skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The situation isn't too dire yet. As you can see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_debt, as a percentage of GDP, US public debt is still comparable to or below many other first-world countries. But you're absolutely right about unfunded entitlements. If nothing is done, we'll be soon be on par with Zimbabwe, and it's uncertain whether anything non-horrific can be done. Those unfunded entitlements are not just an accounting problem -- they're real material wealth that people are counting on for their retirement that doesn't exist. The obvious solution is to raise the retirement age, but you can only raise it so far before people are too old to be physically capable of work. If any tightrope does exist between hyperinflation and octogenarians starving in the streets, I question whether the political will exists to walk it.
Got married.

Sold everything, moved from Australia to London.

Took up contracting

Wife worked on our startup while we bootstrapped instead of earning a salary.

In retrospect, it really doesnt feel like a risk at all, but I have significantly less hair.
I like Seth Godin's take on the ads:

"[...] Vista and PowerPoint and Microsoft's other core non-game products are largely devoid of personality and are optimized to be sold to organizations that prefer it that way. Microsoft can change this if they want to, but until they do, running ads pretending to be something other than that is a waste of money."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/what-adverti...
Ask YC: Anybody want to strike while the iron is hot and hack global capitalism itself?
Chaos can suck. But it can also provide wonderful opportunities since it is a time when institutional grips are weakened and during which confusion leaves room to squeak different things through that would have never been possible before.

Here's what I bring to the table; you pick the order of importance according to your experience.

- A vivid, 2 syllable URL that just grabs you, never lets go and keeps growing on you; it also contains the framework for the entire business model, so once you understand what the business is up to, it's hard to imagine what the heck competitors would call themselves.

- A 2-page business plan/presentation; the first page communicates the idea,the second the execution. Lots of pictures and whitespace.

- A business model built around immediate and continuously sustainable profitability on the top end first, meaningful social impact second, and rapid buildability. There's no new "app" to build - if you know your way around the craigslist stack and can replicate something like cl, but on a much smaller features scale (although with greater eventual user scalability), then it's possible for you to build it. And the business model is simple and direct enough to understand right away, no "Start, then "something", then success!" The "something" is the starting point.

- A willingness to share equity according to your contribution; if you have the know-how and resourcefulness to build it, you can share an equal percentage with the rest of how ever many people are needed for a core founding team

- Hopefully it won't be necessary (see above), but if you prefer cash to equity in these shaky times, professional connections to a UAE-based private equity group (11 years business/personal relationship with key person) that can invest quickly no matter the state of U.S. markets. But this may not even be necessary since if its built, it can be turned on, if it's on, it has a way to make (ad-free)profit ASAP.

If any of this seems interesting, send something you feel is relevant (intro email, questions, resume, project work, your own ideas on the subject): risingsun "at" ymail "dot" com.

Unfortunately due to time constraints it is not possible at the moment to monitor this forum for replies, so if you'd like to communicate, please use the email above.

Thanks for reading to this point and enjoy the weekend.
Yes, and to be environment friendly you should also clean up stray bottles.
Don't Interrupt Actions When Users Login
CC? Compiler Construction?
After watching that talk - I was actually inspired to build this same thing.

Well done and thanks - this is going to be quite handy.
I don't know about "worst failure". I think Steve Jobs is actually the unusual CEO here.
http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3426

Not sure, but you could always check the source code in Arc =)
I didn't use the word "all"
http://www.bartleby.com/141/, III especially.
I have a problem with your sources, specifically julian simon, as it primarily cites research dating back to the 1980's and does not take into account a lot of factors that are placing significant pressure on the CURRENT supply of oil TODAY.

A good analogy is a human and blood. Our bodies naturally regenerate blood... but we can't possibly donate blood on a daily basis and expect to survive.

What blows my mind is that you're stubborn about NOT innovating (job creation, less dependence on others -- specifically middle east), while both parties in the presidential race seemingly agree on one thing: we need to curb our dependence on oil.
There are other ways to start a startup. You don't need all that to be successful.
Why Sergey Brin May Have Disclosed His Risk for Parkinson’s
Programming Languages are PC OSs circa 1986
Yeah sorry - I think I might have overreacted because I was so sick of hearing about Microsoft/Seinfeld/Apple. The "parenthesis" thread comments some up my other thoughts pretty well.
Make Money Online With Diet System Riches
Diet System Riches is fantastic. I`ve already started creating my Diet system and I`m really confident in making lots of money from it.
Python metaclasses in five minutes
LHC damaged -- research to stop for two months
This reminds me of a little sidebar in "Fundamentals of Physics" (Halliday et al. 6th ed.) that talks about how dangerous a rapidly spinning object can be. They listed a case study from Test Devices Inc. where a solid steel disk exploded from a test rig while spinning at 14 krpm. There were lead bricks thrown into the hallway, a door was now in the parking lot, etc. Amazing.

(This was a solved exercise, ans: about 20 MJ)
hmmm lisp ... i use newlisp
Star Simson is a victim of 9/11
Ask HN: Virus scan service?
Hi All, does anyone know whehter there is a service for scanning files for viruses remotely?

E.g. you send them a file over https, they give you back a result.
Yes except that would imply that current solar cells have an efficiency of at most 0.2%. Which isn't true.

Maybe they are 500x more efficient in the UV, but in that case it's a meaningless number because the Sun emits very little energy in the UV.
Plastics degrade into smaller plastic particles. Assuming the land mass above them is sufficiently rough to entangle rising particles, the degraded material would still provide buoyancy, and simply contribute to the underlayer of the island.
I'm curious why you'd want something like this?

ClamAV is among the top five virus scanners for accuracy, and it's free and open source.
Gossip Girl Photos From “The Ex-Files”
Below is a photo gallery from next Monday’s episode, “The Ex-Files.” Looks like yet another terrific Gossip Girl episode from the looks of the pictures and previews. Follow the link for a brief synopsis, and click to enlarge the photos below!
Life After Death - ER
“Life After Death” takes place after an event that has left several people injured in an ambulance explosion - in particular, Pratt. The timeline of this episode seems to cover at least several days.
n1 thx
That's a great idea until you decide that you want a contract to be exclusive provider for X.

I currently have a product that I sell to a single customer who spends $1,000's/year with me and he packages it up with other stuff and resells it (kinda like AT&T/iPhone, dontcha think?).
Under your "perfect world," his competitor can come to me and force me to do business with them whether or not I want to.
Smalltalk - "pure" OO. I guess you would call it "OO-anal". Alan Kay - ACM Turing Award awardee (among other things). Fairly smart guy. Genius, some would call him. You would, I imagine, call him a "crazy kook".

This is one of those rare instances where I wish I had more karma here.
1 TB of Free Online Storage
So, not only did you just drop in to the HN community on a lark, with purely selfish intent.. but you are actually admitting to us that you have no plans to participate in the future? You are under the impression that this will be an effective strategy to change the world? You are about as far away from success as humanly possible.
Cool, just did not know about this one
So my guess was wrong. What does CC mean?
http://virusscan.jotti.org/
Widgetbox Launches The Widgetbox Blog Network @ BlogWorld Expo in Vegas
Yes, though legal language is mostly still full of loopholes. Unfortunately.
Ubiquity - a project from MozLabs which connects the web
New U.S. rules may impact Second Life, other "games of skill" web sites
Gotcha. I hadn't seen either of those two stories. Thanks for the links!

And yeah. Flawed logic following those two stories. I still think Microsoft's campaign is questionable at best, but at least it looks like they're still proceeding as per plan.
Yeah, I think that a simple "left and right" to switch would work better. It's odd, though, how no browser has a really easy "shift tabs over" shortcut.
Wait what? How do tabs in different processes preclude cross-domain user scripting?

Didn't express myself clearly, sorry - I meant to say that I hope their security policy will allow cross-domain scripting from within addons.
This is a two way street. In some cases, exclusivity helps entrepreneurs if they're savvy enough to land those types of deals.
> Moon landing

is the result of intense competition with soviet Russia.

> arpanet...

is the result of a competition between different contractors ultimately won by BBN.
The Wikipedia article is outdated for the US. Public debt was spiking even before the new bailout package (.5 trillion?) and the costs of FNM/FRE liabilities.

While entitlements are definitely a long run problem, I think we have a more immediate one: the willingness of other countries to keep trusting US govt debt. It doesn't matter what our debt/GDP ratio is if our creditors think we'll debase our way out of what we owe. We should know the answer to that one within a year.

We live in interesting times.
I'll give my personal opinion on this: I don't care about Chrome's market share. I don't care about market share, period. I don't care that my browser of choice, Safari, is woefully underrepresented on the market. All I care about is how good my browser is. And the excitement I have about Chrome isn't that I think it'll dominate the market, but that I think it's a damn good web browser. Blows Firefox out of the water, blows WebKit out of the water. It's a joy to use. Them adding add-ons creates the one last thing that Chrome didn't have to offer me.
Dolphins swim so fast it hurts
What I'm curious about is how Nik managed to get the marque angels to invest in him, when he's new to the Valley. And how did he end up in the Valley in the first place.
Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (1880)
Cool, now the world won't end until we all get at least a few new episodes of The Office.
backtype = searchyc.com re-incarnated as a start-up (rather than a completed side project)?
In this context, college confidential. See great-grandparent.
Moot point since you're not listening (there's your first mistake), but:

> There's no new "app" to build - if you know your way around the craigslist stack and can replicate something like cl, but on a much smaller features scale (although with greater eventual user scalability), then it's possible for you to build it

What's to stop me from waiting till you launch, copying everything you've got, listening to customers better, and keeping all the equity for myself?
"Mr. No" Gives 2000 Nos A Year To Companies
Are you saying that, because the economy is so interdependent (by the way, why is it so?), it's better to centralize it even more?

And if you assume that some individuals are greedy or incompetent (and it's a reasonable assumption I must say), how do you prevent them from becoming the regulators?

> Cooperation, rather than competition, is the higher good.

Cooperation works well with people willing to cooperate. It doesn't scale, though, so we have to rely on the next best alternative: competition.
Django 1.1 Roadmap
Digging Deeper
Wow. I am amazed. 17 miles of tunnels and super conducting magnets and only one section malfunctioned (yet).
Proposed features for 1.1 are listed here:
http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/Version1.1Features
> Moon landing

is the result of intense competition with soviet Russia.

debatable, but what about this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe

and these:
pythagorean theorem, sieve of erasthones, Clarkson-Erdős theorem,
More accurately: only one section failed in the couple of days that passed since the test run.

Prior to the test run the LHC has been continuously delayed to problems and component failures.
http://www.virustotal.com/
That sounds like a fascinating study, but I was disappointed to learn that this was an announcement of the start of the study, not a release of results...
It could of course be the Higgs Boson itself altering the past and preventing the LHC from functioning. If the LHC hasn't hit full speed in ~2 years, we might be looking at the weirdest consequence of physics yet.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/08/11/will-...
You said in your post you were paid competitive salary. Why is it 65% less now? What are you basing your salary on?

From what you've said, it sounds like the mathematical models play a pretty significant role. If the product is like Digg, then the algorithms are 90% of the company (in fact I think K. Rose outsourced the site). If the product is like Myspace, however, then your contribution will be the other way around.

In your situation, the best bet is to negotiate your equity compensation based on opportunity cost. I recommend getting the negotiation finalized before the company does find a hire, since this gives you more leverage. I say start with 3% and negotiate downward.
Penalty Shots? Heh.
I'd venture a guess that this is just a way to get billions in free publicity for his wife's venture. Open sourcing doesn't really play for me since Parkinsons is a well known disease so there'd be thousands of scientists working on it already + its not like he can't afford the best of the best
"The authors reason that any accelerator which surpasses a certain threshold of super-high-energy collisions (thus producing many of these new particles) will never go into operation because it violates some yet-unknown universal law. As evidence, they provide the failed Superconducting Super Collider, which Congress canned in 1993 after spending $2 billion on the project."

Im just going to assume that a system as large and complex as the LHC is just hard to maintain, thats a much better explanation, because it doesn't involve too much unprovable assumptions.
You laugh now, but, taking into account the shutdown of the SSC, how many more failures would have to occur before you started thinking "anthropic principle"? (I mean this as an exercise in probability theory, not advocating that the time to start thinking it is now.)
Brostalgia - Art, Culture, Fashion, Lifestyle
Art is perception, perceive what you wish.
Ah, ok. Obviously. Thanks.
I think Microsoft is trying to convince us that it's okay to be "regular". It's targeted at the market that doesn't necessarily want their computer to be "special". So, all Microsoft has to do is keep reminding us that Windows users are the majority. It's not an Apple-reinforcing disaster as this article implies.
A two page business plan?! My god! How can you fail?! Here I am with my one page plan like a sucker... Why oh why didn't I think of that?
I got the same error on a few pages, but the site also (repeatedly and reproducibly) crashed my browser when I tried searching for a college.

I thought I would love the site after reading the article, but the actual execution kind of sucks...not just because of the programming errors, but because of the general site design and 'flow.'
The looming crisis: Personal syndication overload
So what is lisp?
Came here to say that...

Seriously, penalty shots?
It's not in the article, but the 60s Ray Davis band Kinks had Lola (Lola... Coca Cola).
If bottle failures are contained within the sacks this shouldn't be necessary. If bottle failures aren't contained within the sacks...well, good luck.
Fuck. My Canadian, hockey playing background is showing through...
But it is strange, isn't it? I would not be surprised if they coudn't get LHC to work in the end. I don't say the reason will be Higgs Boson altering it's past, though. But considering what this LHC stuff is all about, I wouldn't rule out unprovable assumptions.
So, ideally for you, SEs would have to be opt-in and do forceful revenue sharing with page creators?

You realize there is no way something like google could have been created in your proposed environment?
Wow, this is surprisingly good.
Not much has changed since 1880 =]
Skype Shutters Personal Broadcasting Service
What I've wanted is a big red line in the scrollbar where an article stops and comments begin.

I judge the length of an article by the scrollbar size, but when an article is four paragraphs followed by 800 comments on the same page my "should I take the time to read this" measurement gets thrown off.
Yes, this was my reaction exactly.

"The point is that this is the role Apple has reduced Windows to in this advertising campaign. Windows is regular. The default. The norm. Mac OS X and the software that runs on it is special. It is something that the Mac can never lose and which the PC can never have."

..."has reduced Windows to"? Quite the opposite - this is exactly what Microsoft wants...that Windows is the regular, the default, the norm. From business perspective, this is even better than to be so-called "special".
I wouldn't be surprised either, but the explanation would be bad design. And science is all about ruling out unprovable assumptions.
Plastic is heavier than water; are you suggesting that plastic bottles degrade into smaller plastic bottles?
NYTimes has a history of these "All is takes is guts!"-type articles.

http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/01/18/build-a-crappy-website-m...

It takes more than guts, and it's not easy. It just pisses me off to see article after article telling the "I woke up the next day to cash my first million dollar check!" story.

To get the real truth about running your startup, forget about all these fairytale fantasies and read Diary of a Failed Startup. That's the true story of what you face.

http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/
Analyst Predicts 400,000 Android Handsets Sold By End Of 2008
I met this guy Richie in Tulum in 2005, just after hurricane Gilberto tore up his first island. He plays guitar. His plan to rebuild his island was to charge admission. I imagine that's how he's paying for it, but he started by hand. From the video, sounds like the Mexican government wants a piece of the tourism action, so sounds like Richie wants to teach his island to travel.
Hmm, but the cure has not been discovered yet, IMHO, so even the best of the best is not good enough. I wouldn't accuse Sergey of having ulterior motives...if he really wanted just the publicity for his wife's venture, I think he can do that openly with the help of Google.

My guess is, that discovering you tend to have Parkinson is not a joke...I felt like he is just pondering how to accelerate the fighting against the disease; it wouldn't be bad if Google throws itself in health field.

Let's see what happens and I for one wish Sergey all the best.
So many people work for oil companies in Texas that I doubt state funding of competitors would be politically feasible. Also, I doubt that more funding is what is needed to get us off of oil. There's a lot of money already being invested in solutions, though as a Texan, I'd like to see a vibrant renewable energy industry there as well. State funding of emerging technologies seems like a prudent thing to do to create new jobs within the state, and if Texas doesn't get on the ball, California will draw all of the new companies.
WaveMaker - Open Source WYSIWYG Web App Visual Studio
Here's a pdf version of the book:

http://www.freewebs.com/maestro_mr/barnum1.pdf
It's refreshing to see a totally off the cuff and candid looking blog from such an important figure. Doesn't seem to have the multiple layers of PR and Marketing here.
I'm not really questioning his motives...I'm just saying that if there is indeed an ulterior motive I find the free advertising much more likely than the motive discussed in the article

I just don't see some scientist working in another field suddenly getting an epiphany from reading about him having Parkinsons and going "OMG I better switch my research to Parkinsons because 30 years from now Sergey Brin might have it...the man co-founded Google, he is a national treasure!"
This is why "idea guys" can't have nice things.
That would be so cute!!!
When I first opened this I thought it would be an interesting dialogue on how langs/class libraries are blurring the boundaries with operating systems... Particularly with this "is the internet the os?" thinking floating about.

However, it's not that discussion at all - Was more along the lines "Java is like DOS because it's popular, and DOS sucked for all these other reasons (UI), therefore Java sucks"...

Metaphor can be pretty handy sometimes, but this just seems very labored.
I think that the point of the ads is that many different people from many walks of life own PCs - with the implication that Apple only attracts a certain type of person to their products. The ads don't make Microsoft seem "generic," instead they portray the company as catering to many different kinds of people.

It doesn't make me want to support Microsoft any more than I have to, but I don't think the ads are "jaw-droppingly bad."
The Well That Twitter Built
Perfect of example of "entrepreneurs solving bigger problems" (recent theme of O'Reilly).
Yeah... It does come down to experience.

I've found that most sufficiently large projects require a large amount of scaffolding - on a massive project, you can't write a bit of code and compile and run everything on day one, you need to put in place structures and stubs and mocks to get you going.

The reality is - All of this, really, ends up being good test code. Rather than create all this throwaway code, you can actually do better by making these tests and stubs.

So, a lot of developers are writing a lot of the foundations of a their testing framework and not realising it.
How to Launch a Startup, Step-by-Step (according to GroundWork Open Source)
The Myth Of Our Free Market Past
Everyone is bitching and moaning, this week, that American free markets are being destroyed. This article points out just how far you have to go back to find a government who didn't have their fingers in the market.
A call to action! Followed by nothing!
He's wrong because he's digging far deeper than the average viewer. The average viewer sees it as Mac vs Windows, just like Coke vs Pepsi. Hodgman is Windows, and the other dude is OSX.
How many years would we have to go without finding the Higgs Boson (because of malfunctioning equipment) before the unprovable assumption seems more reasonable? I suspect scientists would be fairly certain about it after 50 years.
Indeed it is - and there doesn't seem to be a sign of "there's a sucker born every minute" - in fact several of these express the exact opposite sentiment. i.e. "Be Kind and Polite to Your Customers."
> If you are losing money, be specially cautious and not tell of it, or you will lose your reputation.

Hasn't that caused a lot of problems?
An extraordinary document. I think I have never seen such a model of brevity.
Nowhere To Hide: killer drones that can see through walls