skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good book covering the subject is The History of Money (Jack Weatherford). Money was has had a tradition of being valuable in its own right (gold and silver coin), and eventually banks created paper money that represented an amount of gold held in reserve.

The Bank of England, was at first a private entity (established in 1688) and was only nationalized in 1946[1]. The notes they issued were backed by deposits of coin, gold, or silver. They broke with the gold standard in 1931, and it's then we see money tied not to a specific asset, but rather as a debt instrument; it's valuable only because someone promises to pay you back.

When the debtor is a nation-state, we have fiat money, and the money is backed only by the faith and credit of the nation who issues it.

As Weatherford's book points out, fiat currency was not invented by the British, as the Chinese were using a similar system in the 1st or 2nd century, and continued to use a paper money system until 1399. Abuses destroyed the value of the paper currency, and it did not reappear in China until the 20th century.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England
If you want to see how many watchers/forks a project has, it's easy enough to pull down the data yourself:

mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s https://github.com/mikecardwell/gpgit|grep -A 1 ' title="Watchers" '|tail -1
10
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s https://github.com/mikecardwell/gpgit|grep -A 1 ' title="Forks" '|tail -1
2
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$

Then you can use a locally hosted image and embed the counters in your own content. We're only talking a couple of lines of code here.
I choked up reading this. That kid is awesome and is going places.
As dextorious pointed out, there can be many ideas. You should focus on something where you have some domain knowledge. Said that, pricing may be a cool idea, I wrote a thesis on price differentials across countries, if you want to share that, let me know.

For me, I am starting with something really small, yet really difficult for me being a beginner: pivot tables on the top of a database. There are some reason I am doing it, but mainly it is because excel is really slow with what I call 'small data' and it also has strange row limits. Also, I want to provide an easy way to build pivot tables on the server side, so people don't have to send excel files around.

Project is here: https://github.com/kfk/proj00. It is really just a scratch.
I did what I always do when presented with a list like this - I checked out Visual Basic. The list makes no distinction between BASIC, Visual Basic and VB.NET. That killed any credibility the list might otherwise have had, and after realising that it appears to be more of a "what's hot, what's not" list, I stopped reading. It definitely does not do what the title suggests it does. No value.
The reason why Google is already facing mid-life crises is that the pace of innovation has sped up so much. It used to be that a company could build something like Google and sit on its laurels for 20 years. IBM was the undisputed king for at least 50 years, and Microsoft was king for about 20.

The problem is not other search engines, but disruptive innovation that makes search engines obsolete. And this disruptive innovation seems to decrease its cycle time by about 50% each generation. So after Google has been the leader for <10 years, they are already worried about something new coming along and knocking them off their perch. And I think that fear is justified.
Which is exactly what my keyword search does. For example, if I type 'w hacker news' into my location bar, I'm instantly redirected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news
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Unlocking a cell phone does not require experience or advanced technical knowledge and to complete the network unlocking process consumers only need a computer with a Microsoft Windows 7, XP, or Vista operating system, an Internet connection and a USB cable.
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> two of my last four jobs/internships have been in Clojure

Was this in SF?

I've always used Clojure in my spare time with hobby projects. But I didn't really see it as a professional option. I'm curious if thats changing now.
Overcoming Momentum
First Beer In Space HD..This is cool stuff
Based on what? Fischer Random is exactly like normal chess in complexity, and only cancels out the opening books.

Bughouse and crazyhouse are significantly more complex games (branching factor over 100 for Crazyhouse, even more for bughouse).
> Great, long-term companies aren't built by entrepreneurs who sleep 2 hours a night.

I'd add a qualifier to that. They aren't usually built by entrepreneurs who get very little sleep. They sometimes are, though, and sometimes it's because a person in good physical health has a very important task to complete in a short amount of time, like the example cited in the article of JWZ helping build a web browser.
> Work hard

Yes - a strong work ethic is needed to build a company. But hard work won't save a mediocre idea or flawed business model. Don't work hard, work smart - which means working long hours and pushing a deadline when needed. It also means being skeptical and ruthless with your business model, validating your ideas and pivoting when needed.

> Cry less

No. Cry more. Vent and complain. Give yourself emotional release. Your brain needs it. And how can you code optimally or run a company properly when your brain is working at partial capacity?

If you are smiling, happy and confident all the time when building a startup you are probably a deluded idiot. That being said - always exude confidence to your customers and strategic business partnerships. (insert witty remark here about sausage being made) However ALWAYS be brutally honest with yourself and your team. If you are honestly challenging and validating your idea and business model you will lose faith from time to time and may even slip into a funk. THIS IS NORMAL. If you're honest with your team they will find a way to help you through.

> And realize you’re part of history.

This is true in the sense that you are living and breathing and working during the early 21st century - you are a part of history (by this definition every dog is also a part a history, so don't get too excited). But it's highly unlikely that you will make history. Like most people (and most dogs) your startup will toil and die in obscurity. It's absurd to concern yourself with your legacy before you've built something of value. Build a great company and let history make up it's own mind.
It really bothers me when people

a) fail to see the "rants" in the byline of the article blog

b) fail to read the "Below are my views on what I believe are the 10 biggest challenges Google is facing" part on the article intro

c) confuse an blog post (and a fine one at that) with some research paper or encyclopedia article and ask for citations

d) cannot differentiate between (well presented) arguments (such as those in the article) and opinions.
Ask HN: Resume and NDA conflicts?
When writing a resume, how do you avoid conflicts with any past (or current) non-disclosure agreements you may have signed?

I'd like to describe the general fields that the products I developed were in - although not more than a few words of description.

Does that sound reasonable?
I think there is a valid argument that Bitcoin is an asset class, not a currency. As such, governments would have to make possession of BitCoin a crime. I would think any democratic state would find it very difficult to make possession of an asset illegal.

BTW, I don't find Krugman's arguments very compelling, in that they don't account for the nearly infinite divisibility of Bitcoin and unlike gold reserves, notes held against them cannot be fraudulently inflated.
The quality of posts that make it to #1 on ycombinator lately leave me unmotivated to check the site as frequently as I used to. As a result I work more, cry less and quit whining.
#Mustreadbook
Tweet your favorite book with the hashtag #mustreadbook.

We will all benefit from it.
I never take vacation between christmas and new years eve. Its usually a quiet week anyway and I get to watch all the c3 livestreams and enjoy some unwound coding. Especially the lightning talks had been very entertaining last year.
Get your levels measured and dose accordingly. Most people are deficient in a number of areas, and you can get screened for them all at once.

In the absence of that, if you're just making a qualified guess, you should probably dose significantly more than 1,000-2,000 IUs/day. The daily intake required for toxicity to be an issue are very high (sustained total intake of around 20,000 IUs/day). It's also generally recommended that D3 supplements are taken alongside a K2 supplement.
If you take supplements, make sure you take gelcaps and not dry tablets. Vitamin D is fat-soluble, so it is absorbed much better in gelcap format.

Personally, I take 6000 IU/day during winter and 4000 IU/day during summer (in Canada).
I don't think keiferski is talking about having to crunch for a few days, but about sleep deficiency as a lifestyle.

Mid and long-distance runners (or cyclist) don't sprint for kilometers, they sprint when they have to. And if you have to sprint all the time, something's wrong.
> Even if you compare Instagram photos to professional Adobe Lightroom plug-ins, Photoshop Actions, and all the tricks and desktop software that photographers use, Instagram photos have a decent quality. The Instagram images are certainly not comparable, in terms of quality or resolution, duh, but the images are at least interesting.

These two sentences are exactly contradictory. 1) “If you compare... Instagram photos have decent quality.” 2) “Instagram images are certainly not comparable in terms of quality”.

In any event, the second version is right. Instagram photos are cute gimmicks, and applying predetermined filters to snapshots can be fun, but the results are not remotely comparable in terms of “quality” to work by competent photo printers (whether in a darkroom or in Photoshop).
I agree with what you say about the effects of alcohol. However, with small amounts, a glass of wine for example, the positive effect of getting things done is way bigger than the negatives for most people. Procrastinating and putting things off for weeks like the author is far worse than little bit of insensitivity in a mail.

Of course it's better if you don't need any toxics to live your life happily.
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Ask HN: Why did github choose Rackspace over Amazon EC2?
I've read a ton of articles comparing Rackspace cloud and AWS, but I was wondering what github's reasons were to go with Rackspace.
One of these is comparing object qualities like resolution and effective dynamic range, the other is comparing subjective qualities like "how cool does this photo look".
It varies. Often times I find myself doing something completely unrelated and an idea will pop into my head. It has even happened while sleeping (I woke up with an idea just begging to be explored).

The only consistent thing I've noticed is that ideas come to me when I am struggling or unhappy. Those are the ideas of the 'this could be improved' variety.

If you aren't coming up even with those, well, you can get outside help for ideas. Try attending a startup weekend. Listen to other people's ideas. What do you like? What don't you like? Why? Could you do it better? Start asking yourself (or even others) questions about them and see where it takes you.
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> The problem is not other search engines, but disruptive innovation that makes search engines obsolete.

Can you elaborate on what these innovations are? I cannot think of any. Or are you talking about a theoretical future problem?
Ok, that sounds fair. Two hours is indeed not sustainable except in sprints. Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much more than that on a sustained basis.
I hate to ask an off-topic question here, but is it considered good/bad practice to word-wrap plain text emails?
At the other end of the choice, there's Cliff Young[0]

> In 1983, the 61-year-old potato farmer won the first Westfield Sydney to Melbourne Ultra Marathon (875 kilometres, 544 miles). The race was run between what were then Australia's two largest shopping centres: Westfield Parramatta, in Sydney, and Westfield Doncaster, in Melbourne. Cliff arrived at the start line with overalls and gumboots. He ran at a slow loping pace and trailed the leaders for most of the course, but by denying himself sleep and running while the others slept, he slowly gained on them and eventually won by a large margin.

> [...]

> The Westfield run took him five days, 15 hours and four minutes, trimming almost two days off the record for any previous run between Sydney and Melbourne. All of the six competitors who finished the race broke the previous record, but Young beat them by running while they were sleeping.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)#Westfield...
That's under the terribly flawed assumption that economic outcome is the only thing that matters. There are many other considerations that make a startup appealing (culture, for example).
No. You don't need to work harder. Work smarter. I was able to work for $15/hour two years ago. I did actually work for such rates, but I ended up increasing my productivity. Learning new tools, techniques, patterns, two monitors, better working conditions, reading blogs and books...

Now I work less and make more money. I'm still brushing my skills, and the more I do the more I realize that I can go further. Before you start a Start-up, make sure you have the necessary skills and that you have mastered them quite well.

Make a plan. Put 8-10/hours of work per day. Take at least 7 hours of sleep. Practice sport. Meet with your friends (but don't let them distract you). If you plan the time required for your startup to get up and running (coding, testing, papers, marketing, capital...), then you'll be able to work in healthy conditions and meet deadlines.

And doing that you'll be called a HARD WORKING person. Because no one else (or few) is doing it. If you are doing what the author suggests then you might possibly end up destroying your startup, health, relations and life.
Nice presentation with notes for people reading afterwards.

One thing I don't get is the font sizes. At one point, it says something like "notice we're using 24px to tie into the multiples-of-6 rule", but elsewhere recommends 16px as the main base size.
That’s not what the article says, but you might well be right; the author’s conception of photographic quality (sometimes “technical quality”) and articulation thereof are entirely incoherent. He shouldn’t attach 3 or 4 entirely unrelated meanings to one word, or should at least attempt to distinguish them somehow.

Anyhow, that one ambiguity is emblematic of a broader sloppiness at all levels in the writing of the post, which abounds with droopy clichés and empty puff. I wish the author and his editor had made a firmer commitment to prose quality.
From growing up in the Southeast, I think that's true to varying degrees all over that region. The culture tends toward complacency in its worldview.

One of the most difficult things to do is to suspend your own beliefs, dogmas, and preconceived notions about how the world is or should be, and completely immerse yourself in adapt to another culture, be that culture a foreign country, or just the other side of a big one like the US or Europe.

And that is particularly difficult for Americans who are taught from an early to 'express yourself', rather than to perceive the world or any given situation from the point of view of other people (as many foreign cultures, especially Asian ones, do). It's even more difficult for Southern Americans, who are, on top of all that, brought up with this relatively complacent world view.

I know plenty of exceptions, but in general I agree with your assessment.
> Over years, Google is struggling with innovation.

They're having problems with execution, too. The Google Talk/Google Voice rollout/rollback/merger/turfwar/clusterf*ck is a classic display of big-company ineptitude. It's like something you'd expect from the online services of a Japanese consumer-electronics giant.
Well, they explained it clearly in blog post: https://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace
You wouldn't sign an email with "Also, I'm drunk right now" but that's effectively what you've done here.

Kudos for honesty, but you've now put a time stamp that says, roughly, "I acknowledge being under the influence on Nov 27 2011, and further, this allowed me to behave differently than I normally would." Anyone you've interacted with today can go back to it. It's not just that you might be making bad decisions - you are publicly acknowledging that those decisions were made while drunk.
> Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much more than that on a sustained basis.

Yes, but these people are (physiologically) the exception not the rule (this characteristic is not uncommon for sailors, for some types of race sailing it's pretty much a base requirement).
From what I've read, the kindle fire has been underwhelming. I think this is largely due to our expectations for tablet computing, given that we now have android tablets and ipads. Would it be fair to say the kindle fire is a better kindle, but not a tablet computer?
This post is disappointing to see after all the talk about people working in start ups being depressed last week. If you are hurting at a start up, you should definitely take a good look at your life and figure out what you can change to make it better. I am glad the article says "if you work at a startup and you think you’re working too hard and sacrificing too much, find a job somewhere else that will cater to your needs", but I think working with your start up to try to arrange a job that is more compatible with you is an option as well. Please do not just suck it up, if you're feeling bad, start making a plan that will make you feel better.
Raynes is amazing.
>>entrepreneurs who sleep 2 hours a night

That is just hyperbole. In reality is more like sleep 8 hours and work 12 to 16 hours a day.
> And realize you’re part of history.

You're a part of history whatever you do. Spend time with your friends and family, volunteer to help others, get outdoors and enjoy the world. Take some college classes if you like, and drop out if you like. Learn something beautiful and utterly useless like calligraphy. Travel to India. Explore ideas, meditation, and Zen. I daresay your startup will be better, stronger, faster, and make a bigger dent in the universe.
> But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable

And we wonder why BigCo acquisitions of startups rarely pan out.
I've tried coding drunk. It was a disaster - even a couple of beers had me really struggling to produce anything worthwhile. I decided coding was like driving - you need all your faculties to work. [...] I've read things where people brag about coding drunk, and frankly I've been jealous that I couldn't do it. Or code tired, fuelled by nothing but pizza and coffee.

I'm reading Uncle Bob's latest book: "The Clean Coder". In chapter 4, "Coding", he writes about his set of rules and principles for coding (behavior, mood, and attitude while writing code). About 3 AM code, he writes:

The worst code I ever wrote was at 3 AM. [...] I remember feeling so good about myself for the long hours I was working. I remember feeling dedicated. I remember thinking that working at 3 AM is what serious professionals do. How wrong I was! [...] The moral of this story is: Don't write code when you are tired. Dedication and professionalism are more about discipline than hours. Make sure that your sleep, health, and lifestyle are tuned so that you can put in eight good hours per day.

I think this is solid advice. He later says that "The Zone" (aka "flow") should be avoided, which is more controversial... ;)
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Hackerspaces in China
>If it could be done simpler, faster and more secure, it would be done simpler, faster and more secure.

With imperfect information, an optimal market cannot exist, security and complexity is one of those things that is very hard to assess before, and even after a purchase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_lemons

I think purely from personal experience, what you are saying is absolutely untrue.
"Are there more options to be had in life than mediocrity/wageslavery vs glory/startups?"

Sure ... freelance. But depending on how you structure your work, you may end up with a similar work-load as a startup, or failure dropping you back into TPS-land.
I think so, yes. Certainly, something like this is very common in Mutt configuration files:

set editor="vim -c 'set tw=75 ft=mail noautoindent'"

The 'set tw=75' bit, sets the text width to 75 columns.
Indeed, the google trends graph for "bitcoin" looks remarkably similar to the bitcoin price history:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin&ctab=0&geo=al...
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zvztgSzm1g10zm...
Not to be the correlation/causation asshole, but I wonder if possibly low vitamin D is to some extent a proxy for being a low income sedentary shut-in, all things that on their own are tied to disease.

As the article points out Vitamin D supplementation is not very effective vice working up a tan a couple times a year. So in modern America we can surmise the individual with low vitamin D levels is someone who sits inside watching TV all year. And can't afford a winter vacation to somewhere sunny.

Is the problem low vitamin D, or is it being sedentary inside all year? It's probably actually the vitamin D.
Yes, I started working on it part time and I will continue. I would just like to work on it full time.
i check about the same, but probably click and read a lot less.
Similarly try namecheck.com

It searches the main social sites for handles but also searches for domains and trademarks.
Yeah I've considered freelancing+frugality as a viable alternative. My goal being to minimize the amount of "work" I have to do to survive, so that I can focus on getting interesting stuff done.

I just consider it such a damn waste to sit in an office all day and basically do jack shit. It's not even that I dislike the work all that much, it's just... all those wasted hours. All down the drain.

</whine>
My guess is first-class support for libraries like Lucene and Hadoop, and to avoid software purchases or cloud surcharges.
In playing with my friend's e-Ink Kindles, and then playing with my new Kindle Fire, I would answer "no: this is a step backwards"; note: I also love reading on my iPhone 4 (which is actually where I get books; the Kindle Fire is just for development), so it is not because I'm attached to the e-Ink. The Kindle Fire just has this feel of the software having been roughly hacked together at the last minute...

I realize they probably couldn't have for numerous reasons, but the simpleton opinion is: they really should have delayed shipping it, and by the time they get it together the existing poor press is likely to have already killed them. (That that happens is something I think is stupid, btw, and causes poor incentives to not ship things: old news should rot faster, and people should care more about updating old articles with "the tiny software update they released a week after I wrote this article makes everything I said obsolete".)
Nov 11th, 2011 – Cain Accuses Paterno of Sexual Harassment
The arguments here that it is good advice is some mumbo jumbo handwaving that you will learn "something" because it is hard. Guess what else is hard? Trying to sell lemonade for $1000 a cup in the ghetto.

Will you learn "something"? Probably.

Will it be a good use of your time? Probably not.

And for your information, my posts here have plenty of upvotes, so do not take the sheer number of 37 Signal fanboys retorting as a sign of evidence. PS, 31 Pixels? Seriously?