skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it would ever have occurred to me to try to turn ash into something I could clean myself with (given that jumping into coal is a quick way to get dirty). Should I find myself in the middle ages, I hope to remember your comment...
The government borrowing from SS is no different than them borrowing from the Chinese, either way it has to be repaid.

I'd like to offer you an annuity. Here's how it works: you give me about 15% of your paycheck every year, and I spend the money on whatever I feel like. I replace it with a piece of paper that says "Dear Byrneseyeview: Please tender to the bearer -- Byrneseyeview -- an amount equal to the sum borrowed)." See how this 100% foolproof scheme might break down?
Sometimes "losing a fight" can just be agreeing to do something their way, if the fight is superficially about some course of action, etc.

I don't think arranging to lose a fight is dangerous for all types of relationships. I think a personal relationship is less likely to be damaged by that than a working relationship, since in a personal relationship, deliberately losing a fight is (or can be seen as) a sacrifice you're making for your friend or SO.
This should give a nice boost in the already awesome job FreeBSD's developers have done profiling the kernel in the 7.x and 8 branches.

Note that DTrace on FreeBSD can only be used for kernel-space probing, for the time being. Userland probing is expected in a future release.
shush... please don't reveal this well guarded secret... I love always coming late in the plane and still getting the exit row.
But if you start teaching other people that those are nice sits....
But bringing a baby to a business meeting has nothing to do with feeding it.

If a baby was in an appropriate place for a baby to be, then of course it's OK to feed it.
Herding Cats - How to encourage better content from a community
Stop brute force listing of HTTP OPTIONS with network-side scripting
Here's 2 scenarios.

a) Government borrows $4 trillion from the Chinese at 2% annually.

b) Government borrows $4 trillion from Americans, by way of Social Security, at 2% annually.

What's the difference in what the government owes after 10 years? Either way the government has to raise $4 trillion (plus interest) in taxes, borrow it, or print it to pay it off. Either way everyone is in the exact same boat, except in boat b, Americans get the interest. In boat a the Chinese do. (Unless you count borrowing from the Chinese, leaving the Social Security money in a CD, and defaulting to on the borrowed money while paying out SS an option, which it isn't.)

I wasn't suggesting that government borrowing is not a problem. It is. They probably should just not borrow the $4 trillion from anywhere. But that's just a different issue that has nothing to do with Social Security, as many economists have pointed out.
Why the hysteria? This is a useful tool in detecting and preventing serious crimes in the modern world. I think it's a good thing.
It seems one of the hardest, but smartest, things to do is get started on something. Sometimes, anything will do. But your idea of having things that are fun (easier to get yourself going) and somewhat productive make for a better change of success. thanks for posting Jacoblk
I disagree on that. I would have much preferred the Tories to stay in, but with a strong leader. John Major wasn't that person. He was a lame ineffective duck, just as Brown is now.

At least taxes are very likely to come down under Tories, less smaller government, less needless waste etc. Maybe they'll get rid of some of the things Labour have put in place like the regional assemblies, minimum wage, endless tax credits etc
A lesson on infinite loops
Actually it didn't http://klausler.com/cray2.txt it had a command for a square root approximation and a command to iteratively get closer to the real square root.

But even if a certain computer did compute a square root (or even an approximation) in a single cycle, that would mean CPU speed was reduced by slowing down the clock to enable a more complex action to complete within the timeframe of a single cycle, and other simpler actions like adding/subtracting/moving memory we're sacrificed in its favor.
You weren't promised "an amount equal to the sum borrowed".
San Jose, Santa Theresa neighborhood. I can look out of my back yard and see the Santa Theresa foothills less than two blocks away. The greenspace in Santa Clara county is really nice. http://tinyurl.com/8w8fpo

We also try to take day trips to the beach to muck about or to San Francisco to hear jazz every week or two. Sometimes we need more nature. Sometimes we need more culture. As I said, that balance is a lot more possible here than it was in Chicago.
Thanks for the post gaius. Makes sense and what I like in your case is that you gave yourself time to do it. Alot different than saying I need to have some big huge thing done tomorrow and setting yourself up for failure. Also, like the idea of letting everyone know and the motivation of "saving face"
fantastic system pistoriusp. How long did it take you to come to this point of the system?
[Social Security] would work perfectly well if the population remained stable over time, or shrank. And it would even be alright if it grew slowly and linearly.

You got it right but say it backwards. The problem is population shrinking.

The generation retiring is much larger than the ones still working when population has shrunk at some point. Baby Boom wouldn't be a problem in this respect, had it been followed by Baby Big Bang.
37signals made a bad decision with this, in my opinion. They don't emphasize the expensive packages first, to make the cheaper packages seem more affordable. They make the one you want huge, and the 49 dollar price, at first glance, seems expensive. If they emphasized or drew your eye to the $149 package first, by the time you get to the package you want, at 1/3rd the cost you were looking at before, you'd be more inclined to feel it is a good deal.

Look at WuFoo's design, they do an incredibly great job at the price chart, and they can back up their decisions with data.

http://wufoo.com/signup/

On the other hand, if your service is not something you're trying to upsell people on based on gimmicky features, I strongly suggest following the Slicehost model: http://www.slicehost.com/ They know you know what you need, so they very plainly list all of the plans and their prices with no gimmicky sales bullshit. I love them for that.
Thanks Ryan for posting. Do you find that the time of the day matters? For example, do you practice on the piano first thing in the morning? I've found that the longer in the day I do something, the more chance I have of not doing it.
Even if it wasn't for the anomalous population boom that is causing the problem, you would essentially be being forced by the government to put a portion of your salary into an investment with a 0% interest rate. Which granted, would look good to a lot of people right now, but is bad financial planning on the whole.

On the other hand, I reject his cries of paternalism for the simple reason that other people's poverty has a negative effect on my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Poor people have incredibly high rates of criminal activity, drug use, etc. Granted, I don't see a lot of retirees selling crack or robbing banks, but the effect it could have on their families, who sometimes they support or sometimes support them, could create a serious ripple down through generations.

Which doesn't necessarily mean I'm for Social Security or forced savings of any kind, but the issue is not nearly so simple as paternalism.
Yep. It occurred to me that the HN community might find E-Prime interesting as I wrote the comment.
Good point palish. sounds like focusing on the small goals keeps everything on track. Maybe you are breaking down the big goals without even knowing and thus, having success. Thank you for posting.
You're right, I meant the ratio of retirees to workers, not the overall population. Thanks.
It may not technically be a Ponzi scheme but it is in effect. If you're not able to take out what you put in, you're losing money. If you work 40 years, putting in 12% of your salary (companies have to pay it, otherwise it would be part of your salary) you should get all that 12% back for 40 years. Since most people don't live to 108, SS pays very low monthly payments and pays back about half of a lifetime.

If you die however, you don't. Sure there's exceptions but... you can do better on our own. Mutual funds, Money Market accounts... heck, even bonds and CD's would enable you to pass it down. In addition, from 15 on, 12% of your income even if you only make $8 an hour for 52 years and only invest it in something that nets 10% would easily make you a multi-millionaire. You could retire comfortably and still pass it down.

Since we're facing massive shortfalls, isn't that about the same as a Ponzi scheme?

Also, I've been reading this site for probably close to a year. I greatly appreciate having intelligent people post comments. Sites like Digg or Reddit not only have very biased commenters, they also usually only parrot whatever HuffingtonPost or Keith Olbermann said the night before. It's mindless.

Intellectual comments, even if they're not ones I agree with are interesting to read. Kudos to you guys!
Is a circle a kind of ellipse, or vice versa?
A year later, Amazon's Kindle finds a niche
Nice post RiderOfGiraffes. Can you give some detail of you GTD system - paper? application? how you turn goals into next actions? etc. Thank you.
No worries, I feel like I've learned an important lesson here about generalizing. For the record, you don't need to talk about being tarred, throwing up in your mouth, for me to get your point - but it does get across that how you feel about this. I'll be more careful about broad generalizations going forwards, and best wishes.
interesting about the rebeling part. Really like smacklet, thanks for mentioning it.
Writing is hard for a lot of people

If your product is something that needs to be marketed to the blog-reading masses, I'd say that having a decent writer on board is roughly as important as having a decent salesperson would be for an enterprise-facing start-up.

If you can't write, better get started. Practice makes perfect. You don't need to be an amazing writer to write a successful blog, imho. You just need to be somewhat articulate and have interesting things to say (which, as an entrepreneur, shouldn't be too hard?).
I've heard so many times that writing them down (and reviewing them daily) is critical to success. Thanks for the post.
Social Security isn't a good investment for anyone and it never has been. It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to prevent our seniors from plunging into poverty because that would have many negative effects on society as a whole.

If you made it opt out, people would fall into two categories. One would be smart enough to manage their own money and opt out because they can get a better rate of return putting it in a money market. One would be too dumb to manage their own money and opt out because they don't want to pay 12.4% extra income tax. Either way, Social Security would be opted out by almost everyone and totally fail to accomplish the objectives it was created for. At least the way it is, it has a chance, assuming it can remain adequately funded.

I'm actually against Social Security (at least in its current incarnation) but recognize the need for some form of it that is forced.
I would take your point about there not being many political current events a step further. The broad ideas discussed here are some of the most important issues of our day. I might be overstating things a bit, but I think it's safe to say that the HN audience is largely composed of the people who work to propel society forward through their ventures. The readership here are highly educated and are largely "in the trenches" every day solving problems and building the things society needs. These professional problem solvers and hackers are the very individuals I want to be engaging in healthy debate about the virtues of various policies and their impact on business, innovation, and society as a whole.

The problem is when the policy debate degenerates into the standard political name calling and senseless bickering that does nothing to advance intelligent ideas. If any community can keep that to a minimum, it's this one.
Macworld & CES scale back
Shackleton .. truly legendary.

For those who haven't read about his story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Trans-Antarctic_Expedi...

.. amazing stuff.
Letter From Steve Jobs
China targets Google in crackdown on pornography
MIT started long before it was in the people's republic of cambridge.

Serving the market doesn't make any sense, the market is letting people voluntary interact with each other.
Steve Jobs speaks out about his health
First, the words "ponzi scheme" don't mean "anything where you put X in and get X - n out."

Second, Social Security isn't an investment program. The goal of Social Security is to provide each generation of retirees with a baseline level of income. It has succeeded at this task.

Third, we're not facing massive shortfalls. We raised taxes on the baby boomers in the early '80s to build up the social security trust fund to pay for their retirement. As it stands, social security is a small part of the entitlements problem moving forward --- Medicare has more than 7 times its liabilities in the projected future.

Fourth, this "small payments" thing is a myth. 2/3rds of Social Security beneficiaries derive more than half their income from Social Security; more than 1/3rd of them derive the overwhelming majority of their income from it.
> "The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves".

The former sentence implies the existence of an essential characteristic of being overrated, while the latter makes an observation, possibly incorrect. I think facts vs. opinions isn't so much the relevant distinction here as things being as they are because of Aristotelian essences vs. happening because of action (in this case, judgement).

With the Barack Obama example, the is-ness crept back in with "false impression" ("the impression is false"); rewriting English the whole way down seems excessively cumbersome to me, of course, but I've found doing it as an exercise to helps me recognize when ideas are reified largely due to language quirks.
Free Teamwork 4 user licenses for reviewers
I would be interested in talking to many of the people here about cooking. But this isn't "Hackers Discussing Cooking"; it's "Hacker News". Your idea about what this site should be is a slippery slope.
You just made me log into friendfeed, but I don't see those features. Where are they?
Gvke - Download Old Telugu Sitakoka Chilaka mp3 Songs
6 Great Tips to Launching Your Product c/o Jason Calacanis : East Coast Blogging
I'd grab my Wagner's Chemical Technology 1872, a Pocket Ref, a hatchet, my wristwatch (automatic movement, no batteries), my Leatherman, every knife in my kitchen and the entire contents of my medicine cabinet (asprin, alcohol, gauze, etc). That ought to fit in a large backpack. Maybe some nylon rope if I could dig it up fast enough.

Yes this is all stuff in my house at the moment.

If I had more time I'd buy a 9mm revolver, load up a Kindle with reference books from demonoid and start working out.
Don't advertise.

Be enthusiastic about your product. Have a twitter account? Talk about your product. Start a company/project blog and pimp that content as much as possible.

Email every single blog that covers what your product is about or have influential writers who would like your product. Simply introduce your product in the email and don't ask for a post, link or anything. Ask them for their opinion.

This is the best marketing.

It's extremely time consuming but I have much more time than I have money, not sure about yourself. You could outsource this but personal emails from the owner/developer will get you further.
Steve Jobs admits poor health
That sound you hear? The shuffling of papers and stomping of feet as editors order their writers to "dig up everything you can" on hormone imbalances.
"Somebody is wrong on the internet". I'm wasting my time and this is my last answer. If you haven't noticed, I only use strict mathematical arguments and I invite you to do the same if you intend to answer. Pure and clear maths please, no litteral arguments about the sexes or god knows, this is the only field where we can verify it.

Lacking elementary probabilities knowledge isn't as dramatic as refusing to learn it, please teach yourself now since nobody will look at this thread again.

Here is my last point, and you can ask any teacher of formal logic, probabilities or maths to verify it :

For universe [M,F], the table of possibilities is :

MM

MF

FM

FF

And that's it. I'm sorry but the table you just made up doesn't exist at all, please go ask one of your teacher about it. If you still believe you are right, and you can prove it, you just discovered a new field in mathematics and probabilities, congratulations.
In defense of social security:

It pays significant disability and survives benefits which has little to do with investing and everything to do with insurance. So consider SS as insurance in case of a long life.

Some people will live well over 100 so finding the "correct" amount of money to save is overkill for most people who die far younger than that. If you invested a portion of your savings each year and pooled you money with 10,000 other people your age then paid dividends from that to the survivors you could save less money and still not worry about running out. Granted if to many people lived until retirement age you might need to reduce benefits. Granted you would not be able to give people money at the time of your death but if your single what's the point?

Now the implementation of social security is broken in several ways but minor changes in retirement age will fix the "benefit gap" long before it runs out of money. The basic problem is people are living longer so they need to increase average retirement age. The surplus was also invested in government bonds with terrible long term returns etc, but when you consider how much more important the first 20k/year is over the next you might consider guaranteed benefits even at high cost are worth a lot more than the simple math would suggest.

PS: There are a lot of things I hate about SS, but it's not really a Ponzi scheme.
wow. i think that's the first time jobs has ever tipped his hand in reaction to stories in the media.

i don't know if it's just because it's so out of character for him or what, but i don't like it.
I think it's sad he feels compelled to reveal this personal information.
How to Integrate an Acquired Company: Lessons from IBM
Norwegian Broadcasting publishes all 212 tunes from the Beatles - free and legal
The Bayh Dole act is used as a bulldozer to run over University professors but it actually doesn't say anything about a faculty members obligation to assign his rights to a university receiving federal funds.
This isn't technically speed reading, it's skimming.
This is actually much better / more valuable than it sounds.
In particular, are hormone imbalances frequently comorbid with, say, pancreatic cancer?
Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme because it would work perfectly well if the population remained stable over time, or shrank. And it would even be alright if it grew slowly and linearly.

Only if benefits match contributions. If benefits exceed contributions, you do have a Ponzi scheme, and you have to find ways to funnel increasing amounts of money into the system.

Social Security taxes, as a percentage of income, have risen continuously since the program was started, well before the baby boomers started retiring:

http://www.ssa.gov/history/pdf/t2a3.pdf
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420450
How's your logo? StartupSchwag.com will put you on a sticker (for free) and distribute those stickers to its subscribers (also free). People take pics that wind up on flickr, talk about what's in the bag on their blogs, etc. Good times had by all.
I had a 486 when Quake came out. The framerate was far too low to make it playable. I remember trying to play the demo, and I had to cut the screen down to the size of a postcard (something like 160x100) to get a framerate of 25fps.

The first Pentiums, on the other hand, were more than up to the job.
without a warrant. Certainly I want to police to be able to search people's homes if they are likely to commit serious crimes. However, I don't want the police to be able to search my home with out some sort of evidence that I have done something improper. Similarly, I consider the data on my computer private. I think that history suggests that the government cannot be trusted to use authority responsibly unless there is some sort of system in place to guarantee that it uses its authority responsibly. That system is called warrants.
Letter from Apple CEO Steve Jobs
This is one of the downsides to being head of a publicly traded corporation - shareholders deserve to know about things like this. If Apple were private, it wouldn't matter.
So, you have $1k for marketing your current site. That's actually a ton of money.

Here's a couple of ways to stretch $1k marketing budget:

* Hire an Indian/East European company on eLance that specializes in internet marketing. Pay them $3-5 an hour x 10 hours a week x 3 months to do their thing. Or, you can pay them by the task.

* Write a letter to English/Business departments at the three closest colleges. Tell them you have a 3 month marketing internship. It's unpaid, but interns will receive a $200 a month stipend. Have them write blog posts, blog comments, submit to bookmarking sites, write press releases, etc... If college kids are your demographic, be sure to give your interns swag.

* Get a bunch of users at once from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Set up a job called, "evaluate my new news service", and pay $0.02 a hit. 10000 hits x $0.02 = $200 Ask them to write their impressions in a comments form on your HIT description. Give them an option to submit their email address if they want to be updated about future changes to your site.

* User Amazon's Mechanical Turk service command line tools to script a recurring HIT. You can ask 100 people a day to look at your site, register, comment, etc... 100 hits a day x $0.02 = $2 a day.

* Adwords, but depending on your site, your keywords, you're probably looking at $0.05-.50 a hit.

* Depending on your site, you could hold a competition and submit it to whatever forums and BBS's you'd like to. The winner gets a brand new $200 iPod.

* Buy swag and hand it out to your targeted demographic. Or, give it to your first passionate users. People love free stuff, and you might be able to get some word of mouth/buzz from passionate users that just got a t-shirt from your site. Cost of a custom T-shirts in small batches: $10-15 a piece. Custom stickers in batches of 1000: $75. http://www.stickergiant.com/custom_stickers/
Or a side effect of cancer treatment . . . .
This was one of the intellectual flaws of the Bush privatization scheme; they calibrated returns from individual private accounts to the average lifespan, without noting that a pretty large contingent of social security beneficiaries would outlive the average.

Current estimates are that many of us will be long retired before there even is a "gap" between Social Security funding and Social Security benefits. The trust fund, for instance, doesn't run out until the 2040's.