skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are several major problems with inflation (meaning a vast expansion of the money supply through government spending, resulting in a rise in prices, and a fall in the value of the dollar):

1) That purchasing power went somewhere. Instead of going to what people wanted, though, it will have gone to what the politicians want, which is most likely a waste of resources. At the very best, the investments will be mostly harmless.

2) It doesn't just cause the exodus of capital, it practically is the exodus of capital: by printing money, they devalue all of the cash investments in the United States, thus reducing the amount of investable funds. While the foreign capital may be able to buy more dollars worth of goods per euro, there would be far less local capital to be invested.

3) While in theory the lower value of the dollar would make purchasing American goods more attractive to foreigners, that is often not the case. Just because a currency is cheap doesn't mean that items denominated in that currency are cheap. One example of this which I have experienced recently is the East Carribean Union dollar, which is worth much less than a US$, but where all of the items cost as much or more than they do here. Just because the currency is low in value doesn't mean that goods are actually cheap. Prices can rise to make up the difference, and often do.

However, if the dollar becomes cheaper not due to inflation, but because of our continued trade imbalance then yes, your description of increased exports would be quite accurate. Trade imbalances aren't bad, and they can't last forever. What goes in must come out or accumulate. And in the case of dollars, accumulation causes a relative change in value. Supply and demand and whatnot.

4) Extreme inflation can cause instability, and reduce investor interest. No one wants to invest in Zimbabwe, because they are financially (and in other ways as well) unstable. Inflation is bad because it throws the future into question, and makes people less likely to lend money. If they do it is often at a higher interest rate.

Also, deflation is not nearly as bad as many people think. Yes, dramatic and sudden deflation is just as bad for an economy as dramatic and sudden inflation. But an economy can get used to deflation just as well as it can adjust to inflation. In fact, it is almost a bonus, because it encourages saving, and thus investment and growth. I'm not saying that we should intentionally cause deflation, just that it's not a guaranteed cause of a death-spiral. The United States had a long deflationary period in the 1800s, and it was also one of the longer periods of high sustained growth. This will not always be the case, but there is little reason to be more afraid of deflation than inflation.
Where to get Super Bowl 3D Glasses?
It would be useful for Snipt to automatically detect the language being used. You could maybe do detection in a way similar to highlight.js http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/

I could imagine quickly pasting in a code, the detector running and modifying the dropdown box accordingly. If it's correct I click "Snip It", if it's not then I adjust and then click "Snip It".
I was indicating what an average user might be, not commenting on the feasibility of migrating to Linux.
Like say, Slashdot?
> The author magnificently understates how useful closures can be.

I didn't see a reference to closures in the article.

I know you probably know this but first class functions aren't closures.

The wikipedia article for them doesn't even mention closures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function
Input is huge. I have a coworker who has done a lot of research on two thumb qwerty keyboards like the one on the Blackberry. He's actually found that users can type fairly accurately and upto 60wpm with about 400 minutes of practice [1].

Also another friend has looked at the Twiddler, a one-handed chording keyboard. It requires more practice but you can type accurately and touch type [2].

[1] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jamer/pubs/mq%20-%20TOCHI06.pdf

[2] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~kent/pubs/twiddler-iswc.pdf
Wow, how intrepid.
The article is huge so here's the main point:

"Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer."

I think the statement that money must be sloshing into cash registers again is a misnomer. Why must we spend money on items we don't really need? Is it our fault that the products are "nice to haves", but not so nice that we're willing to spend on them? I believe that the products and services offered will have to stepped up a notch; become items that improve people's lives and increase happiness.

I see these times as Darwin's law applied to products, services, and businesses in general. If it's not profitable it should fail.

That said the current mess of the economy is at such a scale that it's hard for me to even keep straight in my head. As Henry Ford said, "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. "
There are many society's that could be built using the HN code. For now it seems like the combination of Software and Society has produced one of the most interesting websites on the internet. Call it Obama News and the same system software in not going to build the same community. Or PG could change the software and add a private messaging system, but doing so would change the nature of the site and it's society.

You have 3k Karma so clearly you learned how to gain Karma and clearly you like the website / society. But, these are not the types of posts that make people want to come to the site. Meta discussion is like philosophy it attracts the intelligent and leads them in circles.

Karma is a psychological instrument PG could show Karma divided by the number of days after account creation and on the leader board but if he wanted to increase the amount of Karma trolling going on. I suspect that showing his Karma 32029 on the leader board would change the nature of the site. For now the balance seems to work. We don't see every XKCD posted and the political submissions are dieing down. Looking back there has been far less change as the site has grown than you might expect.

If the goal where to make money changing the system to accommodate people might be useful but there is no advertising so it's costing more money as the site grows. You can find several statements that HN is an experiment and I suspect it's also a recruiting tool and part of the vetting process for ycombinator. Which suggests that people who never discover how to get positive Karma are supposed to leave. This is probably a good thing. A funny twist of irony is the site about making money is more interesting because it's not trying to directly make money.

Edit: NM, You win someone up modded the thread so it might be interesting. Anyway, I am going to sleep have a nice night.
The average auto worker doesn't make 100k. Including health care costs and future pension benefits, they make 42k. That 100k number was thrown about and included pensions being paid to retired workers, but distributed that cost only to current workers. It made no sense. If the company evenly pays out $100 to 10 current workers and 5 retirees, you can't say the current workers each made $10. They made $6.67.
I've done projects in both and I would say to go with Java. It is much more widely used, fast, capable of much more, and has a great documentation.
As far as I know, deflation cannot cause inflation. Maybe the governments response to deflation (print money!) can cause inflation, but the destruction of value and the reduction of the money supply cannot cause the overvaluation of assets or an expansion in the money supply, except through government action.

Of course, it is true that hyper-inflation, if it happens, will happen quickly. People will be, as you say, hoarding their cash because of uncertainty. But when they become confident enough to borrow from the banks again, and the large reserves they have been stockpiling hit the fan, it is quite possible that people will quickly notice the change in money supply, and react by trying to get rid of their money too. Which would set off hyper-inflation. But this hyper-inflation is not caused by deflation, but rather by inflation, which people may not notice because of their presently high hoarding rate.
‘Fantastic Voyage,’ Revisited: The Pill That Navigates
This gives me high hopes for the woolly mammoth clone, although the clones seem to live no longer than a day.
Looking back including heath care and pension and adjusting for inflation, many autoworkers made over 100k/year in 2008 money. Benefits, and pensions are not "free" they cost the company money. A major problem at GM is they ignored the long term cost of these "benefits" and agreed to insane levels of compensation for their senior Union workers. When the times where good the company agreed to things assuming that times would always be good.

EX: The jobs bank program is not a big deal if you run the numbers assuming constant growth forever.
some brains are wired for that kind of abstraction

In my experience if someone can't program it's not becuase they have the wrong static structure, it's that they're unwilling to dynamically metaprogram their thought processes and fundamentally reshape their mental models.

far more mediocre programmers than good ones

Same goes for actors and boxers and cops. This seems, almost tautologically, true of any industry. Why is this meme so prevalent?
This idea has been discussed. I personally remember 3 years ago when everyone though people would be working off of thin clients within the year.

However a lot of people do more with a computer than currently offered by online spreadsheets and email.

Not to mention companies and government that have strict IT security policies that wouldn't allow data on these external networks.
Ask HN: Starting my first web app
Note: I tried doing a search for a similar thread but the searchyc site seemed down and doing a Google search for "first web app site:news.ycombinator.com" didn't turn much up. Feel free to post a link to be thread if this has been asked before.

I'm ready to dive into creating my first web app. Most of my experience is on front-end development/design, but I think I have a killer idea and it's a great opportunity for me to learn more about programming.

That being said I have 2 questions. I've (very lightly) looked into PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Django. The depth of my experience for ROR and Django involve installing both and making a clock program. I have the most experience with PHP, but does anyone have any advice on which language I should use? Pros/cons?

2nd question: do you have any great resources for planning my project? Since this is my first time I 'm wondering what other hackers workflows are like. Do you typically work on the app locally and getting it to work for yourself, then build in features to open it up for other users?

I'm really just looking for any helpful guidance on getting started.

Thanks in advance for your help!
Where do you get those statistics? I wonder what the homicide rate in London in 1800, 1700, 1600, 1500, 1400... was.
You are quite correct; however, I think one interesting corollary to this research is the interface between brain and computer. Though we still require a method by which to translate brain function into Boolean-esque logic, at least when we figure that out we'll have a method to input that data into a computer (however inefficient that method may be).
Y'all can laugh -- good lord, I did, thanks Cornify! -- but you'd be shocked & awed to learn the money people make with stuff that's not far removed from this.

Viva la difference!
I am inclined to agree. The open source nature of Java and many of its tools make it a more appealing choice to me.
Good point, the potential for it to be used to block innocent people from communicating is far greater than any real usefulness against people using cell phone bomb triggers- which isn't that common.
Scarcity is impossible to eliminate. Even if you got rid of all of the costs of production, there would still be limits on human creativity and time. Even if you made infinite ai, so that creativity was unlimited, and made humans immortal, so that time was unlimited, people would still be forced to make choices between alternatives. And those choices can either be voluntary or coerced. Which way would you like to spend your infinite life? It's not communism if you aren't forced to share. It's capitalism.

Capitalism really is a bad term anyway. Marx invented it so he could use it for his straw-man arguments. But really it should be called free markets, or freedom, or opportunity, or the American Dream or something.
Doesn't seem to work on my Mac; clicking on the icons just makes them jump around.
The main issue with this is that remote bombs do not seem to be a big issue in the US. So we are giving away our freedoms for what amounts to scaremongering: there's no actual reason to use it outside of very few high-profile targets (and maybe not even then).
Why is this book so expensive? The cheapest used copy on amazon is ~$60.00...
"in case they fix it"?
Even something as simple as an <hr> would be nice at the end of a detail page. I'm a scroll wheeler, and I rarely pay attention to where the scrollbar is while I'm reading.
This might help you out: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33974
May I ask why you don't believe the alternative evolutionary explanation? Forced (to some extent) penetration has been with humanity for a long time, and will likely be with humanity for a long time. It was not until relatively recently that it is generally accepted as a bad thing, and even in our "enlightened" age, there is a great deal of misinformation.
What sort of skill set do you have in house? That should probably be among the things you use to decide.

All things being equal, I would probably go with Java. I'm a Microsoft stack developer today and it's fine; but there seems to be a better ecosystem in the Java world.
I use a wiki as a personal wiki, personally. I've become much more organized since I started using it - things that were previously on scraps of paper and miscellaneous text files are now tagged, cross-linked and searchable.

I'm not sure what else you would do.

A few types of structured data, like addresses/other personal info, does go in a specific program - but mostly because I need to export/input that data between applications. Generally phone numbers get input in my cell, exported/integrated to Outlook, and then exported to Skype (and to my wiki).
These tools are useless because they struggle to play well with all the other tools on your computer. There is no common interface that allows them to share functions or data easily. We're working around this with various hacks but it doesn't solve the underlying problem which is your modern operating system. If the OS allowed easy sharing of code and every program was forced to share its functions/classes, then it would be trivial to move data around between applications.
Leopard is almost there, with Spotlight comments you can tag really easily but it's not [yet] part of the save routine. I don't use comments too often though since the fulltext search is good enough for my uses.
What happens if you average over several non-intact samples and take the common denominator? Or layer the DNA over a descendant based on certain markers? Given enough damaged "files" and good diff tools, I feel like hacking together a working one would be possible. Can someone who knows more tell me what I'm missing?
Agree completely, things should be evolving in the opposite direction: standardization of data types ("file formats").
JavaScript itself is a great language, not just good enough. It's got higher order functions, closures, prototype-based object definitions and all sorts of other lovely, lovely things.

If it's not the language you like off the bat, you can redefine the core objects until it is.

Beautiful!

For people think it's like MS-DOS, I can only assume that they think so because they don't understand it truly as a language. Pure JavaScript is a thing of beauty.

The DOM API that most browsers expose (as per spec -- and worse, as not per spec) is, on the other hand, a steaming pile of crap.

The DOM API has gotten more consistent and less crap over time, but its design is still ugly and inefficient (and browsers still differ in annoying ways).

Which, of course, explains the huge success of Prototype (which redefines the whole language into a more Ruby-like one), and jQuery (which hides the DOM stuff for people who want to avoid it).

I'd estimate that now, JavaScript has the most developer attention of any "upstart" language -- and that means it'll get even more exciting in the future.

Granted, as somebody who's given training courses & talks on JS, written an (unpublished) JS book for O'Reilly (damn them), and recently cowritten a JavaScript performance ebook (http://jsrocks.com) with my husband Thomas Fuchs (the script.aculo.us dude), I might be biased, but, such is life. ;)

As an aside, I don't know ANYONE who knows both ActionScript and JavaScript and prefers Adobe's to the real thing. (Other than the post author. But I don't know him.)
I would suggest the major problem with constructing buildings like that automatically is that each floor has to be carefully prepared with reinforcing material long before the concrete is poured. I think for this reason alone you're going to find trouble.

While the arrangement of these rods is a fairly straightforward but tedious process for a human to do, it's particularly tricky for a machine to manage because of the highly variable nature of the structure.

If you had some kind of construction material that didn't require internal reinforcing, where it could be just applied as-is, then you would see a lot more automation.

As others have said, building codes and quality control would have to play a part here. A lot of automated manufacturing is subject to strict checks, but usually the resolution for a defect is to discard the part. In the case of a building, or even a part of it, that may not be so easily accomplished.
Anyone who has the technical know-how to build a remote-triggered bomb has the technical know-how to build a jam-resistant system. RF jammers can't possibly jam all the EM spectrum, and any evil-doer would easily be able to break this "security" measure.
Another thing to note which significantly alters the analysis is that facebook is a brand in any country whereas porn (or the other such search terms) come mostly from english speakers.
I would...
And assuming I know what I want to type, I can type upwards of 100wpm with a full sized qwerty keyboard without having to spending 7 hours looking at a 2" screen.
This is basically like hypertext and Ted Nelson's ideas outlined in Computer Lib/Dream Machines. He says that our data shouldn't have a strict hierarchy since that hierarchy is subjective and is typically inflexible. What we should have instead is data that can be reordered/represented in different ways. The Everything Bucket apps that Payne is talking about are totally flexible and you can make up whatever hierarchy you like for your data. This is powerful and I haven't used any of these tools, but I assume they aren't powerful enough to allow multiple data representations.
This is one of those features that I've read Lua has and JS doesn't that sounds really good in theory. But I haven't ever run into a situation where I've wanted an index other than a number or string. It's probably just a blub paradox though; I'm curious, in what situations are other values particularly useful as keys?
I have a related suggestion: show someone's median karma per comment and karma per post in his/her profile. This would shed light on someone's real contribution level: e.g. someone puts up a TC article and gets 128 pts in one day vs. someone makes 64 moderately insightful, 2 pt comments.

StackOverflow awards medals to bring out distinctions. I don't think we have to go that far, but it's a similar idea.
Ask HN: How do I gracefully accept one offer over another within the same company?
I happen to have two teams within the same software company making me offers for a summer internship, and the company has asked me to to choose which team I would like a formal offer from. The teams do reasonably similar things, and I think they actually interact on occasion, despite the fact that this is a pretty large company. This means that A) I can't really make a decision based on the actual work, since it's pretty similar; and B) I may end up interacting with the team I decline.

I think I know which team I'm going to go with. One of the teams' managers got in touch with me right away, he seems to have a good attitude and sense of humor, and he put me in touch with a former intern who sent me a long and extremely positive e-mail about the team. The other team's manager didn't get in touch with me for a couple days, and when he did I just didn't get the impression that he was excited about his work. He didn't seem like he'd be as pleasant a boss as the first team's manager.

So my question is this: How do I present what is basically a personal decsion without it seeming...well, personal?
The site's running slow, but I'm pretty sure searchyc.com will have some good information. I'm pretty sure this discussion has been hashed out before.
To 1.) Steam? Still requires the power of a gaming computer, but web based and portable game.
Prob. not relevant to this board.
No. I dislike Google Docs, I use Mail.app for Gmail, and 2GB is enough for me.
That's the great thing about the Twiddler. With the right chord setup you can get crazy fast. My professor has used his wearable system for a long time and he can burst to 120wpm.

Ref [1] shows info on how blind typing affects speed and accuracy on the two thumb qwerty keyboards.
Sorry for the much-delayed reply. It's certainly nowhere near Atlas Shrugged in terms of quality, and there's a heavy US Republican undertone. I'm a moderate that leans slightly towards the right and it bothered me a few times. So if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, then no.

That said, I did find it to be insightful in places. So I can't say I'd recommend it wholeheartedly, but there is some value in there.
I haven't tried a blackberry, but I have tried Windows mobile device thumbboards - and accuracy may be ok, but thumbs only on such a small keyboard ... it's just not good enough to be even a netbook keyboard replacement. Too tiring, too difficult/slow to access other keys/symbols/numbers...

I like the ideas of the senseboard ( http://www.senseboard.com/product.php ) and the dataegg ( http://www.xaphoon.com/dataegg/ ) chording keyboard best. Unfortunately senseboard seems a bit of a dead / vapourware company and the dataegg vanished and the closest thing I can find to it is the cykey ( http://www.bellaire.demon.co.uk/index.html ) which I have tried, but it's not a keyboard replacement really. Apart from speed, it needs to be on a surface and metakeys are awkward.

Twiddler I've seen online but it looks incredibly uncomfortable in a finger-contortion sense to me.

Imagine a DataEgg style jacket for the iPod/Phone...