skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in the middle here. U.S. and State debt is a huge problem IMHO but I agree that private debt is a bigger problem (given it dwarfs public debt by a large margin).

But the one point where I think you're clearly wrong is using interest rates or lack of inflation as measurement sticks. As long as the U.S. holds the reserve currency we have the whole world trying to prevent our currency from collapsing. That means giving us whatever interest rate we want and pegging their currency to ours.

I suspect we'd see a major collapse in the dollar if the world decided to abandon it as the reserve currency.
I'm not sure I follow how this is supposed to be progress. This looks like NASA did before the had real shuttles, and (though I'm not an aeronautical engineer) it seems really strange to me that they think launching and bringing down, not one, but 3 different parts of a space vehicle safely and exactly where they want it... Sounds far fetched to me.

Virgin Galactic seems to have a much better design and plan - plus, they actually have a working spacecraft, spaceport, and they're selling tickets for the first flights in 2013 right now. SpaceX is a CG animation of a rehashed 30-year old design. Wanna know who my money's on?
I think Urchin was under $100/mo at Rackspace, but I also think Rackspace had some sweetheart deal since they invested a ton of money at a critical juncture. We used to install it an awful lot, so it couldn't have been that expensive.
Why can't I just click 1 button and start bloggin?
famous 5-minute installation did not work. so, why can't I just click 1 button and start bloggin?hackers, what about it ?
Well, the space shuttle's booster rockets were similarly reusable, don't see why this couldn't work in theory, except for the no parachutes trick. It's probably to make the video more dramatic.

I wonder what kind of maintenance cost those boosters had. They didn't have the same needs as the shuttle, it wasn't catastrophic if they broke on re-entry, but one did blow up during launch. It's probably important that the crew re-entry vehicle is small and so is easier to maintain than the shuttle was.
I am continuously amused by people vehemently arguing about topics they have almost no expertise in and thinking whatever insane batshit theory they have is better than a PhD doctorate's advice.
Guys, share the link to the web app, please :)
By the definition given in the article (just solve the user's problem, don't build a tower of abstractions): Forth.
Thank you for pointing out the elephant.
> With all due respect raising taxes that high is a straw man.

How high? And how is it a straw man? A straw man is a false argument that someone uses to make another person's position seem weak in a debate. I don't see that happening here. (Except maybe in your post. You're making it seem like the person you're responding to is in favor of doubling or tripling the tax rate or something, when in reality he probably supports a moderate increase.)

> That's why per capita tax receipts have stayed fairly consistent over time . . .

Your link shows the opposite. Per capita tax receipts have grown 250% over the last sixty years according to that chart.

> I don't think we can raise taxes to the point where it would get us out of this mess

How high do you think that is? Right now receipts are well south of 20% of GDP. Currently revenue would have to be doubled, but outlays typically increase and revenues decrease during a recession. If you look at the non-recession tax rates that would be needed to close that gap in, e.g., the Bush years, it would have only taken a 5-10% increase, which hardly seems as outrageous as you're making it out to be.
I like you too, and I agree that what happened looks unfortunate and is not Josh's fault.
Google Analytics In Real Time, The End of Clicky and Woopra?
How is carrying all that fuel used in landing up to space more efficient than, say, a parachute?

I'm assuming someone at Space X did at least some back of the napkin math, but color me skeptical.
The scariest part of all this, is that for the first time in the past century, we no longer have any options. Less regulation, more regulation, centralization, de-centralization, it's all been tried. We're out of options, and the policy makers and central bankers have clued in (Bernanke's recent speeches have been dreadful to listen to).

Maybe, just maybe, things are going to go really, really badly this time around. Maybe.
I dont care who is #1 or #2 as long as it isn't IE and IE just goes away completely. I work in a real estate industry and it seems like so many of our customers are still using IE7 and have no clue how to work a computer which just makes it even more frustrating.
Notify.me closing shop - Oct 4th
People only like JavaScript because they know it. Yes, it's more productive than Java because it's (barely) functional, but I personally believe the renewed love for JavaScript is mostly Stockholm Syndrome.
Just as an alternative point of view, I thought it was quite clear and concise, and made its point strongly. More so than a typical long-prose essay may have done.

It would probably be more readable with the ALL CAPS, but then it would lose its humor.
Holy shit, it isn't just me! I've been muttering for years to coworkers, colleagues and random acquaintances that elegance cannot be obtained by adding an additional layer of complexity, yet modern developers seem absolutely enamored of the kind of vile unnecessary complexity that comes with layered abstractions.
There's some good stuff here, but a lot of the psychology is ill-founded. Flow, for example, is probably the most effective form of practice, and play often creates flow. Jamis recommends practicing constantly, but it's extremely well established that spacing your practice out gives you more bang for the buck, more improvement per hour of practice. (This is called "massed practice vs. spaced practice", and it's been known since before the dawn of cognitive psychology.)

(There's some pretty good evidence that you can fill the spaces in between your practice sessions by practicing something else — without losing the benefit of spacing.)

The maze generation algorithms, though, are awesome.

My favorite is still this one by Joe Allen:

/* jallen@ic.sunysb.edu */ /* Amazing */ /* Joe Allen 129.49.12.74 */
int a[1817];main(z,p,q,r){for(p=80;q+p-80;p-=2*a[p])for(z=9;z--;)q=3&(r=time(0)
+r*57)/7,q=q?q-1?q-2?1-p%79?-1:0:p%79-77?1:0:p<1659?79:0:p>158?-79:0,q?!a[p+q*2
]?a[p+=a[p+=q]=q]=q:0:0;for(;q++-1817;)printf(q%79?"%c":"%c\n"," #"[!a[q-1]]);}
Googler Builds Site That Shows You What Top Tech Companies Pay
I have been using notify.me for year, it notifies me new hackernews items, what a pity to say farewell to it...
I am struggling to think of a single piece of software that I interact with in my day-to-day life that brings me pleasure. I suppose Emacs comes closest, but it's a hideous pile of hacks and YHWH help you if you want to get into the internals to start paying back the massive amount of technical debt.

tsort. There we go. I don't hate tsort. pbcopy and pbpaste.
Seeing that you are being left behind is a great motivator. The USA went to the moon to make sure that Russia would not get there first.
Autonomy's Secrets Revealed
I added checkout command last night. I also prefer to jump on console to do my git commands, but it's really nice that you can use Sublime's quick menu to quickly see the diff or checkout changes you've done. Well done David.
It's not as black and white (ex suffering or no suffering).

It's possible there will be much more suffering as a consequence for not acting now - by letting the core problem persist.

It could have major implications that last for decades versus a few years of hardship.

Most complex problems can't be fixed from constantly patching the top surface. They need to be broken down and rebuilt into something better.
No problem. Not sure of all the highest traffic airports to/from the US but if you download the latest PDF from Infraero (http://www.infraero.gov.br/index.php/br/estatistica-dos-aero...) you can see which BR airports have the highest traffic internationally and therefore deduce that they probably offer flights to the US...or at least cross-check them.
I know a company that did a consulting software project for Google. The team is using Oracle (it has something to do with their Google search in the box purchasing order or some sort).

I saw an opening in Facebook website looking for someone with Oracle skill (specifically Oracle).

http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/08/tim-campos-dreamforce-comm...
And also note that inflation is next to non existent right now. A few years of 3% inflation would do more to fix the housing market than all government assistance put together at this point in time.

PS: I still think we should cut government spending by around 30% AND remove the home mortgage tax deduction but both of those need to be slow changes or they are going to cause a great deal of harm.
On one hand, I agree with him. The software ecosystems we work in have a whole lot of needless and incidental complexity. I could go on and on about the insanely and overly complicated things that developers -- especially ones like Ryan Dahl -- have to deal with all the time.

On the other hand, it's arrogant for one to think that he or she could do it that much better than the next guy. Writing efficient, maintainable, and "simple" software requires adding layers of indirection and complexity. You have to use your best judgment to ask whether the new layer you're adding will make things ultimately cleaner and simpler for future generations of programmers, or will hang like a millstone around their necks for years to come.

Let's try a little thought experiment: go back a few decades to the early 80s. Propose to build node.js as a tool to make it much easier for developers to write real-time network applications. You'll need to design a prototype-based dynamic language, itself an extremely difficult (and dare I say complicated) task. The implementation will need a garbage-collector, a delicate, complicated, and cumbersome piece of code to write. To make it acceptably fast, you'll need to write a JIT, which traces and profiles running code, then hot-swaps out JITted routines without missing a beat. You'll need to write a library which abstracts away event-based IO, like the "libev" node.js uses. That will require kernel support.

Frankly, even forgetting about relative CPU power at the time, I think you'd be laughed out of the room for proposing this. All of these things, for production systems, were extremely speculative, "complicated" things at the time they were introduced. People can't predict the future, and they obviously have difficulty predicting what tools will become useful and simple, and which will become crufty tarpits of painful dependencies and incidental complexity. No one in 1988 could say "a dynamic, prototype-based, garbage-collected language paired with a simple event model will allow developers to create simple real-time network applications easily in 2011". Many of them probably had high hopes that C++ templates would deliver on the same vision by then. But, instead, we have Boost.

Further, it's extremely arrogant of Dahl to create a dichotomy between those who "just don't yet understand how utterly fucked the whole thing is" and those, like him, with the self-proclaimed power of clear vision to see what will help us tame and conquer this complexity. Who knows, maybe in 15 years we'll be saddled with tons of crufty, callback-soup, unreliable node.js applications we'll all have to maintain. I don't think James Gosling envisioned the mess that "enterprise Java" became when he designed the initial simple language. Most developers do many of the things he cites, like adding "unnecessary" hierarchies to their project, because they believe it will help them in conquering complexity, and leave something simple and powerful for others to use down the line.
And there have been dozens of cases of wild polio in China and the Philippines this year, and a current outbreak of 84 cases in Pakistan, according to the WHO. http://www.who.int/csr/don/en/index.html
I imagine it feels different dealing with Google when you're paying them six figures or more.
Does Stripe let us take our data with us if we want to leave for another processor? If I build a recurring revenue business on Stripe, am I screwed if they hike up their fees by not being able to move the credit card #'s elsewhere?
You're not kidding. I used an old PC power supply bolted to the underside of my lab bench with a set of banana jacks on a panel facing the front for years.

Then I spent a whopping $200 on a real lab power supply with adjustable current limiting and variable 0-30 volts and I've been using it for the last 15 years. Sure is nice to be able to set a comfortable 50mA when bringing up new hardware knowing that you can't blow anything up! That alone is worth the price.

It's a nice project, but $45 for something you could build from $10 in parts in literally less than 10 minutes? Really?
This may be the right place to say it:
PHP... i love you!
When to invoice for web development projects?
That would break the biggest advantage of PHP (which granted, is already fading), which is the ability to immediately and effortlessly deploy scripts to basically any web host in the universe.
When it comes to economics, you can find a set of PhDs to support whatever wild theory you happen to fancy.
>But say you have a untrustworthy employees (it happens),

Well that's still a PCI requirement, but many more of their requirements wouldn't apply (i.e. rendering stored PAN unreadable, etc).

When in doubt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpfCr4By71U
I wonder if JavaScript is mainly loved for its frameworks and libraries? Without jQuery, node.js, etc., how many people would be singing its praise?
http://easyoradba.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/apples-oracle-dat...

Check my above reply for Google.
Too true.
It sometimes feels like programming is about trying to glue a bunch of hacks together creating yet another hack. Then someone standardises said conglomeration of hacks. Repeat.
jfruh, I disagree with you there. By setting the goal of reusable and reliable he could change the cost structure in a way that would make a fundamental improvement in financing of space missions.

The rest of the video make no sense with rockets helping for reentry. Why not just use pilot guided shoots?
How can I show my photos to other friends? I don't see any public url
Ubiquity Illusions and the Chicken-Egg Problem
"That could change if Congress came to its senses, passed Barack Obama’s jobs plan"

The jobs plan doesn't even have enough Democratic support to pass the Senate, so the likelihood of it making it through both houses is nil. It's more of a political plan than an economic one.

I also think that we have limited capability to make expedient investments in infrastructure with a positive ROI. Take a look at the Columbia River Crossing project between Oregon and Washington states - six years after project inception, the final environmental impact study still hasn't been released. Construction would start in 2013 at the earliest and is estimated to take 5-7 years. Time lines like that are common with large infrastructure projects in the US.
For what it's worth, you're 100% spot-on correct.

Don't feel bad that no one else believes it, heh. Throughout history, the world has been literally insane -- this is just another example of an insane view that's spread into popular culture. ("The system is too big to fail" / "Postponing the disaster is better, because the pain will be distributed over a longer period, rather than shocking us all at once" / whatever other crazy, impossible thing.)
Are you legally allowed to even do that? Do you store card data yourself?
Twitter-Mining Captures Global Mood Patterns
Yup, we do. Checkout my other answers in these comments.
> How high? And how is it a straw man? A straw man is a false argument that someone uses to make another person's position seem weak in a debate. I don't see that happening here.

I suspect it's around where they were during the Clinton presidency. But I honestly don't know. And if we were making policy rationally instead of trying to demonize one side or the other what we'd be doing is trying to find that out.

As for the term Straw Man what you're saying when you says "raise taxes" is "The answer is simple". You're giving the impression that the other person just doesn't want to look at the obvious answer. My point was the tax argument is false (because we can't realistically raise taxes that high) and hence the argument that our debt is a serious problem is not a weak one.

> Your link shows the opposite. Per capita tax receipts have grown 250% over the last sixty years according to that chart.

Consistent is relative I'll grant you that. But the point is when the top tax rate was around 90% tax receipts were lower. So in comparison to our wildly fluctuating tax policy the receipts have been relatively consistent.

> How high do you think that is? Right now receipts are well south of 20% of GDP. Currently revenue would have to be doubled, but outlays typically increase and revenues decrease during a recession. If you look at the non-recession tax rates that would be needed to close that gap in, e.g., the Bush years, it would have only taken a 5-10% increase, which hardly seems as outrageous as you're making it out to be

Right now you're just making up numbers so I can't really debate your point. 5-10% of what? Income tax? Capital Gains? If you combine National + Average State debt for each American the number comes out to around $150,000 per tax payer with interest. That is not something that is going to be solved with a 5-10% increase on anyone.
PHP encryption for the common man
Rumored cost of this video is over 1 million dollars.
Unfortunate music choices aside, the video was well done and clearly demonstrated the concept without narration or text.
A reusable rocket concept with some magically fuel supply that seems to defy physics ;)
> ... emerging countries like Hong Kong...

Erm... I'd like to see your definition of "emerging country" because it seems completely different to the accepted definition for either of those words
That's exactly the distinction being made. Italy's debt is highish but manageable; it budget deficit is small. If it can borrow at reasonable rates for the next few years, it's not in danger of default. That's illiquidity. Compare to Greece, which, even if it could get loans at low interest, is never going to be able to repay what it already owes. That's insolvent.
What a pathetic rant. I was totally not surprised that day #1 of a total codebase rewrite would not have all the features of the old version. AVOS hinted enough at this too. At least they are innovating and responding to users. Having said that, I do hope 'networks' returns since that's the feature I miss, so far.
> I really, really want to know how you just 'reboot' the financial system without massive disruption to retail banking or the payments system.

There will be massive disruption in any case. It can come in the format of recapitalization (Iceland) or inflation due to inflating their insolvency away (Latin America).

> How do you 're'capitalize a new bank?

OP meant recapitalize the failed banks. Short version:

1. Fire the board of directors.

2. Fire the management. (The question here is how many levels: At least the C-level execs, but probably another level below that.)

The above people have FUBAR'd the bank in the first place. Leaving them in place and expecting a different result is insanity.

3. Wipe out the shareholders.

4. Haircut the bondholders. Subordinated debt is probably 100% wiped out, preferred is probably 50%.

5. Inject treasury capital, and subordinate the formerly preferred. Nobody gets ahead of the treasury.

Total time is probably 1 week for the BoA sized guys. Declare a bank holiday if you wish, like 1933. Guys smaller than BoA are a weekend, as evidenced by FDIC takeovers.

6. Prepare for steps 1-5 for all the idiots that depended on the bonds from this bank as Tier 1 capital because they thought this bank was too big to fail. The system will be better without those idiots too.
Can you make a power supply recommendation for the casual hobbyist?

Edit: I mean a variable voltage variable current bench/lab power supply.
Raising taxes does work since the tax level in this country is quite low. It has a long way to go to catch up to France, Germany, etc. If raising taxes to the level of Germany would cause such a massive outflow of capital (which could be taxed at the exit point) then why does Germany have so much capital? Wouldn't the same thing happen to Germany?

The current tax burden as a percent of GDP in the U.S. is low by U.S. standards of the last 50 years and quite low relative to other industrialized nations.

The so called fiscal problem we have is easily fixable. Raising taxes is a viable strategy.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/07/tax-burdens-around...
Rich Hickey really nailed the definitions of "complex" and "easy" and "simple" so well in his Strange Loop talk this year. Too bad there's only notes available right now: http://blog.markwshead.com/1069/simple-made-easy-rich-hickey...
When it comes to spacecraft Fuel is cheap manpower is expensive.

The Americans built the first ever reusable spacecraft but they never really stuck with one design. Just about every shuttle was slightly different which resulted in slightly improved performance, reduced safety, and dramatically increased costs. They then kept using them well past the designed lifetime which once again radically increased the costs. All while flying them a minimum number of times each year.
FYI, in 1988, Self (a dynamic, prototype-based, garbage-collected language that had a JIT) existed.
I'm not sure how it handled concurrency, though.
Stripe looks great and is definitely at the top of my list. Does anyone know what name shows up on the customers statement? Is it customizable to something that includes your company nane (e.g. Stripeyour_name_here)?
Stripe looks great and is definitely at the top of my list. Does anyone know what name shows up on the customers statement? Is it customizable to something that includes your company name (e.g. Stripeyour_name_here)?
Wrong; TTF (and most other vector typeface formats) support "hinting," which provides metrics to handle glyph appearances at small sizes on low resolution displays.

The problem, however, is that hinting fonts takes extra work many designers don't bother with, and even if they did, rendering engines may ignore them due to a nasty thicket of patents related to font hinting. (Though I've read that the main ones have expired recently.)
I disagree.

The fee structure for "credit" purchases is different than that for "debit" purchases. It's in the interest of VISA to have me run the transaction as "credit". Would it surprise you if there was cooperation between BoA and VISA (or any other CC provider) to encourage the use of this? The $5/mo charge just encourages it even further.
Here are some charts. I don't know how to make links in a comment.

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/07/tax-burdens-around...
You know SpaceX has successfully launched and recovered space vehicles right? In fact they were the first private firm to launch and recover an orbital spacecraft.

I'm a big fan of Virgin Galatic, but their design so far is for suborbital tourist visits.
I believe since Java 6 (possibly 5), the JDK has come bundled with a minimal installation of Rhino which runs JS on the JVM. How many people actively use that? It's not hard to get going, 5 or less lines of code to start running a JS file and it will run everywhere with JRE >6.

But there's no jQuery, etc. It's a somewhat nicer way to work with Java since you aren't forced into I-don't-care-about-it-exception-catching hell and Map<Map<Map<...>>> madness, but compared to Jython or Clojure it doesn't match up. You can get a headless jQuery working with Rhino, though it's not as simple as it should be.