skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
National Debt : $9 Trillion. National GDP: $13 Trillion. Science and Research - #1. Innovation - #1. It took 8 years to create this debt. It will take a while to get it off, but it's a freakin powerhorse we're talking about here. It's not South Africa, it's the biggest economy in the world.

All these things you speak about are momentary things. They react to short term events.

The problems right now are due to the gambling nature of many American businesses - but it's that same nature that makes American #1 in so many ways.

This is just a correction. It's not a recession. America has been living above it's means and will drop down a notch or two, but the fundamentals are very strong.

Education - good
Science & Research - good
Investment & Risk Taking - good
Intellectual Capital - good
Natural resources - good

America is fine, people are just using this bubble cycle as propaganda for an election, and you guys are panicking. Take it easy - go scoop up some stocks at rock bottom prices like the richest man in the world is doing.
I have heard they have too much debt denominated in foreign currencies. Their recently-deregulated banking has been a major economic growth area for Iceland (read: levered to their eyeballs). The global instabilities pretty much pulled the rug from under their feet, and their productive economy is not large enough to be likely to pay off the debts; so their currency gets dumped. That makes it harder to pay the foreign debts, and each failure to pay further damages the currency.

I think they will almost certainly have to default.
The first thing I thought of was a version control system that only lets you make one version; then it's etched in stone for all eternity.

So, maybe it's a bad choice for a name, but the system itself sounds interesting--it includes a wiki and bug tracking.
Git. It's extremely fast and featureful and I don't care about interoperability. Much faster than SVN or anyone else. Linus writes great software.
I'm not arguing with the value of a filesystem as a general-purpose organizational tool. However, it's a strictly weaker tool in terms of structure and semantics than a proper VCS. Also, not only does using a raw filesystem put the burden on you to remember the associations between branches and versions, it also gives you zero support for merging once those branches are made.

Git is pretty good about following renames, moves, and other changes to the underlying filesystem, while still maintaining a proper graph structure to relate revisions to each other. Fast network replication and mirroring is just another benefit, as is the ability to quickly merge changes from multiple branches.

Finally, as another commenter has already suggested, it's really just about establishing good habits as part of your workflow early. It's much like testing: if you start out with a decent test suite, you're much more likely to maintain and use it than you are if you have to overlay testing onto an established project. Similarly, if you have full version history from day 1, things will be much easier further down the road.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/722
Compiled, non cross platform, download-only, "client software"... no.

Cross platform, deployable on the web or any OS desktop, or mobile phones (with new generation browsers)... yes.

But we had to write an entire framework first ;)
I'm waiting for a 14/15" notebook with a Netbook-class processor. It would be light, have great battery life, and be cool.

If they can put those processors in desktops ("Nettops"), they should be able to put them in standard-sized notebooks. Altho I'm not sure MS will still allow XP on them, and -barring Linux- XP is needed for battery life and performance.

It's well established that larger screen sizes increase productivity. A 9/10" screen may be sufficient for web-browsing, but I'd like to use the device for many other things, and I'd like it to be more than barely sufficient anyway.

There isn't much difference in the portability of a 15" laptop and a 10" one. Neither can be pocketed; both need a laptop case.
He said "relies".

I could do without all of those during hard times.
Sorry, I don't know much about Detroit. From Wikipedia, it seems like Detroit is fine. But I have no real idea how it looks like in the city.
> For desktop apps, the normal thing to do these days isn't even to code them -- you drag and drop together a UI in something like Glade, Interface Builder, or whatever Visual Studio packages, and hook up handlers to talk to the core logic. It's mostly grunt work... [t]he same is true about web interfaces...

I wish it were true for web interfaces... something like balsamiq.com, but it would output html (or haml, etc.) instead of xml.
In the software world, if you're exerting a lot of effort, you're probably doing it wrong.

Increasing your productivity by a factor of 100 in normal, real world work is not something that happens very often due to physical limitations. But in the software world, where you can rewrite the basic laws that govern you, gains like this are a lot more attainable.

In the physical world you have to work hard and you have to work smart. But in the software world, working smart is much, much more important.
How The Financial Crisis Affects Angel Fundraising
You could do without airplanes? Clothes? Soft drinks? If you are doing without those, then what do you need from China?
Spying via webcam using ClickJacking (Flash)
Time for a calendar revival
Generally I frown upon lists as well, but this is a pretty good list =]
That's a useful link. U.S debt is perfectly within normal bounds for its income.
doh, i actually was hoping that iceland was more shielded from this than japan.

maybe, if they go through this first, they will be the first to succeed post Credit Crisis.
I love mercurial because it's so painless. It just works. Everywhere.
Clickjacking Details
Speed, non-idiotic operations (rename, branches) and offline commit's
The website is most probably designed in Mac and the designer forgot that Lucida Sans and Lucida Grande do not exist in Windows by default. Although the Arial and Verdana are also declared in the CSS, however for some weird buggy reason, Windows fails to perfectly render the text in either Arial or Verdana, or any other sans-serif font. That's why it looks like sh*t.

In my Linux, the text seems okay and perfect although my computer lacks any Lucida typefaces.
Are you changing the position of the divs multiple times per "event" (i.e. mouse/keyboard event, etc) or just very frequently on separate events?

Very frequently on separate events.

What are all these divs?

The cells of a spreadsheet. (The pos/size resets happen as the user scrolls or does something resizey. Oh, and the content of the divs changes under these conditions too.)

Are they simple enough they could be drawn with Canvas?

They're about as simple as you could get (at least before you add in formatting and all that). I never considered Canvas as an option - do you recommend trying it?

We might not need to do anything, since the deterioration in FF3 is already getting better with the next release of FF (Shiretoko), though not as good as FF2. On the other hand, performance of this particular UI is critical to its user-acceptance, and if there's something we can do to get significant improvement I'd probably go for it.
It's not unimportant. It's just menial and trivial when done in code. Yes, there's an art to it, but that's not a technical challenge in the programming domain. The outside veneer is important, but it's not interesting to work on from a technical viewpoint. And furthermore, it's best left to UI experts to design -- any sane GUI designer makes it easy enough for 90% of the UI to be done by drag and drop. (Yep. No sane GUI designers that I've seen yet exist for web apps,partly because there's no standard GUI toolkit.)

It's not like mechanical engineers spend the majority of their time deciding on the trim and positioning of internals which compose the interface to the car. Instead they collaborate with the designers the constraints on the interior layout, and then they leave the interface details to the designers, while working on the drivetrain, suspension, frame, and so on.

The point I'm making isn't that GUIs are unimportant. The point is that GUIs are uninteresting if you are looking for a technically challenging problem to solve with code. This lack of challenge can be compounded today with the trend towards designers providing specs to programmers, and then leaving the programmers to implement it, as the creative element is reduced.
Mercurial's metaphor for local branching is awkward. Git's metaphor is not, and most people go batty for it. That's a pretty good reason to change.

I wouldn't use git if it didn't have cheap inline local branching. It is the Killer Feature.
svn's complete lack of merge tracking is simply too painful to use. git will make you much happier.
Two Obama modes in the Chatbot Game including one where you pretend to be Barack Obama.
Check these out...

Barack Obama Bot: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=obama

Be Barack Obama: http://chatbotgame.com/?cmd=chat_b&mode=obama2

In the second one, you pretend to be Barack Obama while chatting with the bot.

Hopefully, players will add a lot more chat rules for these modes to
make them more compelling.
I wrote one for AT&T that got deployed to ~1M PCs and lost my luster for client apps when Microsoft released Vista & XP SP2, both of which resulted in months of patch work just to get things working again before we could focus on newness again.

I'm sure some day I'll love Client Apps again, maybe when Microsoft isn't killing the little guy.
You are right, some will have to close down.

In all fairness, they should have seen this coming and they should have had more cash on hand. Many businesses anticipated the downturn and started building cash reserves a year or two ago.
Sorry! I follow HN primarily through the RSS feed and a lot of posts/threads never show up there.

Before posting, I did Google for polls on the subject of version control and didn't turn up anything (oddly enough, this thread seems to be at the top of the results page):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="version+control"+poll+site:news.ycombinator.com

Even if I had seen your poll, though, I probably would have posted anyway because I'm interested in getting a feel for how many people use some of the systems that are listed at top besides Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.
The problem with finding really great hackers who want to do client-side coding is that a huge percentage of the work required to implement such apps is boring crap: compatibility testing, look-and-feel review, installer authoring, and collection of client configurations from issue reports. You can implement more features in less time when you deliver thin-client solutions.

Also, the knowledge required to deploy apps to each of your target platforms are fairly different, and tend to be developed to the exclusion of each other. A great Mac OS software engineer is unlikely to know Windows inside and out, and a Windows guru isn't likely to know or care much about Linux. Linux folks are, well, an altogether different bunch.
I think "Freakonomics" answers this. If your goal is to get money, and there is no monetary penalty for being "immoral", then of course people are going to be immoral. It's the same reason corporations dump toxic waste -- paying the fines is cheaper than not producing the toxic waste.
Alex Muse is a moron.

No, seriously.
the main splash image looks like a broadway dancer holding onto suspenders or something. It took me longer to figure out the point of the site because of this.
What caused this problem was excessive liquidity and the tendency of people to gamble. The U.S needs to get more material, and this correction is part of that.
> I've been thinking about XUL/Firefox addons

If you value your sanity, put the XUL handbook down and step away slowly. Of the handful of completely failed software projects I've worked on, most have involved XUL and the Mozilla runtime stack in some major way.

The complexity of XUL isn't worth it for the payoff, IMHO. Stick with something simple like Shoes or Tk, or go for Qt or WxWindows if you need a rich widget set. Don't let the fact that XUL looks kind of like HTML mislead you into thinking it'll be easy to build on and deploy.
Why can't they make some kind of role playing game where have to actually use math to progress in the game, for example calculate, slope, gravity etc for targetting, build a machine to up and incline, but you need to know the slope, etc.
The problem with questions like this is that "moral" character is kind of a relative and arbitrary concept in the first place. What's immoral today might be moral tomorrow, and vice versa. In fact, if a free market becomes ingrained into the culture deeply enough, it will eventually decide what's moral. Not the other way around.
Full-size LEGO replicas - $60K
Yes, many people are in debt, but they converted the debt to assets. And those assets are still around. They have to produce value to be able to finance those assets, and so in all, it balances itself out. In economic terms, I don't see how population debt is bad for an economy. If this 'debt' was paid from money that was excess in the economy anyways, then for the country, there is no direct loss.

Let me explain.

A bank has $10.000. The government gives then $2000 for free.

You come to the bank and ask for $1500. They give it to you. Over the next 4 years you work for an employer, giving him about $4000 of value. Of that, you pay $500 in taxes, payback $2000 to the bank and keep §1500 for yourself. The bank makes more money, the government makes more money, and you had to work harder to stay in the same spot.

Debt is a way to make slaves of citizens, but for the economy, it is good because it forces productivity out of people.
It's only a little bit faster than mercurial, and the size of the repository is larger.
visual studio does that for web interfaces
Not in the ideal case. The best long term strategy in a free, highly competitive market with knowledgable consumers and no externalities is to build long term trust. The way to build long term trust is to be moral and ethical.

Now, this breaks down if:

- There are externalities
- The consumers are uneducated and uncritical
- There is a monopoly
Sacramento Hospital Goes 50% Solar with 736-Kilowatt Array
Ask HN: What's a good startup PBX system?
So we will finally be moving into a dedicated office next week, so the question arose what PBX system to use.

In a previous startup we used a traditional one from Nortel, with expensive everything and multiple lines from PacBell. Pros: reliable Cons: expensive everything.

What about hosted PBXs via VOIP? Speakeasy offers solutions for $19-29 per employee. Are those any good?
Off with their heads! How Jack Welch would solve the banking crisis
DIY - Soldering BGA IC on PCB
DIY: soldering BGA ICs on PCB in your garage/lab without professional facilities. It is a headache to have a BGA IC mounted on the PCB if it is a small project. Today I want to share something about soldering.
Some of the recommendations were on target, but there were about half that were far off. I like being able to browse through the similar tracks and it's cool that it keeps the history of them so you can go back.

Do any of the music recommendation places have an api? I've been thinking about creating a site that recommends music for groups of people that might have different tastes in music. Not many of my friends like the same stuff, but I know there is some overlap there.
Using Git, Mercurial, and SVN ... for diff projects
I’m Going Long Right Now
Yes, the idea is that you would boot the target machine using a CD and then connect to the machine via a web browser to finish the installation.

From the article:

The idea is booting the target machine with a Debian installation image preseeded with a fixed / dynamicaly assigned ip address that start up a web server that allows the sysadmin to connect to with a simple web browser and perform the whole installation process comfortaby sat at his desk.
People were producing a lot of value in every previous recession and depression too.
Linking out: Often it's just applying common sense
Thanks! Great links!
If you're talking about the kind of hard times where your economic needs are reduced to 1400 calories/day, a lump of coal to cook your millet gruel, and some shoes made of old tires, the US is at least a major food exporter.

I don't expect times to get that tough.
There are less-expensive alternatives for all of the examples you provided. Take a look at what happened to each of those companies (which existed) back in the early 90s.

For planes, there's already a nice inventory of used aircraft backing up thanks to the latest airline bankruptcies. Do you think an airline will be buying new (or any?) aircraft if vacation and business travel drops off a cliff?
I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to.

Probably not. I remember being scared of the Japanese because everything I bought was made in Japan. I think the main Indian exports like IT services are so much less visible to kids that age. Most 'tweens probably just think of Indians as the people with the red dot.
"Buy Now" takes me to a big page full of text rather than to stuff I can buy! And when I scroll down (without reading anything of course) I see a price of $19.99 which I assume is a subscription price so I leave your site never to return...

I'll bet that's how it's going for quite a few of your potential customers.
:) exactly what I thought. Putting "moronically easy" is a bit off-putting.
In that case, putting in extra effort would be learning how to build better tools (or in your terminology, craft better basic laws).
It should have just stopped after the 6th paragraph.
I think that the point about risking the incomprehension of those around you points to something deeper. I always marvel at Goddard's courage, for example, when he was launching liquid rockets out of a cabbage patch. Here's a guy who moved back in with his mom and faced the ridicule of local and national newspapermen who fundamentally misunderstood the physics of what he was doing.

The incomprehension of the tribe nearly always leads to the most crushing kind of social defeat. And when you factor in the inevitable failures of any novel challenge, I'll bet you'll find that the life of an intellectual hero isn't just lonely, it's leadenly depressing. (I'm thinking right now of a comment made by one of the Wright brothers on the train home after a failed flight attempt: "Man will not fly for a thousand years.") It's no fun to be a depressed hero, I'm sure. For every Goddard and Wright brother, there must be thousands of failure stories, each of them detailing a life you'd never want to live.

The cost associated with real innovation is generally very high. We are, after all, paleolithic creatures living in a technical world. Conformity means a successful hunt. We're monkeys with mp3 players. Thus, this innovator's penalty is an atavism, but it's not one we're going to overcome anytime soon.
The Next Trend in Organizations? Y Combinator-like Funds
"Personally, I’m not convinced either candidate is really well equipped to “lead” us back to enconomic growth. However, you can be sure that if either candidate somehow manages to raise taxes on small business owners and their employees/customers, the American economy will suffer further and we may see more businesses in bankruptcy."

Except Barack Obama want to brings taxes for small businesses and startups.

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/#small-business
svn as of 1.5.0 does support merge tracking. I must admit that when first looking into svn I was very surprised to find that it did not originally support it.
Like more corn syrup for the money is a good thing. It's not exactly good for you. The optimum concentration of corn syrup is either 0M or as little as it takes to satisfy you, which means that you should take as much ice as you want. Unless your goal is to "hack" your insulin receptors.
Using bzr. A few months ago when evaluating bzr, git, and mercurial, the features were similar between all three, but bazaar won in the ease of use category.
I can see where this will end - "Uh-oh, baby hacked his diaper."
Another Way To Follow The Campaign: Dipity’s Election Center Timelines
The biggest economy in the world is European Union, not US (as measured by GDP.)
I've been trying it with my 12 year old niece with similar results. It's one of the most compelling "learn to program" games I've seen - I'd love to see a rewrite as you describe, and would pitch in if you've got some code started.
Patrick, what's your score? :)
Aza Raskin is developing some really cool technology over at Mozilla, dealing with things such as user interface and intuitive design. I expect that some of what he is producing now will be standard within the next couple of years, for example Geode, which was discussed yesterday (http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/10/introducing-geode/).
My company, Happy Camper Studios, builds cross-platform client apps using JRuby, Swing, and Monkeybars. We like it. :)
Also, that poll had much fewer choices.

For that matter, this one doesn't have plain old RCS, which is what I use.
In a datacenter where you control the DHCP assignments, it would be fairly easy to determine the IP address of a new server, since the MAC address is usually on a label somewhere on the chassis.

For a remote install, you could either configure the IP before burning the install media (as you suggested), or have the installer scan connected USB devices for a known config file name, and load configuration from it. That way, all you would need to do is have the colo tech load a file you emailed them onto a thumb drive, and then insert that into an available USB port on the server before starting installation.
The Atom-based netbooks generally have the Intel 915 video processor onboard, which runs Compiz quite nicely.
Team Foundation Server.
Last.fm Adds Lyrics
Wearing Politics on Your (Record) Sleeve
Steve Rubel on how blogs are changing the face of PR
"GUIs just aren't interesting to create -- there's nothing challenging about creating them. For desktop apps, the normal thing to do these days isn't even to code them -- you drag and drop together a UI in something like Glade, Interface Builder, or whatever Visual Studio packages, and hook up handlers to talk to the core logic. It's mostly grunt work."

Oh, so very wrong. Yes, technically, the mechanics of making a GUI are not hard, but it's much like good technical writing. Deciding what goes where, what goes in, what stays, out; these are hard choices. Just look at almost any random shareware VB app. Fugly.
Why Smart People Do Dumb Things—Personal Lessons from the Financial Meltdown
It's not just the "control content from one bad seed" issue. Wikis are great to solve some problems, deliver some content, etc, but they're not the answer for everyone. There are different levels of transparency for us to explore...
No, I would say free markets expose existing moral/character flaws (namely greed).
I use a combination of git and Subversion. SVN for the main repo that is shared between developers (with many developers working at once the lack of atomic commits really sucks), and git as my own offline versioning system. The code that I write tends to go through several iterations, and I'm loathe to commit anything to SVN until things work well enough to please me. Bad code should never make it into your prod repo, but I'm not a fan of rewriting/deleting mass chunks of code without SCM to back me up.
not really sure I follow your comment.

In any case, saying you're going to do something and doing it are two different things. Time will tell.
Yahoo’s new calendar probably won’t convert the masses