skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More taxing = less investor activity, no?
The Worst One-Day Percentage Losses for the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq
Neither bankruptcy nor bailout are the right answer.

Compromise is the right answer.
> One of the more stupider suggestions

Agreed.
Or we can not socialize either and let companies who make poor decisions fail.
Hostname is "treehugger.com". I'd have to say I think there's some bias, but I can't make out if it's pro- or antienvironmentalism...
pretty sure our pegging is better.
Fairly incoherent rant... not much value to be found in here.
Yep - but that could arguably be a good thing. Fewer daytraders, more long-term investors, less volatility.
Because Windows PCs are well known to be friendly to developers, with a lovely, powerful Win32 API that's a joy to use, has no horrible warts and... oh. wait.

Thanks to an accident of history (NeXT) combined with Apple killing backwards compatibility with OS9 down, they have a really developer-friendly API compared to Windows. On a purely technical level, Apple is far more developer-friendly than Windows.

They are doing their very best to shit that all away though, when it comes to the legal and backwards-compatibility side of things. That's one reason I doubt I'll ever spend my money on Apple.
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Household balance sheets are nowhere near as bad here in Canada as they are in the US. This is common knowledge so please provide some figures if you've got something that suggests otherwise. We also have stronger banks and didn't get nearly the "deals" that American's got for mortgages.

You are correct about our dependence on resources, but the US is only one of several markets we export to. I'm sure China and India won't mind buying our oil and trees.
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They're going to try to ram it through again on Thursday, so if you agree with this economist call your reps. (Sorry for the politics, but I've been on the phone all week about this. I probably deserve some mods down, so pile on!)
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Did anyone else notice that his math is off? If each sell and buy is taxed at $.10, wouldn't the total tax on a stock transaction be $.20?

A fixed value per stock seems foolish, why not make it a percentage. And, a percentage of the total value isn't very fair (stock values would have to go up significantly for it to be worth buying/selling. So, we'd have to tax just the gains... the capital gains.

Oh right, we already do that. It's called capital gains tax.
What if the answer was yes?

There are some things C or C++ are just better at, like operating in a low-memory environment when you want to squeeze as much as possible out of the system. Sure, GC is nice and all, but for things to work well with a modern copying generational GC, you need 2 or 3 times the amount of RAM as an equivalent manually managed tool, because collection is lazy and you don't want to run it on every allocation -- that would be too expensive. So garbage sticks around for a little while.

Alternatively, some people like writing in high-level compiled languages (most of which are faster than Java) like OCaml or Haskell, both of which are suitable for a device that would also be running Java.
Adding friction to an otherwise efficient market is the opposite of a solution.
I agree, ;) .... wonder if that is just an urban dictionary entry gone wikipedia.
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It should probably really be a percentage, not a fixed 10 cents.
I love that the domain is "GodAddy" with Addy being a truncation of Address. Then when it came to commercializing they could just shift the capitalization and have a bizarrely named domain, but it was commercially usable.

I use Godaddy for domains, I used to use them for some hosting but the sites were slow and unacceptable in terms of support. I want to move my domains away but it would be a sizable investment to transfer away. So I wait.
Oh right, we already do that. It's called capital gains tax.

No, capital gains tax taxes gains. This will tax losses as well. It seems "unfair", but I think this could prevent people from liquidating "slightly bad" positions that will probably recover.
Ubiquity?
Why Stallman is wrong when he calls cloud computing stupid
This article is embarrassingly low on details. Does anyone have an article that talks about what is logged?

It would also be nice to know what the performance impact is. It seems like the weirdest bugs are the ones that happen in production after I've turned off debug logging "for speed". It would be nice to not care about speed, and have lots of information to help me fix the problem.

Even something simple like this:

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_trac...

would be nice to have for other languages.
I think he has a good point. Have you done a Google Image search for "pegging"? There's got to be some other term you can use like "pinning."
I thought it was rather well-established that RMS has some severe paranoia-like syndrome.
Also, bristling a little bit at the comment that you need parser generators for anything but "toy" languages

Just to extend your point -- Most commercial compilers (GCC, for example, or Clang, among others) use hand-written recursive-decent parsers instead of parser-generators
I always thought this was obvious. I used to work in a top science lab, and if I had dared to make a blog post about what the lab was actually working on I'd have been fired immediately. How can you scoop the other labs with your big publication if you leak information about your line of research before the manuscript is submitted?

I might have been more free to write blog posts criticizing the work of our peers, but perhaps not. You have to be careful what you say publicly about your peers in your field. They're refereeing your papers and grading your grant proposals. It pays to handle your relations with them very carefully.

It's fairly safe to blog about fields that are unrelated to yours. But that doesn't do much for the level of blog discourse.

If we want lots of open science blogging we have to change the politics of science funding, publishing, and career advancement -- which might happen, but is likely to happen very slowly. We have to make it so that having a widely-read blog is as good for one's career as quietly sitting on one's results, saying nothing about them in public, until one can get them accepted in Nature (or PLoS, for that matter) three years later. Right now, the old-fashioned stealth approach still seems to be the better bet. Particularly when you consider that, if you're an academic of lower rank than a chair or a dean, and especially if you don't have tenure, the public's opinion of your research is almost immaterial -- it's the opinion of your peers that matters for your career, and you don't need a blog to reach your peers. You need top journal articles and a handful of scientific conferences.
TDD is great in Smalltalk, Ruby, and other late-bound languages. Otherwise it's just a safety net against regressions.

I think that the author's point can be summed up as: think about what you need to do, and then write the code to do it.
I'm not sure what your point is. I was talking about the iPhone only, not Macs.
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Open source software (OSS) is defined as computer software.
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I do not suppose that the "machine" is anti-environmentalism but it might be anti the man made global warming religion. However it's feature on that particular site makes me doubt the scientific credentials will be as rigorous as the claim.
Any Chanse you still have that Torrent
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I would call these appetizers, like the appetite-whetting, sweat-breaking taste of a sample platter of spicy-sweet Mexican appetizers. The Smallville spoilers for the first 6 episode make your mouth water for more.
Quote RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1):

"HTTP communication usually takes place over TCP/IP connections. The default port is TCP 80 [19], but other ports can be used. This does not preclude HTTP from being implemented on top of any other protocol on the Internet, or on other networks. HTTP only presumes a reliable transport; any protocol that provides such guarantees can be used; the mapping of the HTTP/1.1 request and response structures onto the transport data units of the protocol in question is outside the scope of this specification."

So while it doesn't rule out protocols other than TCP, it does exclude UDP.
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That's one side of the argument, but it will be punishment on top of loss.
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Not getting enough sleep is bad in itself, but I think my bad habit is world-class in stupidty:

7PM: arrive home
8PM: have dinner
9PM: start drinking wine (3-6 glasses depending on mood)
11-PM - 01 AM: can't sleep because booze is a stimulant in the short run
01 AM: crash. Now, because in the longer run booze is a depressant, I'd need 9-10 hours of sleep instead of 7-8
06AM: but instead I got 5. Congratulations!
I don't think it would work for Ferran Adria's El Bulli.

http://www.elbulli.com/reservas/index.php?lang=en
Yeah, I want to hear this too. Usually compromise is just being wishy-washy, so unless you've got a GOOD idea for compromise...
What? That's the whole problem though! The 'efficient' markets fucked up, didn't they?
When I type a key in the input thing, it's as if I hit PgUp.

I get completion, select an item and hit enter. Not only does it PgUp for every key, it also keeps the autocomplete visible after I hit Enter.

And otherwise slow. Try WebKit nightly on OS X.
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This is all above my pay grade. But when I'm evaluating an argument, I tend to discredit folks who say that their opponent is "like" something stupid, rather than taking a position and defending it.
Uh, we started this administration with a Budget surplus, and now we are more in debt than ever. How exactly is that fiscally conservative? Not saying democrats are, but if that statment it ever was true, is definitely myth now.
one part Decline of the Roman Empire

That line pretty much sums up the idea of "trendy restaurants".

If you want a good night out, avoid this shit and find an old money haunt: better food, better service, and better diners. No, you won't see any celebrities (another plus).
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counterpoint: http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives...
The crash is only indirectly based on the fact that getting a loan was joke. The real problem is the financial institution which bundle these bad loans in short term currency and starting selling them. It was all good while the housing market was still going up as if the loan wasn't getting paid to could just take back the house, but when it went down these short term bonds where without any value.
Not particularly.

I am not enough of an economist or politician to be able to tell you in detail what the ideal compromise is in this situation, nor do I care to claim that I am.

What I do know, however, is things are not black and white. Baying for the banks' blood and shouting "liquidate!" is exactly what they did in 1929 and that kind of behaviour is even more reprehensible than the banks'.

Similarly, handing the banks a giant wad of cash with no strings attached is not right either.

The solution lies in the middle, as always.
Anyone know of anything in ruby that can do something like this?

I'd settle for some sort of ultra-logging gem that would log all method calls so I can see what happened before a ruby process went awol, after I've killed it.
Sticking to the method. A lesson in software design
I agree. That's what it seems to be for. What I don't get is...how does that regex work? Can anyone give me a sample string that actually matches it?
Ding Ding Ding.

Not exactly the effect we're supposed to be going for here is it?
Down, boy. :) I didn't say that. I said it's an easy way to resolve the cognitive dissonance for those who want to.

Just to be clear (and because I think it's interesting and would like to hear others on this), let me spell this one out. Say you're an atheist who agrees with that recent comment by Bill Maher that Christians "drink the blood of a 2000-year-old space god" (something like that) - in other words, are loony. But like most college-educated Americans you support Obama. Obama is a practising Christian. Who wants to believe that they're supporting a loon for president? It's a classic cognitive dissonance. So you look for a way to resolve the contradiction. One can think of a few:

1. Some Christians are loony but others aren't. This is what you originally suggested. But there are a lot of atheists who won't accept it.

2. He's loony but he's the lesser of two loony evils.

3. He's not a loon. He has to pretend to be Christian for political reasons. Sure it's not optimal, but such is US society, at least for now.

See what I mean? Does anybody have one to add to this list?
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Interesting idea, although my guess is that most words won't have any particular color associated with them for most people.

Except, of course, for synesthetes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
Not really. The issue is that the efficient markets were allowed to do some things they shouldn't have been, and they did it really well.
This reminds me of PG's essay on how to create wealth:

"his essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it. There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these."

There was a time when inheritance was considered more honorable than trade (typical of most aristocratic societies), but that's been pretty well dismissed by now. In most free market democracies, the social respect for huge fortunes tends to be closely correlated with the proximity of the activity to the direct creation of wealth.

So high tech tends to be viewed very favorably. Seeking wealth through marriage is viewed unfavorably ("gold-digging"). Flipping condos is tolerated but not highly respected, but renovating for a profit is viewed more positively. Vast sums won through litigation tend to be irritating (though people generally reserve their scorn for the big share taken by the attorney, less so for the litigants). These activities aren't despised, but they are respected less than the true wealth creators.

And lastly, of course, there's genuine hatred for the illegal (or legal but predatory) practices like extortion, robbery, cartel-building, and so forth.

Finance probably isn't despised (or at least wasn't until the recent bail-out), but because it's perceived as further down the chain from high-tech, it will generate more resentment than admiration.

By the way, high tech isn't completely clean here - Carly Fiorina did receive a huge retirement package - worth about $40 mil, I think.
> Household balance sheets are nowhere near as bad here in Canada as they are in the US. This is common knowledge

Simply untrue. The debt to income ratios are about the same, but US households on average still have more assets and cash.
yeah, pegging means lots of things. to us, it means saving your search results. we don't mind if other people have more... exciting definitions for it. :)
What's wrong with bankruptcy?

The assets remain intact, the investors who poorly judged the risk lose their investment and those who buy up the assets (to clean things up and bring about a recovery) rightfully reap the rewards of taking on a very high risk.

Enron, to take an example, went bankrupt, but energy kept being generated and traded under new management. Former employees went on to find work at the acquiring company(ies) or took their labour elsewhere. Would things have been better if Enron were still scamming around after a bailout today?

How about the dot.com collapse? What if Pets.com and WebVan were given billions of dollars to continue on?

Bankruptcy is good. It's the market's way of flushing out bad ideas and starting fresh.
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Not sure how much has changed since I posted this:

http://www.gridgainsystems.com/jiveforums/thread.jspa?messag...
We need a new economy.

Tech guys create jobs, and save money for old companies with ease. I mean, what's the utility of some of these idiots? Seems like the next phase of obsoletes are just raping the system before they're noticed as completely useless.
The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need...
It's interesting to see how Wundrbar continues to evolve, particularly with the emergence of Ubiquity as a similar tool. The live results are a big step up, and combining them with pegging gives Wundrbar an advantage on Ubiquity in my opinion. But I imagine there will be a lot of leap frogging between the two products.
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Things to think about:

If it is a feature, not a product, that would be a warning sign.

If the bulk of what the incumbents have already radically increases the value of the product, it will be harder to compete. As an example, kiko had calendaring, but google held higher ground with a massive user base and large critical mass of related functionality in other apps.

You have to weigh who the competitors are also. Do they buy, or invent technology? Are they vigorous (startups, or google) or slow and lethargic.
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> There are several studies to show that lower IQ matches with a higher probability of religion.

Could you show some. I couldn't find any via search sites.
Again, a citation is required. Canadian economists regularly state that the D/I ratio is much better in Canada than in the US. (Although it is a cause for concern nonetheless)

Also, given the dramatic drop in US housing values and only a leveling off of Canadian prices, I question your second point as well, at least looking forward.
Suppose some ostensibly "unforeseen" but avoidable* disaster befell your neighbors, and they got together to rob you and your friends in the chaos. But you don't want to part with your property. Should you (would you) be willing to "split the difference" or "compromise" with them?

We can live without these incompetent fly-by-night money men. Bailing them out sustains and rewards their incompetence.

* There were honest banks like BB&T that /chose/ not to get involved in these shady deals
Philip Wadler wrote an interesting critique of this classic computer science text: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.p...
We don’t need a bailout, and the sky is not falling
I find it entertaining that Aaron Pressman (author of the counterpoint argument listed by someone else on this thread), who holds a B.S. in History from Columbia, is calling Jeffrey Miron a "know-nothing," who has a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT and is Senior Lecturer and Economist at Harvard University, in addition to the 166 academic economists who were against this bailout. Who else said the CRA is responsible for our current crisis? What's that, Ron Paul?

Sounds like these guys just know a whole lot of nothing...

Just to expand on this topic a little bit:
http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/we-dont-need-a-bailo...
I can't believe everyone is taking this comment seriously. I happen to also think that a collapse will cost the U.S. far more than $700 billion, but they try to imply this bailout is the only way to prevent that collapse. Also: "The only way your characterization of the bailout as a net transfer of wealth is tenable is if you're against government intervention in financial crises altogether..." The only way you can think this is if you think that, providing me with a straw man to rail against! And of course the argument against the straw man is essentially worthless name calling in and of it's self, "...which is silly." Ah, a quality, well reasoned argument there! Then pretty much lather, rinse, repeat for the next sentence... maybe he's just a troll? I guess I rose to the bait, but I'm shocked such a comment is taken at face value by everyone else.... Looks like two DH0s, a couple of straw man attempts, and although I don't know enough to say much about the first sentence, it does seem like a claim made with out any proof\reasoning.

And never mind the fact that even if you support a bailout this one was setup with language to specifically prevent oversight of any kind and would hence almost certainly be extremely corrupt, which rather does characterize that bailout as an attempted net transfer of wealth to me.
thanks. yeah, we see potential for a lot of compatibility between Wundrbar and Ubiquity. Nick will have a blog post about that soon. but we also think we have distinct advantages in certain areas -- multiple distribution channels, execution on the server instead of the client, etc. so moving forward there's a lot we can do with Wundrbar that might not be possible with Ubiquity. stay tuned...
I agree that those answers aren't good enough when stopped there. But it's not merely limited to religion. How many people understand the evidence of evolution being true, and are able to apologize for it when challenged? There are easy answered for everyone: Evolution made animals; the big bang made the universe. Most people stop at the first reasonable idea passed onto them from authority because it is widely accepted. Don't credit religion for creating in man what was there to start out with, please.

Don't be satisfied with easy answers: alway dig deeper for reason. The easy answers to "Why the central basis to every single religion is wrong" is temptingly easy as well. (hint: "it's impossible") What is the basis for ethical behaviour? (hint: "herd instinct/evolutionary advantage") What keeps humanity "going" in the face of understanding that each of us and the universe will die one day? (hint: that "something" will continue on.) Look deeper, keep asking.

Jesus' first and greatest commandment, contrary to popular belief, isn't love your neighbour. It was 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ Christians are required to use our intellects as part of worship. The first step to understanding anything is to find out what it's all about; making insulting blanket statements and feeling condescendingly superior without actual knowledge is something "the other camp" does, no?
Exactly. The government ultimately has to print the money that it uses to bail out these guys (who deserve to fail anyway) - the consequence of this printing is that the dollars in your pocket can't buy as much as they could before.

Taxes are not the only way to tax people.

* Yes, the government has been playing this game for around a century. But does that make it right to tack on another trillion in the theft?
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