skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If "making this stuff up on the fly" means "revising the policy proposals based on complaints from the public solicited via the Internet", then: bravo!
that's how progressives operate. their ideology doesn't hold up to close scrutiny so they get very good at dodging and weaving.
I kind of agree. Unique apps have a small chance, easily substituted apps have no chance.

It's actually a very nice little snowglobe model of how all the other markets work. You can be told a hundred times that your solution must stand out from the crowd, but there is nothing like seeing 10 identical copies of your application competing with you side by side. That really gets the message through.

The other fun part is addressable market fallacy - it's easy for a junior entreprenuer to say that "game market on iPhone is 13 Million people * $10 / year and if we only get one percent of that we'll have 1.3 million". It's also easy to get proven wrong really, really quickly.

The way I see it App Store is converging to the mean - your typical market where consumer's biggest problem is choice as there is too much competition. The solutions to this problem that will emerge will likely be similar as well.
I'd sure like to see a statement about who's writing this stuff and how final it is. Still, it's a lot better than secreting the process away behind locked doors, the way our current energy policy was made.
FYI, here's what http://change.gov/americaserves/ said 35 minutes ago:

"The Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges. President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in underserved schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps. Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year."

(There was nothing about tax credits.)
or slavery :-(
Tax credit info has been on a different page (http://change.gov/agenda/education/) for longer than that. It contradicted the info on the linked page and that contradiction was apparently resolved a few minutes ago.
A good deal for whom?
Essentially they are planning to pay college students who choose to participate $40/hour to do community service work. That seems like a great deal for students, and a bad deal for taxpayers. How many college students are actually worth $40, or even $20?

It would be better if they required something like 300 hours of work to get the $4000. That would be closer to the market rate for unskilled labor. And it would only be 6 hours per week for 50 weeks per year, which any full-time student could manage.

Meanwhile the federal budget deficit continues to grow unchecked...
I think the 5th, 9th, and 10th amendments of the United States bill of rights say that the government can't require us to do community service.
Well that is exactly what they are doing. The talks with Chrysler have been called off until they find a solution to their liquidity issues. And the Volt and other Volt-like designs are getting all the attention while other programs company-wide have been put on hold.

So to summarize, they are doing exactly what you said.
Interesting article, but the fact that Peter Thiel didn't bet any money on it was disappointing. It could just be a case of the halo effect. There's just too many stories of "I predicted this too!". A broken clock is right 2 times per day.
Because they are not really into free trade? And because he looked up more into moral and ethics than economy

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

US far-right conservatives are anything but Adam Smith. They are more like the conservative lords Adam Smith was revolting against. US far-right is closer to the Victorian, or even Feudal system (saving the distance of centuries!)

Note by US far-right I mean people like Richard "Dick" Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush.

For them talking about moral or equal oportunities means socialist, commie, or something else.

http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=37&...
"[...] Although both Smith and Quesnay criticised the mercantilists belief in state interference with
foreign trade and capital flows as a way of augmenting national wealth [...]"

It will take many years to undo this US government's deeds in the world. And as it starts affectig the interests of this powerful groups there will be a dirty smear campaign like we've never seen before.
Yeah, but it would be better if their first drafts showed a little more thought.
This plan was out in the open before the election. Why is it only now that everyone's suddenly discussing it?

Prior to the election I only saw it discussed on right-wing blogs.
Taxpayers already seem reasonably happy with giving tax breaks to college students. If they get some work out of the bargain too, so much the better.

Personally I suspect that the government showering money onto the higher education industry is a major factor in causing tuition to rise, but this doesn't seem to be a widely discussed issue in the public sphere so the chances of getting it fixed soon seem slim.
partial summary:

the app store promotes whatever sold the most units yesterday. this gives an incentive to sell more units at a lower price, even if that's not the ideal pricepoint. it should promote whatever sold the most real dollars yesterday, instead.
Actually the 13th admendment forbids this most explicitly:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Chromium Blog: Putting It to the Test
Encouraged != Required
LinkedIn launches event service to help you schmooze in person
Impossible. The Irony gods would destroy us for surpassing them.
How To Recover Your Google Account
Technically it seems to be (and I only learned this word a couple of hours ago) a Corvee:

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

"Corvée is labour, often but not always unpaid, that persons in power have authority to compel their subjects to perform, unless commuted in some way such as by a cash payment; sometimes this was an option of the payer, sometimes of the payee, and sometimes not an option."

"Corvée has existed in modern and ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, China and Japan, France in the 1600s and 1700s, Incan civilization, and Portugal's African colonies until the mid 1960s"
I guess even Google can't get the whole OS thing right on the first try.
Thanks, that was insightful. Then again, there is the possibility of a progressive sales tax, which is more in line with the conservative (not necessarily Republican) ethic that, if citizens are taxed, they should be taxed equally, proportional to their income or consumption.
You talk like it's mutually exclusive.
College students that make less than $40/hour after taxes yet pay exactly $4000 in taxes.
The tax credit has definitely been mentioned at barackobama.com for a while.
What makes it so impractical? Isn't a bone marrow transplant just an injection with the new cells? It doesn't even require surgery right?

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.
ICanHasCheezburger.com is a VC backed startup?
With the $4,000 tax credit this is really a massive subsidy for college tuition in return for a bit of make work.

The trouble is that the iron law of college subsidies is that the subsidy gets capitalized into the tuition. The net result of the tens of billions in existing aid is that tuition rates have risen higher than inflation for the past four decades.

If the government was serious about making college more affordable, they could simply mandate that in return for the non-profit tax status a college must keep tuition hikes lower than inflation. This wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime. It would simply force colleges to cut a lot of the bloat they've added over the years.
Students do have to work for aid. It's called work-study. This just means that instead of useful jobs at the college where the student may gain experience, they'll be doing stupid Community Service type stuff (like the courts force criminals to do instead of jail time).
It's not quite slavery, but it's walking an awfully fine line, especially since the value of the so-called "tax credit", at $40 an hour, by far exceeds the economic value of the work performed.

As a thought experiment, suppose the value of the "tax credit" were increased to $1000 an hour, so that you need to either do your 100 hours of community service or pay $100,000 extra in tax. Since the vast majority of us can't possibly afford to pay a $100,000 fine for not doing our "community service", this would in effect be a government-run slavery system.

At $4000 (forty bucks an hour for college students who otherwise be lucky to earn 25% of that) it's pretty borderline.

This policy was always one of my strongest reasons for opposing an Obama presidency. It's facepalm-worthy to find out that many of his supporters are only just finding out about this policy now.
There is aid separate from work-study. Specifically (and this is just the federal stuff; states have education aid programs too): Pell grants, Stafford loans (some are subsidized, and even the unsubsidized ones charge below-market interest), PLUS loans, Hope credit, Lifelong Learning credit, tuition and fees deduction, Education Savings Bond program, the ability for parents to claim full time students age 19-24 as dependents...
You can already do this: quit highschool, take the GED, go to a community college, and transfer to a university. The only problem is that the school switch can have a bad effect on your social life. Hopefully the New Hampshire test will help students to skip community college and get directly into university.
That is nowhere near the worst bug ever. But nice headline attention whoring. Did Michael Arrington guest write?
NYT: Unemployment numbers even worse than they seem
I bet the first designer babies will all have this CCR5 mutation and will be immune to HIV.
If you want an example, read an article of his that's freely available called Big and Bad, and then look at NTSB safety stats. His article poses that SUVs are less safe because they are less maneuverable, and therefore more prone to accidents. His "proof" is that a Chevy TrailBlazer didn't handle nearly as well as a Porsche that costs 2x as much on a test track.

Fortunately for SUV owners, actual data does show that they're safer. They don't really handle much worse than sedans in their price class, and they do have lower instances of fatalities in accidents.

They make up nearly a half of the top 20 safest cars, while they are nowhere near half of the total models sold. Gladwell actually even shows the safety stats of a few hand picked sedans and SUVs, but doesn't bother showing the entirety of the data available, which proves the exact opposite of his thesis.
"Betting against the entire sector would have been clumsy." It's my impression that he did just this. Short financials, long oil. This was a sweet position until about 2.5 months ago and apparently he either didn't get out or took up new positions elsewhere that went bad because they are down big now.
Indeed. It's funny how the central bankers believe we need free markets for everything except setting interest rates and adjusting the money supply. For those apparently we need a Communist-style central planning bureaucracy.

And now in retrospect it's clear that most every major decision made by the Fed for the past decade or more has been wrong, and has made macroeconomic problems worse instead of better. Perhaps Andrew Jackson had the right idea after all (at least on that one issue).
Like most "happiness research", this seems to rely on dodgy methodology and be aimed at some sort of political agenda. Ooh, and here it is:

So what are the policy implications for this new research. The researchers said single-shot events such as a tax cut will probably have little impact on people's happiness. By contrast, "policies that lead to small but repeated gains are likely to succeed."

Well, for starters, who says that a tax cut is a "single shot event"? A tax cut would give me more money every single month, which I could then use to buy more of those "lots of little events".
Yeah definitely not. It's not like the girl's ims from the other end executed on the shell.

Seems like it was an easy bug to find and temporarily patch. An official fix will probably come soon.
Entreprenurial Negotiating Tactics
The DJIA at 5000 and hyperinflation are mutually exclusive. Currently we are in a deflationary period.
PA Semi is PPC.
I'm no expert either, but I think the problem is that suitable donors are extremely rare -- and most of them would prefer not to give up their bone marrow to some random stranger, thanks very much.

update: Oh, and a bone marrow transplant is a horrible procedure which kills 30% of recipients.
Wrong.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.faq.htm
This is exactly why I buy AAPL puts. The cult of Steve weighs far more heavily on their share price than their actual results.

Apple's success is clearly due to a lot of people. Nobody does that well due to the brilliance of a single man, and Steve Jobs isn't as bright as people give him credit for. The man tried to cure his own pancreatic cancer by eating carrots for Christ's sake.

Yet every time he sneezes their shares drop $10. So I buy puts knowing that one day, probably soon given the way he's looking lately, he'll announce his retirement (either voluntarily or due to illness) and their share price will plummet, at which point I'll sell my options and then go long AAPL, because really, they don't need him.
I'd be disappointed and speak your mind...
> If the government was serious about making college more affordable, they could simply mandate that in return for the non-profit tax status a college must keep tuition hikes lower than inflation.

The effect of this might just be to encourage colleges to drop their non-profit tax status. Or it might force the best faculty to all work for for-profit colleges, which makes a for-profit degree nearly required, which makes college less affordable. Beware unintended consequences.

IMHO, if the government was serious about college more affordable, they teach basic financial literacy in high school, and then give graduating high school students accurate, detailed information about the real degree requirements of different jobs and the salaries attached to them.
It would almost seem that the battery, or even more simply, energy storage is really the problem holding back electric cars. If a company came up with a new kickass battery that was way better than what exists, they should just start a car company, or at least every car company on earth would buy their batteries as fast as they could get their hands on them.
OpenID QA with Plaxo's Smarr and McCrea
Media-hosting site ImageShack raises $15M from Sequoia
yes! feel the hatred flow through you! strike this comment down and complete your training!
It must be just me. I was seriously almost hallucinating after reading his blog.
Social interactions can alter gene expression in the brain, and vice versa
I'll check that story out. Thanks!
That was a pretty short long answer.
That would be crazy Joe Biden, who also doesn't mind paying a premium for his shotguns.
Clinton and Bush Jr. were also Mac users...
Actually, I personally have always found that one a bit ominous too. If I were President I'd say:

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your own sorry ass."

I've got no interest in getting into a particularly deep and codependent relationship with my country. I'll pay my taxes, they can enforce the laws, and we'll leave it at that.
http://delicious.com/ogu/

just 267 bookmarks.

I love this service, and the firefox extension is one of the main reasons I still use firefox as my main browser. :)
"Betting against the entire sector would have been clumsy."

This would have still made a lot of money. Maybe not a maximum amount of money, but still a lot.
I think the best way to save the planet is to buy more carbon offsets.

And, by the way, I happen to have a few for sale.
Whoa! They're making that into a documentary?
It's too bad Yahoo has neglected it so, it was a great service.
They lost more THIS QUARTER than their entire market capitalization. Keep taxpayers out of it!
It would seem that the beagle board (beagleboard.org) would be way better than this thing in all metrics besides maybe power:
1. Not hacked together by you (not gonna break so fast)
2. 600+MHz ARM processor
3. USB(2?) port. Hook up a hard drive!
4. Monitor hookup
5. Runs linux. Just install a lightweight server.

And about $130.
Source: Google teaming with Ustream for YouTube Live event
> I don't understand how US still doesn't get it. You bail out Wall St. people who ran a pyramid loans scheme

It's not just the US - the EU's bank bailout was about 3x as large.

The loan problem was a US govt idea - encourage banks to make loans to folks who didn't qualify under normal standards (including punishing banks that didn't do so) and have two huge govt sponsored enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) buy many of them and "create a market".

Which is where the EU got involved - EU banks and govts bought those loans too.
AT&T buys Centennial for $944 million
And apparently it's not just me...

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-draft.html
The don't have a "liquidity issue", they are utterly insolvent.
I can feel the change starting now! LOOK! One of Obama's running mate's aides is HOLDING a Mac! I mean IS there any better symbol of CHANGE!?

Yikes. The intersection of Mac and Obama fanboyism could probably create a reality-distortion-field large enough to cover the entire planet.
Promotional material on websites isn't policy. I'm sure the actual proposed legislation will give you plenty of ammunition to snipe with.
Down big now? I thought they were down single digits, and thus about 15% ahead of the average hedge fund, which is itself ahead of most other financial assets.
Reactions:

* 100 hours! Shocking! Tell it to the Israelis who, last I checked, didn't seem to have much of a problem building up a technology industry.

* The nerd exceptionalism is wearing a bit thin. Open source is the best you can come up with? How about: (a) teaching, (b) improving technological infrastructure (testing and improving muni and state web applications, helping administer muni wifi), (c) collecting, refurbing, and recycling computing equipment?

* Or for that matter: a large fraction of Obama's margin of victory came from mobilization of youth and first-time voters, and his overperformance of polls in Indiana are also attributable to the field operation: people wandering around towns in Indiana knocking on doors. Can't get more low-tech make-work than that. But that effort was disproportionately staffed with clueful, Internet-savvy college students. Lots of valuable work isn't sexy, but still benefits from smart people figuring out where when and how to do it right.
The effect of this might just be to encourage colleges to drop their non-profit tax status. Or it might force the best faculty to all work for for-profit colleges, which makes a for-profit degree nearly required, which makes college less affordable.

No way. For one, most top professors get paid from government grant money. Second, you way underestimate the benefits of the non-profit status. Most colleges have accumulated vast land holdings because they do not have to pay property tax. They then lease this land out to retail stores and restaurants and make mad cash. The tax free status also gives them a big advantage in equity trading: "Its endowment managers can trade rapidly in hedge funds without paying the short-term capital gains rates that we peons pay. This gives them a big advantage over most investors. If it were taken away, I wonder what the endowment's return on investments would be in stock or commodities trading." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/23every...

Also, you make the assumption that for-profit means more expensive. Personally, I'd expect the opposite.

The other thing that the government should do is separate credentialing from schooling. Want to become a teacher? Pass a test and do a year apprenticeship. Want to be a lawyer? Just pass the bar exam. If going to college helps you learn the information you need to pass these exams, then great. But if you are poor and determined, you should be able to teach yourself and enter your chosen career without having to pay the college tax.

Of course, none of this has any chance of happening. The universities are probably the most politically powerful organizations in the country. That's how they got all these advantages in the first place.

The point of this exercise is to show 1) there are plenty of solutions to the problems of this country that don't actually require spending more money and 2) the current political system is not even capable of talking about these solutions, much less actually enacting them.
Isn't this Hacker News? Not boring, repetitive, economic + political news????
you know perfectly well why you are being downmodded
Spare us the innuendo. Mandatory service is not an Israeli innovation and it doesn't come from "kibbutzim". The Finns, the Danish, the Germans, and the Brazilians all have mandatory military service too. So do the Swiss, not exactly the hub of Western European socialism.
Yeah... for it to work you basically have to completely destroy the immune system of the transplant target and they recover in a bubble.
Cory Doctorow: Why I Copyfight
That is right. They had a commercial electric car in 1996
Now they expect to have the Volt save them which of course won't happen.

Imagine the quality of electric cars they would be making today if they had kept the EV1 project going.

But that is what a good part of corporate America. While Toyota was developing the Prius to be able to comply with the California 0 emissions mandate. GM had their lobbyists trying to change the law.

Lobbyists succeeded, GM failed.
It's worth noting that the writer of "I, Cringely" has pumped out more than just a few off-base Apple articles in the past. Apple merges with Intel, Apple teams up with Blockbuster, Apple to stop making hardware, Apple buys Adobe...
My 'A Guide to the Star Wars Universe' is telling me the first one was 120 km, and the second one was 160 km.
I'm a PC, and I'm kind of obnoxious. And/or creepy.
Fun email
first, let me say i am a malcolm gladwell fan...but that advice seems nebulous at best. maybe i just need to read the book.
Ummm no. Refundable tax credits put money in your pocket whether you owe up to the amount that year or not.

"Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and _fully refundable_ credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of community service."

http://change.gov/agenda/education/
He's sort of missing the way markets work. In time one of two things will happen:
1) People will find way to make very good money off of free apps. To my knowledge this isn't the case yet on iPhone, but it's certainly happened on the web and facebook. or...
2) People will start making their apps cost money.

It's an unfortunate fact of markets that you have times like this, where it's still in transition.
Venture Capital is Broken