpy group chat on a quad short espresso.

Which made me feel old. Whenever throngs of people love something and I can't figure out what it's for, I immediately think of mainframe programmers sking what on Earth anyone would ever want to do with an 8 bit microprocessor, a couple of K of memory, and a paper tape reader.
Now might be a bad time to do a start up that deals with sub prime mortgage backed "securities"... ;)

Seriously, though... the idea is the key, not the "time"
dying agriculture sector and massive dependence on imported food (doesn't appear to be a problem in u.s.)

Only 1% of our population knows anything about how to farm, and if you substitute "oil" in for "food", you have the American problem. Our food production and transportation are highly dependent upon oil, and we don't have enough domestic oil to sustain the system in place.

non-existent property structure: nobody owns anything, so nobody has the incentive to maintain things or use things to turn profit, etc (doesn't appear to be a huge problem in u.s.)

I agree that we don't have this problem in the US. Our housing infrastructure is decaying because of poor, unsustainable design (sprawl) and because people lack the time and money to maintain it, not because they lack incentive.

no preexisting contracts, markets, distribution channels, etc; almost no preexisting social network of business relationships, since all operations were run by the state (not a problem in u.s.)

The "preexisting social network" of people who actually run American society is small, exclusive, and unambiguously an enemy. These people won't be relevant in an economic collapse, but I can't see them doing anything to help out average people. They'll fly off in their private jets. As for the suburbanized hoipolloi, they're already culturally and emotionally alienated, and they'll be physically dispersed once gas is expensive/unreliable.

the main issue: it was 3rd or 4th generation of people raised in the world where "business", "profit", "property", etc were all synonyms for "crime". "doing something people want/need" was unthinkable. the only people who dared to think about it were criminals [and that's how we got the country we have now] (and no, i can't imagine that being a problem in u.s.)

This is one crucial difference, and the US will be served well by the difference in attitude. Although the corporate elite are rightly viewed as a parasitic, criminal class, people harbor positive views of small business, and are largely comfortable with markets, capitalism, and profit. This might enable us to recover well.
Scaling: what to worry about first? and then? and then?
Our goal is 'making med school easier, one less click at a time'. We have no business model, just trying to make our own lives easier. (tmedweb.tulane.edu). We went from bluehost to our own server on the university's network, and we stayed with CentOS along the way. The box is a spare dual-core dell desktop (highest load I've seen was about (0.30 0.14 0.10)), we have a 10 Mbps card and 100Mbps card (our current bottleneck), a little 500 GB RAID from G-Tech (total used ~ 8.4 GB, but if we take on lecture audio or video, this will get eaten fast), UPS (enough to drive in if needed), etc. We end up working a lot with the university's very helpful netsec guy for ports, bandwidth throttles, that sort of thing. We get about 500-600 visits a day.

I'm also getting ready for a different project, to take on the military's medical records system, which could get huge fast. So the tmedweb project is also a bit of a sandbox for what to do for that bigger project.

Gigabit ethernet is probably next on the todo list; what else should we be getting ready for? In what order to people generally arrive at which scaling issues? From where we're at now to "big". Not Google big, but, let's say, Navy big.
Why did Sun really buy MySQL ?
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/who-is-the-...
We did something similar. We've been coding furiously throughout the past few weeks, to flesh out in a demo what we thought would be the key differiantiators of our idea. Then we reserved a few days before the deadline to work and re-work the application. We submitted it a day before it was due as well.

Pressing that button was in itself quite satisfying.
Any location can become desirable. As the population rises, so does the supply of desirable places to live. Chicago and San Francisco weren't even on the map two centuries ago. Within the U.S., differences in levels of "excitement" and cultural amenity between cities are narrowing due to modern technology, to the point where the decision of whether to live in New York, Chicago, Seattle, or Minneapolis has more to do with personal tastes and situations than with one city being more desirable.

As for existing houses becoming more central, I tend to disagree that this is inevitable. Many suburban and exurban houses are going to be abandoned as oil becomes scarce. Many towns and locations have died instead of developing. We tend to assume that existing houses will age well, but this is driven by survivor bias as we forget about those that are abandoned and die.

As for the long-term influence of population trends, if the population continues to grow, it will be too large for the planet's resources long before we run out of physical space.
I don't know much about football (and my friends corroborate), and you may be surprised to learn that the forward pass itself was actually an innovation that was introduced into American football over 100 years ago. Before the forward pass, teams simply brute-forced the ball forward.

“John Heisman, a noted historian, wrote 30 years later that, indeed, the Tar Heels had given birth to the forward pass against the Bulldogs (UGA). It was conceived to break a scoreless deadlock and give UNC a 6-0 win. The Carolinians were in a punting situation and a Georgia rush seemed destined to block the ball. The punter, with an impromptu dash to his right, tossed the ball and it was caught by George Stephens, who ran 70 yards for a touchdown.

Heisman wrote he was at the game standing near the action on the sidelines. He is emphatic that Pop Warner, who was coaching Georgia, protested to the referee to no avail. And he adds that he personally wrote Walter Camp, the final authority on football, of the possibilities of the ‘forward pass’ making football a new and more exciting game.”

http://tarheelmania.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/unc-invented-th...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_pass
Wish Me Luck
Now were finally coding the most complex part of our system that will set the stage for us to get the next phase of development, that will actually require a little capital.

The capital is not a problem, the success of the venture is the gamble.
Wish me luck!
Easy wins? Could you point to which ones are easy wins and could you also explain why beating the spread is important? I've never really watched football but found that article interesting.
That passage could be read as a whimsical description of 'median voter theory':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theory
I think one problem with this analysis is the assumption that all empires collapse in the same way.

It's quite possible that any U.S collapse will be more akin to that of the U.K. A gradual decline and disengagement from foreign territories.
Feature Film By Well-Known Director Premieres on Youtube
Install Ubuntu Application via Web
Looks like an Ignoble prize in the making.
Use FreeBSD. It is based on Unix and powers the internet. In fact, its slogan is "The Power to Serve". It's unified, current, faster than Linux in some areas, excellent man pages and other documentation that's easy to find and can do anything Linux can do.
Sure, for the same amount of house, other factors being equal. But that doesn't mean that the prices people pay for houses goes down, even if other factors stay equal, because people buy larger houses with more features for their money.
It will be a bit late by then; what real-world government is ever going to voluntarily undo a power grab by a previous government?
It would be interesting to see the same graph broken down by house and land prices.
Aren't these things just moving back towards web-chat? Quite funny really.
This is purely anecdotal evidence but many of the elevator pitches I saw were from companies and individuals that were adapting their ideas to the fb app paradigm. Facebook is a great distribution channel for any company really, especially when they are giving you a 25,000 dollar grant to build on their platform.

I discovered YCombinator several weeks ago in a blog post about the fbfund/YCombinator meetup written by a July 2008 fbfund recipient. A link was posted prominently on the fbfund Facebook page for at least 4 weeks. This was the only centralized place for fbfund discussion and updates so a lot of applicants checked it regularly and may have found their way to the YC website.

Maybe the demographic data destroys that theory though.
Get your damn tweets off my lawn!
Alaska Miller, I agree that we're giving him too much power by all the attention. But he already has gathered the power through all that he has wrote - thus, it's not like I'm contributing to the problem in any significant way.

and to quote someone else on YC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=336367

Reminds me of the maxim: Be nice to people on the way up, because they’re the same ones you’re going to meet on the way back down again.

Also, thanks for the good advice to move on, but also know that I haven't not moved on. If I held any parts of my life back because of this person, then shame on me for letting his poison affect me at all. So yes, I am focused on my own shit.

But I still enjoy taking the pot shots.
Time for a trip to Europe:-)

Central Rome has been a more or less desirable place to live for more than 2000 years, modulo the odd barbarian invasion, plague, war, etc... Even the places that have waned in importance with time still usually have expensive city centers that aren't bad places to live.

> Chicago and San Francisco weren't even on the map two centuries ago.

But now that the tabula is no longer rasa, those locations are likely to be sought after - maybe more, maybe less over time, but over the long run, they'll attract people.
Some of TC's news isn't really news.
Thanks! I've used BMN sporadically through bookmarklets, but this is very nice.
On that topic of breaking down what he wrote .. this is a cross-comment I also left on TC.

Ted writes: “As is Michael Arrington’s usual style, he is showing his personal vendetta against me to mischaracterize what I’ve said.”

Uhh, let’s see. Ted’s usual style is to write cruel things to mischaracterize other startups, largely writing nasty things to make them look bad, feel bad. And yes, mostly all that he wrote was personal. Careful analysis my ass.

Ted writes: “My priorities have changed. I am now facing fatherhood, and I want to do what is best for my family.”

And these guys whose startups you delightfully enjoyed tearing into pieces, did they not have their own families that they have to support? Some of them may not have children of their own, but do they not have an aging father and mother who just needs some financial support? Perhaps a sibling that they are trying to help put through college?

EVERYONE has their priorities. If you think you’re the only one who faces shifting priorities in life, you’re just plain dumb.

Ted writes: “This is horrifically irresponsible on Michael’s part, but that sort of thing is to be expected. Michael, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Ted, you’re known for not exactly being that friendly to startups. Your notoriety is infamous, such that your ill intent is more that “sort of” to be expected - it’s pretty much ALL that anyone can expect from you when you open your mouth. It is you, who should be ashamed of yourself.

Last but not least, Arrington’s contribution to startups is at best, a lot, and at worse, greater than zero. This is an unbiased FACT. Ted’s contribution to startups is at best, approaching zero - but largely, negative. A large negative number.
So, he's observing that there is a strong correlation between scientists drinking a lot of beer and publishing less / being cited less.

Causation does not necessarily go in either direction (spending a lot of time in bars could lead to less time in the lab, continual failure to get published could drive them to drink, or both, or there could be a third variable), but I can't say the results are surprising.
New Google Chrome Builds Show Greasemonkey Support
"Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, describes the iPhone as 'the hottest consumer electronics product in the world'"

That would be the Nintendo Wii. It's been putting up iPhone-like sales numbers for 2 years, and only that low because it can't produce them fast enough. It's profitable out of the gate, and immensely so when factoring in game royalties, virtual console game sales, etc.
A Startup Roadmap for Good Crisis Communications
I was disdainful of Twitter for some time, then decide to make an effort to try it out in earnest. It seemed useful for a while, but then the signal to noise ratio is was so dismal I started dropping people from my "follow" list.

What may be of real value are the assorted tools and sites that have spring up around it, where I can get more targeted datage.

I'm a fan of serendipity and the use of noise to disturb mental stasis but there's a limit to how much self-absorbed minutia I can wade past.
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