skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easy counter-question: would it be okay to publish economists with different political opinions as long as some hacker was interested in it?

At some point, a public person decides to make politics part of his brand. That's a business decision. The results of that decision is that whenever they write, whatever the topic, politics gets inserted into the stream.

Personally I thought it was a poorly-worded and easily constructed essay based on class warfare and ignorance of the value of managing risk. (Which is odd given Krugman's occupation) All securities are risky. People make lots of money managing that risk for their clients. Every now and then Wall Street blows up and investors get screwed.

Nothing much to see here, except Krugman's dancing on the grave of hundreds of billions lost to the tune of "I'm with the little guy"
I agree. This site's story is pretty inspiring to me. I don't know all the details but it really seems to be as simple as: one guy decides to create a website from his home, it becomes very successful and he makes millions.

I think the hate is mostly jealousy coming from the fact that this guy didn't seem to know what he was doing (he admits it himself), and that the design is pretty plain (now. A few years ago, it was actually terrible) but still made it huge.

I'm thinking that the story sounds actually similar to Craigslist but Craig Newmark is royalty: I suppose one difference is that the PoF guy talks about how much money he makes a lot more. People never likes that...
Why don't people say trivially parallel vs embarrassingly parallel? What is so embarrassing about an easily solvable problem?
Digg raised $40mm in VC. VCs don't give you money to put in the bank... they give you money to hire people and invest in things that might be profitable in the future.

Yes, Digg could probably have bootstrapped. But they didn't, they raised money, and once they did that, the money that the VCs gave them was meant to invest, which is guaranteed to mean that the company shows a loss.
Fair enough; but I would argue that the main thesis in the counter essay has nothing to do with the scope of pg's argument. In fact, I think the author would have been better off leaving the issue of scope out of his essay. The main body of the counter essay lies in the intermittent sections between the introduction and the end.

The biggest disagreement I see between the author and pg is the current state and value of philosophy. This is why I view the authors concession that most current philosophy might be garbage as largely irrelevant.
I have made a desktop application for a DVD rental franchise. I have created an account as a customer too and whenever I go to a store and the clerk enters my customer code the title of his screen becomes a smiley.
booze, lots of it
awesome. its really tough running a one man show. great job!
It's 3c per visitor. If it were per visit, they'd be rich.
Kurgman makes the point (briefly) that the incentives for hedge fund managers are only given for short term performance. That incentive means that they can look for strategies that won't blow up for a few years and make bank the whole time.

It's not Ponzi, but it's not in the interest of investors (unless their money's in short-term enough to miss the implosion).
Hard work and practice in Programming
Actually even there, Microsoft's claims for Win Mo devices shipped this year is >14 million. If that's true it's nudging out iPhone or at least real damn close.
No, there's a 1% difference between 99 and 100 percent certainty.

Or are we working with the log odds here? Are you going to tell me there's a big difference between 99.999999% certainty and probability 1? I think at some point you become morally liable and that's well before 99% certainty.
Thank God someone finally said it. We need to take 95% of the financial services industry and ship them off to a desert island.
Eh. Interesting, a lot of up-front planning and no "code" in Week 1.
I use virtualmin instead
Even though the cheap one will do substantially better, over the long run, than most of the expensive ones?(Index funds vs. managed funds: the record is clear).
This seems very true to me as well. I'm working on a business that fits directly into this category (SaaS that sells to businesses) and so I'm very interested to know if there are any facts, studies, etc. to prove it is actually the case that you need to look big. Or, at least bigger than a 1-man-show.
Funny. Way off-topic. Flagged.
> You're very protective of this community,

Heh, I suppose I get a bit wrapped up in it. Living in the middle of the Tirolean Alps, and not speaking much of the local language (German), I don't really interact much with hackers outside of this site, or pretty much at all in real life, which is less than ideal - I'm a fairly social person. Hopefully we'll be back in Italy in a few months and things will improve.

> But this economic crisis is not only a once-in-a-lifetime event, but it has tremendous consequences for start-ups.

Sure, but plenty of real, serious economists are still discussing the great depression too, so I am quite sure that there will be enough discussion about current events to last at least a generation. This article wasn't really all that directly related to startups, either. I thought it was pretty evident he wasn't talking about plain old stocks and bonds, but a lot of the wackier things going on (CDO's, CDS's, hedge funds, etc...). Even there, though, he was doing it in sort of a facile way that probably doesn't add much to the debate.
"Be nice to the countries that lend you money"
And nobody has mentioned it but PoF is written in .NET. I don't normally see startups using ASP.NET around here so I thought it was worth mentioning.
Nice catch...didn't see that. He's definitely stretching to make the claim, if he's using percent of US page-views as his metic.

POF's page-view count per user is so absurdly high that you really have to wonder what he's doing to get it there. The other major dating sites (which have roughly the same modality of search-and-view) all have page-views/user of around 10-13. It's awfully suspicious that he's managed to double that number....
Apple, MacWorld and Steve Jobs: the Wal-Mart Connection
James cites the law as a good example of drawing fine lines around difficult issues, citing the definition for amounts of LSD. If you don't know about this, 500 micrograms of LSD is a dose, but you can't see anything that small so it's normally distributed on a chunk of blotter paper weighing 1000x as much. So when the law says that possessing X amount of LSD is a felony, does that include the blotter paper? The courts have said it does. Is this a triumph of the law drawing fine lines around difficult issues, or were lawmakers just ignorant of basic measurement techniques, prosecutors greedy, and judges easily fooled?

An example consequence of this interpretation: having 0.5 oz of pot is a minor crime. But if you mix it with 10 lb of lawn trimmings, you now have 10+ lbs of material with a detectable amount of a controlled substance, and you're theoretically guilty of a major crime. This is not a law written by science majors.

Giving credit to the legal system for sorting out such a broken law is like giving credit to Vista for having a stylishly designed BSOD.
The "S&P 500" is not the same as the "investment industry" which is the subject. Buying an asset with the expectation that it will increase in value is not the same thing as a direct system of payments between clients with no underlying assets. You're not really addressing my comment or Krugman's article.

But that's not the point. The point is that Krugman's objects of comparison share almost no correspondence. Even Lehman Brothers was substantially profitable when brought down by one class of securities, the creation of which was largely a government affair. It is important for everyone to understand that Krugman is the worst kind of shill.
sir, you would feel comfortable being treated by a professional road-kill picker-upper who loves his job?

Credentials cannot guarantee that the doctor will love his job and that he has certain degree of professionalism, but it does guarantee that he is at least smart enough to fake through 10 years of med school. Your statement implies that a professional isn't the same thing as credentials, but in the real world where we can't read minds of stranger, most of the time they are the same thing.
Now how about some recognition for the grunts who actually implemented all of it.
With his essay, I believe jsomers has proven PG's point.
the degree will allow me to find out what sort of training he had prior to practise, what sort of ethical standards he was traditioned under, and guess at his ability to treat something he hasn't seen before based only on "track-record."

For example, if he got his exceptional by cutting people up unnecessarily, and he learns by mistakes instead of learning from a community of certified professionals, it doesn't matter if he's really really good now does it?
Warner Music Takes Down All Videos from YouTube
prove it.. :-)
Ten years ago, if you invested with a balanced portfolio ( 40% CD's, 40% index funds, and 20% real estate trusts) you not only would have failed to make money, you would have actually lost money in real terms. Meanwhile, the financial sector comprised 50% of all corporate profits. The bonuses were not rewarding managers for investing prudently, the entire sector was making money off of legalized theft.
And that is why MythBusters is my favorite show on TV. This has to be the most awesome presentation I've seen all month, great job.
I meant legally rather than morally. There's plausible deniability if they highly suspect it, there's jail if they knew for certain.
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Yeah I've been doing fine with my $25 Costco folding chair - I just threw a soft couch pillow on the seat and try to remember to sit up straight. I think an Aeron could actually be annoying on a hardwood floor like I have at home, with the coaster wheels on the feet sliding all around.
They have. I'm pretty sure Doubleclick does this. Without the CSS hack though(using the cookie method).

The CSS hack is only worthwhile if you don't have the kind of data sources that the big guys have. If this technique actually made money, you would probably want to sign up for something like Lookery or RightMedia because they'd get you better results.
Because of crippled lambdas, Python never felt to me like it really supported functional programming.
I'd like to know more about this as well. I just graduated from college last week and made a point to get a year-long insurance plan that will cover me until august while I do my startup thing. It was from Pearce & Pearce, but that's because it is affiliated with Georgia Tech.
I should clarify where I got "the Paul Graham route" from: somewhere in the Hackers & Painters book, he wrote about how cheap they were in the beginning of Viaweb, with him coding in an old chair that was falling apart.

Sorry I don't have a link, google's giving me no love.
Excellent initiative Aviel. I think it's a great demonstration of the future trends in Twitter mashups!
The fact that Warner (A) uploaded content to a site known for user-generated content, not for the monetization of said content after (B) having not done any research into the fact that YouTube doesn't have a business model for paying people who upload said content (C) expecting to be paid for sharing their content is indicative of why the record industry NEEDS to fail about as much as the auto because of their absolute refusal to cope with changing demands (I apologize for the run on sentence).

Wake up, this is 2008. Either get with the program, evolve with the technology or GET OUT.
seconded, there's no vi in openbsd install image

i had to use ed during installation to change the fstab (from sd0a to wd0a) of a 2.5" hdd mounted on usb

important step coz o/w rebooting from sd0a 2.5" ide put me to single user w/ read-only fs (too late for ed)
I just realized I actually do this right now - a mac mini for work and an ipod touch for music, email, etc. That's how I get away with using such a cheap system for design work - I offload everything except Fireworks on to the ipod, plus then I get a little bit of help with procrastination because the mini is for only real work during the weekdays.
The "S&P 500" is not the same as the "investment industry"

It's a big part of it, and the rest of the industry was operating in much the same way.

Buying an asset with the expectation that it will increase in value...

People expected the asset to increase in price. The only way an asset can increase in price is if new buyers are willing to pay more money for it. If this increase in price corresponded to an increase in the underlying cashflow, that would be healthy. But the price of stocks were increasing at a far greater rate than dividends were increasing. Therefore it was not healthy at all.

Another way of putting it: if you bought a share a S&P 500 ETF, and knew you could never, ever sell it, what kind of dividend yield would you demand? I would demand at least a 5% dividend, maybe more. By that metric, the S&P in 2007 was overpriced by about 70%. That premium is based on the idea that someone else would be willing to pay that price or more.

The S&P is not really a ponzi scheme. When a ponzi scheme is big enough, and it is legal, we have a new name for it: money. S&P stocks were essentially trading as private currencies. See my longer comment on this here: http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=2587

It is important for everyone to understand that Krugman is the worst kind of shill.

He is a shill, but it's important to criticize him for the right reasons. The elephant that Krugman misses is that from 1995-2008 the dollar was diluting at ~10% a year. When that happens, holding any asset other than the dollar - stocks, real estate, gold, oil - starts looking like a great idea.
Skyfire 0.8.5 Beta Rocks | TechJaws
What happens when the new privatized SEC goes bankrupt?
I concur. There is definitely some room for improvement on the word filtering.

I'm at Pac Sun (205 W Blackstock Rd # 210, Spartanburg, SC)

Otherwise, I think this is an awesome idea. Keep it up.
Great piece. Fallows has been doing interesting work as a sort of articulator of China to the US. Since Gao is familiar and comfortable with the US, the conversation is fascinating. I suspect that the editing here is almost as important as the original comments, though.
interesting comparison between church and corporation. Some difference, though:

1) church leaders, the CEOs, are often poorly paid+.

2) The church's revenue source is the members, but its staffing source is also often the members: you can't just serve and profit, you actually have to train your next generation of staff from the members/customers.

3) A customer can receive the same level of service without paying, for as many years as they want.

4) A customer doesn't actually get more or better services by paying more -- they get more by showing up more, for free.

5) Most churches advertise to the poorest rather than the richest portion of our population. If you are thinking that taking money from the poor is easier than the rich, you are kidding yourself.

You may be thinking "Yeah but, some churches are the exact opposite of what you described up there". Yes, I agree with you. Try to remember that just cuz some A's are B's, not A's are B's.

+I'm talking about the average church: you don't take up preaching for big bucks(work for a large corp), you start your own following or religion (startup) for that.
I'm not but my friend works for them and I get the concept - it's like feedburner for APIs. So instead of individual web apps polling twitter a few times an hour, for example, you subscribe to gnip and it pings you (gnip is ping spelled backwards) when there's an update. It turns your typical app's pull request into a push instead, basically.
It's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...
But what Krugman is highlighting here -- and Nicholas Taleb has done in more detail previously -- is that fortunes have been made pursuing strategies that are net losers for investors and society.

All you have to do is make sure the giant losses occur just 1 year out of N. It doesn't matter that the one year's losses wipe out the other N-1 year gains; you've already collected your fees and quite possibly retired, and there's no claw-back of your cut.

A reasonable aim of financial technology is to ameliorate the risks that could obscure or destroy truly productive activities. But the same tools can easily be used to do the opposite, construct net-wealth-destroying strategies which enrich only money managers.

To cook up such a strategy purposefully is a crime, and the classic ponzi scheme is the blatant extreme case. But many other strategies based on collecting fees during the upswing of an unsustainable bubble, while being insulated from the downswing, are close cousins of the full ponzi. That the loot is laundered through ostensibly legitimate investments (like mortgage securities this time around) is a convenient consensus cover story; it helps even the perpetrators believe they are providing valuable investment services rather than just a scam.

This view doesn't indict all investment activity/funds as being similar to ponzi schemes. But an awful lot of this most recent financial-services boom appears to have been like a ponzi skim.

(Despite the truth I see in this column, I would not trust Krugman's suggested solutions, which are likely to be heavy on new regulation. Ultimately capital has to learn to protect itself, with novel compensation schemes that disincentivize the 'year N explosion' pseudo-ponzi strategies.)
"The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing."

This strikes a chord with me. Stop chasing money. Chase changing the world.
I think you're creating a straw-man here and end up proving jsomers's point.

You jump on the delicacy of the language and that's the point. jsomers doesn't argue _about_ this particular law, he was only giving an example on how pushing and pulling language can have direct pragmatic purposes and real political ramifications.

The point is that since law is mired in language, exploring language becomes an incredibly relevant task and pg's criticism seems to ignore this important function.
PG's "most" includes more than I'm comfortable with, which is why I wrote the essay -- to defend those parts of the subject that I thought were unfairly called a waste of time.

My "most," in other words, includes less than his.
We don't really create-- we merely transform physical resources from one form to another, increasing total entropy in the process. Because entropy can only increase and never decrease, our creative activities are outweighed by the destruction that is a direct consequence of it.

In other words, the only ways we can be "creative of resources" are to create energy from nothing, create matter from nothing, or to reduce entropy without increasing it elsewhere. All three of these are known to be impossible.
Yeah. I think there's a pretty dark side to the rise of POF that Markus has been less than forthcoming about.
Smells like spam. Tastes like spam. It is spam!

Your logic is self-serving, don't you think? You have no history of contributing to HN discussion besides posting your company link twice. A post title has little to do with the quality of content on the other side. I think people ignored it for a reason. Not to mention, how is this that much different from Schill's random hack back in 2006?

http://www.schillmania.com/random/humour/web20awareness/
I think it depends how well you know your customers. I've did SaaS some years ago to business and they put trust in the brand that was us, more than our "business". That is the 3 of us were very much in contact with our customers, in person, over chat, etc.

If you have a self-serve model over the internet then that is much less true, and having the appearance of grandness is extremely useful.
> the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur

Hmm. You might want to check the etymology of the word.
fortunes have been made pursuing strategies that are net losers for investors and society

That seems unavoidable. It's the same in most industries. You have to pay top baseball players high salaries, even though there's no guarantee they'll do well after you hire them.

To cook up such a strategy purposefully is a crime

Is it, actually?
This is one reason I'd much rather do advertising supported, rather than selling to small business. You don't have to spin/exaggerate/sell etc.
Zach Beane has a nice wrapper for the asdf:operate nonsense on various CL implementations:

http://xach.livejournal.com/191187.html
Wub - Cool Javascript effect
Would have? It's did in my case. But you're picking the ten year period that supports your argument. What matters is whether you're right for most ten year stretches, and I'm pretty sure you're not.
To the second level. Where do you think they go when they move over to Python/Ruby/whatever and find out dynamic typing?

ask Dante Alighieri...
Incidentally, most presentations that I've seen that have contained lolcats have been by people who do "work at IBM". I've used a lolcat once or twice, but I stopped after I noticed that :)

Apparently it is now cool to use the word "fuck" a lot, since the corporate types seem to have trouble emulating this. Even that is getting old now, forcing speakers to be even more obscene. My favorite example was a friend describing mod_perl during a talk -- "When all you have is a nailgun, everything looks like the Messiah". I am not sure what was funnier, that remark, or the horrified look on people's faces.

Either way, it was better than a lolcat.
There is a similarity between a ponzi scheme and the bubble created by the financial system: it works only as long as you find fools to trust it, and the last one to get out loses.
I think what Amazon is doing with AWS is a superb technical achievement and positions them well for the future. It's all very impressive, even as Google gets more mainstream attention.

There's one thing that holds my admiration back, though: I've read in a few places that Amazon is not a great place to work. Would those of you here who have firsthand knowledge, or have friends who do, care to comment on this?

Just to be clear, I'm not talking about free massages or foosball tables or any of the stuff in that endlessly-recycled article about "fun" workspaces we've all read a hundred times. I want to know what the culture is. Is Amazon a place where creative people have respect and are free to do great work? Is it a place where great hackers would want to be? That kind of thing.
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does anyone really do javascript fulltime...? It sounds to me like doing CSS fulltime. Or writing XML configuration files for a living. Or something...
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This high-level overviews aren't very helpful anymore. All web frameworks fit into this description, replace Django with your favorite X.

I wish someone had written a comprehensive comparison of Django and RoR. There were some attempts, but people involved inevitably happen to be much more familiar (and efficient) with one framework than the other. Therefore every comparison I've seen to date was heavily biased.
Exactly. Same can be said for Facebook. These sites only make economic sense if they can be run by small staffs.
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