skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that increasing the SS age is a good idea.

Anyway, Employment is vary stable even in the GD I vs. every other asset class. If unemployment goes from 5% to 20% the drop in income does not change much on a year over year basis, but just about every other asset class is going to tank. If unemployment stays over 20% vary long there is not much that can save your retirement.

The reason to fund SS with workers income is it's more stable than just about everything else in the economy. Inflation or deflation and people still make about as much money.

If you have 5x what you need to live off of and it's extremely diversified then it's not a problem but what's the point in waiting that long?

You might have 20% cash on hand but how long is that going to last you? You might have some bonds but if the company tanks your out of luck. You could have some property but who's buying? etc.

PS: How much money do you think you need to save and how would you invest it to have a 99.9% chance to live off of 20k inflation adjusted for the next 30 years?
Powering Down: Q&A With Saul Griffith, Makani Power
I don't understand -- they seem to have been hosted by someone else; did the hosts not do backups or did the employee somehow delete those too?

Seems like at least two things went wrong.
As Steve is a shareholder, if the stock price has uncertainty about his health factored in, and Steve announces his health is ok, the share price will likely rise and perform better going forward. If he is selling shares periodically to generate cash and diversify, he will get a better price.
Shantytown, U.S.A.
Speculation: Cisco wanted to buy Xobni, but Xobni said they wouldn't sell for less than $too_much, so Cisco invested instead and will end up buying them later if they do well.
Be more time efficient - Startup advice for the Super Busy
How do you know if something is "100% secure"?

It looks like they did exactly the right thing, which was to make the support tools out-of-band until they can resolve how to secure them long term.
I don't personally like sites that "resist" resizing. Try increasing the font size in your browser by even 1 or 2 levels, and you'll see that the content of your site is truncated. Try making your browser twice as wide, and ask why you can't see twice as much content.
there isn't anything magical about the Ramen profitability point... However - you;'ve been gorwing revenue/profits up until that point - customers wont magically stop appearing as you hit it - so you're likely to go past just living on ramen.
It's simply what a customer is paying you each month.
"... The bet, in short, is that the map is about to become the interface to many of the things people do on the internet – and that the company that controls this interface could one day own something as prevalent and powerful as Google’s simple search box ..."

Remember one thing, "ground-truth"... the representation on the map may/may not show what is really on the ground.
The reason this flies well is that it is a proper airplane. Most paper airplane designs I have seen don't have a horizontal stabilizer, which will usually doom the plane to crash.

Without a tail section, most airplanes are unstable in the pitch plane - the resultant force from the aerodynamic lift doesn't work from the same point on the wing as the center of gravity. An additional horizontal lift surface is required to make sure the plane doesn't pitch up and stall.

The point the author makes about the center of gravity is good - with the center of gravity far forward, the airplane will have a smaller angle of attack (and hence less lift) for any given airspeed, and hence the plane will end up in stable flight at a higher speed, with a resulting higher margin for how strong gusts are required for it to stall and crash.

This is pretty basic applied aerodynamics, but not very common knowledge among the kindergarten teachers who teach the art of making paper airplanes.

This thing might fly if you remove the tail, because the center of gravity is far below the resultant lift center - there is some trick here that can allow you to get by without a horizontal stabilizer. Paragliders and hang gliders use this, but I don't know why it works. Actually, the instructions on this site are pretty neat and probably a good way to learn about practical aerodynamics. On the "how to fly" page, they explain how you can trim the plane for higher or lower speeds by adjusting the tail section and making "flaps" - changing the shape of the wing in order to alter the lift coefficient (how much lift you get at a given airspeed and angle of attack)
The new site seems to be even slower than the old one, which was a slug in its own right.
As one of these student with no money, yes that would be awesome. I enjoy using github.com, however because I need to protect my source I have been using http://unfuddle.com as a single user. It works, and it is nice, but it is a single user environment (the free version).

I would prefer to use github.com, just think of it as a mini-investment for each student startups. I for one would pledge to use your service for a while if any of my ideas "make it". In addition to this it might encourage students who use your service to become evangelists for github.com once they matriculate from college.
I love that he's saying "The ACL is Dead." This should be said loudly and often. Maybe it'll get through the heads of management out there. Heck, it needs to get through the heads of a lot of programmers.

Modern security and access controls need functionality like capabilities.
If the website was getting 100,000, how was it abandoned? Just not being developed further? Why were people coming to the site? And why would the owner sell for 500$.

These are genuine questions - I've very interested in this approach. Congrats on how well it turned out for you.
Remember that scene in The Matrix where Cypher kills Switch and Apoc by unplugging them. "Not like this."

Wow. What a way to go.
You think someone might want to rename this story "Twitter's official response to security breach"?
There are of course many factors you could include. If you do an excel sheet it is pretty trivial to include all sorts of numbers.

The advantage of this approach is that instead of just guessing you'll be naking an informed decision based on an assessment of the underlying assumptions. In my opinion this is hugely superior to just guessing.
Presumably not everyone realised that it was available for free. I imagine many of them bought it as it was rising up the charts fueled by people who had listened to it for free buying it (as a tip or a donation).

It seems like this model is still mostly a buzz machine which won't necessarily scale.
There is some, most of it that I've seen is related to vulcanology.

There was also an article in Discover magazine in the late 90's (which formed the basis for "The Day After Tomorrow" even though it was blindingly obvious that the writers didn't understand any of the article's science) that described some simulations that the author's had developed. They found that the runaway greenhouse effect lead to an ice age, but not from global cooling.

Instead, it lead to an ice age because the melting ice submerged the North Atlantic Gyre, preventing it from transferring heat to New England and Europe, leading to a drastic drop in their temperatures. So while the arctic and sub-arctic zones experience plunging temperatures, the equatorial waters end up getting warmer since the currents that normally convey their heat elsewhere aren't flowing... so the hurricanes get stronger and more frequent.

The buffoons that wrote the movie script somehow got the impression that it was possible for a hurricane to form in the arctic. They should have consulted a 4th-grader about how things tend to move downhill rather than uphill.
Sounds like there is some overlap with my startup, NewsCred. Have you taken a look? Get in touch if you want some tips.. will be happy to help.
If you build it, they will come — on Google Earth
Good catch ;) My thinking was revolving around cooking.
If you read the original post, the supposed "disgruntled employee" worked for lagomorphics, not JournalSpace, and there's no evidence said employee was involved in the data loss, just conjecture by JournalSpace.

Flagged for being incorrect and not adding anything.
How to Make Money in 2009 With Your Web Startup
What I can't fathom is whether this person realized that there were any legal ramifications to doing a data wipe?

Did he think they'd just ignore the fact that he just killed their business?
I'm sorry, but this always sounded like pretentious whining to me. Sometimes when you have a skill your friends and family ask you for help?!

For a serious reality check, consider for a moment what doctors must go through at family reunions. Then go help grandpa with his email; he's likely done more for you over the years than immediately springs to mind.
CEOs Getting a Free Pass
The essential thing to understand about ramen profitability is that it's a way to hack fund-raising. It's not the goal of the company. It need not even come from the source the company's ultimate profits. All it means is getting enough revenue fairly early that you're not at the mercy of investors.
sl is still around, and at a minimum easily installable on Ubuntu (apt-get install sl)
First Annual SIGMOD Programming Contest
In my opinion, E-Prime appears good for two things: dehumanizing English, and making it hard to say really stupid things!
on "steak and strippers...." - well I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding - ALL input products (not just software based) is sold this way to large corporations. Everyone has an agenda.

Also - its not just big enterprisey things - rails is so common in the enterprise these days due to the "steak and strippers...." work done by companies like thoughtworks. There is always wheeling and dealing, even with grassroots things - things are never as white and as pure as they seem (well almost all things).

I don't see this ever changing, unless somehow all these types of corporations simultaneously cease to exist, and something else more merit based takes their place.
I commented there too :). I have the knife that Cooks Illustrated recommended, the Forschner. It's a good knife, worth the $25. Probably worth more, but it's not remarkable. I also have a Shun that's the same size and it's an amazing knife. Priced as such too, it's around $100. The differences are subtle, but because the Shun is perfectly balanced it's not hard to notice. My chef friends love it. Novice cooks who pick it up immediately notice something different. It's a very well crafted tool. Switch the prices and I'd still say the same thing, I'm all about getting a bargain.

If we're doing car comparisons, it's like a Camry versus a Lexus. The Lexus can't get you anywhere that the Camry can't, but you'll enjoy yourself more.

That said, I'm sure there are expensive knives out there that are simply shit. Price is a marketing technique sometimes. But there are real gems out there too. If I had to buy over again, I'd still get a Shun.
I have never set goals. Not on purpose, I just am focused on going forward from where I am now that I let it work itself out. Might sound bad but it has worked so far.
Do not confuse people who don't think global warming is a problem (or even happening) with "it's all OK" dolts. A lot of people, myself included, point out that pouring trillions of dollars into a non-problem does nothing to solve the real problems, such as the Pacific dead zone or massive overfishing. If global warming is not happening or not a threat, those who support it anyhow should earn the same contempt you spew for the "it's all OK dolts", for their opportunity cost of their solutions to non-problems will be the worst thing to ever happen to the environment.

Believing in climate change doesn't make you holy regardless of the evidence.
Thanks for posting this; the part at 40:00 actually motivated me to view the rest, which I recommend to anybody working in a corporate job.

Hopefully this summary does justice to the remainder (but IMO it's worth watching):

40:00 Essentially he says you're not defined by your job. Your outside projects represent your self-expression and the corporation doesn't get a piece of that.

42:00: Most companies treat programmers like factory workers. In that case, act like one: do a professional job and punch out at the end of the day.

43:30: "If the company makes money off the sweat off your back, you get a chunk. If you don't get a chunk then you give them what they absolutely ask for, keep it to a minimum, be friendly, be very professional, do your stuff, make sure it's well-written, but don't go out of your way to give them your latest, greatest research or your idea or whatever."

44:00: Work on weird and cool stuff at home to stay sharp. If all you do is corporate coding, all you'll ever be is a drone.

45:00: When you're coding at home, "you're making poetry people can play with." But you don't want to do this for a company that doesn't care. "Who wants to make another document management system, time tracker or accounting system? There is money in that, but unless you're making the money too, it's not really fair."

47:30: Don't fear change. At home, take chances and learn new stuff. But at work, just give them what they want because they'll make changes whether you like them or not. It's just a job.

50:00: If you're concerned about being outed, consider creating an online identity (like "_why").

51:30: Don't do Blub at home; do something completely different, break the rules and code for fun. At work, don't think too much, don't be different and just get it done.

52:40: Outside work, make sure you're not someone's "resource" to be "utilized." Run with like-minded folks.

54:00: Embrace your geekiness, get out there and do it now.

55:00+: Questions and answers. This was good too, but somebody else will have to take over the transcription. ;)
Still looking, but I found one for japan: http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/database/db-hw/lifetb04/2.html

1955: 40 and live to 60 = 71%;
2004: 40 and live to 60 = 88%;
1955: 60 and live to 80 = 32%;
2004: 60 and live to 80 = 64%;

Edit US: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005124.html (Looks like deaths are down per 100,000 people but I can't find the right tables.)

Edit: Got it: Even more old people in the US: 1990 vs 2000: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0905042.html look at Percent change in the over 75 age range. The US population was not growing anywhere near that fast.
Speaking as a student that is about to start working on a startup I think the prices are fair and hell, I'll probably end up signing up for GitHub myself in the next couple weeks.
It's Christmas - I have seen the light  - thanks Mac
Trust Your Customers... And They Do Amazing Things...
Criminals often have poor impulse control, and let their emotions govern their actions without worrying very much about the consequences of their actions. This is particularly accentuated in those criminals who are also affected by psychopathy, for which the consequences of their actions towards other people are irrelevant.
Well given that the SEC gave Apple the smallest of slaps on the wrist for backdating options (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Heinen), and given that they failed to do anything at all about Madoff despite Markopolos beating them over the head with detailed evidence about his Ponzi scheme for ten years (http://mises.org/story/3273), and given that SEC staffers seem to do little more than surf porn and run their own private businesses (http://www.soxfirst.com/50226711/sec_porn_conflicts_of_inter...), I wouldn't hold my breath over any SEC action for something as ambiguous and comparatively trivial as this.
The alternative to GitHub isn't svn, it's git.
The "it's all OK" crowd may be half right in that they see Earth's climate as a stable system. It is pretty clear that there are many negative feedback loops involved. The question, however, is how far can we push these built-in regulations?
The original journalspace announcement was discussed here, btw: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417762
Jobs gave an address to Stanford university's graduating class in 2005. Here's a link to youtube if you want to watch it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

It was quite interesting and spoke deeply to me.
It's in Factor, right?

Is the source available?
MemcacheQ seems especially interesting!
Anyways, the limitation of 64k-1 of body length is a bit frustrating...
It would not have prevented this, but by jumping on another tangentially-related bandwagon the Twitter folks probably figure that they can distract everyone from the real problem and get ahead of the curve on credentials and authentication for the third-party ecosystem that is starting to develop around twitter.
I never went to starbucks as a student... cmon, when you're making zero cash, you're basically living off of whatever you made during the summer, or begging parents to help pay for stuff. Or you're using student loans that you'll have to pay someday. Could you beg your parents for $7 to drink coffee? come now!
Xmonad has an Ubuntu package.
http://www.zedshaw.com/conferences/cusec2008.factor
especially in this market
When buying material goods, I think it we may be mistaken and shortsighted to only consider the purchase price and the satisfaction it will add to our own lives.

What about negative externalities, like the future cost of having fewer resources to use for more important purposes, environmental degradation and rehabilitation, and the cost of dumping/recycling after use? These are all real costs of every purchase you make, but often not "included" in the price.

Living on less leaves more scarce resources for use by others whether now or in the future, and sends less crap to landfills. Label me a moralizer if you like, but I think it is smart for society to encourage individuals to think beyond themselves. That capitalism has proven incredibly effective at driving innovation and efficiency does not mean we should defend its weaknesses as well as its strengths (better to work hard at mitigating them, to minimize the total overhead of the system).
1-3 month for free. That should be enough to see the value.
he made a grammatical error in that sentence!
For those who might not know how this speedup is possible:

Traditional databases use data structures like b-tree indexes. These are awesome! They look up data in log(n) time (n being the size of your dataset). That means that as your data grows, the time to execute a single query doesn't grow so much. So, what's the problem with databases? Well, the problem is that as your data set grows, you're likely getting more queries as well. So, you end up with m * log(n) where m is the number of queries that users are making. Boo!

What about throwing hardware at it? I hear that's all the rage! The problem with that is that it's really, really difficult to split data across more than a handful of machines. Replication is good for a few machines, but eventually you hit a wall with writes since writes must happen on every server in the cluster.

Or do they? There's a technique called sharding that you may have heard of. Basically, it's putting some articles on server 1 and some articles on server 2. Then, when you need article 450, you need to figure out what server it's on and get it. This is what MemcacheDB (and memcached) do. They hash the key you give it and that tells them what server it will be on without having to actually ask each server if they have it. That's a constant time process so it scales infinitely (unlike those hosting companies that claim they scale infinitely). All you have to do is keep throwing boxes at it as you grow.

Awesome! That's so much better than MySQL! Well, no. I mean, it is in some ways, but you can't say something like "get me the latest article that someone has commented on". That might be useful to your site, might not. All you can do is lookup by the key.

It gets hard when you want to do something such as getting the comments for an article. You can't say, get me the comments for article 450. You have to actually store a list of the comment ids in the article, get the article, and then request the comments based on that list in the article object. Worse, lets say two people comment on an article at the same time. You'd better make sure you start a transaction before reading the object, modify the list, and save it. If you don't, you'll hit race conditions that can see a comment's association lost (something you don't have to worry about with foreign-key associations).

Plus, beyond that trouble, you still can't say "get me the article with the most comments".

To an extent, I'm wondering how this is much better than memcached. If you still need/want an RDBMS for query capabilities, do you really need another key-store that saves to disk? memcached can always be reconstituted from the RDBMS if a server fails, but I guess MemcacheDB forgoes that warm-up process (similar to the Shop.com Cache) and that can be a bonus. However, it's a lot slower than memcached due to the disk access.

It looks really interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it would be (I should say, in my line of work). I won't give up queries and their site says emphatically that it's not a cache. If you're doing something that needs a simple key-value store, this is going to be an amazing product.
No. It supports the memcached interface. Most languages have libraries for this as memcached is decently popular.
In this particular case, Trent has a very loyal fan base (I bought the $300 limited edition Ghosts set and saw him twice in concert during their most recent tour).

As far as the rationality behind it, personally I purchase items from artists and go to their shows to support them and to thank them for their hard work and their talent.

I want the bands I like to keep producing more music and hopefully my support will help.

Disclaimer: I attend 15-20 shows a year, have far too many band shirts, and am sure that I'm a statistical outlier.
Meg Whitman Considers Run for California Governor
Any links? As only a sometime-programmer, the "ACL is Dead" idea is new to me. I could use some good examples.
I wish I knew why that is. Could you please elaborate?
Q&A was good - I think Zed is wildly missing the non technology/boring business aspects of starting up (I guess he hasn't tried to start something up before? Or maybe he has...).
"Not ready for prime time" because someone found a flaw in an admin tool? This is naive. For most of what TechCrunch does consider "ready for prime time", there's no assurance that similar flaws don't exist. What has Yammer, Arrington's "can't live without it" enterprise Twitter clone, done to address this problem?
Multiple languages in the same interpreter in Parrot
So does that mean I'm not invited to Natalie Gulbis's birthday party (http://twitter.com/natalie_gulbis/status/1072283758)?

Bummer.
I can believe the "True geometric growth is hard to deal with period." argument when it comes to downtime.

But what does scale have to do with security?
Thanks for posting this. Unfortunately it doesn't really add much detail. Have you had any luck in tracking down more details?

There are some gems though, "According to recent reports, images of sexually abused children available on-line quadrupled in the last five years and half of all internet crime involves the production, distribution and sale of child pornography."

I can easily believe the first figure of a quadrupling over the past 5 years but I find the second figure highly suspect.
Actually, there's an even easier fix: don't put those tools outside the firewall. Use VPN, or even just a tunneling proxy or SSH to protect your admin console.

This is a classic security failure, and their response was both typical and appropriate: take the tools offline, restore the affected accounts, and admit your mistake (in that order).
I bet staunch got it in the above comment