skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right now, the major barriers keeping China's capital in China are actually chinese regulation and china's economic growth in that order. China has very strict capital regulation on how money can be moved around across borders. Also, so far, the Chinese govt. has only been interested in holding on to US treasuries so that capital is effectively out of circulation. Lastly, even if some chinese citizen is allowed to invest in foreign infrastructure, why would they when the chinese infrastructure is experiencing faster growth?

Still, once these regulations prove too onerous to maintain (which they will) and once China's economy stabilizes, we will suddenly find that half the US is owned by China and that will cause the labor markets to shift again possibly moving production back to the US and away from China. Still, thats ~20-30 years away and who knows what else might happen in that time.
Update: A way to make sense of this is that China is making a massive bet on the future of the US. Namely, they are assuming that the US will continue to be rich which will maintain the value of US securities which can eventually be cashed out for tangible goods and services. The problem is that the future of the US is dependent in a large part on what the world thinks of it. Thus the catch-22. As long as everybody thinks that the US is rich, they can trade on that. Note that this is just another symptom of a bubble and when this one bursts, its going to make the great depression look like good times.
They have been building a lot of infrastructure but I think they were simply at capacity. I mean they had more than 10% GDP growth for years. There are only so many engineers and skilled workers. Increasing demand further would have caused even greater inflation and more social unrest than they had anyway. But what you suggest is exactly what they should and probably will do now.
ha, this is similar to the interface on my site's homepage: freemontpost.com
One of the nice things about traditional newspaper layout is that story placement and size help readers instantly understand the relative importance of each news article. (Of course "importance" is an entirely subjective notion, but you see what I mean.)

Other than the 2-box story at the top-left, having both X and Y axes and same-size boxes makes it difficult to determine what's worth reading and what's not. It would be interesting combine the grid with a Hacker News/Digg-like point system that reordered the stories by popularity.

The fact that you lose access to the Skimmer interface after clicking on a story seems weird, but that's fixable.

Still, I like that they're trying new ideas. And I love having a small photo with each headline.
yeah most investors seem to be investing to flip, not to build a long term business
Twitter’s Settings tab fails the most experienced
Actually more relevant to this specific case is:
ROI = discounted value of expected future cash flows. It's not good enough to be profitable 10 years from now, unless the profit is much, much larger than the losses in the previous 9 years.
Selling Citizenship Manifesto
The current global crisis is partly rooted in US trade imbalances. The US is in dire need of producing something the world finds valuable enough for wanting to accumulate dollars for. Short of the US developing some surprising and radical new technology that won't immediately be outsourced this is unlikely to happen. However, the US does have one other thing going for it: It is still one of the most desired countries to live in and be a citizen of. So, the US should just sell itself...i'm talking citizenship not prostitution.

Consider this my friends, we already have existing customers!!! Who am I speaking of?? Current illegal immigrants. Give them a chance to pay in and buy their citizenship. Then they can even start paying a share of taxes. Couple this with a strict policy in which only US citizens are allowed to work domestically and we will make a killing!

We are still the country everyone wants to come to! I work in the science field alongside many Chinese people and they don't want to go back to China, where they'll live in an overcrowded apartment. They want a big beautiful house in an american suburb. Don't you think that will help with our foreclosure problem and housing market crisis.

This is a no brainer. We will get rich, smart, entrepreneurial people from all over the world buying citizenship. Increasing domestic demand, paying taxes, and contributing to our culture. And really what's the alternative... depreciate the dollar to the point where we can compete with cheap foreign labor and live a subsistence manner?? Come on... it's time we put our country out on the open market for real!
probably the first time i vigorously disagree with krugman....and oddly he appears to be in stark contrast to some of his own writings.

austrian economics has probably become too dogmatic for some, but i do think there is validity in the notion that recessions realign capital flows in more constructive directions. look at what we are trying to do now - fight excess debt brought on by overconsumption with more debt to support overconsumption.

the stimulus bill subsidizes the purchase of new cars...but we just spent ten years watching people blow too much of their net worth on cars...is more of this really constructive? what next...government mandates that we all buy (taxpayer subsidized) home theater systems?

i'm troubled that the government is working hard to promote the same reckless overconsumption that put us in this mess to begin with...but it won't work, people out there are getting the message that debt is poison.
i would think you would want a strongly typed language for something like this
One final point in response to your urban thesis: the difference in the standard of living in downtown Singapore and downtown Havanna.
Example using Google App Engine's new Remote API
It's not a real tag anymore, but <xmp> was really cool. Everything between the start and end tag was presented verbatim, with no HTML parsing. Basically a lazy man's HTML escape in a fixed width font--good for pasting in code. We use it every now and then for our internal tools since Firefox is down with xmp.

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/x/xmp.htm
... and realize they clicked this link and are watching themselves watching ...
Nope. That's stack based, this is frequency based. It learns what directories you visit more frequently, and jumps to the right one based on very small bits of input.

I wish it were interactive, like iswitchb ... or I guess I could just start using shell-mode inside Emacs.
Billions of dollars are won and lost on Wall Street everytime the Fed meets. If it were as easy as you say to predict the actions of the central bank, this would not be the case.
Is Jesus God - Ahmed Deedat vs Anis Shorrosh on Yahoo Video
Safe to say then, that it's a case by case and so, not so much a rule of thumb?
From the profile:

Projects run out of the hacker house: http://divvyshot.com http://www.wonderwarp.com http://ipodrip.com http://www.wattvision.com http://tinycoupon.com http://bluwiki.com
The squared relationship is actually pure coincidence. The dude who proposed the next popular ratio took all of the common presentation ratios (like 4:3 for TV, 1.85:1 for film, etc.) and laid them all on top of each other. The overlapping sweet spot was just about 16:9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)#Why_16:9.3...
Ask HN: Any upcoming web conferences worth attending?
I was thinking of taking a last-minute trip to the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami or the Web 2.0 expo in SF.

Not really sure why I want to go ... just to take a break from my routine and maybe get some motivation/inspiration I suppose. The money isn't really an issue, but I don't want to go if they're completely worthless.

Anyone been and care to recommend one? Or avoid?
Why not do it in reverse order? First drawing with the machine and then without.
What is the hacker house? I've heard it mentioned before, but don't know what it is.
Exactly, we really don't need another "Fucked up things in the American justice systems"-news site.
While I have an interest/fascination with theology, this isn't really appropriate for HN ... I bookmarked it but I can't upmod it, sorry
Iridium Already Replaced Destroyed Satellite
And Dreamworks just tries to copy Pixar films. Where's the creativity again?
Glad it was revealed and not surprised at all.
Denver Karma Examiner: Ten Steps to Accelerate Karma (Introduction)
Define a function kaprekar(n, b) that will computer Kaprekar's operation on an integer n expressed in base b. Now we can explore the properties of this function. We know that if base = 10, the integer's digits in base 10 aren't all the same, and the integer has four digits, the function has a fixed point at 6174. Under what other bases and digit-counts does the function have a fixed point? Is it possible for kaprekar(a, b) to return an integer c with fewer digits than a, assuming once again that the digits are non-uniform? Etc.

"Number of digits in n" is shorthand for "floor(log(b)n) + 1" and the digits themselves can be expressed in terms of modulus (while n > 0: digits.append(n % b); n = n / b). Speaking in terms of digits just makes it easier to talk about what are really rather odd mathematical operations. It's true that their primary use is in our number representation system, but that doesn't make them any less interesting from a pure-mathematical viewpoint.
Here's the long answer to the question: what could anyone learn from rearranging the digits of an integer?

First off, it's helpful to know that the integers (denoted {Z}) are the canonical example of what's called ring structure, which basically means + and * work normally, but you aren't guaranteed clean division. Since they're simple, mathematicians sometimes use {Z} as a stand-in for more persnickety structures in the same way they use n-dimensional Euclidean space as a proxy for thinking about infinite-dimensional vector spaces. Articles like this one usually get written when an algebraist or number theorist publishes an epic proof, and the only way to make it comprehensible to a lay audience is to project it down into toy examples in a simple space. That's kind of a "trust me" answer by itself, of course. So without further ado, the math:

There are two notable things about rings. You can make polynomials with + and * in them, and division generally leaves you with remainders. Remainders are okay, though, because they let you define new rings. {Z mod 12 Z}, for example, is shorthand for "integers mod 12," or more formally, "map the integers to a new space where all the multiples of 12 get sent to zero," so {1, 2, ..., 11 } act normal, 12 is actually zero, 13=12+1=0+1=1 and so on.

It turns out that this is all you need to represent numbers in place-value notation. A number N in base r has a representation of n digits:

N = (A_n)(r^n) + ... + (A_2)(r^2) + (A_1)r + A_0

which is just a polynomial whose coefficients are members of the ring {Z mod r*Z}. If you map that back to the integers, plug in the actual value of r, and crunch the numbers, you get your original value of N back.

So, "rearranging the digits of an integer" is actually "permuting the coefficients of polynomials with coefficients mod r."

Now, suppose you have an email message that's 12000 characters long. You can think of that message as the polynomial representation, modulo 256, of a really big number. Mapping that number into different modular spaces, or permuting the coefficients of its various representations so that you can get it back later ("encrypting the message") forms the basis of the field of cryptography, which in turn is closely related to information theory and the theory of ergodic processes, etc, etc, etc.

For more details, you might start with:

http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algorit...

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html
I see your argument re: the 'importance' of stories - the 'above the fold' placement in print papers is the same idea - but I think, at least in terms of my own reading, that I can judge for myself what the important stories are.

Thinking about it this is one of the top selling points to me of this design. I don't CARE what the editors think is an important story, show me the article summaries and I'LL decide what I want to read about. This system is great because I can quickly scan the stories for those topics I'm interested in (Science, Tech, Business, Politics) and never have to look at sport or fashion or Britney's new tongue piercing etc

But either way, as you say, nice that they're trying out new ideas
> It all started 2 weeks ago.

And I posted this 2 weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458663

Coincidence?
Apparently, a Medtronic MagPro Compact's street price is around $1000* . I might try to find me one.

* https://www.medwow.com/item.php?search_results=&sale_id=...
Anything automatic is by nature impersonal.
"The Great Depression happened largely because policy-makers imagined that austerity was the way to fight a recession."

I have heard the opposite in many "Austrian"-tilted debates, how accurate is that?

From checking Wikipedia, Roosevelt did try to stimulate the economy with government investment near the end. It also says that "Keynesian economists assumed poor people would spend new incomes; however, they saved much of the new money."

So is it Krugman's point of view that the policies weren't Keynesian enough to be effective (or too late)? The same arguments were made about the failure of communism and more recently free markets.

That may be the biggest flaw in economic ideas/models, they take a high level of purity to be effective but that's rarely the case.
Los Angeles - Home of the cheap 11AM quickie
Why eBay Should Consider Breaking Itself Up
There are two ideas of the Austrians and the Keynesians that both seem true that I have a hard time reconciling. The Keynesian idea that depressions are caused by everyone cutting back at the same time, and results in a downward positive feedback loop that can be combated by government spending makes sense. But at the same time, Krugman asserts that there is no reason unemployment should rise because of a previous misallocation of capital (ie a bubble), and that just doesn't seem right. When a bubble bursts, there are too many people who work in previously inflated industries, and their skill sets and geographic location are not things that change easily. People aren't going to learn a new trade, take a pay cut, or move unless there is a real threat to their livelihood if they continue doing what they are doing now.

It seems like the classic conservative vs. liberal argument over social safety nets. Yes, we need safety nets to keep people's lives from being ruined by things largely outside their control. But at the same time, those safety nets introduce moral hazard, and the more bad situations you promise to protect people from, the more people who don't really need that safety net are going to take advantage of it.
The "bubble" has only been building since Jan 2001 (guess what happened then?) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png. It's clear that if Clinton's policies were extended, the public debt would have gone close to ~0.

US debt is just government bonds, etc. The US govt holds China's money, and promises to pay the interest on those bonds when they mature. China owning US bonds actually makes it harder for them to purchase companies and properties in the US (they have a limited amount of free capital). If anything, the Chinese would avoid buying US companies - they would much rather concentrate on building up their own companies.

The Chinese have a few 100 billion dollars invested in US bonds (a tiny fraction of US GDP) mostly because it is a very safe investment. Why is it so safe? Literally, the only reason is that the US can print more money to pay back its debt. US bonds are the safest place to keep money because the US has proven to be such a stable country. Worst case scenario (other than the US collapsing, which is not likely), is the government will print more money and devalue the dollar.
Very nice. I must've been living under a rock! =]
Keep in mind that I'm not in a startup yet, but I have worked in several intense jobs and professions in the past. It is my opinion that you should never regularly put in more than 10 hours a day except for the occasional short crunch period. It is also my opinion that one day per week should have no more than 4 hours of work in it. That should give you a few hours for dinner and a movie on a fairly regular basis.

I just don't think it's valuable to put in more time than that in the long run. Does anybody disagree?
Vogue Feb features "The Healthy Side of Sunshine"
Basketball Stats: They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for
I suggest not buying flowers and a card daily.
In general, credentials are not worth much. If I don't have the technical background or knowledge to evaluate an answer given by an expert, I would be doing a disservice to myself to accept that answer on face value.Sure, I could use that explanation for learning. But still, it would be a lot better to get explanations from multiple sources.

So basically expert opinions can give a good start for learning something, but you won't learn a lot if you only go off that expert opinion.

Since the post you were referring to was about the value of ideas in math, credentials might have helped a little bit, because evaluating an idea's worth requires knowledge and experience in that problem domain. But even if that post were written by a credentialed expert, that fact would not help me a lot. I still have almost no idea how to evaluate the importance of an idea in mathematics, and learning that will take more than talking to one person.

Also, expertise and credentials are overrated. That's one thing that really shocked me while I was reading the four-hour work week. Tim Ferris suggested that you gain expertise and credentials, mentioning that it was quite easy. One of the ways he suggested was to go to some close by organization or fortune-500 company and hold a free seminar on a topic, which is easy to do because the standards for letting someone show up and do a free seminar are probably low. Then, when talking with someone, you just need to mention the seminars, and they will assume that the organization has evaluated you, and your worth will be viewed as dependent on that organization.

So basically, what I got from that was I naturally give too much deference to experts, and I don't really have the knowledge to give a thorough evaluation of someone's credentials.And a thorough evaluation of someone's credentials in an internet forum would probably devolve into a flame war.For example, the author of the article on the number 6174 has decent credentials, but it appears that he misused the definition of a kernel (See http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ModuleKernel.html).So how do I evaluate errors in an opinion where the value is determined from credentials? Do I say that it's not an error, the author just missed the details, or the credentials are not worth much?

Edit: Link to HN conversation:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=480398
"But 'on the machine,' he says, 'you start seeing what's actually there, not what you think is there.'"

In the world outside the machine and his experiments,
I like how this statement ties in with Zen/meditation/Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of Flow. I think we can all think of times when we've just been totally aware and immersed. But those are few compared to the too-many times when I've been thinking too much, worrying, and not being aware.
Singles Awareness Day? Bah, Humbug!
Notice that Krugman provides very little hard evidence to completely discard the entire school of thought of the Austrian economists. He even sneers at them using blatant straw-man attacks: "some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors."

Regardless of whether all the Austrian school's claims turn out to be correct or not, they certainly deserve a seat at the table. Hayek, in particular, was a true polymath, contributing brilliant ideas to everything from philosophy of science to biologically-grounded psychology. Read the first several chapters of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, and decide for yourself if Krugman has any right to sneer at the "supposedly deep Austrian theorists".
That first sentence was so depressing. Are you really being serious?
Yes that's true. There are no loops or gotos and functions have no side effects. PostScript has all of that. But I think it would have been sufficient to remove the possibility of global side effects to support out of order rendering of pages. A purely functional language without global state could've done the trick.

So I suspect there were other reasons as well for removing so many features. Maybe the complexity of interpreters. I don't know.
The Chinese produce goods because people buy them for cash, not because we "send" them debt (which is another way of saying that they buy US treasury securities).

As long as US consumers purchase 100s of billions of dollars in Chinese goods (the Chinese->US trade was 340 billion in 2008), China will continue to run its factories at full-blast.
Thanks - that's the kind of thing I was hoping to find out. Could you elaborate a bit on why people didn't like being at Amazon?
There's some corresponding girl who's going to be eating alone too. Why not ask her to go have coffee with you afterward? Unless the college is Caltech, in which case never mind.
I use mathematica for general scripting tasks. It takes a little hackery to do things like use it in a pipeline and such: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves/mash/mash.pl
I'm at http://twitter.com/semel, I'm also cofounder of the 'Oscars for Twitter': http://shortyawards.com. My feeling is that Twitter is what you make of it. People use it for professional networking, sales, customer service, keeping in touch with friends, organizing events, letting people know what they're doing at the moment, or any other number of uses.
But our brains don't just hide outliers, they help disparate things make sense with respect to each other. I have to figure the world would seem really disjointed if you were just walking around, rather than sitting in some controlled environment reading off a piece of paper.
for the hangover theory is disastrously wrongheaded. Recessions are not necessary consequences of booms. They can and should be fought, not with austerity but with liberality—with policies that encourage people to spend more, not less

Ten years later, well. We are coming out of a situation where 40,000/year salaries could get you a mortgage on a 400,000 dollar house. There are 101 reasons why that situation emerged, and most of them are directly related to prior policies to get people to buy "more". Sure, it would be stupid to suggest a repeat of this process as a solution.

Krugman isn't stupid. Read the "stimulus" bill. Most of it doesn't even pretend to address the situation at hand. It's a list of very expensive programs that Democrats and their lobbyists have always wanted. Krugman approves of this, why not?

The same thing happened with the "Patriot" bill and the TARP. Crises are useful.
You're sitting on the table? Not sure she'll like that.
This looks of limited utility. Why would I want to process data away from where it is stored?
$250K Reward for Conflicker Author | TechJaws
my god, that is like somebodylikesyou from back in the day. spam-o-rama?
Why Not?: How To Use Everyday Ingenuity To Solve Problems Big And Small