skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Krugman is missing the elephant in the room. The most obvious comparison to Madoff's scheme is Social Security. New funds fuel current payouts, and the entire system rests on the addition of new members (population growth) which is why its insolvent as our population levels off in the next 30 years.

Luckily the government isnt crazy enough to promise extraordinary returns on your social security contributions, however once the funds run out for the current recipients, watch our forced contribution be raised sky high to keep paying it out.

Bad times ahead. But thats the predetermined path for a Ponzi scheme, no matter what the size.
Why does everything have to be perfectly relevant? We're a group of people, and it's the holidays. To raise a little awareness for a good cause on a weekend night is nice. An article on emacs can take a backseat for a day to one of the other 29 open spots. Why is this more worthy than any toher charitable activity? Because ten of your peers have so far deemed it so.
I find coffee to be terrible for all-nighters. I find the best method to be a combination of 15-20 minute naps and either lots of strong black tea or small sips of sugar-free energy drinks.

Of course, as most posters point out, actually sleeping is always best, but sometimes it just has to be done.
How did his nonsense contribute to other people writing sense? Who was influenced by Wittgenstein then wrote sense?
Can't speak from personal experience, but from I'm read this is near ideal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil Don't get the Indian generic, it is reportedly not equivalent.

And don't pull all-nighters, you're much better off getting some sleep if not a full 6-7 hours.
Adam Savage is a very funny guy, and a true geek. That didn't come across for me on mythbusters.

"You can only clean up a messy room by picking up one thing at a time, you can't think about the totality."
Years and years ago when I worked at IBM, I added a panic button to all the dialog boxes in an internal testing program. When hit, it would cycle through several remarks (stuff like "Don't hit this button again" and "I thought I told you not to hit this button").

Back in the mid-90s I had a hidden Easter Egg in a Java Applet (the next big thing, you know) that expressed my frustration with the language even back then ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp1.html )

Shortly after that, I added another one in the HTML page for the rewrite to that product (no longer a Java Applet) that, amazingly enough, people found and tried to use ( http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html ).

And for the past fourteen years I've included an HTML comment on some of my webpages and I've only had one person find (or at least, one person find and comment about it).
To someone making ten dollars an hour, a 2000 dollar medical expense is devastating.

The problem I have is that I have seen people with this same health insurance end up 50k or more in debt and worse because the provider fights you at every turn. At that point, is it health insurance?

Finally, going for preventative care saves more money than it costs for a provider. Having someone see a high cholesterol number and adjust diet and such is much cheaper than a heart attack a few years down the road. For the provider, it makes sense for them to cover basic health expenditures because it stops much bigger ones down the road.
learn something new everyday, nice!
Technical Proof of an Apple iNetbook
I created Ruby Advent (http://advent2008.hackruby.com), which was inspired by 24ways(httpL//24ways.org).
It was actually turned out to be a great experience. I got the opportunity to connect with many renowned Ruby Hackers and learn bunch of awesome stuff myself.
Also, I sincerely hope other Rubyists too enjoyed the series.
How is it a waste of time?
Propaganda, if done correctly, is much more effective than blocking internet access or other forms of censorship.

Witness Fox News. I think it has done more to prevent conservative US readers from reading the New York Times than any amount of censorship could ever have done. Actually, active forms of censorship might well have increased the readership of the NYT.
I'm a full-time small project maniac. I've been working by myself for over a year now, my model being to work on a lot of small things for a few days, trying if anything catches on. Worked great so far. I've done about 40 different things, some released and abandoned, some abandoned due to lack of interest, but a few I've released and they've succeeded well enough to cover the time spent on all the others. Christmas will be the only time I'm NOT working on some small project, but I'm sure I can't avoid thinking about them.
Might want to edit the loading time for the YouTube video out.
I'm making a mod for Half-Life 2 with a friend. At this point we're both fooling around with the SDK to see what we can do, but I think we have a solid plan for a pretty good mod.
chances are you'll stick to the original look...nothing really looks better
I understand that, but as I said, the core purpose of a physics engine is to perform calculations. It shouldn't be tied to the DOM (i.e. where all the browser incompatibilities are) at all.

Many people seem to not understand that the JavaScript language itself is fairly consistent across most browsers; it's the DOM and other browser APIs that aren't.

Release the core as a standalone library, and wrappers for your library of choice.
i. hate. gratuitous. periods.
"Jennie is a natural on computers - she [...] has reached a point where she's gaming the cheat codes in Sims, without really realizing that she's actually using the programmer's interface into the program and beginning to learn LUA."

Cuuute!
Find an insurance agent. They are experts, and contrary to some beliefs, it's not cheaper to go directly to the insuring company. They will work to find out what's best for _you_.
well, everybody here misunderstood the meaning of this post. It wasn't get instant userbase, but instead get the feedback of hacker news community. This is partly achieved and i say thanks to everybody who partecipated in this discussion.
interesting concept and this might actually be useful to me as I "follow" something like 700 or 800 ppl.

on the other hand, i will not be able to use it. my twitter password is for me and me only:

http://blog.dave.org.uk/2008/12/twitter-and-passwords.html

isn't there a way to use this with the user's currently logged in twitter cookie/session or some such like http://twitpay.me does?
i graduated from undergrad last week so i'm just starting to devote more time to my startup for the last year or so. http://skribit.com
> treat the slides like a ventriloquist's dummy, so that they counter your argument, mock you, undermine you.

This is an awesome idea. Stephen Colbert does this a little bit. But having a conversation would be great.
Tiny (misproportioned) photos, sentence fragments for bios, no explanation of method...

This is just bad, even for a list.
I can see how "X = X + 1" could be confusing to someone who has never been exposed to programming before. All your life you're taught in math classes that "=" means the things on both sides are "equal" at all times.

Maybe replacing the "=" with an array while teaching would be helpful. Then once he understands the concept, try to introduce the "=" syntax.
i do think that you do not know the word Spam, a duplicate post isn't spam. I've explained why i duplicated and i won't be posting more. My purpose was to get feedback from the community. You might believe that i'm stupid enough to think that i can my business fly by advertising here, well, this is not exactely true. Anyway thanks for your comment.
I just think that a succinct summary of their views by a clear modern writer would have been sufficient for my purposes. For others who are more interested, it's great to have.
A Lisp library for the Twitter API. And then, use it for some reasonably small entertaining side project.
So that bloggers can call you on it the same way they did when Apple did the same thing. Nothing like a little drama to spice up a product launch.
Are you in China?
My first reaction was "what the f...", but I got quickly sucked in to reading about it. I think your value proposition is clear, though it isn't something I would use.

And the monseter is growing on me :-)
The web interface only allows you to go back 10 pages (* 20 tweets), and the API only allows 10 * 200. So if you want to keep your tweets, start archiving!
One thing that many people who have not had hospitalization may not realize it that hospitals really nail it to people without insurance. I had surgery a few years ago and the bill was $80,000. The insurance company disclaimed $60,000. I ended up paying only $2,000. Also make sure that all the doctors in a procedure participate in the insurance plan. Beware of anesthesiologists.

If you are a small company, check out HR outsourcing like Administaff. They can save money because they can pool all the employees of their clients. I have not used them, just an example.
Yes, I am in Shanghai.
Good call. It really shouldn't be hard at all, i can query weather bug with a UnitType parameter depending on the location.

Thanks!
Look at this
my name is Billy d. Clark. you should check out my website at www.billydclark.webs.com
check out my photo gallery and tell me what you think!!
Yes you are right,i should not have linked the post to the main page, this might look a bit rude.Anyway i do think that this application has some kind of value to share. And as i already commented the feedback of this community is very important for us. Finally our methodology is much more extended from the "random hack" you talk about, that random hack is something coded in one evening just to give a proof-of-concept.
Recently we increased our holdings in Blackstone a little bit. Now we’re increasing a little bit our holdings in Morgan Stanley, so as not to be diluted by the Japanese.

Is anyone familiar with what he is hinting at? If I am interpreting this correctly, he is indicating that Japan has been increasing its stake in the US financial industry, is that correct?
Fair enough, though I think we have to put an evangelist discount on everything you say.

Based on what I've observed, I have no trouble believing that Amazon is extraordinarily customer-focused and still has a startup feel. That's not quite what I'm asking about, though. I'm trying to figure out whether good hackers are esteemed by the culture or downtrodden by it (as they are in most organizations, and were in most startups of Amazon's generation). Not because I'm looking for a job, but because I'm interested in testing a pet theory.
I keep my fingers crossed.
Engineering Tradeoffs, From A Google Chrome Developer
yeah, I wanted something to make it stand out in the crowd of twitter apps.
I found it amusing that most of the tweets were by women.
What a poor reply. Paul Graham's essay can easily be dismissed. Some examples:

1) Graham found philosophy not useful and didn't understand it. This is basically a sample size of 1. Is this a meaningful sample or just a confirmation bias (or suppressed evidence)?

2) Graham believes the early philosophers were encouraged by the progress in maths. But was there really much progress before Euclid's Elements, written around 300 BC, one of the "the most successful and influential textbooks ever written"? Sokrates lived about 150 years earlier (c. 469 BC–399 BC), Plato 50 years earlier (428/427 BC–348/347BC) -- even Aristotle lived earlier (384BC–322BC). One might as well argue that the Greek tradition in philosophy encouraged Euclid to write his elements. The Elements might also have been inspired by Aristotle's logic. But that was obviously useless, according to Graham.

3) In hindsight, it's easy to say what's, for instance, the shortest way out of a labyrinth. But one needs to go many false routes to find out. Are these useless, then? Graham obviously thinks he could spot the shortest way out, by studying "useful" goals. But who really knows? It's easy to say: "I know what's the shortest way" but most people fail when put to a test. Even Wittgenstein was first "wrong" and wrote a rather abstract -- and Graham would probably say: useless -- treatment called "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" before he was able to articulate his critic of language. Sometimes you need a ladder before you can throw it away.

4) Graham also forgets that philosophic thinking inspired or formed many other schools of thought: for instance, the study of moral philosophy by Adam Smith marked the beginning of modern economics -- indeed, a useless art --, the study of natural philosophy and that of Malthus' work (an economist and demographer) lead to the discovery of "natural selection" by Darwin -- truly useless, I guess -- , the study of the philosophy of positivism by Comte started modern sociology -- yet another useless art --, theories guiding modern scientific thinking were formulated by philosophers (Popper, etc.) -- obviously useless, too --, even Russel and Whitehead's work was basically inspired by philosophy. And these are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Anybody who's a little bit careful can find these examples easily. Graham, however, failed. What does this tell us about his essay?

In summery, what he wants philosophy to do -- namely concentrating on useful stuff -- is already happening, for hundreds of years. It's called science.
I have great respect for Wittgenstein, certainly far more than for the myriad of analytical philosophers I read a long time ago who all "wrote sense" (comparatively speaking) and all of whom I've forgotten.
I like it - not sure if I'd use it, I get too many links through feeds and regular twitter use... but the biggest problem for me is that I hate putting my password into 3rd party apps.
The Word segments: http://www.hulu.com/watch/47154/the-colbert-report-the-word-...
"Problematizing a purely syntagmatic critique of postmodern critical theory"

Plus ten style points for irony. Minus a thousand for writing that sentence at all.
Witness Fox News. I think it has done more to prevent conservative US readers from reading the New York Times...

What are you basing this on? Just asking.
haha...I would love to actually see that monster catch a bird with those hands...

I know some links show up more than once among the various people I follow on twitter. Anyway you can eliminate that redundancy?
Reformatted: http://teej.github.com/social_media_superstars.html
Did anyone see Technology, Science, or Education?
http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/StudentAndStartup.html
Although you seem to mostly be talking about new platforms, I'd add another reason for this perpetual reimplementation: the amazing lack of knowledge transfer from one generation of programmers to the next. Nearly everybody seems to start from scratch, and of course we all think our ideas and programs are original and far superior to what came earlier.

I've often wondered about this. Part of it may be that the real practice of programming is totally divorced from the schools that (supposedly) teach it. Another part is obviously that the quick succession of languages and platforms reduces earlier work to the equivalent of ancient indecipherable tablets (if it's even available). On that last point, one of the unexpected pleasures of working in Common Lisp is being able to easily read 20-year old code. It turns out they weren't as stupid back then as we might think!
"If everything you learned in philosophy class was useless, and other classes, in addition to teaching you valuable truths, also used the same “process” as philosophy, then it’d probably be Pareto optimal to jump ship. But I don’t think that’s the case."
I'm no longer in college, but my employer does give a lengthy winter break. I plan to finish some iPhone applications (hopefully providing some extra income), work on some music recording, read, and do a bit of volunteer work for Project GNU.

Basically, what I do on free evening/weekend hours, but I'll get to focus on it for longer blocks of time. :-)
I found the writing style and visual design most.. PG-esque.
Twitpay doesn't use the twitter session. The way twitpay is setup, it's a lot easier to go without a password.
The only ways not to use a password lead to ridiculously huge scaling issues.
According to Twitter, they will offer OAuth (http://oauth.net) "shortly". When they do that, I'll implement it.
Keep your prices down and your APIs open and people will do this stuff for you

A mere upvote can't express how good I think this advice is.
yeah, that's a good idea. I'll probably add it soon.
As a real hacker, you could use greasemonkey...
Picwing (or someone) should make the reverse of Eye-Fi (http://www.eye.fi/ ; it's a WiFi enabled SD card that transfers photos from your digital camera to your computer).

The reverse would just be a similar card (probably identical hardware, just different software) that can be plugged into any frame, and automagically download images from Picwing's website, or an RSS feed, or whatever.

I'd buy it.
But to be fair, reddit was acquired by Conde Nast so it can probably leverage staff from its parent company.
Zendesk is nice, but maybe a bit expensive for what you need (it was for me).

I use Cerberus myself. Once you figure out its quirks, it's pretty handy.
Will it show photos from a Media RSS feed?
Project Pigeon: Ingenious use of pigeons to guide bombs during WWII
"the community find "interesting"."

You already got the answer yourself. You can actually submit whatever you want in HN.

The community will decide which is the best.
Hasn't Google put an embargo on blogs by its employees?
Maybe, instead, programming is as central to philosophy as mathematics is.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
by Peter Norvig
25 Free Computer Science Books
I second that, I really would like to see the experience of a startup getting into manufacturing (especially finding the manufacturers and how you work with them)
That's wonderful. Perhaps you, as a Wittgenstein buff, would be so kind as to explain how the Wittgenstein quote I gave above, which at first glance appears to be nonsense, is in fact respectable and worthwhile thinking? I don't get it; enlighten me.
Yeah, I thought about that as an option. I actually used Firefox Web Developer Toolbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 it does everything!) to see what it looked like w/ #f6f6ef as parenthesis says he uses.
Google should really also integrate this hack into google analytics -- that way they can give rough estimates of where else your traffic is surfing.
Noam Chomsky
As I posted above/below/wherever that thread migrated to now, I plan to use OAuth once Twitter makes that an option.
Ok. I understand your point of view much better now. Thanks.
this was just me getting student insurance (dirt cheap) while I was still eligible. before it runs out i will get another plan and have an overlapping period where i have primary and secondary insurance, just like I had when I was covered as a dependent on my parents' plan while I also had this plan.
Things like this make me wish for either a down arrow or a higher voter to lurker ration.
best mascot ever. very seriously.
I keep waiting for one of these distressed, failing newspapers to realize that it has nothing to lose and get a little crazy and create something brand new and brilliant for readers and advertisers. I keep being disappointed.

A UK friend of mine who knows a lot of media people mentioned that the Guardian have been putting money into experiments with this purpose in mind. Nothing much has come of it, though if any newspaper is going to pull this off, it could well be them.

Part of the problem here is the lack of overlap between the geek and journalism communities. (Adrian Holovaty is a notable exception.) My friend and I were toying with the idea of having a conference to bring hackers and journalists together, a few days organized around playing with ideas and making things.
I would definitely use it as a way to see analytics data on a website
One quibble.

Graham believes the early philosophers were encouraged by the progress in maths. But was there really much progress before Euclid's Elements...?

See http://people.hsc.edu/drjclassics/texts/socrates.shtm:

So how else can we know anything if we can’t use our senses? Well, like many others of his time, Socrates was a Pythagorean, a follower of the pre-Socratic philosopher Pythagoras. Now Pythagoras believed that the entire cosmos worked according to mathematical principles – in other words, that there was a plan, a great cosmic dance orchestrated by a divine intelligence.

So if that's true, then certainly Socrates’ worldview (as presented by Plato) was very Pythagorean, and the Pythagorean worldview was very much founded on the power of math. And you can find Socrates demonstrating math in some of the dialogues.
Hands On With The Intel Convertible Classmate
Send me an email (in profile)... I may be able to help.
It's always hard to judge tone online, but yours appears sarcastic and indicative of petty sparring rather than anything I would enjoy.
This is cool stuff. I think picwing will do great as a kind of clock for any kind of data, driven of the internet.

For ex.

1. A web startup could use it to showcase their website metrics (visits,pageviews etc.) in real time.
2. Could be used to show updates about a game - cricket scores for example will be a big hit. Especially inside an office where television is not accessible.
Ask HN: What to read during the holidays?
I'm going to the library tomorrow and would love to have some suggestions on what to rent for the break.

What are your favorite fiction books?

I'm not a fan of science fiction or fantastic, but anything that is not programming related is fine.

p.s. Last book I read was The Fountain Head (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead), which was great (except for some long descriptions).
I don't think that needing thirty thousand hours of practice to learn something qualifies as learning it "easily", and that's how long children normally take to learn their first language. Adults can often learn new languages to an expert or native level of competency in only ten or twenty thousand hours of practice. What's exceptional is the adult who takes that amount of time to learn a language, challenging themselves and trying to improve the whole time.

(Exceptional adults may be able to do it in less time, and far less time to achieve a lower level of competency. Sidis supposedly could "learn" a new language in a day.)
This happens all the time, at least in my experience. I've yet to be part of a project where every good suggestion was implemented.
Your post had no content. It made a bald assertion that ignored what had been said before. I would genuinely like it if you posted some actual content, and I hoped to indirectly encourage you in that direction. The tone is from a book I've been reading today (The Diamond Age).
Ask HN: website for viewing hackernews on weekly mode
I browse hackernews and reddit on a weekly basis (usually weekends when I can focus on reading). The (slight) problem I have on HN is that it doesn't have a weekly view, so some really good submissions end up on the 5th page or later. Reddit has this and I'd like to ask if there is already a website that does this for hackernews. If not, I'll try doing it :)
I believe there's something in Google's S-1 filing that might technically prohibit them from doing this.
But he writes nonsense. What did he ever get right? Besides the obvious point that "we learn language by copying sentences" can't explain where new sentences come from.
Yes, the Art of Problem Solving web forum is a very good resource, and there are other great resources available via the main Art of Problem Solving site.

P.S. AoPS is where I first took on my screen name.
I can get nytimes in Beijing. It's useless reporting on this stuff as it changes all the time and even from connection to connection.