skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fiat money is backed by something - the majority of the time it's backed by real estate, or other real property.

Does that mean I can redeem my dollar for a specific amount of land or real property? Or do you mean it's 'backed' by such property to the extent that I could trade it for such property, maybe -- in which case the value of everything I own is 'backed' by a diversified portfolio consisting of basically every other asset in the universe.

Fiat money allow the value of property to be represented as cash.

Any currency allows this. If you have a currency backed by gold, or barrels of oil, or heroin futures, you can represent the value of a house in terms of that currency. In fact, you can represent the house as a single unit of a currency denominated in houses.

On the other hand if we use gold, then if I create value - a house - you can't also create more gold to match it, so instead I just deflated the value of the gold (i.e. the ratio of value of real propery vs the value of all the gold just changed) - that's bad.

Why is a declining real price level bad? It rewards saving, keeps interest rates low, and makes people want to accumulate productive assets rather than natural resources, property, or other hedges. Also, why do we trust people not to print up more fiat money? I can certainly trust gold miners not to 'print' up more gold -- the market is just too inelastic.

Please spread the news: the anti fiat money/anti federal reserve/anti fractional reserve banking meme's are dead.

I'm sorry the meme is are dead. It has lasted a surprisingly long time, what with the long history of governments' responsible stewardship over printing presses, banking systems, and the like. Why on earth would anyone think that a fiat system does anything other than adjust, like clockwork, to the size of economy? Why doesn't someone just tell them that $1 in 2008 can buy about as much real estate, food, or clothing that $1 in 1908 could?

The dollar is a pretty stable currency, and it hasn't faced any serious crises. So shouldn't its ability to hold most of its value be a great argument in favor of fiat currency? I bet people would even consider your ideas sensible if the dollar had only lost a modest amount of its value -- 5%, 10%, maybe 15%. So, ars, how well has our tailored-to-the-economy, modern, anti-meme fiat currency done during that time period?
Hacker News is not Slasher News or Shooter News. This is a generic crime story. Flagged.
7 reasons for current financial crisis from Neel Kashkari @ Wharton Conference
Please watch this video for full video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiOfu8QAuU4
Agreed, partially.

In mathematics, proofs really have two purposes. The foremost purpose is obviously to assert the logical necessity of the statement being proven. The second not so widely publicized purpose is to gain insight into mathematics. A proof is not just a way to prove that you are right. It is also a way to see what could be further explored. Thus the importance of elegance and insight in proofs.

Automatic proof systems are great for the first purpose but they detract from the second. That is why they should not be considered the begin-all-end-all for mathematics. That is not to say that they are not useful or not an advancement. They are certainly that. Just that they are not a replacement for elegance.
Education correlates pretty well with impulse control, which correlates well with not shooting up your office. There is also a fairly strong correlation between being law-abiding and having a high IQ. So while it's true that some educated people commit crimes, it is absolutely false to pretend that they're equally likely to -- or that this story is anything but an aberration.
I'm feeling happy with what I got by default, i.e IE6 with no plugins :-).

PS: Our stats on Google Analytics show that 62% of visitors from US do use FireFox. It's quite surprising to me.
I actually wrote some 150 pages of a first (technical) book before sending out proposals to 10-15 publishers to which I received a resounding ... nothing. I think maybe one rejection.

After a year of feeling a little bummed about it, I tried again, this time pre-clearing topics with the publishers and got a proposal accepted.

But the advice that stuck with me is to just write. Sure, plan out what you're going to write ( topics + sub-topics for non-fiction, storyboard for fiction), but otherwise, just let the words flow. You're going to butcher the crap out of it later on when you start editing it anyway, so don't _start_ by worrying about it.
I still have those 5 chapters of that first "book" I never wrote. I like to go back and look at them every once in a while -- they're not great :-P.
As a developer, wouldn't it seem odd to do the work up front, and then have a group of people you don't know vote on whether or not you should be paid? I can't imagine that would be very attractive.
I wonder what the impact of having an article that goes "Why aren't women interested in Computer Science" every other month has on this sort of thing..
Those examples are a bit of a stretch. The number of "normal people" who understand that they need new software written must be very small.

College kids who want a good, free game to play at a LAN party

College students pirate software. If they want a free game then who is supposed to fund the idea on your site? I don't think people want cheesy open-source games. They want quality graphics and good gameplay. You can't achieve that with a shoestring budget and without a team.

My mom, who wants a free alternative to MS Word that works well on Windows and is less intimidating than OO (and more powerful than Google Docs)

Does your mother really know that she needs someone to write an alternative to MS Word? She knows enough to seek out a developer and is willing to invest in software that no one else has used? I don't see people trusting their documents to an untested word processor and I don't think they would pledge money for it. OOo and Google Docs are good, free, alternatives.

Most open-source software projects are started as some hacker's pet project. If I'm going to get paid to write an MS Paint clone for the Mac then I'll keep it closed and sell it myself since normal people don't understand or care about OSS.
Tracking the LA/OC Fire on Google Maps
Wow. What a self-important asshole. Even if he had a point, he could have said it without being so venomous.

I'm a big fan of scribd and my experience as a user is much more pleasant with a scribd document than pdf or ppt or anything else. I could spell out the reasons, but I'm sure this guy will write another followup explaining why I'm wrong and if I cared about DRM and kitten-killers and all that's evil in the world, I would have to force myself to hate it.

So he doesn't like its usability, he doesn't have to use it. Let me point out that scribd is seeing steady growth according to quantcast and others. Ultimately, the market is going to provide the answer.
It's a bit presumptive to call men the reference case and to ask what's wrong with {universities, women} that has caused a drop in female enrollment. Maybe a better question is: Why are there so many men in computer science.

The article's author doesn't seem to really make an effort to figure out what happened, other than to reference one individual who went into health care.

I think exploring this question to its fullest would require dropping some politically correct guards and questioning quite a few gender assumptions, something that neither web forums nor national newspapers are particularly good forums for.
If they vote no, you can always take the project somewhere else. Contributors are voting on demos or samples, not on the real code. We don't release that until the election passes.

The hope would be, of course, that developers would resolve their differences with the contributors. But if they don't, developers can walk and take their code with them (shareware it, say, or take it to a third party)
don't forget the constant need to refresh your skills. Pretty much any other job requires no refreshes, and the few that do have refreshes that basically involve a 3 hour seminar. Computer Science you gotta be on the cutting edge of technology all the time.

And unlike other fields where you basically take a 3 hour seminar to get up to speed, learning a new programming language takes a ton more time.

And like you said, its really not that much more financially rewarding than other fields
I am genuinely surprised more people don't go postal after layoffs. Maybe adult-aged people are just more likely to commit suicide alone or just bury their pride while they lose all their savings and move in with parents/friends.
If an hour of negotiation gives you $5k more money per year, you just got (effectively) $5k for an hour of work.
That makes sense, and it's likely that if I read through the entire book that you linked to, I'd grasp it pretty clearly. But it was certainly out of my mental reach as an 18-year old. And believe me, I tried.

In general, it appears that our ability to ask philosophical questions, especially of the mathematical variety, far outpaces our ability to find answers or even comprehend answers that others have come up with. It is highly plausible that this is linked to the disturbingly high occurrence of depression, bordering on mental illness, among mathematicians. (I know enough mathematicians personally for that observation to have some statistical validity, but anyone who has read many biographies of mathematicians should get the sense of it.)

What I'm trying to say is that while many of the questions of mathematical philosophy pique our curiosity greatly, and it can certainly be a rewarding experience to get a taste of the beauty of the field, everyone should have a mental threshold for how much they are willing to get involved. Perhaps this is obvious to other people, but since it was a painful lesson for me, I feel obliged to share it :-)
That doesn't explain why there are so much women in biology (for example) where the techniques, required skill and knowledge base change every few months or so it seems, and it isn't exactly financially rewarding.
Genious in 10,000 hours in 10 years is challenging to obtain, and may indeed still require something special.

Can you do 10,000 hours in 25 years, though? You may still not be as recognized as Gates, but you'll have "da skillz".

Programmers do get one advantage, which is that our careers and our hobbies can coincide in ways that many can't (though it is not unique in this way).
It's shareware except you've made it much more complicated. What happens if I vote yes and the other contributors vote no or vice-versa? Does the vote need to be 100%? That sounds like a pain in the ass -- I want my software, now.

This is also not very good for the developer. They have to perfect the software to please all the contributors before getting paid. How long until everyone agrees that it's ready? Where am I supposed to take it if I walk? I just wasted all this time writing code, thinking I was going to get paid and now I have to try and sell software that I didn't even come up with the idea for. At least with Rent A Coder, I don't have to please a group of random people.
Someone had a conspiracy theory that this strengthens the link between Google and the Obama campaign/presidency even further. If anyone believes that BS, let me just point out that they released it on all the major video sites, as you can see on change.gov.
In Manhattan, some of the top doctors have stopped participating with insurance companies, because the companies (which are manned by the sorts of people who would be in guard towers of prison camps in other kinds of societies) often refuse to pay for bullshit reasons, leaving the doctor unpaid, or "negotiate" pay that is below subsistence level for the doctor. We've had a two-tier health system (insured vs. not) for decades, but now we're approaching a three-tier system (self-insured vs. crappily insured vs. not) because of the sliminess of insurance companies and the crappiness of their policies.

If you are not from the US and/or not already familiar with US healthcare, listen to this person. This is the sort of experience 99% of people on insurance get. Sure, we have insurance, but it's a crapshoot whether the company is going to actually pay for all the expenses it should be. This lulls the "insured" into a false sense of security, and provides a great incentive to not go to the doctor.
The amount of votes required is definitely not 100%. That would be way too hard for any developer.

Our election algorithm looks at a lot of metrics before deciding whether to pass a project. Our goal is to pass projects that have broad community consensus that they meet the project requirements. We obviously want to fail projects that have obvious stability problems, or that don't do what the proposal says. We're working hard to make it difficult to game the system, and I'd be interested in any thoughts you might have to make things more fair.
We've got a couple of companies we're in talks with, but of course we're looking for more. If you can think of any, shoot me an e-mail (in profile).
Personally, after all the efforts of the past couple of decades to get women involved in college have succeeded to the point that women now make up the majority of college students (with the trends continuing to favor even more women for the forseeable future), if computer science is actually still dropping, the possibility that it is simply an outlier must be taken seriously.

If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed. So, I mean outlier in the technical sense of a statistical distribution. There will be extremes at one end or another, and the mere fact of their existence is testimony that gender differences of a statistical nature do indeed exist, not proof that there is some other factor. If we actually got all professions to strict 50/50 proportions, that would be proof positive of major meddling.

I mean that first paragraph seriously. In the absence of such efforts, discrimination of some form would be a plausible hypothesis, but given how many other fields have overcome this and the dominant culture of universities, I find it increasingly difficult to believe the members of the field are really the problem. Computer scientists can hardly be blamed for a culture that considers them nerds and tells girls they shouldn't be nerds, if that is the root problem. (Nor will the obvious solutions work; protesting that you aren't really nerds is not a good approach. Making tons of money was a reasonably effective approach, though that has lost its apparent inevitability. :) )
Yah this is because of vulnerability in their website, its a web messenger website just like meebo, but this vulnerable can cause serious problem to major website Im user like Google and yahoo!!
What happens if I vote 'no' but the project still passes? Do I still have to pay even though I wasn't satisfied?

If a bunch of contributors vote 'no' and pull their money then how do I improve the project and get them onboard again if it's going to be OSS? With shareware, I can improve the product and catch them on the next release.
"maximum budgeted salary" is probably a more relevant concept to large 1000+ employee company. I typically only know what the _minimum_ budgeted salary is - that is, the lowest skilled employee I can justify bringing into a position. At the top end, sky is the limit - if you can justify $200K/year based on contribution, we'll be lucky to bring you on board.

And yes, I immediately tell all applicants at the conclusion of the interview process precisely what I think they can command in the peninsula economy, and at our company (65th percentile), based on what I know about their experience, the listed (and back door references), the local economy, and what our needs are. I don't negotiate salary - that's the number we offer them, and they can either take it or leave it. The information they provide on their salary, and the reason they are leaving their last position, just happen to be two pieces of information that feed into that final number.

The difference, of course, being that I know very little about how smart they are, and how much they can get things done, whereas the candidate knows almost _everything_ about themselves. And having the candidate hold back that information just makes my job more difficult, rather than easier. Certainly not what I'm looking for in an employee.

They should be able to walk into the interview and tell me to within $5K precisely what they should be making.

Remember - I'm a hiring manager, not an HR staffer. I see my job in life to maximize my employee's compensation, ensure that they are making more at my company than they would anywhere else. Every single day consists of me trying to increase what my employees make by giving them more training, more tools, more projects, more guidance, more time to focus on what interests them.

Also remember - it hurts an employee just as much to be overcompensated as it does to be undercompensated.
Wikitude.org
Top 10 Hollywood movies on hacking
The movie listed below doesn't teach you how to hack, but these movies are good enough to inspire/motivate you for hacking.

These are the top hollywood movies on hacking which is worth adding to your movie collection.
The concept here is great. But if those people laid off from Sun Micro and other companies divulge past salary in a tight job market, are they more likely to get a job over those who don't?
Conversely, this is also a reason given to justify stuff like Creationism. Maybe it is just 'that simple'; our current financial crisis is primarily the result of a bunch of people realizing "oh, it's bad to give out huge loans to people who are probably going to default, but sell them like they are AAA loans", or perhaps more precisely "oh, maybe we shouldn't print so much imaginary money to the point where there is not enough real money getting generated to back it up".
The world has never seen such freezing heat
PQ Tree Algorithm
Same here! My mom always used to get on my case about it too.. I just hope karma doesn't kick my ass for wasting all that water.
Step 3 should read ???
> If there are relevant differences between genders w.r.t. to how one chooses a profession (and the negation of that statement would fly in the face of everything we know about such differences), then in all likelihood the gender ratios will be normally distributed.

I don't see any reason why they would be normally distributed. Their weighted average would be the general gender proportion among students, but there's nothing that says or implies the distribution would be normal. One could imagine an extremely different scenario, a species with every field being populated entirely by one gender, and one could imagine a species where a few fields (say, engineering fields) are strongly preferred by one gender while the rest are equally preferred among non-engineering students. There's no reason why the human species is one where these ratios are distributed normally. And if it were, it would be entirely by coincidence.
Gerald Weinberg has written a wonderful book "Weinberg on Writing" http://www.amazon.com/Weinberg-Writing-Fieldstone-Gerald-M/d... where he outlines his "Field Stone" method. It's an approach that likens writing a book to constructing what the Irish call "dry stone fence." You write capsules and modules that you have energy around and then gradually re-work them into a narrative once you have a good understanding of the topic and how you want to proceed. He also ha a blog at http://weinbergonwriting.blogspot.com/ devoted to his thoughts on writing. If you are unfamiliar with him, he is a bestselling technical author (and now fiction) who has written more than 40 books.
43 Reasons Why You Need iBuzzPro Voice Broadcasting | ProVoice Broadcasting - iBuzzPro™
What is the difference between a father and a mother?
Interesting Graph:

CEOs’ average pay, production workers’ average pay, the S&P 500 Index, corporate profits, and the Federal minimum wage, 1990-2005 (adjusted for inflation)

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ceo-...
I am a woman who has been programming professionally, on and off, for about 9 years, and full-time at a corporate job for two and a half of those. I was the first woman to be hired as a software developer at my workplace in almost 25 years. I hate my job, and next fall, I will enter grad school to go into an allied health profession. My reasons for leaving full-time software development are as follows:

1) The social interaction leaves something to be desired at my job, especially if you are not into gaming or D&D. There are few coworkers with whom I can discuss non-geek topics such as travel or food. This is probably due, at least in part, to having so few women around. The guys constantly revel in their geekitude. It gets old.

2) The work itself is isolating. I love to code, but especially during the long, depressing months of winter, I long for meetings to go to, or phone calls to receive.

3) Similar to the last point: I'd like to have a reason to leave my desk several times a day, for periods longer than it takes to get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. The highly sedentary nature of the job starts to make it feel like a prison.

In contrast to the last couple of points, my male coworkers act as though they would be happy if they never had to leave their desk chair to go to another meeting. Maybe this is just personality, and not a gender difference. Maybe I don't love programming enough to lose myself in it for hours at a time. I think some of these things, however, especially the social issues, may be indicative of basic female needs to have a connection with others, a feeling of being nurtured (and nurturing others), and good (female) role models. It would be interesting to see a workplace in which the majority of developers are women.

I recall reading about a study recently in which they found that men tended to concentrate in the hard sciences (math, physics), where women preferred sciences with a human aspect (psychology, biology). I believe they found that even women who had entered the hard sciences often ended up leaving them for fields with a more human touch.
"G94B@aol.com"? Yuck.
yeah suicide I don't get at all...if you are going to kill yourself anyways...why not take the people who drove you to it with you?

Or do something wreckless w/o caring about consequences? Steal a Ferrari and drive it at 180 mph w/o a seatbelt until you crash or jump out of an airplane w/o a chute etc.

Slashing your wrists in a bathtub or eating a bullet alone by yourself just seems like a waste of an opportunity
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4713753.stm
If the project passes, the developer gets paid. If there's some sort of dispute, we can manually arbitrate. Again, our metrics are for broad consensus and having the shipped product match the original proposal. If those two conditions are met, I think in all fairness, the developer should be paid.

Contributors can only pull money if it's been more than 30 days since they made the contribution. After that 30 day holding period, they can walk. We've considered playing with that number, or letting it be variable.

Contributors don't have great incentive to let an election fail; if it does, they don't get any software (other than whatever demo the developer posted). While I'm sure there will be cranky contributors here and there, hopefully we can factor them out to some extent in our election process. At the macro level, people are going to want the project they contributed to released.