skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm afraid the real hit to many Americans will happen right before Christmas - the standard time when companies lay off. And I'm thinking that there may be a lot of layoffs this season, unfortunately.
Sales were up, but what about profits? Retailers cut costs like never before, and while sales are up, if you have an item that costs $4 to make and sell five of them at $5 a pop, sales are up but profits are down relative to selling four items at $6, as long as you can still sell the fifth later. And I guess that's the key this year - can retailers sell more after Black Friday, or will it represent an abnormally large percentage of holiday season spending?
I just happen to vehemently disagree with the notion that you can let revolving debt ride while you pursue high-risk investments

Starting a business is not a high-risk investment (unless you put your own money into it)

And if you truly believe in your business, then why wouldn't you want to invest everything into it?

Because, excuse me for saying so, that would be silly. Think about my business separately from me for a moment. If the business needs money, the best place to get it is from people who have money, not from me who has little.
This is why I've felt all along that they should have gone for the sedan first. They'd be getting twice the hype if this were the cost of a typical Lexus, and people would give them a pass on a $50k price tag because it's new technology.
Awesome post. I've been thinking a lot about these ideas and its nice to see it presented so clearly and concisely.
How do you all feel about wanting to "leave a legacy"?

A few years ago, if asked, I probably would have said that I cared whether people knew my accomplishments after I died. Now I'm not so sure. It just seems... misguided.

We shouldn't strive to do great things so that people remember us by them when we're gone; let achievement itself be the goal and everything else will follow.
In my opinion, the financial crisis is (hopefully/mostly/maybe) over, and this is now a consumer-led problem, led by people who are scared about losing their job. But those who still have jobs have noticed that declining interest rates and declining gas prices have given them more money than they had 3 months ago, and are cautiously spending some. The near-constant drum beat of pessimism seems to be the main headwind.

I speak from personal experience here, I'm in an area where I could lose my job if we all stop spending, but it hasn't happened yet. But I'm making the best money of my life.

And the Dow has a five-day winning streak (thank goodness for small good things) and suddenly there's a good retail report from the US. Let's dream of good things.
She may not be the "type" -- and I respect her -- but you have to call it for what it is: overreaction. We are not even in a recession, as the previous poster points out. How can Helen see years into the future and declare, brazenly, that we're in a depression? People out of work for less than a year does not equal depression. Let's maybe save the D-bomb for serious situations. We're not in one -- yet.
Your source is not very convincing.

He discovered that non-standard definitions of unemployment disagree with the standard one (U3). Yes, unemployment is 8.4% if you include people who "would like to work" but haven't actually looked for a job (U6). His super secret definition of unemployment might even give a 12% unemployment rate. So what?
Perhaps, but until several people you know have been out of work for 2+ years and have dwindling savings, we ain't in no depression.
Disclaimer re: #1: I'm jaded. If I had a penny for every time an engineer thought they were smarter than everyone else in the room -- I would have retired 2 years ago... and perhaps our startup would still be alive. What blows my mind is how often they think "it works and thus makes sense" thereby ignoring very simple UX issues that can severely impact the product. Just sayin'... sometimes it's like pullin' teeth out of a donkey.

I'm most definitely guilty of #3 often. And I tried doing #6 when I lived in LA, but those pretentious bastards look at you like you're the door man. :)
This reminds me of a JWZ quote: "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." The same principle applies here.

A business is exceptionally high-risk, if you value your time at more than zero. It's not like a savings account, where you put your money in, ignore it, and you're guaranteed to get it back someday. It's not even like a stock or a bond, where you have a framework to evaluate your investment, and can make prudent choices with a little bit of effort. When you start a business, you're investing your time -- your future earning potential -- into a vehicle that has a poor history of return, and no framework for evaluating the odds. That's as risky as it gets.

This point plays into your second comment: sure, it makes sense to get as much of your funding from outside investors as you can get on favorable terms, but it's naive to think that outside investors are going to save you from investing in your own company. Investors don't want to take the risk unless you have some skin in the game, and founders don't want to relinquish control before they need to do so. Thus, in reality, founders end up investing in their companies heavily. They're already committing their most valuable possession (time); it makes sense to double-down with money, too.
Has anyone told Helen about the wonders of Prozac?
I suspect that was so that he can try to push a deal like this through. If it were already more or less a done deal it seems it'd be asking for prosecution for inside trading.
I know Chase's Paymentech payment gateway has a SOAP interface. Good? Maybe. SOAP? Yep.
No need to be a fanatical Obama downmodder to see your use of the term "forced labor" as trolling. If you're unfamiliar with how the term is used-- though I don't think you are-- take a look at the first page of Google results for an idea.

Mandatory community service may be a terrible idea, but it's "forced labor" in the same way mandatory K-12 education is.
Heck ya, you spend soo much time thinking and working on the business that remedial tasks are a great way to a) get out of the office and b) feel like you've made some progress by accomplishing small (but relatively important) goals. Things like finding office space is very important to creating an enjoyable and productive environment.

In my last startup, 5 of us lived and worked out of our investors house so we had weekly maid service. Doing this dishes is definitely not a task anyone wanted to do. :)
Hiroshi Ishiguro is Bridging the Uncanny Valley
In my opinion, the financial crisis is (hopefully/mostly/maybe) over

What data do you base your opinion on? Or is it meant to express your hopes rather than perception?
Congrats to CO2Stats. Take that money and do good for the environment (and make yourselves rich also, of course).
I haven't been in such a situation... but you said, "Sell any other assets you don't need for work (e.g. television, videogames, other non-essential and time-wasting items), use the money for food and debt service."

Is the $500 you're going to get for selling a TV and a video game system going to help that much? It seems that you should keep anything you actually use, to me - you're in enough stress as it is, you don't need to make yourself feel desperately poor.

Or am I missing something?
Response Time for the Mumbai Attacks: The Media Versus Twitter
I am on my way to becoming a hacker :)

My blog: http://www.catonmat.net
Have you read Founders at Work?
I mentioned that the dow is up 5 days in a row. Good retail report from the US. The general perception that most people overcompensate - that fear is the primary emotion in work right now. My paycheck. My net worth. Interest Rates. Gas prices. Spent the weekend in Montreal, and there were crowds everywhere. The feeling that while the US is the sick man of the world, we're all a lot less dependent on the US than we were even a year ago. Several people expressing the same opinion to me - that it's a US problem (including americans who had come to Montreal for the primary purpose of partying, secondary purpose of shopping). My paycheck. My net worth. That I booked 2 more trips this weekend (home for Christmas, vacation in February).

I'm not an economist, but I'm optimistic based on my own bank account. And I've got validation from other people around me, who have the same (rapidly growing) bank accounts.

And in general, I'm a contrarian. I was at the center of Web 2.0, and my general perception was that it was almost entirely fake. I'm suddenly optimistic, because all the fakesters have been exposed.

That enough?
It's forced labor in the sense that Obama advocated forcing people to perform labor. The gulag was vastly worse. So what?
Lets Go Deep - We Love L.A.
There are two sides to stability: "stability through lack of change" and "stability through tracking upstream". I seem to get bitten by the former more frequently than I'd like with certain distributions.

Then there are problems with upstream some times, this Mysql 5.1 GA release may end up being problematic for distributions that track upstream really closely. But I consider that to be more bleeding edge than not.

I'd like to see some distributions smartly packaging both a considered stable version and a closer to bleeding edge version, without goofy include-the-version-in-the-package-name cruft (except in the case where upstream does it, like sqlite did with sqlite and sqlite3 naming), so it's easier to pick and chose and move between versions without double installs and a lot of conflicts. Its more likely easier to just stay on an older distribution release than it would be to maintain this.
Incidentally, one of the data sets that we have from a friend of ours that we're playing with internally is a collection of links from the entire German blogosphere. From there we can do queries to see which blogs are similar to others, so if you had a starting point of blogs that you liked, it can suggest others.

Completely unrelated, a while back we did start putting together a planet for some of the folks from HN. It didn't really take off, but there's still some good reading there:

http://planetstartup.directededge.com/
The basic idea, yes. But on the other hand, my girlfriend's macbook (white plastic) discolors easily, and even worse, cracks around the edges. It has tiny spacer bumps on the lid that press into the keyboard layer plastic all around the outsides. It then cracks a millimeter around the edges of the plastic that surrounds the keyboard tray.

Anyway, Apple does it well, but has room to improve. However, they get my money because they keep trying to improve.
i personally knew mckelvey, as one of his scholarship recipients, and I can attest that he was very driven. as he told me that he did not own a computer while he was ceo of monster, i can add that he had exceptional business development skills and experience, especially with acquisitions.

very sad to see him go. i learned a lot from him.
leaving a legacy is why i contribute to open source software. i don't do it to become famous or be remembered when i'm gone, i do it to leave something tangible for others to use, to benefit from, and learn from (even if it's learning what not to do).

running a company, making money, selling services to customers; these are all short-term things. providing value to customers is great, but let's face it, we all do it for money.
Same here, except they yelled at me once for doing laundry after 10pm :-P
you just gotta realize that there is nothing you can do about it...and just setup alternate identities.

One for your friends/family etc.

One for your work/company.

One for forums etc.

And of course, before you click submit(on email, comment, chat message) ask yourself if this is something you wouldn't want to come out under your other identity
Yahoo's insider blackout period began this week, so it's no surprise that he bulked up before he's blocked out for the next 6 weeks.
In hindsight I would have used EC2 instead of buying servers. For servers I already have it pays to have clients using them and paying you more than your expenses on them.

Get out of the Credit Card debt ASAP. Instead of trying to sell the lead management system, go radical and open source it on an account on GitHub. You can then charge a high hourly rate for people who need help with it.

Focus on launching one site at a time, work on it until you are done. Consider using PivotalTracker for planning each project.
I think the idea behind leaving a legacy in the post was more along the lines of how people will remember you rather than if, or which of, your specific accomplishments are remembered. I think there is definite value in living your life in such a way that people reflect upon you, your actions, and your ideals favorably and look up to you and strive to be better. I have a friend at a previous job from a decade ago who every so often tells me he gets inspiration on solving some hard technical problem by looking at my old code and configurations; and I do the same for peers and superiors who have had some kind of influence on my life and work habits. Conversely, I've had some terrible bosses who left quite a legacy, such that I'll think "What would X do?" and I do the opposite because their legacy isn't one I look favorably upon.
People have always been going hungry.
QT is indeed really good. They also wrote an article about how to design APIs:

Designing Qt-Style C++ APIs

http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html
MS Live Search has a SOAP API as well.
I remember wondering if it was a local thing that I had to pay for or if it was some cloud like service that I pay for and upload to..
There is a difference between doing hardcore data crunching in Python and tweaking performance slightly. If you are doing lots of networking and are not using twisted or stackless then you are an idiot. Psyco can sometimes lead to a significant speedup just by adding a couple of lines of code; this speedup may indicate the need for further tweaking of your data structures or codebase, but sometimes it just works faster using psyco. If you have a couple of hotspots that need speeding up then Pyrex and Cython are good tools to drop down into C for a particular function and they are both very good tools (along with the ctypes modules that is now included in the standard library) for writing interfaces to existing C libraries. Using the "real" C/Python API should be a last resort if you have no other option, but not the first tool you reach for...
This kind of thinking, "If they got an $X billion bailout, then why can't I get only $Y billion?", is an example of the kinds of perverse incentives that these bailouts create. Rarely is the true nature of democracy on such clear display: everybody trying to rip off everybody else.
Do you know who you'll be working for at either job, and who you'll be working with? Are they personable? Are they knowledgeable? Will they be able to look at your work and tell you, in the simplest terms possible, how you fucked up?

Your first job is going to be, in the best case scenario, extremely humbling. Even if you can make major contributions to the project, you'll find a lot of your assumptions coming in will be silly and ill-founded. A lot of the things you'll learn will be independent of the language you're using, or the platform you're developing on.

Choose wherever you'll learn the most. Responsibilities matter more than titles and salary (modulo whatever you need to live comfortably), but these things aren't mutually exclusive.
Feel free to add my blog, http://blog.jrock.us, to your reading list. It is usually about Perl or Lisp, and I try to keep it instructional instead of "omg this is shiny" or "why I hate $programming_language_foo". Some of that creeps in from time to time, and I apologize in advance :)
No results found for 3 of my usernames. I don't really understand the premise of the site.
It seems like you didn't read most of the article. They specifically talked about its effects on lab animals, including rats which had been brought up on heavy water.
Invisible Customers?
The author never describes the results of those studies.
How to Discover What Do Your Customers Want?
hehe, http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/11/28/whos-the-addict

At least he practices what he preaches :)
Amazing Service Podcast
Customer Service Expert Says It's Ok to Say "No"
Thank your customers for complaining
The Content IS the Marketing
Customer Service Expert Warns: Never Leave Your Customers Wondering
You're foolish to turn down a job only if it's a job you really want. No position is so awesome it's perfect for everybody.

Most any job can have interesting problems. That's a function of the problem space, and the freedom you have to explore solutions in it, not the platform/architecture they use.

I've worked at a (very) big company, a (very) small company, and in academia. If you're not sure what you prefer, maybe you should try several (in any order).

There's a lot of "how to write software" that you didn't learn in your CS degree, but you'll pick that up quick enough on any real-world project. I learned most of what I know on a solo project (and reading the c2.com wiki); most people I worked with at the big company still haven't figured it out.

Recent startup people I've talked to have been very interested in my small-company experience (even in a different field), and almost not at all in my big-company experience. Who do you want to impress? If you're thinking of doing a startup, tenure at IBM may not impress potential cofounders; if you want to work on device drivers at Microsoft, a web startup may not be the most relevant.

You will almost certainly have many, many jobs over your lifetime. Even if the one you pick today ends up being terrible for you, it's simply not possible to choose a job so bad from which you can't recover. Not even "Swiss Patent Clerk".
I don't get #3. If I thought there were other belief systems or ideals that were more valid than mine, wouldn't I make them my own?
I'm all for respecting others' beliefs/ideals, but that's not the same as considering them just as (or more) valid.
its a bit confusing at first, i'll admit.

I think the premise is that alot of people sign up (with usernames they choose) and then give that username out to friends and family so people can see where they are...

A sort of twitter-meets-GPS(?) except not as cool as twitter or GPS. :|
The point I was making was that the 'sane brand manager' is part of the traditional media advertising that drives TV ads & the rest of the modern advertising complex. That sort of advertising is highly speculative game with winner take most outcomes. This is the game that created the 'household brands,' the purpose of this kind of brand management. We have clear successes in this field. Coca Cola, is essentially a brand: production, distribution etc. these are all details. They are 90% brand. Like Viagra is 90% patent.

The new online advertising Google's spearheaded. The kind that is resilient to economic droughts is not really a part of this. In some ways it is more similar to yellow pages, in some it is more similar to sales departments or direct marketing providers (eg telemarketers). There are all sorts of things that change in this sort of game.

2 of the most significant differences between the online advertising environment that adwords is a part of are: (1) It's has many small participants (rather then dominated by mega brands), (2)It is analytics driven (rather than 'theory driven.)'

Large 'brand' campaign needs to pass board rooms, advertising executives & consultants that theorise about the long term brand associations associations that will be drawn with brand a by using a girl or a boy in the next ad. They may be going on instinct or consumer behaviour research. It doesn't really matter.

Many small online campaigns are driven by 'how many phone calls will I get tomorrow.' That can be crude or scientific too. But it's fundamentally different. Hulu is a part of the former context They compete for ad dollars that would have been spent on billboards, tv ads & radio otherwise. Adwords does not. Or at least it does less.

For this reason, I say that Hulu is not part of the same thing. It has TV's clients, not Adwords'. It will be part of the same campaigns, follow the same textbooks, be recommended by the same consultants & used by the same companies as TV. It is an extension of the TV ad complex. Not an extension of the adwords one.

The fact that it is online is incidental.
The DOW growing for 5 days does not mean anything - it can go up for 5 weeks in the middle of a depression: http://dshort.com/charts/bear-markets.html?four-bears

Most of the rest of your data is all at micro level - you and a few friends. In any climate there is someone who is doing well, and while this single data point is important to you it's not really meaningful for me.

I'm just checking to make sure I didn't miss any macro signs of recovery. This retail report is a bit premature.
From their FAQ, you signup for their site with a "username". Then you install their software on your phone. Their software determines your location using the cellular network. Once you install the software, anyone who knows your username can see your location.

Creepy :|
Interactive Map of the World's Fastest Supercomputers
close down the money hole? tell that to the man that has spent the last 10 years of his life digging on 8 hour shifts. the hole is all he knows.
The company seems to be at extreme risk: if warming is not happening, or the planet is actually cooling as many solar scientists predict, the value of the company will quickly approach 0. I'd be interested to hear how they would use their tech in the case of co2 having no impact on warming/cooling, as the product looks pretty clever.
I think you had a bit too much to drink tonight :)
I would like to review the rules on here that are just plain irrational:

Rule #3: No. If their belief systems were more valid, I would adopt them.

Rule #4: This gets into the realm of rainbows and unicorns.

Rule #5: And a legacy matters to the dead, how?

Rule #8: Everybody needs a dose of reality occasionally, even people we love.

Rule #9: Unless you have seen first-hand or experienced true poverty and despair, it's quite presumptuous to assume you can "think" about it. Trust me, it's worse in person.

Rule #10: What if I'm not wrong about something an average of once a day?
S3+ has multiple locations, but it uses the multiple locations AT THE SAME TIME, it is like a mini CDN, unlike S3 which is only delivered from a single location.

Amazon DOES charge you for transfer between S3 and Cloudfront... you have to pay transfer TO EACH EDGE SERVER at standard S3 transfer rates.
You say the prices are about the same on S3+ (SimpleCDN) and S3 (Amazon), but S3 is 17 cents per GB, and S3+ is 5.9 cents per GB.

That makes Amazon THREE TIMES more expensive.
Keep in mind, though, Tesla does not directly benefit from Moore's law the way Nvidia and ATI do. According to the article, the increase in battery capacity is more like 8% per year.
Tarsnap is a backup service -- you pay to store your backups on it.

And thanks for replying; knowing what people find unclear will make my life much easier when I write all the text for the tarsnap website. :-)
"Can you conceive any way that federal dollars could be put at greater risk — and for no equity in return, keep in mind — to benefit fewer people?"

Yes. Give it to the "Big 3" auto makers.
Has anyone used this to build a serious system? I wonder if it is an undiscovered gem.
That's exactly what I thought, especially with all the recent articles about lack of digital privacy. I immediately tried entering in my friend's unique username, only to be disappointed by the text "We cannot find that person".
I wonder if Yahoo would be allowed to build a new search business. I'm sure they could do that for way less than $20 billion.
A Long List of Distributed Filesystems
Psychologist Says: iPod Most Played Songs More Telling Than Bedroom
Fix your deprecated CodeIgniter Form Validation syntax