skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What do you do with the money that comes out of people's paychecks for Social Security? Now, a lot of that money gets invested in –- you guessed it — Treasury bonds. If there are no Treasury bonds, what do you invest it in? Stocks?"

So why couldn't we buy other sovereign debt --obviously stable/safe. It's not as though we're the only ones with debt or safe debt. I don't imagine Germany or Japan or France defaulting.
Startup weekend encourages new ideas, this focuses more on projects that you had started at some point in time and had just abandoned.
Well, PHP was certainly a frustrating choice.
There is an example on the home page.
His cute answer is safer than mine, which is "I rob banks."

You need to internalize something about marketing. When Patrick says, "I helped 2 million kids learn how to read", he has framed the conversation in terms of the value proposition he wants to talk about.

Statistically speaking, "nobody" cares about websites and iPhone applications. Moreover, virtually nobody --- even practitioners --- can tell the difference between someone who is good at building a website and someone who is working from a copy of "learn PHP in 3 hours". Saying what you "do" is a remarkably bad strategy.

If the thought of explaining the broad value you choose to provide to people produces cold sweats, my recommendation is "practice more".
Just because he is a human doesn't mean that it's not a stupid decision, it will always be a stupid decision nothing will change that.
It doesn't speak very well of the credibility of the investors who wrote the post to say they'll pay for something without any apparent knowledge of existing solutions, nor any critiques of why they're deficient. It's like saying, "someone should invent a good car."
guess what, country is no private citizen. it isn't even a family or a company, so pictures like this are deeply flawed:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/318450_...
HP and Oracle Hope to Make Sense of Big Data
> Seriously though, limiting it to STEM majors would goose academia in the right direction.

What is this supposed to mean?!

If you don't know, humanities programs are being badly squeezed already. Some programs are being cut entirely. I have a friend who is earning her Ph.D. in comp lit, and she (with all of her colleagues) are seriously scared that her field will no longer exist in 20 years.

And all this, despite the fact that undergraduate courses in the humanities are, according to my friend, as popular as ever.
you die.

the government lives forever.
Cool! Maybe we can get something like this is Austin. Love the idea of focusing on launching and getting it out there. Too many of my projects die in my head and half way through.
> $750 a year to cover your end of basic coverage

That might as well be free.

I pay almost $7,000/year in California for good (by US standards) medical coverage. That includes some prescription coverage, but not vision or dental. I'm in a low-risk age group, I'll let you guess what my premiums would look like if I were, say, 50. :)
Paypal with IPN integration.
And if Jobs cured his cancer they would be saying how much of a smart man he was to try this alternative cure.

It's easy to pretent you have 20/20 hindsight on other peoples lives.
Great idea. Wish I was still in Ann Arbor.
going to the linked pages, I find this part a little more interesting (National average wage index):

2006	38,651.41
2007	40,405.48
2008	41,334.97
2009	40,711.61
2010	41,673.83
It should be pointed out that Bell's inequalities only rule out the existence of classical hidden variables being able to explain quantum effects, which if one understands the history behind the question makes sense. Technically it doesn't (and can't) rule out hidden variables that are "quantum" in nature (if you'll permit me the shorthand), but from our perspective those are the very definition of a needlessly multiplied entity in the Occam's Razor sense. Nevertheless, that simply means they aren't useful to us, not that they don't exist. It is certainly possible to imagine that we exist in a simulation in which the simulation is "quantum", but whenever a random number is needed, a psuedorandom and deterministic source is used instead. We'd never be able to tell from the inside, unless there was something very, very broken about the psuedorandom number generator, which given that we are talking about something with the capacity of simulating our entire universe seems unlikely (unless intentional).

Basically, our universe could be deterministic from the outside while being nondeterministic on the inside, in the sense that those of us on the inside will never be able to collect enough information to predict our own universe's evolution from the inside. (In other news, I'm in the camp that considers "randomness" and "lack of knowledge" to be two phrasings of the same thing, so it's sensible to talk about things being deterministic(/"not random") from one viewpoint but nondeterministic from another.)

This is just FYI since it's relevant, not disagreement.
Encrypting Amazon Storage: Not So Simple
And if all of us stopped using credit cards, the credit industry would fail to catastrophic effect. Support your credit card company by going into massive debt. It's for the economy.
A product is never finished, only shipped.

It should be called Ship Weekend
HDMI can't drive 2560x1600. Mini DisplayPort can.

+1 Macbook Air...
Backbeat Tickets
Backbeat is a musical of the story before the Beatles began.
I think part of it is that you have a higher reimplementation rate for your code in languages like Clojure. If something takes you 3 hours in Java and you find its a crap design, you might take 15-30 minutes to figure that out in Clojure.

It has the side-effect of teaching you to think through your ideas more (wait, I thought we were supposed to avoid side effects! ;) )
Many non-crazies also advocate abolishing the Fed. One of them is running for President.
Well, this is yet more evidence, as if anyone needed it, that budgeting for a sovereign nation -- particularly one whose economy the world revolves around -- is qualitatively different from budgeting for a household.
Foundation website is buggy when I try to resize my browser. Also, the reference http://dynamo.dictionary.com/ is very buggy :/
> "The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment."

There was no such claim. From the beginning, they were asking for explanations of the error in their measurements. They never claimed that what they measured was actually correct.
To me, Clojure is about as productive as banging out a script in Ruby. It's way more productive than writing the same thing in any language where I can't (easily, or at all) just fire up a REPL and start hacking.

I can actually just crank out code that I use. It can be quick and messy. Clojure is not concerned with type theory and provable correctness.

But the end result of a quick hack, in Clojure, is often something (or is made of of parts) that can be applied to other problems by pulling it out into a library, or by abstracting one more argument to a function, etc..

I think someone like Gabriel Weinberg could get along just fine in Clojure, with much the same spirit as hacking Perl, but maybe with better results.
I think reviewers should disclose when they get a free product, much like I think people should separate their recycling. But if I catch my neighbor throwing cans out in the regular trash, I don't also accuse him of dumping toxic waste into nearby bodies of fresh water.
Well, the word secret has multiple meanings. I think it's fair to call this a secret memo, in a fairly broad sense of secret. But I agree that it's misleading, since secret has an additional sense specific to government documents.
Maybe, but I enjoyed reading all of Steve Yegge's rant. It was informative and funny. And I don't even work for google. And it wasn't really even 10 pages long. The criticism of its length is fatuous and flippant, and not substantive.
To The Edge And Back Again: Dreaming The Future
First was a French / NATO air strike, then rebels finished the job.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-20/french-air-power-be...
Baby Products, Baby Care Products, Baby Products Online
A2zbaby.com promises to provide you with world class baby products at your doorsteps. Shopping for your baby is a tussle between finding the best products at the best prices. We always believe that no one can take care of our babies like we do.
> Also I was shocked to see that "The 1%" included essentially anyone making over $100K.

It looks like it's anyone making over $200k not $100k if I'm reading it correctly.
This is one of those charts that is great for grant writing (if you get your local area data) or making a point in an article, but doesn't really tell you the whole story. It doesn't list all the income and really doesn't give you a real picture based on family make-up. Don't get me wrong, its useful data, but it can be used in a very poor manner.
seriously? even if those personal electronics are priced at a hefty premium over their counterparts?
The signup button gives it away...
Don't feel bad for us, there are lots of places where things are worse. Australia, for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

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

Adjusting for PPP, your $16 USD is only about $11.40. Australia is considerably more expensive than the US.
This sort of makes no sense. The Province of Alberta (in Canada) balanced their budget, then paid off all debt in the early 2000s.

They still had the ability to issue debt (and did) because it was the belief that they were a good credit risk that was the reason behind the AAA rating.
It seems like they just reimplemented a custom HAML subset.
What I like most about this is that it is a non-trivial, non-toy example of using Redis effectively. Thanks antirez!!
I think the point is that less ceremony makes it feel like less progress is being made, but actually it's equivalent. Information density is much higher compared to java, but the programmer is still rate-limited himself, so his brain will work at the same rate. The benefit would show up in time spent reading and in higher signal/noise as you don't have to spend brain cycles dismissing boilerplate. It's not as big a boost as say garbage collection vs no garbage collection, but still notable. I think clojure's immutability story reduces cognitive load quite a bit on its own. Also, I don't think clojure has the craziness of perl, but I've never used perl. It's pretty easy to read, IMO.
The ordasity of your leftist signature, sir.
Ahh, remember the good old times under Clinton when we were actually paying off the debt. What happened then? They mocked Al Gore for his plans to pay off the debt (remember all the "lockbox" stuff) and then we got a president that promised tax cuts and drastically increased federal spending, and added a couple of wars just for fun. Now there is absolutely no danger of paying off the debt.

By the way that report is absolutely wrong. Nothing terrible would happen if we paid off the debt. So there wouldn't be federal treasuries. BFD. Just set the risk free return to zero and you can use all of your old formulas. Yes several bank departments would not be able to make money for absolutely zero risk as they do now. Oh well, I suppose the banks would have to do what they are supposed to do, i.e., calculate risk properly.

But of course it is all academic now. Because it is unlikely to ever happen. Paying off the debt means doing something to help the future generations of Americans and it is doubtful any president would do such a thing, and if he did he would probably have to face a lot of angry voters who do not give a shit about the future generations as happened with Al Gore.
Good complement to Chosen, which gives you improved <select> elements.
http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/
"What do you do with the money that comes out of people's paychecks for Social Security? Now, a lot of that money gets invested in –- you guessed it — Treasury bonds. If there are no Treasury bonds, what do you invest it in? Stocks?"

Perhaps this is a ridiculous question, I admit I haven't taken a lot of econ. But couldn't they just take the money that comes out of people's paychecks and, you know, keep it? I know that treasury bonds have a very slight overall interest rate, but that interest is paid by tax payers anyway, so if I'm not mistaken it's a net gain of zero.
> In almost all the major centers the death rate from this surgery is now less than 5%.

That implies the worst major centers have a maximum of 5% death rate. Steve Jobs would certainly go to one of the best hospitals, which I assume would have a much lower rate.
Yep - with the possible exception of exact ZIP boundaries, it should all be on the download server:
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/

Grab the US.zip file and the English-language feature codes, filter down the data to the stuff you're interested in, and you're good to go.
> seriously? even if those personal electronics are priced at a hefty premium over their counterparts?

Which has ceased to be the case for Apple products for quite a while now.
There are thousands of reasons to love or hate android. One thing i like is the development going on in Cyanogenmod and MIUI Android. It's relevant to me.

Those things wont help android 'win' against the iphone, but it will be relevant in other markets, like the MIUI phone, wasnt that around 200$?
I think it's pretty clear at this point that running for President does not constitute evidence that you aren't one of the crazies.
Wedding Business 3 Tips For Outsourcing, Streamlining, and Delegating
Sounded like a great replacement for my X201, until I saw that there's no TrackPoint. Disappointing. After some reading, it sounds like they're only included on the ThinkPad series. I've been quite dependent on the precision, and don't bother with a mouse or touchpad anymore.
A lot of what people consider "talent" is arguably due to the right upbringing and social connections.
The example (and code) are below the fold on a 1440 laptop. I didn't even realize they were there.

That is absolutely the most important thing for a library. First page, right after the name. A functional example of what it does.

That huge logo on the homepage is pointless. Replace it with a nice lickable demo (you can move the logo to the header or something), and the page will be twice as effective.

Just my .02.

Once I got to look at the actual example, it looks good :).
I wonder about it, too, but this gives me hope:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019052
ahhh I've never seen that, so true!
Have you ever heard the theory that a little debt is a good thing?

With businesses, investing borrowed money can help the company grow, and give returns greater than the interest on the debt.

With countries, the theory goes, a little debt means other countries have a vested interest in your success or failure. For example, why hasn't China invaded the USA yet? Perhaps they are waiting until they get their ~$4T back! :)
The tax rates vary from 10% up to 35%, as you go up the income scale [2]. So, there are your progressive taxes.

Income taxes vary from 10-35%. Payroll taxes vary from ~14% down to infinitesimal as you go up the income scale, they are not progressive, and for the people at the bottom end of that 'progressive' scale, they tend to cost more than income taxes.

It's frustrating that I even have to make this point. Everybody knows about this, and yet when these discussions happen, it's like payroll taxes don't exist, or don't count, or somehow or another are not part of the debate. For that matter, neither are capital gains.
I see this mostly in Java. Outside, you can deal with simple dsls (it "should something") and simple functions (equal x, y).

But yeah, on Java and C# land, the complexities of the type system and the class based OO complect the testing, yielding this big complex testing system (which are large enough to be called testing frameworks).
God forbid nobody could get rich simply by having a lot of money. If that were the case, people might have to actually provide society with a valuable product or service to earn a living!
No, Kurzweil was not equating the "Law of Accelerating Returns" to a physical law of the universe. Instead, he was comparing it, albeit clumsily, to laws that govern aggregate behavior, like the second law of thermodynamics. There are lot of things that we colloquially call "laws" that clearly don't have the same footing as laws in physics, "Moore's Law" being one of them.
There's a difference between consumption and conspicuous consumption.
Just look at this. He keeps rolling out what is usually hard earned wisdom gained over years of time of experience while constantly striving to improve yourself and any software you work on.

Do yourself a favor and take the shortcut of listening to this talk..not to say he may not join a cult religion at some future point in time and come out with crazy crackpot ideas then but everything I've seen and read so far are things that all senior+ quality engineers should find some common agreement with.
To be fair I agree with the notion of publisher driven publicity. Perhaps he's obligated.

I suppose my real problem is that the contents of the book are being pieced out to the media before it is available. From my past reading about Jobs this kind of frenzy wouldn't seem to suit his tastes, and you can be damn sure he'd be pissed about information leaking prior to release. I stand by the "bad taste" statement as there is strong evidence that the subject of Isaacson's work wouldn't appreciate what he's doing.
Be the Marco Polo of Email Data with the "Explore" Console Tab - Context.IO
Rich Hickey's "Hammock-driven development" keynote seems applicable here:

http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586
Sure.

But if someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else. Money is, after all, a medium of exchange, and if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society... barely enough value to account for the baseline amount of wealth (food etc) which every one of us destroys each year just in order to stay alive.

People who only make $26K a year need to take a good hard look at themselves and say "How can I make the value of my labour higher, so that I'm contributing more than a minimal amount to society?" If they'd start thinking about the problem in the right way, they might be able to solve it.
>The basic premise of this article is suspect. The US would still issue enough T-Bills to provide stability even in a zero-debt scenario... it would simply buy other safe, long-term assets to hold.

The US has no reason to issue T-Bills in a zero-debt scenario, through. The only reason that the US government has to sell bonds like T-Bills is to make up for the difference between income(taxes and fees) and costs. If the budget is completely balanced, there is no reason for the government to sell off bonds of any form, since they would need to pay them off with interest at a later date.
I fully agree with your estimates, and would just like to point out more precisely where people (especially biologists) tend to misinterpret this argument.

The strawman argument that people tend to hate is this: the brain is encoded in 25M of DNA, so it would only take 25M to build a physical brain. To be clear: we're not arguing that.

Then they go on about how complex the process of creating a physical brain from a string of DNA is, how there's so much information that we'd need about the chemical reactions, that because the building-up is so complicated we couldn't do it with computers 100 years from now even if Moore's law held up, etc. And I agree with all of that, but it's not what that 25M figure refers to.

What we're saying when we give that number is that an algorithm that does more or less what the brain can do can be coded in less than 25M. It won't implement its physical structure exactly, but some algorithm that comes in under the 25M limit in almost any suitably strong programming language is all but guaranteed to qualify as "intelligence". Whether we can find it or not is another matter; all we're saying is that it's there (and I'd go further, and say that many such algorithms exist in the <25M algorithm-space, because if they weren't relatively easy to find, evolution never would have figured them out).

That the particular genotype->phenotype->algorithm encoding that creates the brain's algorithm is hideously complex doesn't change the information theoretic content, it loosely corresponds to inserting a massively complex general-purpose compiler in front of a Turing-complete language, which doesn't change the compressibility of the code one bit. Unless the compiler is specifically built to compress a certain type of algorithm very well, the compressed information density will not change significantly for any program of sufficient complexity (this is provable mathematically if you properly define the various conditions). In fact, there's a very good chance that the genotype->phenotype->algorithm mapping that results in human intelligence uses a less efficient coding of the algorithm than we could achieve via a modern expressive programming language, because the brain's physical implementation severely limits the expressivity of algorithms that can be baked into it.
Take a close look at the graph. The debt starts going down for 3 years (at the peak of the market) and they make the assumption that that's going to keep happening for the next 14 years? Yay for gov't estimates.

Second, I think the fact that the market crashed in 2000 might have a little something to do with gov't deficits as well.
ok well i cant it says account creation closed
You Are Not Your Name and Photo: A Call to Re-Imagine Identity
Minor correction, Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 by the Graham-Leech-Bliley Act. (It was originally signed into law in 1933, which might be where your 3 is coming from...).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act

But otherwise, yes Clinton signed it ostensibly for the reasons you mention (needed Wall St. campaign funds for Dems), but it was led by Sen. Phil Graham, poster boy for the revolving-door between Wall St. & Washington (and now on the board of UBS).
Total US debt (in dollars, not as a fraction of GDP, which is a horrible measure) increased every year through Clinton (and basically everyone else in modern history).
The money supply, ie. the amount of money in existence, fluctuates. Obviously, paper money is only a small fraction of the total amount of money "stored" in checking acccounts, etc. Money is created through debt. If nobody is in debt, the amount of money in circulation is much lower otherwise.

Does anyone know how much of the money supply is government debt?

I always get dizzy when I try to understand the monetary system. It seems insane. It really shouldn't work at all.

If you want to get a headache, too, try reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking or watching Money as Debt.
US Dollars = US Treasury Bonds.

they are freely interchangeable!

money IS debt!
Stop Arborcide, get Personalized video invitations
> The Federal Reserve — our central bank — buys and sells Treasury bonds all the time, in an effort to keep the economy on track.

And how's that working out? This is all FUD, FUD, FUD..
All I need is a mapping from county to cities, which is missing in this data too
Your math is suspect even here in Canada. First, for nonexempt employees (hourly), anything over 40 hours is considered overtime (1.5 rate); there may be a second point where it's double-time, but I'm not sure. So employees who can work 54 hours a week (which is an unreasonable working time, IMO) 52 weeks a year (which is also unreasonable in a civilized society) and their employers give it to them, will make more than $28k (by about $70 / week).

The Federal Minimum Wage in the U.S. is $7.25.
Likewise :/