skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The three points above all refer to the financial system. I'm not entirely sold on this "it's not just the financial system it's systemic" argument.

The way I see it, the overall setup looks like this:

[capital] <--> [financial system] <--> [projects]

So basically the role of the financial system is to (i) allocate capital and (ii) manage risk. I think it is totally clear that the financial system failed with the latter, but where is the evidence that it failed with the former? With the "subprime loans" were the houses that were built shoddy? It's not like as a world or nation we went out and built some giant white elephant that is now useless. By and large the projects funded remain sound. The problem is that the financial system has seized up.

A few folks have suggested that rather than pumping several trillion of new capital to save the existing disfunctional financial system, we should just pick 20 banks out of bankruptcy, capitalize them and basically replace the existing financial system with a new one (and then distribute the shares in these banks to all citizens so it's not a government run thing).

Bottom line, the financial system is broken, but I'm not sure the fundamental underlying "projects" are themselves broken.
Representing ordinal numbers in the computer and elsewhere
"Schaden" is roughly "harm". "Freude" is just "joy". So, no, Schadenstartup doesn't make much more sense.

I tried to think of a phrasing that would work for the idea, but nothing came to mind with a similar ring to it. In kind of faux German, Startupschadenfreude, being sure to pronouce "Startup" as "Schtartup" might be amusing. :-)
So there is a New York Times article saying now might be a buying opportunity, and you readily find posts here in the same vein. This STRONGLY indicates the bottom is a LONG way away. At true secular bottoms nobody mainstream is even asking if the bottom is in; they're too scared off the asset class.

Think of the mirror image: the top. In 2000 and 2007 did you repeatedly hear the press and random normal people debate if the top is in and things were set to plunge? No, you didn't. That's just not how mass market psychology works.
After only looking at your the title: the world changes every day... go with it and get used to it!
Total US debt (public, private & consumer) is 320% of GDP. Government alone is about 70% of GDP. Consumer debt is pushing 90-100% of GDP, historic high. Rest is private sector. The 320% is a never-before-in-history number, even bigger than the great depression.

Income is what is used to service debt. Conventional mortgage rules limit you to 3x mortgage debt to annual income. So debt to GDP ratio is entirely appropriate.

The wealth figure you quote itself is bloated by debt - think of how houses increased in value due to all those easy loans they were handing out. Debt is a mathematical fact, unless discharged in some kind of bankruptcy, while the "wealth" is an accounting opinion, and valuations change. So as the debt comes due, more of it gets impaired, which means people who owned that debt have to write their assets down, which causes asset values to fall everywhere, ... classic debt-deflation. We are witnessing it right now.

The only meaningful end is when debt gets vastly reduced. By then asset valuations would be a lot lower too.
Yes. Try git or mercurial (AKA "hg": http://selenic.com/mercurial/) rather than svn; both are much easier to set up and try out. When it only takes a second to set them up, you'll be more likely to experiment with them and discover what they're good at. SVN really doesn't have any real advantage over them these days.

There is a function in git and hg (an extension) called "shelve" which does exactly what you want - you can temporarily set aside the new feature in progress, commit the bugfix, and then go back to working on the feature. (If you knew ahead of time you were going to need to do this, it would probably have made more sense to do the feature in a branch, of course.)

People will argue back and forth whether git or hg is better, but in my experience they do the same things* , they just have different personalities. Pick one, get the hang of using it, and then experiment with the other - you'll be better able to make an informed decision. Both are significantly better than just about every other VC system.

* The advanced features they don't have in common are probably not going to matter until you know all the base functionality, and any new features in either will probably get ported to the other by then.
Loses its punch, maybe, but it still makes sense, no? After all the potential failure of the incumbents is a "startup's joy"?
A new location-aware chat startup comes up at least once a month, and to date all have failed. (No, 10,000 registrations does NOT make a successful chat startup)

These startups need to stop re-hashing the same thoughts over and over, and deliver an appealing product that works. No one has, and I'm starting to doubt anyone will.
You are putting words in my mouth I didn't say. I am in the same position as you: zero debt (no mortgage or car payment even), almost all cash or precious metals and renting my home. So this panic doesn't mean anything personally in terms of drop in assets.

But I do see a fall in my income, so I am tightening my belt - by which I mean things like eating out less, stretching out that laptop for another few months, buying fewer non-essentials, less expensive vacations and so on. That is all I am advocating.

It is a rational, non-panicky response to some fairly dire economic circumstances ahead. If you question whether the economic circumstances will become dire, well, bookmark this thread, come back in 1 year, 2 years and 5 years.
Wow, debt of 50+% assets is 'fine'?! Grab the nearest person who lived in the 50s, and ask them what they think of it. That we've grown accustomed to this sort of debt is the cause of all this mess.
Codemator.com
Best Opensource Code for webdevelopers
The Strategic Value of Complements
No, that just means "damage startup."
Ruby's Ambition
The first version of the Facebook app was awesome, the new one is amazing. I think (hope) that, to anyone with any dev experience, the amount of work that went into it is pretty evident, as for those without, the reaction will always be the same.
5 Ways Recessions Help Startups
Economic Dis-equilibrium: Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
See above, somebody posted a fast mirror.
A Short Banking History of the United States: Why our system is prone to panics.
Any idea on when Vertebra will be released ?
Thanks for the mirror, I wasn't able to download the original file, speed was under 2k/s!
It might be your last change to charge up a mountain of debt before its all gone. Might as well do it now if we're all going bankrupt!
I know you meant well when you posted this, but to me, it came out so wrong.

I complete disagree with, "Focus on yourself."

I would change it to, "Focus on your customers."

Do well by them and you won't have to worry about yourself.

I'd wager that one of the biggest reasons businesses fail is when they forget to focus on their customers. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to focus too much on yourself.
Best way to forget about "Waiting for the Weekend"?

Start a business.
Right - markets. What about the debt rates the author referenced in his OP?
Where do you think UW is lacking?
I think you have it backwards.

I'd say 1/5. Having a customer is the only thing that makes it a successful business.

Otherwise, it's just a fancy hobby.
Since the release of SVN 1.5, branching / merging is trivial.
I think he's saying that he IS an Apple employee (that eats at BJ's) not that he overheard it. The the patent link below seems to indicate that he's dead on.
Not yet, I predict the dow to hit rock bottom around 5k in the next couple of weeks, then rebound. Be alert, then buy.
Ebay was weak before this 'downturn', it's just a bad excuse for a fading brand. Ebay needs to reinvent itself to stay relevant.

Amazon just keeps on rolling.
Thanks SwellJoes,
Thanks gtani

But have you noticed that Perl doesnt really have a great charting/graphing or plotting library? So, I am a bit unsure of developing visualisation tools.

And secondly I would like to ask, will it really have a computation edge while handling MBs of data? Or rather put in this way can it scale?
The Rise of the Machines
I made it to the third paragraph before I bailed...

I think it's common here to brag about how many hours you work for your startup/business/job but I think it's missing the point entirely.
Awesome. Been planning on doing something like this myself, but now we can share the burden. Yeh-haw!
Printing only what you like (Format any web page for printing)
Thanks hs, but can you please talk about it a little more?
Do you mean to say the entire graphing engine is matplotlib and it has open apis? I dont know, but I dont think so, Mathworks will allow that.

Moreover, any library as such to be used in languages like C/C++/Perl?
How about the argument that the branding of online 'theft' as 'piracy' has been a boon to the offline Pirate product/apparel business?
What kind of self respecting hacker would admit to the cops "yeah I'm a super kick ass hacker with mad skills" and risk invoking more punishment/hassle?

"I learned how from the Intertubes officer."
Think of snappy, quotable 1 liners and carry yourself very well/polished.
The 'bailout' isn't done yet; they may yet start destroying valuable things and productive capacity to 'help'.
And the grass was green and the sky was blue.

'Circle of life' FTW.
No offense, but if you really don't know, it probably doesn't help to just unquestioningly repeat buzz you've heard.
What if I work in the dark?
This is one of those threads that just never dies.
I found mercurial much easier to learn/explain than git (the hg team seems to be more interested in keeping its public interface clean), and it has TortoiseHG (http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/) on Windows. (There are several other graphic interfaces available: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/OtherTools)

This book helps, too: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/
The market does not need to "recover" fully in order for life to return and remain normal for most people. Simply getting back to "where we were" is an arbitrary goal.
"Don't know anything" isn't accurate. It's not as if I don't follow the issues in question, read people's opinions, articles, commentary, and so on. It's just that I haven't used git myself, yet, aside from checkouts.

My point is merely that, if I were given the choice today to learn a version control system for my own use (like the poster), I would pick git because that seems to be where things are going. svn works well enough for me and I don't see any need to chase after the buzz, but sooner or later I too will probably get around to figuring out the ins and outs of git.

Either one is obviously a vast improvement over no version control.
So how do you seed your torrents at night? Sleep with the light on?
The United States is now, in some very general sense, bankrupt
You could trace the problems back beyond fractional reserve banking and say that axing the Gold Standard and having a fiat currency was the first con.

Certainly, if credit is too cheap, asset prices will rise as borrowers outbid one another to pay more. Greenspan has to shoulder a lot of the blame for the recent boom.

Here in the U.K., our great leader, Gordon Brown, proclaimed "an end to boom and bust" when he became chancellor in 1997. He was right. Instead we had boom-boom-boom lasting ten years and are now going to have a bust to mirror it.
Good point. Apparently the UK has a situation similar to the US where debt rates are enormous. But you're right in that most of the world is rather more frugal than the US.
A Book Written By the Internet
A collection of humorous IRC quotes, evidently.
So you are imagining what this language is and then complaining about it?
Triage: What Your Investors Are Doing Right Now
...if you want to burn out, that is. If you have read it, you've missed the point.
Will Verizon’s New Three-Cent Hike Kill SMS Services?
This is really well done. Finally no more wasted paper with sidebars and footers on them...

Also, font changing is excellent. Trebuchet MT isn't easy on the eyes.
May i have "Save" button + unique url for every page i edit please?
Fantastic! Now we can skip the iPhone store all together since we can make webapps just as powerful as downloaded ones.
What would be the differences ? There ought to be some differences though ? Native applications were supposedly more powerful !
Men, women use web like prehistoric hunter-gatherers
Agreed. All the things from the post should be filed under "Rule 0: Common Sense."

I'd modify learning as you go to being reactive. You always have to learn as you go, but the part that seems most critical in there is being able to recognize which pieces of information that flow across your view are critical in shaping your direction and being able to factor those in.
Meh, ignore these guys saying yer taking credit. The free culture fosters this hatred for people who actually do the grunt work in making memes live.

We're all supposed to remain anonymous, so anyone who takes credit for something automatically seems like the villain.

That'll pass, hopefully.

However, I do agree with the "$5k" is a lot of development. Very true. But if MTV is willing to pay for your trip. Or if Rick Astley is... Call his agent! Who knows!
I have a lot of ideas for enterprise software. Any ideas how to get customers? Do I have to hire a sales guy? Where do I find one?
Bottom line, the financial system is broken, but I'm not sure the fundamental underlying "projects" are themselves broken.

In your diagram, you need to complete the loop, to more accurately reflect reality:

[capital] <--> [financial system] <--> [projects] <--> [capital]

It is worth remembering how the financial system itself started breaking - it started with all those massively overvalued housing "projects" for which they lent money started going bad, which then spread to other credit classes like autos, commercial real estate and so on.

Ultimately, the financial system is choking on debt that became uncollectable, because the underlying projects that the debt financed proved economically unviable. In micro terms, household income could not service the debt on the house. None of the bailout schemes so far address that income issue. If they started mailing out checks to homeowners to help them pay their mortgages, they can stop house prices from falling, but at the cost of hyper-inflation. In chess terms, we are at an economic checkmate scenario - all options are bad. The least bad option may not be politically viable, so we have to consider really bad scenarios too. At this point it is unpredictable which of the bad choices will be made.

Here is a nightmare scenario: start to really worry if trade sanctions on China or outsourcing ban on India become a possibility. Such beggar-they-neighbor policies begot the Great Depression. We are not there yet, but how confident are you it won't happen once the US Congress gets "serious"?
Nice service. It was only yesterday that I was copy/pasting into word to print some slides.
On a similar note I was wondering if the iPhone (screen or elsewhere) could produce enough IR radiation to function as a TV remote? Any thoughts?

Perhaps flash the screen backlight to produce IR signals?
Also watch the other talks at MerbCamp, they are streaming live. http://www.merbcamp.com/webcast
AC Power filter and phone line filter (homemade circuit breaker)
AC-Safe can protect or filter the phone line and protect or filter the ac power supply (mains), from lightnings (or surges) and extra currents. Toss in a few modifications, and also noise coming from power lines can be easily filtered.
ActionScript 3 Isometric Library
Ah. I'd say checkouts counts as using it, FWIW.

(Mercurial is really good, too.)
Please post your comments on this website
> You are directly or indirectly responsible for every war in the last 60 years.

60 years is well chosen - it avoids WWII.

The US started the Korean war? The US started the uprising against France in Vietnam? The US started whatever it was that consumed Eritria/Ethiopia in the 70s/80s? The US started all of the Saharan and sub Saharan"skirmishes"? The US started Darfur? The US started Bosnia?

The US did manage to win the cold war, no thanks to the beneficiaries. Yes, I'm talking about Europe. Now that they don't have anyone threatening them, they're talking smack. When that changes, they'll tell us how they've always been our BFFs. (Which will it be? Russia? China? Their Islamic friends?)

It's well past time for the EU to take responsibility for things instead of telling the US how it should be done. Surely there are some problems that are within their capabilities. And, speaking of capabilities, shouldn't they have significant capabilities? After all, they have 500M people and a greater GDP than the US.

However, the author is correct. The US should let the rest of the world alone. Whether the result is better or worse, they'll get what they want and deserve.
This has implications in site design: male and female versions of the presentation layer?
Great people are always competing with themselves (see, for example, great athletes). Of course, that requires notions/delusions of greatness, but that's another topic!
In our industry, it tends to be that your first, and most important customer, is yourself. A lot of the greatest companies started by fulfilling a personal need; conveniently enough, you don't need to look at the DJIA to tell you whether you need to scratch your own back.
"It is not merely a financial crisis. It is a fundamental economic crisis. The last two weeks brought the crisis to full focus, but we have been building up to it for several years."

"It is a rational, non-panicky response to some fairly dire economic circumstances ahead"

???

And this is the second time you've posted the same thing:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330134

Almost all the stats & blanket statements you used are uncited, made up, misapplied or wrong. Maxklein is dead on. And if you are right, we get to see him eat his hat. Fun!

Bookmarked.
I see where your coming from, but this NYTimes article is far from the "mass" opinion of the press or the average stockholder.

The simple fact is that people who have enough wealth/capital to take risks during a recession, generally do very well when the economy recovers.
It's now estimated at 90% of GDP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

I'm extremely concerned not just by the responses on this forum, but also because the person who wrote this article has a legitimate concern. He's worried about how much we've grown to love debt as a nation, and I for one agree.
> Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is a student of the Great Depression. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson remembers the mistakes of Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's treasury secretary.

The Great Depression wasn't "Great" because of Hoover, but because of FDR's policies, which extended it for seven years (according to the latest research from UCLA). If it wasn't for WWII, the GD might have gone on even longer.
Startup idea: Sell edible hats :-)
OK, I know you're probably not reading this anymore, but I'll give it a shot :-)

Could you give me a reference to "git is not quite as fast on OS X" because I certainly haven't noticed it. On windows I could feel how slow it was, but not on OS X.
One problem with options is the rift it may cause between people who joined the company while the stock was going up versus those who joined while the stock was going down. The people with the sinking options start to wonder why the guy next to them is leaving early each week to head out on his yacht, while you're stuck working extra hard to try to earn a 10% boost in your base salary next year.
I believe Gates said something once about how offering options in the MS early years was one of his biggest regrets - exactly for this reason.
This is great for those of us who print PG's essays. Now the column can fill the whole page, meaning less whitespace.
> My point was, however poorly made with the Gates example, that I doubt that the thought, other loopholes aside, is to eliminate capital gains tax for people that are deemed to be "rich".

I think that it's silly to consider "the thought". We should look at where we actually are and what is likely to actually happen if we make proposed changes.

Part of "where we actually are" is that the very rich don't pay estate taxes and can work around cap gains taxes, so evaluating cap gains proposals based on their effects on the very rich is silly.

Instead, we should look at people who are actually paying cap gains (and estate taxes for that matter).
Yeah, it does seem they are looking for causation in the economy and not the business itself.
Reminds me of that classic New Yorker cartoon that goes: "On the internet no one knows you're a dog".
The guy does realize that houses are not the only kind of assets that the US has. After they are accounted for, the US is anything but bankrupt.
> The "taxpayer supported" mechanism kicks in only after you've been bankrupted.

Some do, but others don't. You can go to county or free clinics. When/if they bill, ignore.
The key point remains that the US govt has a huge role in the current healthcare system. The programs that it runs that have comparable scope to the private programs do not produce better results or cost less.

Why should anyone believe that they'd do better if they covered everyone?
Merbcamp Day 2
yeah, so i get that i'm an acquired taste. maybe i'll tone that down someday, but change isn't easy and it's probably true that i am a bit off my rocker.

agreed, Economist is pretty much my favorite print mag. too bad they don't do more red bold fonts in their online edition ;)
startingup, I am very relieved to see another person waking up to the reality of the sitaution. I'm glad you are voicing your concern, I'm really concerned about how comfortable we've grown with the concept of debt. It's a dangerous position to be in, with the Federal Reserve owning as much assets as they do (and they will continue to purchase more, as the Bailout gave them the powers to do so).
&#9731; FTW
s/general/inaccurate
That's not the key point of your argument at all. Your thesis is that everyone is covered, under different programs. That's demonstrably, decisively false: the "program" that covers the uninsured first denies them long-term preventative coverage, then forces them into emergency rooms, and finally drives them into bankruptcy. It is the most expensive, least efficient mechanism for all parties involved.

The easiest way to come to the conclusion that the government would do better is to recognize that the only way we could possibly do worse would be to let people die in the emergency room instead of treating them.

Your argument appears merely to redefine the word "covered" to mean "screwed".
How do you get by without database schema support in the Google app engine?
I understand that schema support would slow things down, but there should be support to at least check database integrity with respect to a schema occasionally to make sure things are ok.
how do you register a domain name with a unicode character in it?