skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's wrong. Stocks do not beat gold once inflation outpaces the rate of average market returns, which is exactly where we're at now.

Gold is up 87 fold over 90 years or so. There is no way to capture that kind of return out of stocks, other than to buy one stock, Apple at the absolute bottom, or buy Dell the day it IPO'd or other similar freak scenarios, and then hold all the way through, and then sell at the absolute top. On a long term duration, it becomes increasingly difficult to survive even modest inflation and market changes (you have to constantly shift your investment strategies for all sorts of reasons: age, family, economic conditions, and so on). Few people are skilled enough to do that well.

With gold, you merely need to buy and hold - IF you believe the fiat currency will continue to depreciate due to 'printing' (to pay for entitlements, to devalue national debt, to fund deficits, and so on). There are very few things you could leave for your grandchildren that will retain their value, real estate and gold are two prime options.

If you had bought and held the stocks that make up the Dow over 60 or 70 years, you'd have gotten demolished because the Dow constantly shuffles its index. That is to say, you can't look at the Dow from 70 years ago and compare it to today, because the index is completely different, and the average investor could only easily purchase index ETFs in the last 30 or so years.

In reality, the Dow is not at 13,000 today as we knew 13k to be back in 1998/99 during the huge stock market bubble. Inflation has eroded that nominal value by at least half. The Dow is more likely at 5,000 to 6,500 depending on what you believe real inflation has been over the past 14 years (not the Fed's bogus CPI numbers).

The dollar has lost 97% of its value since the Fed came into existence. There's no way you can outrun that unless you hit homeruns in the stock market, which is what Buffett did, and which is exactly what your average investor cannot do regularly. The majority of people that invest in the stock market lose money. That's tracking since the late 1960s when the US went off the gold standard and inflation skyrocketed (sending oil, gold, and nearly everything radically higher).

Buffett hasn't made most of his wealth in the stock market anyway (nor that of Berkshire). He has made it by using insurance company float cash to purchase other high float companies, and then rolling that ball forward. Nearly all of his big market gains peg to one period of time, the 1970s, when stocks were once-in-a-generation cheap; his timing was brilliant, but it was an exceedingly rare scenario.
Appropriate Gifts For Men Valentine|kumpulan information
An unstable government could just as easily seize your gold.

What investor cares about millennia? Centuries is already too much, unless you're vastly more concerned about your great great great grandchildren than most people. 100 years is probably the absolute largest possible upper limit for a real investor to care about, and typically it's much less still.
His basic point is almost a tautology. Yes, it's great to own productive assets. The real trick is predicting which ones will really stay productive over the long term. Just buying a broad index is often not a winning strategy when you factor in the taxes, inflation, and survivor bias. Certainly Buffet hasn't just bought a broad index -- he makes highly targeted investments.

And he glosses over a basic point that I've seen many commenters miss. An asset like gold behaves differently under bubble conditions than an asset like a tech stock, tulip, or house. The production of those things is price elastic, and rising prices cause rising production that ultimately crashes the bubble.

But expanding the supply of gold available for trade by more than a couple percent a year simply isn't feasible. This is precisely why markets have repeatedly chosen it as a form of money.

Of course this means the market for gold is driven purely by demand sentiment, and of course demand could crash. But this is true of every currency -- it's only valuable because it's valuable.
... will typically code better with a keyboard and
editor than someone who relies on the keyboard
and editor to be able to code

The whiteboard sucks for problems for which you either don't know the solution, or for which you know the solution intuitively, but can't reproduce it line by line in successive order. In such cases people go back and forth, adding new functionality or correcting the existing lines to fit a new condition ... and this happens a lot for recursive algorithms. For instance I cannot reproduce the in-place QuickSort line by line, but I can work it out by evolving it from the basic idea, a process that takes a couple of minutes and a lot of corrections.

So you're basically encouraging people that rote-learn solutions and that line above is bullshit.
Minor correction: the LGPL relaxes the reciprocity requirement for code that uses the LGPL code; linking isn't the only example, imports in dynamic languages is another.
They're looking for aberrant things that will lead them to compromising information. You get some leeway for the sins of the past -- provided that you disclose.

If you state that you don't abuse alcohol or use drugs, but individuals associated with you state otherwise, that will merit additional investigation. If you committed a crime and lied about it, what else did you do? Sell drugs? Grow weed in your apartment? Hang out with drug dealers?

Anachronistic or not, using drugs is illegal. If you're hiding some dark secret, that can be used to coerce or otherwise compromise you, it's relevant.

Do you want the US representative to some trade organization selling the country out, because he doesn't want someone to find out that did something stupid in his 20s?
You had better hope your gold is hidden in a safe place under these circumstances. What percentage of the current gold investors are hoarding trading-size chunks in the cellar and the woods?
What if the chip fails?

What if you forget your password? You should have backups (and not just a backup password).

On Linux, use dm-crypt/LUKS. Why oh why is this still not easy to set up?

It is very easy IMO (the only differing steps are creating a crypted container and opening it). I think you mean to ask why it is not an available option in most distros' graphical installers.
"Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?"

No, but most people aren't investors, they're just people with a small amount of money buying pieces of paper from each other to gamble over which company is most attractive.
Full scale, fully operational 3D printed car.
Evidence suggests ancient Mars ocean
Performance issues with TT? Yowza... I am assuming you're using the XS version, helping it cache, have used a profiler to confirm that's really where it is etc. You must be serving a dramatic amount of dynamic traffic!
While the market is currently very fragmented, Spa Booker has a fighting shot at being the real leader here. From what we've seen, they're doing it right. We'd be starting behind them (they still have VERY little market penetration).

There are a lot of challenges to distributing the scheduling system, even after it is built. We could be starting with a network of around 100 spas, but that's just a drop in the bucket.

Spa owners are so busy running their spas that even if they see your new system, acknowledge that its superior in every regard, and free, it could still take 6 months to get it in use. People are busy and change is expensive (not dollars, but time, mental overhead)

This is sort of like building a social network. You need to get critical mass to really start making it valuable, and that type of startup is scary to me. The original Spaciety business was able to provide value to Spa #1, and able to make consumers happy around Spa #10.
Mozilla know that their updates aren’t as seamless and have been working hard to make them so. Completely silent updates land in Firefox 12 I believe (3 months time).
Well, I did.

I mean, who wants to get busted for lying to the US government? You don't know how detailed their background check is going to be - or whether they're ever going to do a more detailed one in the future.

I'm still down here almost a decade later, so obviously a 'yes' here isn't an automatic deal-breaker.
... unless some breakthrough in nuclear physics leads to cheap synthesis of precious metals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals
I was somehow under the (mistaken?) impression that the unlocked Galaxy Nexus would not work on AT&T or at least not work on AT&T 3G. A bit of research suggests this is not the case.
Why I Don’t Host My Own Blog Anymore
It sounds like it would have been like this:

"Next step - we sort it".

"How?"

"It doesn't matter. You just sort it. I'd use the inbuilt sort function".

"OK, but we still want to know you can sort a list."

"OK ... sigh ... what algorithm? Quicksort? Bubblesort? Mergsort?"

"We don't care."

"Um, OK, if you want me to roll my own sort algorithm, but don't care about performance, let's do it this way ..."
One of the patterns looks like it requires more processing power than necessary. The rendering of a template should be fast, since you will likely be doing it many times on a page.

ContactView = Backbone.View.extend({
template: function() {
var template = _.template($("#template-contact").html());
return template.apply(this, arguments);
},

render: function() {
// This is a dictionary object of the attributes of the models.
// => { name: "Jason", email: "j.smith@gmail.com" }
var dict = this.model.toJSON();

// Pass this object onto the template function.
// This returns an HTML string.
var html = this.template(dict);

// Append the result to the view's element.
$(this.el).append(html);

// ...
}
})

Note that the template is already on the page and has to be serialized by jQuery with the `_.template($("#template-contact").html());` line. It would be faster to already have the template in a JavaScript string, ready to be interpolated with your values.

Otherwise, for every view you will be fetching the template from the DOM. The difference in implementation would be from this:

<div id="template-contact">Mail me at <%= email %></div>

to this:

<script>var templateContact = "Mail me at <%= email %>"</script>

It's a bit more work, but it reduces the amount of work that has to happen just to render one of many templates.
RFC 3092: Etymology of "Foo"
at one point owned a mine with friedland?

<BLANK> Described as a "former hippie" had at one time run an apple orchard in Portland, Oregon, in partnership with Steve Jobs.... Jobs was at one time part owner <redacted> of Timerland in Oregon, which included a mine.
I can't tell, but did he leave the foreign travel section blank, or was it redacted? We know Steve definitely had spent time in India at the point.
Reminds me of: http://simsalabim.github.com/sisyphus/

However, this appears to have more limitations than sisyphus, where you can simply call the library and have all form data saved to local storage:

$('form').sisyphus();
Funny example, but there is something about most three.js examples that bugs me, mostly the way in which they use the mouse position to move the camera. It sometimes makes it really hard to control the demo.
Are you taking dividend yields into account?
First of all, NaCl is now Pepper-only, so it is no longer compatible with Firefox. Firefox uses the NPAPI, not the Pepper API. Pepper is itself an instance of Google not showing interest in working with the other browser manufacturers. The other browser manufacturers considered it unnecessary to add two incompatible plugin APIs when the NPAPI already exists and could just be extended.

Second, the position of every other browser manufacturer is that NaCl is undesirable because (a) it's not compatible with JavaScript, so it requires another language runtime and (b) that it locks the Web into x86 and ARM. As bzbarsky of Mozilla posted here [1], if Google had made and pushed NaCl a decade ago, the iPhone would be unable to browse the web. Google ignored the other browser manufacturers' concerns and are now pushing NaCl to gain a competitive advantage.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3391747
This sounds awesome, thanks for mentioning it here. Mail sent.
Finally, something to help us rebuild after the great Internet collapse of 1996!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_predi...

(I am in fact a fan of Metcalfe's writing, and he did literally 'eat his words' after that wrong prediction, but this deserves mentionining in the context of a 'new Ethernet'.)
Still much bigger than any other free online storage.
"You can practice."

This.

If there was one thing I could tell all applicants at Google, it's to read up on the process, and practice. There is a huge amount of information out there[1]. I feel sad interviewing really smart, capable people who could have breezed through with just a few hours of review and practice.

[1] eg. http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/materials.php
In the 90s everyone rushed the IT shares and then the dotcom bubble burst.

In the first decade of our new millennium, real estate and all sorts of weird financial products somehow building on real estate were THE best way to invest money because nothing can happen, you have a house standing right there, right?? Then that bubble burst.

Now, you'd think people would have learned by now but no... sure as hell now everyone rushes to buy gold and silver because "hey what could possibly happen"??? Even one of my colleagues who has been burned both times on dotcom shares and some shady real estate thingy in east-germany, no less, now religiously swears by gold and silver because what could possibly happen?

People seem to really not be able to grasp that it is just another market.
The GPL doesn't have a reciprocity requirement; it's a pay-it-forward system.
Core Data: Apple’s ORM Framework for iOS and the Mac
Just look at the examples of what was built using Backbone.js vs. Knockout.js. http://backbonejs.org/#examples vs. http://knockoutjs.com/examples/. Backbone.js has many more real-world examples that demonstrate it's flexibility and ease.
Lisp for people who hate Lisp
Subtract about 100 years and a similar statement could have been made about petroleum-based cars potentially replacing electric cars in the near future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#1890s_to_1900s:_Ea...
Could you tell me how you did 10 years of study for Oral Surgery and yet you're 25 yo?
I think he was talking about a small amount of gold. Twenty-thousand dollars worth could fit in your hand and easily be smuggled in clothes, luggage, etc. That's pretty handy if you had the flee the country from nazis(or whatever) that have stolen all of your other assets.

Admittedly that's a pretty unlikely scenario.
No, I read very smart people who try to analyze what it would take to adapt, and they range from deeply concerned to terrified. Start here:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

or here:

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/
That would be preferable, and would have the same properties as keeping a non-passphrase-encrypted copy of your LUKS key elsewhere (possibly a central repository), but would reduce the usability of their software that can 'unlock whole fleets of drives'. And there's no guarantee that there isn't even a secret third unencryption method, companies love to have future options.
Mother sues NYC for $900 trillion
If we allowed the W3C to become a bottleneck like you propose rather than a seal of approval like it is in practice, we wouldn't have CSS transitions in any browser this decade, we wouldn't have AJAX, we wouldn't have canvas, etc. It would be really nice if things could work the way you want, but history has shown time and again that if progress in Web standards is going to proceed at a reasonable pace, it is almost always implemented as a proof-of-concept and then standardized once its utility is recognized. This back-and-forth between shipping code and the standards bodies has evolved as part of the process.

And contrary to your claim that prefixes are just applied blindly, some CSS features have indeed been implemented differently by different browsers — gradients and the flexible box model, to name just a couple. Prefixing is the only reliable way to get the feature before the W3C actually produces a standard with it 10-15 years down the road (I wish that was hyperbole, but it isn't — just look at how long they plugged away at XHTML 2 with no end in sight before everybody got tired of waiting and started implementing HTML5). The point of prefixes is to ensure that the W3C are never faced with a choice between standardizing a CSS feature against their will and breaking the Web.

Although I don't like the bloat from an ideological standpoint, in practice this is the best way we've come up with. But to make reading, writing and maintenance easier, I generally like using a CSS metalanguage with a library like SASS+Compass or Stylus+Nib. That way, you can just write, say, "transition: color .5s linear" and it'll get translated into the appropriate cross-browser code.
In any serious failure of government, the value of bullets far outweighs the value of gold.
If you understand gits internal model, it's a content-addressable data store. This happens to lend itself well to version control, but the fact that it's used for version control is somewhat incidental. It would be good if there were some way of identifying the underlying data-structures as separate from the version control system.
on an architecture that didn't have a square root or a divide function and I replied "and what modern architecture would that be?"

ARM?

What did I win?
Scarily close to the actual conversation!
Worth implementing? Distributed compute gem for ruby without centralized state.
Google launching cloud storage service called Drive
I'm a current Galaxy S user, with an upgrade available. I'm holding out to see what HTC announces at MWC, and comparing that to the S3.

If HTC really does come out with a Tegra 3, LTE phone, that's gonna be hard to pass up. Especially when you add in the HTC build quality and unlocked bootloader advantages.
It's just so sad that all this "backing out" really means nothing after already signing the EC proposal.

> Some critics said the government’s decision violates the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969. In Article 18, the convention states that treaty signatories are “obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty.”
I'd be willing to bet that when he wrote that sentence, global warming was one of the furthest things from his mind.

Even so, I'm pretty sure Warren Buffett is a businessman, not a climate scientist. It's called the Appeal to False Authority, look it up.
Gold would make a lovely material to construct a toilet.
This might just be me, but I interviewed with Google on-site about 10 months ago and never signed an NDA.

It wasn't even offered to me - and this was for an engineering job. So I wouldn't say it's 'standard', even at Google. That said, I've also never seen anyone blogging about their Google interviews who hasn't signed one, so maybe they just forgot the paperwork for me!
I'll try to translate this to another industry for you.

Think about premium brands such as Sony, Apple, and Samsung. They make high end electronics that cost a pretty penny. Not everyone can afford a $2,500 laptop or $3,000 TV. When these giants come out with new technology it's terribly expensive at first(think plasma TV's 7+ years ago). Well, after a few years of production and a limited market, the lower-rung guys are able to catch up and get their share too(Vizio, Olevia, Sanyo) granted their products generally aren't as polished. The technology has evolved enough that others are able to produce it so everyone can afford it, while the big name guys still reign king because not only did they offer it at first, but their product is still superior. This same thing is happening right now. Tesla is the premium brand leader, and the other guys (Chevy, Ford, Nissan) are finally starting to get their act together.

The majority of people would rather have a Sony TV than a Vizio(assuming the picture quality is very similar) all because of that little Sony logo. Brands rule America. It's sad but true. Otherwise there would be no reason to spend $100 on a t-shirt.
isn't it already?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcfsq1_bt8
Ask HN: Do you fret over email newsletter formatting and viewer compatibility?
For "changed" please substitute "have gotten more specific, more grim, and better corroborated."

WRT irrigation, we lack enough water now on a global scale.
I've been critical of seeing so many 37Signals posts around here lately but this one really is a true gem! He's right, there's this idea that you just have to work 24/7 and have no life to be a success. Businesses aren't cool but startups are. What's the difference? These days the difference is one is cool and the other isn't. One makes you think of the 20-something hipster genius loner hacker and the other makes you picture a boring mediocre person who didn't have the balls to do a startup so he starts a "business" (eww, gross, right?).
Really hoping a trusted source can publish a windows binary for this?

The build instructions look insane:

http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/net/tools/spdyshark/RE...

http://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsdg_html_chunked/ChSetupWin32...

added: okay I decided to stop being lazy and try compiling it myself on win32
Don’t Make it So Hard to Promote Your Startup
Add Twilio SMS Messaging to your Ruby on Rails App
Shouldn't the title be "Why I don't host my own Wordpress blog anymore"? Seems like most of the complaints were about the finickiness of WP. Why not host something like a simple static blog, with Disqus for comments?
so many words, so little info ;-(
IPad 3 Coming In March
Veracity has a database feature which might be what you are envisioning. (Disclosure: I am one of the developers of Veracity). But I would not describe it as document-oriented. It versions a collection of records with fields in the same way that regular version control manages a collection of directories and files, with support for history and changesets and push and pull.
> everyone rushes

Who is rushing to buy gold? I'd be surprised if more than 1% of households have meaningful gold exposure.
Wow, First John resig and then This, salman Khan must have some great charisma
Why are you being downvoted? Your comment is spot-on. Look at the market performance of 2011 and you will see why:

Stocks: +0.93%
US Treasury Bonds (Long Term): +33%
Gold: +10%

He's exactly right about Buffet. Buffet makes all his money because Berkshire Hathaway collects all of these insurance premiums and he can use the cash flow float to make a few extra points of interest (above inflation). Do this with enough $billions for long enough and you will own all of the money in the world.
If you read the bio, there's one pretty obvious guess for this one.
I use Gists as user-data files for EC2 deployments. Works amazingly well.
Having to completely rewrite Firefox for no gain, which would basically destroy Firefox. See Matt Brubeck's answer here: http://www.quora.com/Mozilla-Firefox/Will-Firefox-ever-drop-...

Besides, Gecko is ahead of WebKit in several ways (MathML, Direct2D, etc.); there's no compelling reason to switch.
Need Three Things to Know about 'Smash' | Word News24
Is this the actual question ("0 0 0 0 = 24") as given by HR and not something mangled by a typos or text formatting?