skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
+1, but you have to give it to him for the gorilla mask/ass hanging combination. Genius.[EDIT: Even more apropos given his handle.]
Here's the list - http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2008-674

I'm so glad my representative (Barbara Lee) voted against this madness.
There is a simple, good test for smartness in the current climate: Who identified and coherently described the housing bubble in 2005 or before? I think everyone on your list fails the test.
you can't have superior computing power like the "cloud" provides and expect to retain total transparency/privacy. Something has to give.

Sure, but some people would prefer to give on price rather than privacy. Hopefully the market will continue to offer that choice.
My question though is, what is the alternative?
well, i think this is broader than "enterprise". it encompasses SaaS + b2b software plays.
The Democrats have the majority in both houses and could pass the bill without the Republicans if they wanted. They don't do that because they want consensus, especially so close to the election.
After a quick search in The Economist's archives:

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E...

> The technology bubble in the late 1990s at least left behind a modern capital stock, which continues to yield productivity gains; a property boom, in contrast, does nothing to boost long-term growth. Instead, it diverts resources away from more productive sectors and by fuelling consumer spending it exacerbates America's economic imbalances. Eventually, there will be a price to pay.

Also, I'm not sure that predictions of problems equate to knowing what to do to best wind down the current mess. You're right (elsewhere) that some things need to go under. However, I think the point of the 'bailout proponents' is that more will go under than otherwise needs be without it.

Of course I guess we'll really never know for certain in any case, as it's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise. We could have no bailout and massive failures just as we could have a bailout and still have massive failures. Or no massive failures in either case.
Just a quick thing to add: I spoke with the CEO of Ancestry.com after I wrote this article, and he brought up an important fact relating to the digitization of public records: OCR technology doesn't work well with handwritten records from disparate sources, such as the forms used by census takers. The company actually uses human transcription services outside the U.S. to transcribe many records.

I'll be posting a follow-up article later this week about this issue.
Well, let's see how well Canada does if the US economy collapses... :-/ So far the strong loonie has decimated some industry sectors, I'm surprised things aren't worse overall.
You might find this interesting:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4164669.stm

"...anyone trying to access the e-mails of the deceased is fighting an uphill struggle... In future... many webmailers may choose to side-step this process by entrusting their passwords to a loved one."
The issue is that from my understanding, it's a really bad bill. I think it shows a striking lack of character to vote for a bad bill because it happens to contain some earmarks or other terms you (and your biggest contributors) happen to like.

The older I get, the more I realize that character in politicians is far more important than ideology. Decent people can disagree on the right way to solve the problems our nation faces, including this (very large) one...but lining the pockets of supporters at the expense of everyone else in the nation, particularly those least able to protect their assets, strikes me as a despicable and crassly self-serving act. The only way to a solution that most everybody can agree on is to honestly discuss the issues.

With a bill named "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes" that hands $700 billion (actually more...) over to a fellow who'll be doling it out to all of his old buddies from the finance industry with no oversight, we've already established that no sane discussion can take place. It's classic doublespeak on the order of the best the Soviets and Red Chinese ever came up with, and that duplicity in and of itself is enough to disqualify this bill from consideration by honest folks.

This is actually a prime example of why I genuinely like Ron Paul. I disagree with him on some major issues (immigration and abortion being the biggest), but I know where he stands, and I know he believes in what he says and acts accordingly. I think I'd like to see a lot more of that, from any side of the political spectrum. But, it seems like crooked Republicans get voted out only to be replaced by crooked Democrats. I'd be happy with a batch of honest Democrats or a batch of honest Republicans, but it seems the only way to keep them close to honest is to keep churning new people in, keep the parties roughly in balance, and keep them at each others throats so they can do the least amount of damage possible.
Less than 75 years ago, it was essentially illegal in this country to be black. I wouldn't trust our government to clean up dog shit let alone handle $700 billion dollars trying to bail out our retarded amateur-hour financial institutions.
Given that Canonical is supposedly much smaller than RH or Novell, I wonder why they didn't devote 1/Nth of their budget to polish and reap the disproportionate rewards.
Experience in Japan offers solution to financial crisis
Well, in a way, they sort of had it coming with their negative savings rates and all. Personal accountability really does go to die in the States although other countries are approaching our levels. Fat? Liposuction. Ugly? Plastic surgery. Don't want to exercise or eat right? Pills. Poor? Welfare. Don't know what you're doing with massive gobs of money? $700 Billion Bailout!?
You can have Google Apps and Postfix installed on your slice. Articles.slicehost.com Guide 1 and 2 walk you through setting those things up. Its trivial and powerful.
"It's not about open vs. closed source:"

Well yeah, i agree. The poster I was replying to made it about source code.
Brilliant article - I've been sharing it with friends all day.
The bill is quite a bit toned down from how you described it (afaik). You're talking about the initial version of it, which I thought was absolutely horrible. The version that was voted on today seemed quite a bit better (more oversight, some limits on executive pay, not all the money is paid out at once among other provisions...), but I just think that the core of the bill is simply not a good idea.
Based on what? Historical P/E FCF valuations?
Everyone is going to get hit in some form. World diversification for the win...even if you take some lumps, you'll survive.
Killer article, thanks for posting...
Programming Languages Aren't
> I can't prove that the economy is starved for credit

You can get a loan at very reasonable rates right now if you meet the criteria. That's just a fact, and I'm not in a mood to give you documenting links. Outstanding credit continues to grow at only a slightly lower rate than before. There is not a credit shortage. There is a shortage of viable uses for credit. There is huge overcapacity in retail, housing, etc. People who can't reasonably be expected to pay back loans can't get them right now. Which is basically a good thing. Businesses can't get loans to expand because nobody in their right mind thinks many kinds of business SHOULD be expanding.

The macro-economic conditions are driving the markets, not the other way around. The financial firms are suffering because the REAL economy ran out of greater fools and hit its maximum tolerable debt load. The real economy is not shuddering because the masters in Wall Street can't grease the wheels; it's the other way around.
A bit of honesty, maybe?

The bill is duplicitous from the get go. It's entitled "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes"! If that kind of doublespeak don't get yer hackles up, I can't imagine what would.

Some honest discussion, some real consequences for the people that caused this meltdown (and it was caused, it was not an accident), and some oversight in how a bailout proceeds. Perhaps we, as the folks footing the bill, would also like to know what the total is actually going to be before agreeing to it. My understanding of the bill (admittedly weak) is that it is a blank check for Paulson to distribute amongst his friends in the finance industry, with no oversight and no transparency about how it's going to be used.

The fact that a bailout is being presented as "OMG! We have to do this now, imagine the consequences if we don't!" it has a strikingly similar ring to the "We have to invade Iraq now!" pose of a few years ago. I don't trust salesguys that insist I need to buy now, and I really don't trust politicians when they use the same tactic, especially when they're arguments are based on lies and misdirection.

Yes, something must be done. Accountability would be a great start. Bringing some trust back into our finance industry would be a good way forward. A bailout? I dunno. Maybe there are other ways forward that directly help the people hurt rather than the millionaires and billionaires that caused it.
Why "supposedly"?
I honestly thought that was a Douglas Adam-style parody (from one of the later books). Holding all your passwords in one place (no matter how secure) creates a single point of vulnerability.

I do think that it's (theoretically) possible to safely store (in some respects) your data online, through encryption... but this doesn't protect you from innocent data loss (e.g. act of god, bankruptcy, incompetence, bad luck etc).

Why not store all your data locally as well, so it's distributed git-style, and only use the cloud for crunching/archive? This is the model that Google (google gears) and Adobe are moving towards (though I thought their main motivation was so you could work off-line). HDD are unbelievably cheap, and getting cheaper and cheaper... Gmail gives you 7GB for free - wow, that's so much! - but how much do you have at home already?

There's no shortage; it's just convenience.

That startup's PR connection with Stallman (that they use GPLv3, they talked to Stallman and are concerned about the same problems) seems tenuous and disingenuous to me (though I didn't investigate in depth).

I still think it might be a parody.
Glad you agree. Seriously, software should be sign up, get on, get use out of it. Red tape and long sales cycles irritate me more than rolling around in poison ivy.
Money talks.... nothing new :)
Little known fact . . . Canada and the EU opened discussions a while ago on Canada's integration into that politico-Economic body.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news . . . but we are almost certainly on our own with this.

China and Mexico may give token assistance as they are able.
Forgive me if this is obvious, but I'm not sure most people realize that this wouldn't be $700 billion going straight from taxpayers to banks. The actual cost to taxpayers will be much less. The $700 billion would be used to purchase assets from banks, and sold to investors at a later time.
That's a bad day to say "leave it to the market".
I would be very careful picking up people that just run to a field because it "pays well". I try not to hire software developers/programmers/engineers that went with the herd. I want the people that played with computers as a hobby well before they went to college. I want people that opted to take the more hardcore academic route of CS or CE over MIS, IS, Business, or Finance.
I've looked at less accounting and played with there free trial. It was kind of mediocre. Most of these posted are invoicing solutions. Here are the other I've looked into:

http://liteaccounting.com/

http://gobootstrap.com/

http://www.netbooks.com/

http://www.freeagentcentral.com/

http://www.clarityaccounting.com/

From here:
http://mashable.com/2008/09/21/270-online-business-tools/
Same exact position as Friday, minus the prospect of $700 billion. That's not a trivial difference.
Glad to hear I'm not the only person who's had that happen to them. But with me, it happens in the city (I don't do much biking in the country).

In fact, it happened this afternoon, since I wrote my last post. Strange, eh?
It's good to know that there are other people who are great promoters of nuclear power (I am a huge fan), but you're not reading your sources very well (the last article you linked to put the cost of uranium as nuclear fuel at 0.5c/kWh at a spot price of $53/kg), your math is full or errors and you clearly haven't researched exactly what goes into taking uranium from the ground and using it to produce power, or the related fields, such as energy production and consumption in general, mineral exploration and mining, or waste management. You fail to take into account production levels (which are currently only about 65% of consumption), an increase in uranium demand (based on new and proposed build will double by 2020), increased costs of actual mining and transportation of the resource just to name a few, or the effect of mining and extracting ever bit of uranium from the planet. There are limits to fuel efficiencies increases and as well to the economic viability of nuclear power. This is why it's a good idea to invest in new technologies now, such as fusion (the whole reason this discussion began). Sure we can take every last particle of uranium out of the Earth's crust and ocean's but I think we can spend our time, energy and effort doing something more productive. Uranium and thorium are finite resources and no amount of water extraction will make them not so. We once believed oil would last us forever and we have come to realize that this is not so. Let's not make the same mistake by promoting unsubstantiated and irrational ideas that nuclear (fission) will last us for half a trillion years when very educated and informed people who are actual experts put the number at 1000 years. As a nuclear enthusiast, I'm fine with the 1000 years because I hope that by then we have something better that nuclear (fission) to get our power from.
How start-ups can survive
Gritty Entrepreneurs: Jigsaw, a Profitable Web 2.0 Venture
"To roam Flickr is to wander through crooked teeth, local politics, nesting osprey, birth, spaghetti, divorce and every other aspect of existence."

And wonderfully interesting it is, too. I've spent ages, on and off, refreshing http://www.flickr.com/photos just watching the world go by.

Note also http://www.flickrvision.com/ is also quite good for watching the world go by, in a slightly different way.
Some would call it persistence, others stubborness.
I probably should have replied to that poster instead.
Microsoft Updates Hotmail: Faster Interface and More Storage
Where is Saudi Arabia on this chart? SA is both wealthy and religious. It seems like another outlier. And where does Israel fall? Maybe there's some selection bias in the data shown.
Not exactly true, there are plenty in good financial standing who had prime mortgages on their single residence, a place they have owned for 10+ years, that because of the depreciation in the market can now no longer sell their home without owing a huge amount to the bank for the difference. That means you can't sell your home if you have to, what if your job tells you that you have to move? What if you have to sell your house to use the cash for medical bills?

There are a lot of people really hurting from this, just because we're a bunch of hackers living in apartments saying HAHA now I can buy a house! Doesn't mean that families who made previously responsible decisions are not getting really hammered. To say "GOOD!" to this is incredibly callous and most likely a sign of great ignorance to what is really going on.
I'd rather get into the best restaurants.
Open Video Project
MooTools Essentials
What's really interesting about this is (IMO) is that the Republicans are the ones largely responsible for the failure. The president's own party is revolting against him.
Free software is in some ways a "public good", and markets tend to underprovide public goods. The fact that free software is created at all, and the economics of it, is pretty fascinating, and, IMO, far from a solved problem.
Google Hot Trends reflects voter interest -- and anger -- over the bailout vote
It may seem unfair, but a bailout is essential
Developing a jQuery Plugin
Everyone hates ComScore
What are you talking about?

There are plenty of people who put 20% down on a fixed rate mortgage, are paying that off perfectly, and the market value of their house is now below what they paid for it. Those people are going to get hammered if they sell the house and owe the bank tens of thousands of dollars. In that situation you just don't sell your house.

But what if you have to sell your house? Medical bills? Job changes? Want to retire?

It's nice that you think you are superior to all this vain people, but this crisis is not about vain people getting fucked. It is about responsible people have their American dream burned to the ground by morons with oversized sub prime mortgages and the banks that lent to them. This goes beyond hurting the people who caused the mess!
JQuery Tips: Text Searching, Page Load Time and Others
Warren Buffett in 2003. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304237

Note that he's contributed $5 billion to the bailout of Goldman Sachs, in the form of convertible senior debt, at an interest rate of 10%.
As always these articles are wonderful to read. I think the hardest thing for people without depression to conceptualize is the crushing weight of insignificant tasks. How picking up a single sock becomes a literal impossibility. How the implications of acting, in any way, are like trying to assume every single associated burden simultaneously.
Hmmm...after I think about it, this pretty much boils down to: "let me get at my data in a format that I can read."

Basically what you're talking about is standards - but I think the SaaS/Cloud space is too immature to be able to define standards at this stage... In fact, whilst it would give consumers extra security, it would very likely slow down innovation.
MIT scientists move closer to creating 'artificial noses'
SGN Founder’s Rambling, Jetlagged, Semi-Lucid and Beautiful Email On Entrepreneurism
How To Write An Effective Design Brief and Get The Design You Want
Well up to 40% could default on them before you got to that point. Right now no one knows what the rate will ultimately be. In some areas it is already 60%, but in some areas it is 5%, so 40% nationally would be a very high number. At that point the better question would be what to do with so many bankrupt people.
How Do Locks Lock?
You're using a link that claims the resource limit to be 1000 years (the first one).

And did you really state that taking uranium out of granite is economical? The granite you want to mine is worth more than the uranium in it, not to mention that it would take more energy to mine it than you would get from it. There are only 3-10 part per million of uranium in granite.
I've been saying that too, and yet most people don't realize that it would based off the default percentage. Do we really think 100% of people would default? I don't.
His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish".

I never expected Richard Stallman and Larry Ellison to agree on something involving the software industry.

Granted they agree for very different reasons.
Marathons vs. Sprints - a response to Calacanis
just make a fake press pass and tell them you want to review them for your newspaper.
What do you mean by "security model that extends through the kernel" and "A performance and resource sharing model that extends through the kernel"?

I don't believe that most people need the suspend/resume/migration feature. If you have a cluster that can handle system failure then you can easily migrate a zone the same way you would deal with a failed system.

Anyway, I agree that VMWare/Xen offers important features for pausing and moving running applications. I use those features of VMWare every day. But, most people will do very well with Zones because they don't need and won't use and didn't learn and don't want to pay for the extra features that VMWare offers.
MogileFS: Open Source Distributed Filesystem
He's right that the API is important in the language debate - I'd argue the .NET class library is semantically more significant (e.g. to learn) than the individual .NET languages.
I'm really not sure, I have no idea where you are getting a 60x energy boost from.
Direct link to PG's entry:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0929_most_influentia...
Ask YC: Review my app (pycmds, a web-based command line)
Quite a lot of wiki's are based upon flat files - e.g. TWiki.
It's good to know that there are other people who are great promoters of nuclear power (I am a huge fan)

Please keep your bigotries to yourself, and don't speak for what mine might be.

.

you're not reading your sources very well (the last article you linked to put the cost of uranium as nuclear fuel at 0.5c/kWh at a spot price of $53/kg)

That would be the total cost of the fuel after conversion, enrichment, and fabrication. The U3O8 cost of $472 is .264 of the total cost of $1787, which indeed works out to less than 0.2c/kWh (about 0.131c/kWh, actually) if $1787/kg of fabricated-fuel works out to 0.5c/kWh.

2007 fabricated-fuel costs at U.S. nuclear powerplants were 0.47c/kWh. http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/cost...

.

your math is full or errors

Please provide at least a single example of any math errors I might have made.

.

We once believed oil would last us forever and we have come to realize that this is not so.

Indeed, there might only remain some 70,000 years' worth of oil.

http://www.google.com/search?q=oil+70000+dabasteroid

Is there reason to believe otherwise?
You cannot fix a structural defect with wallpaper.
Charles Stross's vision of a post-Singularity Net dominated by spam-bots, con-bots, and very convincing AI's with bridges in Alaska for sale seems more and more plausible.
> I think the point of the 'bailout proponents' is that more will go under than otherwise needs be without it.

I've seen this movie before. If bailouts and stimulus packages worked Japan would have been the economic star of the 1990s and the Depression would have ended before FDR ran for the nomination.
The auto-suggest gets annoying because it's always displayed. You should only display it when you have a partial match.

This query crashes the site:
http://www.pycmds.org/#youtube search for miley
Why must something be done?

I don't understand. Surely if all the banks failed that would be a great opportunity for people to start new banks with extra incentive to prove their honesty and trustworthiness, for instance.

It can't be the case that banks will collapse and everyone goes "Oh shit money is now worthless, I'm shutting down my business, firing everyone and going to find a soup kitchen".

Can it? Really?