skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How else to get an understanding, if not by reading and discussing stuff? Why should it not be possible to gain an understanding of economics (including knowing what we don't know yet)?

Also, economics has a lot of maths in it, which many geeks tend to excel in. So I don't think their starting position is that bad. Actually even most economics students try to brush over the maths, so I don't have troubles believing that some geeks might have a better understanding of economics than the actual economists.
Thanks, I just ordered the audio book.

Have you heard of Prof. Drout's A Way With Words? It's great.

http://www.recordedbooks.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=scholar.sh...
Well,
I already learnt python, but I totally forgot it because I am not on linux anymore :(
This is a bit of a mistake because fractional lending is creating money. If I deposit $100 in a bank and that bank lends you $100, $200 is in use even though only $100 exists.
I've been waiting for an article like this for a long time. Anytime there is an article about money the entire comments section will light up in flame. I will simply post, "we have no idea what will happen, not even the experts. Live responsibly and work hard and you know all you will ever need to."

People can't down mod me, and it never insights any sort of emotions or response so it dies near the bottom. Thanks for the link!
The reason people, not just hackers, have opinions on macroeconomics is that unlike many other branches of science it hasn't come up with a lot of definitive answers. As the article notes experimentation, a basic ingredient in science, is very hard in macroeconomics. This means that there are all sorts of ideas floating around on how economies actually work. Some reputable, some not.

Newtons laws of motion don't get discussed much because experimentation and time give overwhelming evidence that they're probably right. Thus there's not much point in discussing them, they're accepted as a foundation on which you can build, which is exactly what science does. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Economics is different. Partly because of the inability to test a thesis, partly because everything is closely linked making it hard to distinguish cause from effect. I actually believe macro economics is currently in it's early stages, with professional practitioners still trying to get a grasp on the basics. Even among Nobel laureates in economics there's still disagreement about whether Keynes, one of the most heralded economists ever, was right or wrong. And he wrote his main work "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" in 1936. Likewise, if you look at the wikipedia entry on the great depression there's still substantial debate as to what caused it, and how we got out of it.

I also think that this discussion is good. Yes, there are some ridicolous theories on youtube, but the serious amateur probably knows enough to discard these as the crap they are. A public discussion of macroeconomics will, however, be very fruitful as people from other fields bring their expertise to the subject. Mandelbrot and his knowledge of fractals and mathematics has interesting points on economy, Kahnemann uses psychology to explain economic phenomena, and hackers, of course, can set up interesting computer models, which is probably the closest we come to experimentation in this field.
This book will give you some overall perspective:

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-50th-Anniversary/...

Here's a link to one chapter on rent control, with detailed examples (saw this here at HN before reading the book):

http://jim.com/econ/chap18p1.html

Here's part of the reason people won't honestly evaluate the pros and cons of economic arguments:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/blue_or_green_o.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/02/politics_is_the.html

Finally, economics is complicated, but we've got almost all of human history to give us some data. It's got an immense amount of noise in it, but general trends do emerge. Price controls far below market have always created a black market, even in a hardcore enforced police state. That's a fact. Maximum price of goods under what people want to pay... human behavior... black market. That example is clear enough, and not many places in the world today are trying that one. Likewise, we're constantly trending to better economic systems with some blips here and there along the way. Many of the ideas we're arguing about today will be settled, and many of the positions held today will look really foolish in the near future. That's part of being human and progress in thought.
"It makes one work very hard to get a compileable source file."

That seems to be a sufficient explanation to me... (Haven't tried it myself).
"Mosso is offering free incoming bandwidth until the end of the month. Seems a little unfair to be creating a comparison on a situation that will exist for another 19 days."

Wow that's kind of silly, thanks for pointing this out.

Just wanted to mention: if someone is higher on incoming than outgoing like that, GoGrid has free incoming as a permanent policy. (I can't speak to whether they are any good or not, I evaluated their options and it wasn't right for my stuff).
From what I understand you're supposed to get the result (in your example 6) by combining the cells in that box with the given operator (in this case times).

So a "6x" box with two cells results in (1 and 6) or (2 and 3), since those are the only products that result in 6. Likewise, "7+" with three squares can only be (1, 2 and 4).
Personal Rapid Transit Startup
These two things

* Easy to grasp (the basic principles, anyway)

* Experiments are pretty much impossible (making being disproven relatively rare)

make me think that it is not possible to be an expert on macroeconomics. Or, since nothing is falsifiable my opinion about how these random rules fit together is just as good as anyone else's. My entire career is based on how random rules fit together. I'm good at it. That's why I'm an expert on macroeconomics.
I don't think (some) hackers prefer less strict languages because they like to be sloppy, but because they honestly believe it is the better engineering principle in the long run.
This sounds very similar to PG's recent essay, though they're coming at it from slightly different directions. I like his point about the big concepts of contentious topics being reasonably simple. His comparison to physics is a great example of this. People are only likely to make a topic part of their identity if they think they have a reasonable understanding of it. Macroeconomics is a bit more scientific than politics and religion and seems to fit nicely in the sweet spot of simple-enough topics that are also complex enough to appeal to the above average intelligence of the geek community. Maybe macroeconomics is the geek's politics.
Or get by without the bailout money.
Hardly. Marginally clever, but unhelpful, answer.

Young children are generally placed in daycare or with extended family, then the public schools. That's how I grew up, and I'm ok.
hmmmmmm
covers most of the important points, and as we know... it's not secure to allow uploading files!!!

But uploading files out of the web root is a good idea anyway.
The underlying assumption of this blog post is that only experts should ever discuss technically complex topics. I disagree strongly.

The common notion is that someone who hasn't read 1000 books about the conventional academic wisdom can't possibly make a valid argument. However, academic fields can often get into a cycle of conformance to an absurd belief. You don't have to read Aquinas to make the correct argument that belief in God is absurd from the start. You don't have to read Skinner to see the problem with behaviorism. You don't have to read all the latest analytic philosophy to see that it's all circular and useless. And you don't have to read the latest mainstream economics to see that it's based on a narrow and largely useless formalization of the difficult complexities of the actual economy.
The Dalai Lama Joins Twitter
Twentysomething: Obama's salary caps should cap hours too
Surround yourself with brilliance, talent, drive and passion in all aspects of your life

Well put! As always with surrounding yourself with brilliance, talent, drive and passion, you will find that your life after that will not be easier but it will definitely become more fun, more challenging and you'll grow faster (not physically :P)
Update on Famous Awk One-Liners Explained
Actually, that was my first thought, that it's very similar to what PG has recently written. But then I thought that this case is different and the author has made wrong assumptions. I don't think geeks made economics part of their identity. I think sometimes it's not enough for geeks to be geeky in their own field and they want to demonstrate their ability to analyze and become experts in things that lie behind computer fields, while not realizing this might not be just as easy for them as learning another language.
Well,
I did not see this issue before...

But about the data, if you want to pull it out...
You can make a kind of automated script that would pull the data, and store it in another database or wherever you want...

Maybe you can use wget and cron jobs to insure the automation!
Ada has had a high level interface for multi-tasking for a long time. I'm surprised that doesn't get mentioned more often.
I assume you mean that syntax is less important than other language features, and I mostly agree. However, while there are of course many variations of syntax on the same basic set of features, some variations are better than others. It may be difficult to say whether Python, Ruby, or C syntax is best, but that doesn't mean that some aren't better than others.

For instance, terse languages, as long as they remain understandable, generally seem better. Whether to use braces or indentation may be a matter of preference, but few would argue that a COBOL-like syntax is preferable.
The World is Flat
In all sincerity, I think you need to have a serious talk with your husband. You just joined this community, and you're telling strangers that you're considering divorce. I see that as a sign of real unhappiness.
i've written lots of code in ada (dod related airplane systems). at the time, i was a student, and pretty sure i was programming myself in to a dead end skill.

ada, for me, was like a teacher who taught the entire class at the speed of the slowest student. it tries to prevent you from doing anything marginally likely to cause a bug, at the expense of speed or creativity. it assumes the worst in a programmer. good programmers are forced to program simply so that future generations of bad programmers can read their code.

(i'm very glad to never touch it again)
A current account is a bit like a short-term bond. It is a valuable commodity that is created by banks and can be traded in the market. The difference is that bank trading systems allow current account balances to be used directly as payment, without having to be converted into cash first. Therefore the current accounts themselves are being used as payment, and count as money in their own right.

This is why current account balances are counted in all the official measures of money quantities, including the most strict measures such as M0.
Good point, that is pretty interesting how the career woman who wrote the article made her case from an emotional appeal (her story wrapped up with this):

So, guys, if you're game for an exciting life, go ahead and marry a professional gal.

While the career man made his case primarily from an evidentiary standpoint. It doesn't invalidate either argument, but it certainly reinforces the differences in thinking between men and women.

In my experience, convincing people begins with good evidence and mixes in an emotional appeal - the evidence forms the basis for a good intuitive feeling that helps to win people over.
Experiments are at the core of modern social science. In general, econ, poli sci, etc have been moving towards a more rigorous statistics and experiments-based approach. Now whether or not you think social science experiments are valid is another question, but they do perform.
the key is the "self" in "selfish"...
I am talking about Ycombinator, and NOT techstars!!
If you deposit $100 at a bank then you will receive a $100 bank account. That account is the additional money. It remains money whether or not the bank lends out your original $100. So the money is created in the act of depositing, not the act of lending.
My brother has a site that has just gone dark on Google. This is a site that uses no SEO "techniques" - it's just a plain site with content and a form to buy a product (not software) that actually uses Google's own "Checkout". Oddly, it turns up OK on Google's image search but never makes it into the regular key word search results.

Obviously, investigations are on-going but it is a worrying that a site supporting a legitimate commercial venture should just disappear from Google and thus (in effect) from the Internet.
Looks like the discussion is over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=473114

Better head over there ...
Where's The Cash For Flash?
Peter Schiff: Stimulus Bill Will Lead to "Unmitigated Disaster"
The last time I looked, there were no advanced tutorials on the net (this chimes in with the "don't only talk, show us the code demonstating the benefits" and the cheapest book on the market was $130. That was when I gave up, even though I suspect that it is an interesting language with things like calculating with dimensional quantities (you will notice that half of your team uses imerial units when you compile the code, not when your probe crashes into another planet).

Maybe I wouldn't like the style of the language or maybe I would, but my limit for books about languages I am not sure I even want to know is well under EUR 100.
I completely agree with you here. There are certainly geeks (and HN seems to have a higher concentration of them) who haven't fallen into the trap of making a macroeconomic belief part of their identity. But there are plenty who have. This guy appears to be ranting at all of them, with the questionable implied assumption that you can't have useful things to say on complex topics without some kind of advanced degree.
Ada was adopted by the D.O.D because it fit their needs.

I heard once that Ada experience + US DOD Secret or higher security clearance was life-long job security.
I wouldn't read too much into that. Many philosophies so move some people. I marked a philosophy which rejects the reality of a "self" that is separable from the rest of the universe.
OK, so in six months, four new mail clients will have conversation view and Apple will add it once those have some success. But how many will be hackable?

In my view, the real problem with email clients (that aren't emacs) is that I have no good way of hacking the filtering, display, and handling of my messages.
They both have nice pricing calculators:

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

http://www.mosso.com/pricingfiles.jsp

Just tack in your values and see for yourself.
And this may also be one (not the only) reason libertarianism seems to be so popular on HN. It assumes a relatively small set of basic axioms (like Nozick's self-ownership principle, supremacy of markets) and thus ostensibly appears to be an elegant, self-consistent system. (That's actually debatable, hence the "ostensibly.")

In general the article demonstrates what PG was saying in his article on identity. A lot of economic theory is difficult/impossible to test empirically, so there's plenty of room for all sorts of nonsense like ideology/identity/etc... to enter into one's economic world view.
"The more interesting question is why? Why the false expertise? Why the heir of authority? Why the certainty?. The conversations tend to be extremely emotional and defensive. This doesn’t happen in other fields. Programmers love to talk about quantum physics, the speed of light, and black holes. But you won’t find geeks getting all authoritative on the finer points of the event horizon? Why? Because that shit is complicated, beyond their knowledge, and they know it. This doesn’t happen with macroeconomics. Don’t kid yourself. It’s complicated, too. And it’s beyond your knowledge. So what’s the difference?

Here’s my theory. Macro-economics is:

Easy to grasp (the basic principles, anyway)
Experiments are pretty much impossible (making being disproven relatively rare)

The first makes you think you are an expert, and the second removes any fear you have of being wrong."

A cynic might observe that all of this is true of both the author and professional economists (and other soft scientists). Many of their theories cannot be tested, presumably this fact ought to temper their certainty. As far as I can tell, it doesn't. No lack of certainty is evident in this post.

The author's chief defense of academic economic hypothesis is they are complicated. I have not had much patience for the "its complicated, trust us" idea since Catholic school.

Perhaps the author's and our time would have been better spent if he offered a coherent defense (maybe even using vaguely correct grammar) of these academic economic hypothesis rather than a sweeping ad hominem attack.
Dijkstra talks about it: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW... . It seems that without DARPA, Ada would have faded away. Perhaps things have changed from his time, but the problem still remains: Ada appears to have something of a bad name.
If the bank doesn't lend, no additional money is created. They could just hold on to it.
"dude - wheres my macros?"

I will qualify that with: the funnest part of writing "a scheme" is implementing the macro system! Especially as you can use that to implement a lot of the r5 spec itself.
I don't know why everyone thinks he said that people shouldn't discuss economics. What he said was that geeks overrate their competence and therefore their discussions tend to be stupid.
If:
1) You can secure the domain <yoursite>me.com and
2) It helps with your marketing

I would say go for it.
Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device
I use it under Windows for testing purposes. Maybe it's not as optimal, but I haven't found any problems yet.
A commercial web app.
The single worst business decision I ever made was migrating a site on a .net extension over to the .com once the company bought it without making damn sure not to lose rankings in Google. I had heard that permanent redirects preserved pagerank/googleness, but dropped from top 5 on some important terms to outside the front page. This single poor decision/poor execution cost me and the company tens of thousands of dollars, which is orders of magnitude higher than the additional credibility the .com would've brought.

I suppose I had to learn that lesson sooner or later, so I'll go glass-half-full and be grateful that it was on tens of thousands early in life, instead of more later. But that was a pretty expensive lesson.
Charging for concurrent apps: Windows 7 a non-Starter on netbooks
My own anecdote: when I interviewed with Google it seemed to me that there was a lot of kool-aid drinking and elitism in the process.

There was a time when if you were not from Stanford you didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting hired. Obviously as Google grew this requirement flew out the window, but they are still extremely biased against people from "lesser" colleges, even ones who have impressive portfolios and experience. In my experience academics is one of the poorest indicators of actual work performance you can use.

Note that this isn't sour grapes :P Google recruits heavily from my college (lucky me?), but I generally dislike companies that assign too much weight to academics. This includes NVidia, which enforces a strict minimum-GPA requirement on all hires, but I digress.

During my interview my interviewer seemed to really have a problem because I wasn't a die-hard Google fanatic. At the time I had a Gmail account that was idle most of the time, I didn't do the Google home page bit (my google experiences are strictly vanilla), and outside of Google Maps my interaction with G-products are relatively limited. He didn't seem to take that so well.
Whether they hold onto it or not is irrelevant. If a company issues a bond, but doesn't spend the money it has been loaned, the bond still exists. If the bank issues you with a current account, but doesn't spend the money you loaned it, the current account still exists. The current account is the new money. It exists. You could spend it by transferring it and yet the bank still has the original $100.
It would have been nice to see some facts or figures verifying that his anecdotal views accurately reflect some significant part of the "Gen X" population.
* Because there's a ton of C/C++ code out there. As such, there are lots of jobs asking for C skills. As such, lots of people learn C. As such, lots of schools teach C. Ada never hit that critical mass (as Java and C/C++ did) where people learned it because so many other people knew it rather than because it was cool. Why does everyone in the world learn English? Because more of the world's money speaks English than any other language. So, if you want one of those C++ jobs, you'd better know C++ - not because it's good, but because so many other important things use it.

* Because Ada isn't that fast. It's significantly slower than C according to the language shootout (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/). It's one saving grace is that it's decently efficient on memory - not as efficient as C, but efficient enough that it can be used for things you wouldn't want to use Java or Lisp for.

To an extent, it was too little too late. C was introduced in 1972 and quickly gained fame. Ada, a decade later in 1983, does have dome value, but it also has things many programmers would find annoying (like a syntax that requires more typing). Sometimes, you need to provide enough reason for people to switch. A tiny enhancement isn't always enough. Plus, companies like C because it's everywhere and easy to find programmers (whether that argument holds true or not is debatable, but companies still base their decisions off it).

There might not be anything particularly wrong with Ada, but that can still leave no catalyst that is getting programmers to learn it. There aren't a lot of things written in Ada (compared to C/C++/Java) and so it isn't the "I'll get a job with it" excuse. It isn't cool like Python/Ruby/etc. It isn't widely used in academics like Lisp and Scheme. Ada became widely used in defense and aerospace, but it hasn't created enough of a catalyst.
It turned out the price was spot on and the article was correct as far as I can see.

I agree that it's 'just from a forum', this one turned out to be surprisingly well informed. My take on that is that it is a secret known by so many people that if there is a place it's going to be leaked is in a forum.
Matching people based on looks alone is pretty superficial. I think you're going to have a tough time getting people to adopt this model.

One cool way you could spin this idea is by letting people play match maker. Imagine a Facebook application where a person could set-up two of their friends on a blind date. I think something like this could spread fairly quickly; not to mention people are more willing to accept a friends suggestion rather than a complete strangers.
That's meaningless in the context of the problem of trying to get a job in a recession.
Psystar Wins Legal Ruling Against Apple: Can Argue Apple is Overextending Copyright Law