skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The graph Krugman shows is monetary base - ie actual green Federal Reserve notes. Unforunately, most of the U.S. money supply is not in the form of federal reserve notes, but in the form of credit ( savings accounts, money market funds, etc). Note that in the first graph the monetary base starts at $850 billion. At this time the U.S. national debt was around $8 trillion. Perhaps Krugman would like to explain how the U.S. government could owe 8 trillion dollar bills, when only 850 billion dollars exist in the world.

The basic cause of both the depression and our current crisis is maturity mismatching - ie treating a collection of long term loans as short term deposits. The trouble is that when people want to redeem their deposits, the money is not there, as it has been loaned out. This causes a bank run and a sharp contraction of credit, which bankrupts both households and businesses.
I find PHPMailer a great class to use; there's also opensource mailing list code for it (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer) but haven't used that one personally.
Ask HN: Anybody working on Rich Media for Mobile Devices
I just finished a project to provide rich media to Blackberry devices via FLASH and I'm looking for a real money maker idea. It uses PHP script to render Flash files with dynamic content. Fits all models and looks good. I thought maybe an on-line game or something of the likes. Any ideas? Know of anybody who might have a project in this regards?

thanks, Paul
What if the client is fully in the browser and the server is simply serving up JSON or XML? Seems like as long as the verbs and nouns served are appropriate, you've got a good RESTian solution in the end, with interactive (browser client) and batch (server) interfaces available.
The really unfortunate part of this is that it's going to probably come with Windows Mobile 6.5. I'd never use it, but most people use whatever default browser they're given. After Firefox's success the last few years you'd think MS would want to put out a competitive browser on the mobile front, especially considering Opera's share!
There's an excellent prototyping policy in effect at Maxis:

In terms of time, they have a policy of permission vs. forgiveness. You need to be prepared to fail early – but that’s okay! If a prototype takes less than two days, don’t worry: just go ahead and do it. It if takes more... you should probably have permission.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=11628
Although these hardware kits are open source, it takes quite a bit more money to try them out. I have tons of open source software apps running on my system, but can only really afford to try out several open source hardware platforms.
I'd use neither. Both go against the open nature of the web.
+1, More and more true. Plus there is never an incentive for universities to lower price.
Do not want Silverlight.

Want javascript.

By the way, why don't you have a blog? You post some interesting stuff to your twitter sometimes, but it would take a few hours at most to set up a Wordpress site.
I would add that in addition to having to show the cost of any new checks that one should have to show how the check will actually prevent the problem it proposes to prevent and the likely-hood of that problem occurring or re-curring. A major problem I've seen with checks is that they just become CYA material rather than anything truly beneficial or preventative and people will work around them.
When PG worked there they only had 7 flavors :).
I haven't used them but have heard good things:

http://freshbooks.com

Couple bonuses for me:
- there's an API to use
- easy to use
- scalable pricing
- they're Canadian
That depends on your level of trust/expectation from either parties as well as your own assessment of the situation.
For me it guessed Hamlet, Bin Laden, Leonardo, Che Guevara and Woz, but couldn't think of Buddha.
You aren't a typical non-early-adopter user. I've had people make loud, public complaints about such trivial matters as a new logo being too tall, or a text box being too wide, or an optional WYSIWYG editor feature ruining the "text-only flavor of the community". These on websites far smaller than GMail.

Look at some of the major Web2.0 kerfuffles in recent years. Off the top of my head, I can think of:

- The HD/DVD mutiny on Digg

- Public suicides on both JoelOnSoftware and Justin.TV

- Reddit storing passwords in cleartext and them getting stolen off a laptop

- Ariel Waldman and the Twitter harassment fiasco

- The Flickr censorship debate here: http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/40074/page3/

Yeah, you could argue that those services are all still around, so obviously they haven't been hurt too much. How much management time was wasted in dealing with them? How many non-users decided not to become users because of something they heard 3rd-hand about how it's a terrible company?

(And I don't think the solution is to never innovate. I can understand why a middle manager at a big company would think so, though - a PR disaster is by definition public and disastrous. In the short run, it always makes more sense to not mess with success, it's just that this doesn't lead to success in the long run.)
Clutterme.com eBay auction ends below reserve price
I'd have to disagree with this. I think if the persona is serious about setting up a business they should spend the money to get it setup correctly to start off with. The reason for this is that it's a lot easier to do when you don't already have customers and you can take the time to do it properly.

One caveat though is of course it takes money to set it up properly. I think that in the long run though it will pay off big time.
That is a ridiculous counterargument. No-one is asking Al Gore to wear a hair shirt for our sins. All he has to do is walk the walk, just as he advocates that we do. How often do you think the other 11 bedrooms of his mansion are slept in? How often is his pool swum in? These things are pure ostentation. It's not even like his pool is solar heated!
Although I Clearly cant speak for UK, Australia, or other Americans, I know people that believe in man made global warming, they just dont see it as a big deal.

There is a difference between people who irrationally disagree with relatively conclusive evidence and those who are skeptical about outcome.
What's their LOM like? I can't say I've been impressed with cheapo IPMI cards which (attempt to) piggyback off the on-board ethernet.
It'd be a toss up, but I've been surprised by Silverlight. The recent implementation of Netflix streaming has been working without a hitch for me on Mac, and I like some of the concepts they've worked into Silverlight-- most notably the dynamic language support for things like IronPython.

The idea that I can code Python clientside, even .NET-ly, makes me happier. I haven't done much yet there, but it does raise my curiosity to avoid hacking around with Flex/ActionScript.
You are appealing to emotional arguments instead of rational ones. Just a thought.
But I think what Dustin is saying (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the multiplier applies both ways. And that the total cost of making a 5 minute downtime mistake, even to a million users, could easily be outweighed by the benefits of releasing a product/feature/site 2 weeks early. In most cases, I think large companies are risk adverse instead of risk neutral to situations like this.

I agree with both of you that it varies considerably based on what the site does (infrastructure, videos, games, etc).
Perfect timing! I'm taking a C programming class and this short tutorial on Make is exactly what I needed. Thanks!
As a counterpoint though I have found Apple to be less than helpful when it comes to hardware issues. My Macbook Pro developed a hardware fault after I upgraded my Hard Drive.

The design of the MBP is surely aimed at discouraging you from upgrading the HD, you practically have to dismantle most of the laptop. I took it to an Apple Store in London who would not help as it was out of warranty. The store employee advised me I would be better buying a new one than repairing the laptop. So I went to an Apple Authorised Repair Shop where they quoted £120 just to look at the laptop, then parts and labour (again this would likely be £600+). I then went to an Unauthorized Apple repair shop where they took 6 weeks to repair the issues and charged £250 to replace the superdrive. The only faults found were a broken clip jamming the superdrive and a reinstall of Leopard. It is not easy to get Apple parts to repair it yourself.

So a design flaw cost me 2 months without my Laptop, the Apple Store were not interested without serious £££'s, and the Apple dealer was the same.
tough to go wrong with dada mail http://dadamailproject.com/
I have little patience for writing long blog posts. And I suspect most people have little patience for reading them.

In a way, twitter is a great equalizer, rewarding ideas over writing ability.
wow@woz. for me it got: mother theresa, richard branson, bowie, tarantino but stumbled on dylan for tom waits. it will guess your cousin too.
Definitely Silverlight. I generally avoid Microsoft products, but the .NET framework trumps AIR any day.
I think people probably would.

But I am of the opinion that Flash is slowly but surely dying in favour of JavaScript and related technologies. Flash still has its niche for streaming audio and video and a few other things that would be otherwise be a pain to write, but they don't really justify the existence of Silverlight which has largely marketed itself as "a better Flash".
> ...but since we don't understand the climate very well

But, wait. Apparently we DO understand the climate well enough to know that global warming is happening because of the small percentage of CO2 emissions caused by humans, and that by cutting our emissions, we can stop the warming.

Based on that, we must have an extremely thorough understanding of our climate, and it should be trivial to simulate a vulcano going off and see if it cools the climate.
What if you look at the data and find there is no chance of a shark as your in a swimming pool?
Once someone makes something better than safari for the iPhone, I'd complain. But that's a big ask.
First of all: Programming is learned by practicing, get off HN, books and just do it.

If you are a person who can master a practical subject (typing code) by just reading specifications, I'd recommend stop using PHP and maybe switch to a more thoretical language; LISP, prolog, mathematica why not?

If you are a "mechanic" type of person why learn by experience, just start programming, don't worry, you'll learn!

I recently programmed a site in PHP more or less boilerplaty. The idea to avoid ugly, boring code is to abstract things away, supposedly by a framework or by yourself. Nevertheless if you don't know what you're looking for, you won't find it.

A thing i would probably use next time is MYSQL-classes as described in http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2008/10/25/php-design-bigg....

A thing i would probably use next time is MORE regular expressions for sanitizing input. Learn regexp, it's a time saver!

1) I too started with basic tutorials, but bit by bit startede gravitating towards PHP.NET, finally landing in some nice PHP-framework. I see PHP as a great language, but not a great framework. There are no prepackaged 'concepts' of programming as in, for instance, ruby on rails. There is however lots of nice low-level type of oppurtunities for clever hacks if you know the technical bits, as in C.

2) I wouldn't think about it, as for always, i would start typing away. It's not LISP, Prolog or Haskell where a lot of planning is involved.
It guessed Randal Munroe! A warning to chronic procrastinators such as me, this is addictive!
Good luck finding few enough sides. There are easily about eight sides in the global warming argument.

Is global warming even happening?

Is man-made CO2 causing it?

Will reducing man-made CO2 help?

Is the best way to mitigate this to stop emitting CO2, to research green tech, nuclear or to look into measures allowing us to live in a hotter world? And why? How is "best" defined?

Then you'll need impartical referees. When side D claims that no recent study shows that X is true, and side G says there is, who's right? What exhibits are allowed, and how?

But never the less, this form of debate exists and thrives, it's called peer-reviewed journals. Too bad that the climate debate is too much in a hurry to use them.
In most cases, I think large companies are risk adverse instead of risk neutral to situations like this.

I'm not going to argue with that. Just because a certain increase of caution is rational doesn't mean that caution isn't being overapplied in many cases, just as PG suggests in his original post.
I think this can be generalized to say that start-ups have a different cost-benefit analysis - one where losses are capped at the (relatively small) value of the company. On the other hand, large companies have to be risk-averse because the worst-case is several magnitudes worse. When you're working at ConEd or AIG, the "tiny probability/worst-case-loss" factors start to matter, because "worst-case" can include investors losing life savings, federal investigations, and jail time for your boss's boss.
true. true.

i used to TA for a comp sci course. a well respected music school (Eastman School of Music) was affiliated with our university, so i'd get classical musicians in my section frequently. computer science concepts did not come easier to them than others. just my two cents.
The script http://pastebin.com/f239f43a7 referenced in the above link could be rewritten without pype module as follows http://pastebin.com/m5c5a89df (not tested).
geeze -- either a) people here have never seen the Kubrick classic "2001" - which would be nothing short of a crime or b) people here have no sense of humor (or both i guess). please feel free to downmod me freely for this comment. :-)
Re: ponds. I would most definitely want to experience both scenarios. So I would pick the one I hadnt experienced before.
How about Posterous then?
Barack Obama's plans for the web
None of these were the kind of bug that comes from releasing code with insufficient testing. The only one that even involved code was the Reddit password problem, and that was more a design mistake than a bug.
Never. The web was built on open standards, if we let somebody put a toll booth we're screwed.
This is exactly why we don't respond to RFPs any more.
not surprising based on what the thing looks like...if I were those guys I'd spend a few days to come out with an updated design at least for the front page...also I'd come up with a few designs myself that actually look good for the samples...the current designs in "Samples" look worse than what you can do with myspace
'Malware' strike, thought to be from Russia, hits US combat zone computers
Ask HN: CakePHP? CodeIgniter? Symfony? Other?
I'm interested in what the HN community has to say about these PHP frameworks?

What makes them different from each other?

What makes each better/worse and why?

All things considered, what is your favorite?
Obese have right to 2 airline seats - Supreme Court of Canada
!!!
4chan played with this a while ago, so you can find many manga/anime/game characters, including some really obscure ones (try it!). It has everybody from Tsukihime and Touhou...
Sorry, guys, I'll run my antivirus in a sec.
Consumerism -- trading money for bigger and better things you probably don't need -- isn't that bad. What's bad is that politically we want things without having to trade anything at all for it. This leads to the attitude that the only reason we don't have things is because we haven't legislated it.

Not a good thing.
I think we're just arguing semantics here.

believe: to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so.

Your "acceptance" of "the facts" is "believing" by the definition above, pure and simple.
The problem is this: if the Canadian telecom market were open to competition, why doesn't a new competitor move in and clobber the existing phone companies in the market? I read the article and in two of the three complaints, the writer is angry because government doesn't fix the problems he sees in the marketplace. The government won't force Bell to give small ISPs unlimited bandwidth and the government is allowing SMS "price gouging". (The writer's other complaint is that the government wants to modernize copyright, I assume that means that government wants to extend the existing copyright laws to the internet.)

The writer implies that outside competition is not a viable solution and that consumer wellbeing is solely a function of government whim.

Assuming the writer knows what he's (not) talking about, i.e., that outside competition is not an option, then I can only assume that the reason it's not an option is because of the existing regulatory environment.

The writer's proposed solution seems to me to be calling for yet more regulation.

So it appears that in Canada government is keeping competition out and not doing enough to force existing companies to increase their quality of service and decrease their prices.

Excuse me for assuming that over-regulation is the problem. Now I see that Canada needs more regulation. Government there is not doing enough to tell businesses what they need to do, what kind of contracts they can make, and what prices they can charge. Of course this would also make Canada more open to competition. Businesses just love to do business in a place where government bureaucrats help them with lots of detailed rules that require teams of lawyers to figure out. Businesses, especially startups, also like it when government forces them to rewrite contracts and charge lower prices. Thanks for setting me straight.
what toll booth? Silverlight's implementation is open enough that the Mono project was able to clone it with moonlight. You can serve it from any server, too, not just IIS. In fact my buddy is serving it off of Apache.
I have only tried CodeIgniter so I can only speak for that but it is by far the best decision I have made to move to this MVC framework. It's holds a lot of libraries and helpers which will simplify most tasks and they are incredibly easy to extend. It's downside though is that you're not able to call functions internally from other controllers but once you get used to that it doesn't pose many problems. I would recommend you having a look at their documentation (which is very well done) and a demo video.
CodeIgniter is OK, but the first question is -- do you really need any PHP framework? It's not hard to get MVC in a few lines of code without any framework.
I would use a basic spreadsheet until you actually get to revenue or have got some outside funding in the door. Keep those fixed expenses as close to zero as possible.

For managing startup financial and strategic goals though PlanHQ is really nice (http://www.planhq.com) I just wish they had a basic minimal free version to hook pre-revenue startups who could then switch to a premium plan once things progressed.

Many of the top VCs have their startups on PlanHQ to give everyone visibility into progress (strategic and financial)
That was dumb to do a reserve price... you should have just set the minimum bid at whatever your reserve was.

Relist it! :)
I'm sure it could. Thanks for that.

pype is something I use every day as part of my workflow, and I didn't think it was worth the effort making a non-pype version. The other reason I left it in is to motivate myself to properly package and release pype one of these days, along with a video demo and so on. A couple of people I showed it to have said, "holy crap, dude. you can do that? this blows my mind." So I'm thinking there's value in making it usable for everyone instead of just in my own projects.
Motorola U6 PEBL Green Unlocked
The discreet hi-tech capabilities include video playback and capture. The Bluetooth wireless feature is the main attraction about this phone. It allows you to transfer your files to family and friends within a short period of time. The Motorola U6 PEBL orange (unlocked) makes sure that all your daily travel requirements are taken care of. There is a lot to enjoy behind this beautiful design.
"My laptop stopped displaying anything on its LCD."

I had a Gateway (acquired by MPC), same thing happened three months ago. I sent it in after an on-site repairman couldn't fix it.

Two months later, MPC doesn't answer their phone and doesn't reply to emails. In fact, MPC filed bankruptcy earlier this month, so it looks like my laptop is in limbo.
It would be better if it didn't always respond "Too many users" -- AFTER having me fill out the "who i am" form.
Unusable for me because of the excessive amount of advertising on the site. Is it really that much better than 20q.net?
This is a standard machine learning homework assignment for decision trees. If you're interested in how these things work, that's where to look.

(Oh, and this is more parlor trick than clever programming. "Crowdsourcing" works with this parlor trick well.)
I tried "Cory Booker," mayor of Newark (recently on The Colbert Report). It asked me the same questions several times but worded differently, and in the end it guessed Obama (though not surprising since Booker isn't as famous).

http://www.20q.net always amazed me.
I'd expect math people and CS people to get the theoretical stuff better. But, what I've heard is that musically trained people are better at coming up with good design.
I'm getting raped on my iPhone plan.

250 mins + unlimited Rogers to Rogers/Fido calling ($40)
6GB data ($30)
Call display/visual voicemail/2500 txts ($15)
System Access Fee ($6.95) + 911 fee ($0.50)
Tax (~$11)
True, but does the public generally have access to these journals? Maybe issues like this would be alleviated some if the journals were opened up.
Btw, has anyone else here read James Hogan's "Kicking the Sacred Cow?"

I read it, and it is very eye opening just how many of the major scientific "facts" and causes rest on pretty shaky, if not outright false, foundations.
We've used ConstantContact for some time. It's nothing special but it gets the job done. I'm not a big fan of the logo on their emails, but I don't really mind.

I do use phpmailer to send off some stuff to me on my server, but nothing for mass mailings.
Why does he need to walk the walk? What does his walk have to do with his argument? Who's going to wake up in the morning and say, "you know, I was on the fence on this whole climate change thing, but if Al Gore is going to drive a Honda civic, I'd better sell my Hummer?"
Intel rethinks Netbooks: 'Fine for an hour' but...
I wonder if Scott Adams peruses this site for strip ideas.
I, for one, love pseudo-science. I dig UFO studies (what better way to learn about the process of learning?), world religions (what drives people to vary their beliefs so widely yet cling to each detail?), reincarnation (are those strange stories true or just crap?) and all sorts of things that involve reason, creativity, and some sort of evidential and symbolic modeling process.

But I know it ain't science. It's fun, it's speculative, and it's entertaining. It ain't science.

What I don't like is when religion joins with theories that can not be reliably tested and scare-mongering under the rubric of science. Then they deny being the pseudo science that they are. Seems like it combines the worst of everything: end-of-days, a call for repentance, smearing the critics, and smarmy self-righteousness.

That's just my opinion, mind you. I really think if you've only got one earth, a hugely complex environment and some kind of computer modeling system that a little degree of humility probably is a good idea. I'm happy with saying "I don't know." Seems like even (or especially) if you take a large grant that should be a fine response.

Global warming may be true and deadly. But that still doesn't make it science.

I'm looking forward to the new Czech pol. Discussion and skepticism is a good thing, especially when it comes to science.
Chinese internet giant sacks staff over paid for search listings