skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Friedman makes a fair point. I've lived in three very different countries for some lengths of time, and traveled to many others over the years, so the following is a little more than anecdotal. When I first came to the US several years ago, my first reaction was that in many ways (and remember this was over a decade ago) the US was a little backwards, culturally, socially and most definitely when it came to infrastructure and facilities. Is it still the technological leader of the world? Yes, but that's less due to its own efforts and more due to sheer inertia from the heyday of US technology and an inability of the rest of the world to take advantage of the sense of ennui that seems to be pervasive.

There are many countries, out there, young democracies (or not), that are hungry, eager. When they figure it out, watch out. You can't assume that the US will stay ahead forever.

America does need a reboot. Our future depends on it.
I think it is one of teach12.com courses (sounds like Gates mentions teach12 but its not very clear in the video):

http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=8050
This is a very dubious assertion. What is your underlying theory of value from which you can deduce that assembling a car creates "REAL value," while fixing one (a service) or designing one on contract (also a service) doesn't?
If you keep scrolling there are some more non-pure-math algorithms. Including: pathfinding, heaps, and some threading stuff.

I like the reverse chronological order... It's like being transported back in time, and watching the history of CS fly by in fast-forward.
You're just flattered. :)
Unix is better than Windows because doing Unix development is easier on Unix than on Windows?

I like OS X, but this is not a very well-constructed argument.
We've already lost one decade. Why not another?
Ah, one of those Ruby "ninjas" who think they're God's gift because they made a website. Say no more.
Teaching kids almost anything (worth teaching) is a good idea. By the time kids grow over 10, large portions of their learning abilities are gone. For example, consider languages. Kids growing up with multiple languages learn them with ease, but for most adults, learning a foreign language is nearly impossible.

The early years are a person's best chance to expand their minds.
I am Chilean. I have thought of an Atlas Shrugged scenario in Chile, and Chile does have a lot of lithium, but...OK, I have no idea if the government is going to socialize what is currently Soquimich's ill-gotten concession, or if Obama is going to mess things up real bad, but I do know that getting a citizenship is a major pain in the ass. Major, major pain in the ass. An American I know lived here for twenty years, married a Chilean, and still had to do about three year's worth of bureaucratic bullshit to get a citizenship. That said, it's not that hard to immigrate or get a residency.

Now, if you want to chill out here for a while, sure, it's a great idea, but you have to keep a few things in mind. First, you're probably going to make more American friends than Chilean friends. Chileans often confuse Americans by telling them they'll do something sometime but never call and are very dodgy. It's not easy making friends. This is coming from the experiences of exchange students, teachers, and family friends that came to Chile for a while and found things to be somewhat different than they expected.

Then there's the flayte factor. [1] What I'm getting at is that there are quite a few people that aren't totally friendly to Americans or English speakers in general. They think they can take advantage of you. This should come as no surprise because I have yet to travel to a country where the default attitude towards Americans is friendly. Anyway. Taxis try to rip you off for sums that are not insignificant. People may try to steal from you. However, if you're 6' or above you're unlikely to get shit because people here are small compared to the first world. So yeah, a lot of reverse racism, and people sometimes have no class. OK, and customer service sucks. But it's not all bad.

Things are cheaper here, there are nice restaurants, cool neighborhoods, human rights, beaches, skiing, and so forth. So there are reasons to come, but for Americans, I recommend staying in the better parts of Santiago, turning off the trust instinct, going to malls, making friends in the international community, and going to a lot of restaurants and ski trips.

I know less about this, but the work environment is more chilled out than in US, but also somewhat more "Dilbert".

[1] So..."flayte" comes from someone who gets high. It's a corruption of the English "flight", as in Spanish someone who is high on weed can sometimes be referred to as "estar volado", literally "being flown".
I will miss the maddox of the tech community
I did a spree of hacking last week, but came away very healthy. It was about 72 hours, and I only took breaks to eat and sleep. I follow a few basic rules, I would encourage you to do the same:

1) Find a comfortable chair with a comfortable desk. I refuse to work on a wooden chair, it's just distracting and like you pointed out, it isn't healthy.

2) Take breaks and eat decent food every once in a while. I went and got Subway and drank lots of green tea (has tons of antioxidants and some caffeine, which keeps you awake and helps your immune system deal with the lack of sleep). You cannot overdo caffeine because your body will quickly build tolerance. You have to sleep at some point. If you're tired while drinking caffeine, go to sleep.

3) I slept in two 4.5 hour chunks throughout 24 hours (biphasic sleep cycle) and it worked really well. Some people do polymorphic sleep cycles, and some do really weird uberman cycles. I suppose it depends on how much control you have over your schedule. I don't like monophasic because 8-10 hours at a time seems to have a recovery curve from waking up to being fully ready to go back to coding.

4) Work with friends. Preferably on the same project.

5) Play classical music (I recommend sky.fm solo piano station). Caffeine makes it difficult to learn new material because you're too energized (or at least it has that effect on me), but classical helps me focus.

EDIT: because of the shorter sleep cycles, I remembered more of my dreams. I had some really weird dreams during this time (robots assembling themselves and teaching each other how to subclass).
"bump the thread" doesn't work here, but would a version of it be useful? Should a story's comment activity over the past X hours be a factor in how it ranks?
Ask HN: what to do if you have only cash?
I don't have that much money saved, in fact I think due to irregular work habits, I have probably fallen being my age group by quite a large amount.

Nevertheless, it all being in cash (not in a sock in my home, but flexible saving accounts) makes me a bit nervous, especially with the financial crisis around the corner. But changing the situation is difficult. Maybe HN has some ideas?

I can not afford to buy a house or flat. I don't know enough about the stock market to invest successfully - plan to buy some Amazon shares, but that is it. Index certificates I don't understand - banks could go broke, and besides, who determines the index. Is it so much different from fund managers, who I have learned can not be trusted?

I intend to buy some gold (like for about 3000€) - probably the price is quite high atm, but it should be an emergency thing, so even if it loses half it's value, it would not be too bad if it could get me safely out of the country or something.

Also thinking to simply buy as much stuff as possible that I had been putting on hold - iPhone, roomba, book travels,...

Bad idea? What else could I do?
Not that I've tried it, but I want to:
http://images.google.com/images?q=treadmill%20desk
scare tactic by a journalist to get attention. He's referring to Ukraine.
How much oil production is there in Ukraine? Don't they also produce a lot of grain, which has gone through big price swings as well? I don't know enough to criticize, I'm just wondering if commodity price swings directly affect GDP or only indirectly through lost revenue.
Are you replaceable?
"Zed's dead baby, Zed's dead."
Los Angeles Times story:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-rocket25-2008dec25,0,5...
my guess is this is their attempt at standing apart from the crowded space in this sector and forming their niche.
It's an open area of research (mentioned in some recent HN threads, in fact) whether all areas of learning have the same plasticity in adult life. It does appear, in the interest of efficiency in using language, perhaps, that language learning plasticity drops sharply after puberty. (Although I got good enough in Chinese to work for many years as a Chinese-English interpreter, even though I didn't start learning the language until age seventeen.) On the other hand, a lot of other skills can be learned to very high levels indeed after surprisingly late starts.

Children also need time to play, and maybe one of the most important things start-up entrepreneurs can figure out is forms of play for children that bolster or increase their plasticity for learning what they need to learn as they grow up.
I don't really understand the merits of comparing the production of a few months in one country to that of several years in another, but then again I'm not an economist (is he?).

For those interested, here is the source for his US data with a full history (rather than a selective sample), which clearly shows that recessions are relatively common:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO
I think the capitalism today is much tamer than the capitalism was in Karl Marx's time. My opinion is based on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_wealthy_historical...

At the time of Karl Marx, the wealth built by Rockefeller and Carnegie is such a big portion of wealth of the U.S. But when you look at Buffet and Gates, they are not as wealthy as Rockefeller and Carnegie were. Besides Gates and Buffet's influence on political power is limited.
A lot of them make sense actually. He has the balls to say what most wont.
Well...he did write Mongrel...so he's a bit of a "ninja."
The Ultimate Twitter Search Tool?
I did not say that all service industries do not create value. Designing a car or fixing one creates or maintains value, so is real wealth.

But a waitress who moves food from the kitchen to the patrons plate does not create any value, she is simply a neccessary add-on to other value creating industries. No economy can function where 100% of the people are in these type of service industries.

Value is created by scarcity, and most of the financial industry is in a similar type of service - no real value is created there. The value of other manufacturing industries is just exchanged there.
http://tweetgrid.com/ is the search engine. It's pretty cool. Chad is doing a bunch of other things with Twitter. Check out his homepage http://jazzychad.net/

He's really active on the Twitter API Google group, I'm glad to see his Twitter projects are getting some love.
Perhaps I am too far down the ladder of programmers, but was I the only one who didn't care about the recent teenage prom queen drama to engulf the Ruby community?

Good hacks continued to come out, the language was still fun to write in, and Rails and Merb continued to move forward.

Perhaps I don't follow enough on twitter, or something. I get the sense enough energy was wasted in the past year to power several nations.

Merry Christmas all, glad Zed is doing what he enjoys as always, we should all strive to live each day that way.
I don't think Paul Krugman is the kind of low-ranking hack who'd need to get attention in that way.
I started having weird dreams while I worked for 72 (almost consecutive) hours on some coding projects. I started having these weird dreams about robots assembling themselves and teaching each other how to subclass their own classes. It was weird as hell.

But yeah, I could see how the brain could change neurologically for math.
I Play WoW Monthly Active Users
on the internet. (though i agree with your agreement.)
1. Yes, he is an economist. He's got a Nobel in Economics just this year. You can diss economics as a whole (Taleb-style or otherwose) but you can not diss Krugman alone.

2. The comparison is not of output of one country to another. The comparison is of one country, Ukraine, to istelf months by month and it shows a 28% YoY decline in manufacturing output. 28% umber is hard to judge without context, so to give perspective second graph shows that 28% is a halmark of a deep depression like the one in 1930s in the US.

3. Recessins are common, 28% drop is not common. Ukraine is in for a lot of pain.
Yes, as well as its recent upvote activity.
No oil.

Ukraine depends on imports to meet about three-fourths of its annual oil and natural gas requirements.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Can we get "in Ukraine" added to the title?
The graveyards are full of irreplaceable men - Charles de Gaulle.
My all-time favorite HN comment about this issue:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=329218

I felt a lot better after reading this.
Cool that the author keeps his eyes on Hacker News, but hard work is basically a pre-requisite to doing anything worthwhile. I mentioned in the referenced article that the guy has a higher calling in life. He needs to feel some purpose, and I think he gets easily tired of contract work (much like I do).

Nothing will change. Hard-working hackers will always get it right, and the slackers will always be weeded out of the system. What we're experiencing now is a massive weed out of people who chose to sit on salaries instead of innovation. Every year is the year of the hacker. We start companies on the dime and innovate faster than anyone else with almost no experience. We bring jobs and solutions at a pace that would make any Fortune 500 CEO's blood pressure rise to unsafe levels. We just don't get much news coverage. It's nice to see it when we do though.
Very nice! Thanks for the link. It's OSS just like Plex which is great.
I use NoScript add-on and Flash Block. Between the two of them, they'll stop 90%.

http://noscript.net/

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
I, for one, look forward to reading about his exploits in the Python world.

He has done some very interesting work in recent days using Python (vellum, SoS ...).

Compared to all the drama that goes on in the Ruby (should I say Rails?) world, reading Python blogs on planetpython.org is a learning experience.
"For example, he thinks giving money to banks was a good idea, but asking them to lend it is bad."

What part of the article gives you that idea?
I pretty much hate Ruby as much as any man can, but Zed has proven himself quite smart and capable, beyond "making a website".
Google, Apple, Microsoft sued over file preview
The problem is that there are many qualified people in charity work who make barely-subsistence wages who would likely do an as-good or better job with far less pay.

So, for the most part, my guess is that $500,000+ salaries are a form of rent seeking, and are not justified in the so-called marketplace.

It'd be nice if someone could crash together the stats and see if this intuition bears out. You know, look at percentage of donations used to actually help their stated cause, and see if having a super-star CEO actually results in a more well-capitalized charity.

I doubt it, but I depend on evidence, not ideology.
How to Seal and Protect Your Wood Deck
My 2009 Prediction on Social Media and Beyond - The Flight from Growth to Value
I don't know -- I think a major portion of the experience is the feeling you get from the donation rather than the experience of seeing an objective indicator of your cause improving. Who the heck cares if Charity CEO A owns a Leer and parties with Paris Hilton every weekend if his charity has triple the ROI on donations as compared to Charity CEO B. (Not hard at all to imagine, incidentally -- private companies have that sort of difference in competence all the time.)
Hm, the waitress produces the food on the table. The food in the kitchen would be not much use, unless the kitchen was big enough to accomodate the customers so that they could eat out of the pots (and the pots would clean themselves afterwards). So while she doesn't create "food", she produces "food on the table".

I am not sure what you are really driving at: that too many people are in the service industry? But what if there is more demand for services than for products? Like there might be enough food being grown on the fields, but what good is it to me if nobody cooks it and brings it to my table?
Not much new about this -- the "make this strand of e. coli flouresce in the presence of certain sugars" experiment was being done by (high school) AP bio classes ten years ago. (I know, I did it. Bloody things died on me, but my lab partner got it to work.) Since you're not doing original research it takes all the biomedical engineering knowledge that growing a pack of sea monkeys takes -- can you follow a set of direction? Good, have gene splicing.

The fearmongering about it is similarly blown all out of proportion -- people think that suddenly everything gets more lethal once humans get involved. Oh noes if it isn't "natural" we're one drop away from World War Z. Of course, crossbreeding never really triggered that, selective breeding never really triggered that, and viral infections never really triggered that -- but when its humans messing with genes directly why that is different, they say so right in the Hollywood movies.
Summize/Twitter Search supports boolean operations, which I prefer:

something OR "another thing" OR "something else"
I got the print edition for 6 months or so after he bought it, the primary news gathering was still awesome. The op-ed page has sucked since Bush got in office.
>But if you pay people from donations directly then it's not OK to pay a lot.

Unless the donator is aware of the fact that you are paying your employees with the donations, and choose to give anyway. In fact, most large charities have employees who get paid, usually out of donations :). But you don't make your decision based on their management process, but based on the service they provide you; namely aiding some cause on your behalf.

You don't decide whether or not to buy a burger at McDonald's based on what percentage of your dollar goes to the CEO, but based on the quality of the service they may provide. Same with charities. If a charity can get away with paying exorbitant amounts to their CEO and still be the best value per dollar, people will donate, and it won't be wrong. Maybe the reason they do so well is that they were able to hire great high level management.

However, to convince people that you were going to spend their money one way and then actually spend it another is fraud. If you paid McDonald's for your burger, and they didn't give it to you, you would be within your rights to sue. At the very least you wouldn't go back. So it is with charities.

It is perfectly fine if you feel that a particular charity spends too much on management, and therefore decide not to donate your money to them. I realize that you may have been stating your personal opinion as to how you decide which charities you donate to, and that's fine. But to then claim in newspapers or other places that because they don't match your standards they are objectively evil and should be shut down/boycotted is a completely different thing. I think that is more what the article is about.
Anyone have success buying in the foreclosed home market?
My first homebuying experience was a bit odd (three generations of a friend's family, complete with general contractors and real estate agents, all sat around laptops one night while we fed them beer and pizza until they found the best houses for us).

This time . . . not so lucky. What sites to use? What are the key variables? I've mapped my new workplace and the best schools in the area. I know the general info about my area. I lived in the same city for six months about 8 years ago and I have friends in the area and I have a 10% down payment. The question is, today, what's the best way to buy the best house cheap?

Foreclosures obviously come to mind, but after trying Zillow and Foreclosures.com and foreclosure.com, this is clearly not a market I'm familiar with. This Boston Globe article provides minimal insight (http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2008/12/19/foreclosure_web_sites_offer_wide_range_of_listings/)

Has anyone had success with the foreclosure market? Could you be so kind as to share your advice?
>"he thinks giving money to banks was a good idea, but asking them to lend it is bad:

Giving banks money was to prevent further financial collapse and panic. Forcing them to lend money to people that they don't think can afford it sounds like deja vu, this time with government backing. I couldn't think of a more short-sighted policy. Talk about not learning from history, and in this case history is 2006.

Furthermore, he says:

>"Large "confidence" costs were always destined to flow from the extreme steps being taken, even if advisable, to prop up the economy. The federal government's alternating takeovers and bailouts of companies are inherently destabilizing and create massive uncertainty in investors and businesses."

One of the reasons that economists who study the matter think the Great Depression took so long to end was that the sudden, drastic, and unpredictable actions of the New Deal created uncertainty and reduced business investment. It is certainly a valid point to keep in mind with a President promising a "Green New Deal" and a "New New Deal".

Obama hasn't got in office yet, but his stated ideology is certainly troubling to me.
"Programmers will listen to people ... not because what they say is all that intelligent or thoughtful, but because they say it like a Man’s Man™."

Yep. We are primates. Purely logical communication is rare amongst us -- a speaker's body language, inflection, status, and arousal level all affect how we hear what they are saying.

People who do not respond in this way are considered weird; those who cannot, receive a diagnosis.
You're right. If the point of a page is to view a video, and the user has explicitly chosen to view the video, auto-play is fine. But choosing to view a video is almost like a pre-emptive pressing of "Play". Thanks for reading the post.
It is well known outside of America that the American trains are bad. I suppose Americans just go by car or airplane, so it doesn't matter much.

I really disliked the article, too. So Hongkong airport is impressive. Hm, maybe some dictatorship has shelled out serious money to make an impression? Somehow it reminds me of the dot com boom - the companies who spent the most were to first to go bankrupt...