skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Banks don't create money indefinitely. If you deposit a $10 banknote at a bank, then the whole money supply can only increase by $100 (when the reserve is 10%). Your example is wrong, because you mixed up deposits(which exists only on the balance sheet of the individual banks) and reserve (which is basically the paper money + balances of all banks at the central bank).

But of course you're right, that banks still lend out more than they have, which I agree is scam.
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What's you're saying is actually not true. Unfortunately, it seems that almost everyone on the internet gets this wrong. The correct calculation goes as follows:

If you deposit $10 then, assuming a 10% reserve rate, the bank will keep $1 and loan $9. In return, you get a $10 bank balance, so the money supply has increased by 10$.

However, the money that was created cannot be loaned again. You can't loan your bank balance to someone else, and neither can the bank. However, the remaining $9 cash can be re-deposited by someone else. Again, the bank keeps 10% and lends the remaining $8.10, creating a $9 account in the process. Then the $8.10 can be re-deposited and so on. The total amount of money that can be created is therefore given by the equation

m = d/r

where d is the initial deposit, r is the reserve requirement percentage and m is the amount of money created. So for my example, the maximum money created is $100.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Mone...

What confuses everyone is that in normal circumstances, banks don't give cash-in-hand loans. Instead, they open an account for the borrower, who has the option of withdrawing that cash, but will probably leave it there. In effect, the $9 has been immediately deposited back at the bank, where it can be reloaned. This doesn't really change anything though. It just means that the same bank is reloaning the money rather than a different bank. The total money loaned to the bank is effectively $19 (the original $10 plus the borrower who has loaned their borrowed money back again). If the borrower transfers the money to another account, then a different bank will hold the money, but it makes no overall difference to the system.
Well, it's not really my ideal; I was just trying to imagine up something that didn't already exist (in the forms presented herein.) I actually like these better ;)
Paying as little as you can get away with isn't always the best policy.
Failure: The secret to success (short film)
If I have only $100 and I lend out $60, then I have loaned more money than I have, because I now only have $40 dollars.

Banks are not doing anything different to this. They are just loaning the cash deposited with them. Although the original $10 loan will eventually lead to $100 being created, it has also lead to $100 dollars worth of loans to banks. There's no scam here, it's just the way that debt works. It's no different to people loaning money to each other.
hah, I was reading the page and going "why does this 'yingzi' sound more and more like chinese as I keep reading?"

The English spelling system doesn't sound like that much of a pain compared to Chinese since some of the aspects of both spelling methods are similar enough: prefixes and suffixes and some Latin roots are pretty close to the idea of radicals. But consider this: pronouncing English words are nowhere near as difficult as pronouncing hanzi because English uses an alphabet and has pronunciation rules that make it easy to at least approximate what a word should sound like. Chinese has no such luxury with hanzi (i.e. the characters alone, without pinyin)...if you come across a character you don't know how to pronounce and you have no way to look it up, you might be able to guess at best if you see some sort of radical or character that looks like some other one you know.

Lastly, I will say this having spent the last few months trying to learn Mandarin...both typing and writing is frustrating to me. One accidental lengthening of a stroke turns a hanzi into something completely different. If I don't know the pinyin for the hanzi it takes me forever to type it (and unfortunately I haven't gotten used to any other keyboard-based input method) and I end up going to my iPhone to use the handwriting recognition. I type slow as molasses despite being comfortable writing in both hanzi and pinyin. I grew up bilingual (english and korean), but this is a completely different experience. And of course, the page mentions the simplification of hanzi...I can't practice using the language because all my Chinese-fluent friends know Cantonese, and not Mandarin Chinese. Talk about a massive brainfuck because of the differences in writing (simplified vs. traditional, which affects lots of commonly written radicals and characters) and speaking, although it's interesting to see how the same characters can be pronounced so differently.

On the upside, I would not mind dreaming that I could take the best of both worlds and combine it into one language. Chinese grammar is ridiculously simple while the English vocabulary simpler to use. I took French and Spanish back in high school and all I remember from then are nothing but conjugations while with Chinese I didn't have to stress over that and could focus on other things. Soooooo simple. Can't get over how simple it is ;)
I admit, it's only for a certain kind of person--the kind that would be talking to the people around them more often than every ten minutes anyway, and would rather have a conversation about a topic than look it up themselves. Extroverts. The resume thing, and eviction thing, are just what they sound like: being in a club. Haven't you ever been in a club? They have membership requirements and you have to maintain the membership by doing all sorts of crazy annoying/boring things. But people do them, because it's better than not being in the club. I'd even say that there would have to be a Fight-Club-esque rule about the place to prevent it becoming some sort of super-prestigious gathering place where everyone there was only there to say that they went, and no one is actually enjoying themselves. But I digress.

I was a bit off in describing the reading material concept: whatever people wrote on the whiteboard above the book-pile, and remained up there for longer than a day without being erased, would be purchased at the cafe's expense and added to said pile the next day. Same with food and drink suggestions. It's not supposed to be about the cafe; it's supposed to be about the other people in the cafe. The cafe itself is unimportant. You're paying to be put in spitting distance of people who love thinking, and are willing to help you out on creative, technical, or even philosophical projects if you reciprocate. It's sort of like the physical manifestation of a compatibility-matching dating site, but without the actual "dating" part (but I mean, if relationships start there, hey...)
Banks loan out money on checking accounts, but the basic idea of a checking account is to have access to the money anytime. So if I put $100 in my checking account, and the bank lends out $90 of it, the bank has liabilities of $190, backed by only $100 in cash. In other words, the bank has created $90 out of thin air.
Tego Revolutionizes RFID Across All Industries With Introduction of TegoTag 
Tego, Inc., the industry-leading developer of intelligent RFID tagging solutions, recently introduced its first generation of high memory TegoTags. Tego's transformational approach and advanced technology have broken through the memory limitations that have held back traditional RFID tags for years. Through tags that can store intelligent data directly on an item and without the need for battery power, Tego is enabling a new generation of functionality and capabilities that were never before possible, according to Timothy Butler, president and CEO of Tego, Inc.
Ask HK: Understanding money
I kindly request pointers to material that can help me understand money.

Videos such as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461720 explain some concepts but also include a load of inaccurate statements. What I'm looking for is an (hopefully) unbiased description of modern banking, finance and monetary systems, and how it all works together.

Note: I'm not entirely sure this is appropriate for HN, so please let me know what you think.
Absolutely. Nokia have 37% of the global market - and they are based on their own OS!

Admittedly they're planning to open source it - but it's not there yet...
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This is still no different to normal lending. If I loan you $100, then you have created a $100 bond "out of thin air." It's true that we use "bank bonds" (checking accounts) as money, and it's true that we do this because they can be redeemed on demand, but that's our decision, not the bank's. We could use bonds issued by you instead if we wanted to. The bank is still not lending more money than has been deposited with it, or doing anything else nefarious. It's just making loans.
http://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Ancient-Times-Present/dp...

A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day
by Glyn Davies
ISBN-10: 0708317170
ISBN-13: 978-0708317174
The bank IS lending more money than it has been deposited with. If banks were sane, they wouldn't lend out any money out of checking accounts. They would only lend out money on savings accounts, where I would agree to give up my right on immediate redemption in exchange for payment of interest.
also search for "Optimum Currency Area" and Robert Mundell ("Father of the Euro")
Eh. SICM is a good source for exercises, and the numerical tools it offers are pretty good (has anyone had success getting MIT scheme to behave on OS X?), but it's not the best way to learn modern physics. I recommend Lenny Susskind's awesome lecture series, "Modern Physics, the Theoretical Minimum," at Stanford-On-Youtube. In viewing order:

Classical Mechanics http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=189C0DCE90CB6D81

Quantum Mechanics http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=84C10A9CB1D13841

Special Relativity: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CCD6C043FEC59772

General Relativity (currently in updated once weekly): http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6C8BDEEBA6BDC78D
Yea, anim gifs, but at least you don't have to steal a spinner from another site - here you can create one of your own.
Not it's not. The bank only ever loans a fraction of the money deposited with (or borrowed by) it. The rest goes in the reserve. The total amount of cash loaned is always strictly less than the cash borrowed. Bank's just can't create base money from nothing. They can create checking accounts, but these are neither loaned nor borrowed. They are financial instruments representing a loan that has been made.
Did you watch the video at all?

* You deposit $10 at a bank
* The bank is allowed, to lend a *multiple* of that $10.

So it can now lend say $60 out. Even though it hasn't got $60 to lend. It's created the extra $50 from thin air.

This is not how normal lending works. It's like if you lend me your bike, and I have magical powers that allow me to then summon 4 more bikes out of thin air, so that I can lend out 5 bikes.
OK, thanks for clarifying. Still, the main point stands.
Many years ago a company I worked for IPO'd and we all got stock options. Our broker's preferred means of communication was AOL Instant Messenger. As in, hi, I'm XXX and I'd like to place a limit order, and they would do it. Insane!
But then how do you explain bank runs? If banks practice normal lending, then bank runs shouldn't be harmful, because the bank would always have enough money to redeem all deposits.
Actually this is the source (haha) of ESR's standing in the community: he looks after /etc/termcap, which is something that no-one else wants to do (and doesn't require much if any coding ability).
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No, and if the video says that then it's wrong.

Please explain to me how a bank can create base money, which is exclusively issued by the central bank.

* The bank is allowed, to lend a multiple of that $10.

False! The bank can lend only a fraction of that $10. However, if the borrower deposits that money back in the bank (i.e. makes a loan) then the bank can lend the money again, just like with normal borrowing.
Creating HTML using tree structures
Just look at craigslist, you certainly wouldn't call it a great looking design but it definitely works!
> Windows "Power Users" frequently have more problems with Linux than people with little or no computer experience

I would agree with that. Recently switched from Windows to Linux at home after about 10+ years as a hardcore Windows fan. Finding it very difficult to adjust to not knowing how to do things, but I am fully aware that this is down to gaps in my knowledge (part of the reason why I converted) and not down to faults in the OS.
The bank can't pay because it has loaned the money out.
OK, but as I already said, the point of a checking account is to always have access to the money. You wouldn't call this a scam?
Maybank Berhad Malaysia and Singapore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

You should at least watch the video so you can see what we're discussing...
Seven steps to overcoming procrastination
The point, I think is that it's entirely too much bloody work to make a GUI using any of the tools that are common for that purpose.

I recently wrote a little utility[0] (under 200 lines) in Clojure to make a folder of images greyscale. Over half the code was GUI-related. The GUI consists of a single button that launches a file chooser, a text display of files processed / files to process and an error dialog that pops up in the event of an uncaught exception.

I know Swing isn't a shining example of concise code, but it's absurd that there should be so much bulk for such a simple thing.

[0] http://github.com/zakwilson/imagesieve/tree/master
Do It Yourself Pest Control
I wouldn't, because borrowers are compensated for the risk through the payment of interest (or other services, such as free transactions). A deposit at a bank is just like any other kind of investment: you get a reward because you took a risk.

It's also worth pointing out that bank runs are incredibly rare events. In a correctly functioning market, a bank can always pay its depositors by securitizing its loans. In a dysfunctional market (such as now) there are usually government guarantees that help smooth the process. The big problem with banks at the moment is that they have been keeping insufficient capital to cover their losses. Insufficient reserves has not been a problem.
Just be wary of employees that have a suite named after them at a Vegas hotel.
OK, thanks for clarifying. I don't see it making a big change to the main point though - banks being allowed to lend more money than they have on deposit.
Banks cannot create base money. That link doesn't say that they do. Creating base money is forgery and is illegal.
Why Davos Never Produces Anything Useful
Now I get your point. So basically we have different understandings of checking accounts. I'm not a lawyer, but in my opinion money in a checking account should always be redeemable. But you're kind of right that by depositing money there, people are agreeing to their money being lent out in exchange for interest.
The Great Client-Server Architecture Myth
It's not low if there are only 10,000 shares. As others have mentioned, only percentage of ownership diluted matters.
I liked "The mystery of banking" by Rothbard, available here: http://mises.org/mysteryofbanking/mysteryofbanking.pdf

It's very well written, but it's not unbiased (Rothbard is a libertarian), so I would encourage you to read other books as well.
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Ask YC: A simpler STM implementation?
I'm pondering an STM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory) implementation in C#. For me, the main reason to use STM is not because I think locking is complicated, but because of the speed gains. With that said, I find the current STM implementations (in .NET, at least) cumbersome and slow, because they involve cloning and a proxy object for every single object.

So I have thought of several potential improvements to traditional STM, which bring it closer to optimistic locking, and wanted to hear your opinion:

1) Lock on race conditions.

Go ahead and execute the transaction, but if you detect a conflict, acquire a lock on the relevant object and execute the transaction again. Seems like a better decision, with a guaranteed worst execution time, than implementing some kind of throttling.

2) Non-transactional objects.

The idea is to have an STM method like so:

void STMExecute<T>(T obj, Func<T, bool> transaction, Func<T, bool> failsafeTransaction)

(FYI in C#, Func<T1, ..., Tn, TR> is a lambda with parameters of types T1..n and return type TR.)

STMExecute would keep track of the generation counter for obj, run the transaction lambda, and if it fails, or there is a conflict, acquire a lock on obj, and run failsafeTransaction.

For example, in a banking system, transaction would increment the account (obj)'s balance by 100, and failsafeTransaction would recompute the balance by going through the history of withdrawals and deposits for the account.

3) No side effect functions

STMExecute would be changed to

void STMExecute<T>(ref T obj, Func<T, T> transaction)

transaction would return a new T instance based on the original object, without changing the original object. True, there is some cloning involved, but it works without proxy objects.

A potential issue is that C# doesn't offer a way to enforce transactions have no side effects. This can be done by making immutable types, though.

4) What is a good benchmark?

What's a good, realistic way to test the performance of STM, compared to locks? The most obvious way - run several threads like so:

while (true) {
STMExecute(ref var, x => x + 1);
}

would always show locks as the winner, as STMExecute will default to locks when a conflict occurs. This scenario is unrealistic, though. Any better ideas?
This sucks. I've been a fan of phpBB for a while now as a free bulletin board, and it always sucks when some asshole hacks your site and screws stuff up for a while.

I know they should've kept the installation up to date, but you could probably say that about tons of other companies.
It shouldn't be that hard in Squeak + Etoys. Drawing things interactively and hooking up dials to them is the Standard Etoys tutorial.
Poor you...
"For me, the main reason to use STM is not because I think locking is complicated, but because of the speed gains."

I'm rather confident that STM is a lot slower than locking. Wasn't the main idea of STM to simplify coding while sacrificing some performance?
There's that old quote (don't know where from) that when your hobby becomes your job, you need to find a new hobby.
Actually, yesterday I posted a link to a video showing something similar
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460904
Both of them were done using FLARToolKit
I know, but I'm trying to get the best parts of STM to actually get an improvement in performance.
Python threads and the Global interpreter lock
I figured this was appropriate given previous discussions on threads/etc and concurrency.
Here's Andrew Chen when you need him!

http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/01/19/how-to-create-a-profita...

Great post.

And thanks for all the other links guys, very useful resources. The SXSW Web App Autopsy deck is very interesting.
While I believe its true, I still don't think good teachers are worth 100k/year. That's way too high. That's higher than any other basic profession except doctor/lawyer, and there are certainly some doctors and lawyers that don't make that much, e.g., public defenders.
Yes, it is a repost. Here is a classic essay by David Moser: "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard". David Moser has taught linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and he has dubbed the voice of Curly for Three Stooges in Mandarin.

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Is that a general reference or something specific to frys?

Could you elaborate more?
True, Chinese has no (?) conjugation, but to compensate, there's quite a strict word order.

I took a couple of courses of Chinese too, but gave up because of the nasty characters, difficult pronounciation, and the countless ways in which you can screw up even one word by mis-pronouncing the tones of the syllables :)

On the other hand, pronouncing Japanese is virtually like pronouncing Finnish, but I never bothered to learn those Chinese characters for Japanese either.
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I'm just trying to muddy the point. Most of those bands playing giant stadium concerts started out playing maybe not bar mitzvahs, but small clubs, and doing cover songs. The distinction between products and services is not as clearcut as pg describes.
It really depends on your target demographic. Look at HN, where the most fascinating feature is it's simplicity and that's an ideal of beauty for hackers. But there's tons of people who would turn away because the layout is not shiny enough.
Ask HN: How do you get tech bloggers to review a startup?
For the past few weeks I tried to get bloggers to review my startup http://www.s3mer.com with no success. Is there something I can do to improve my odds?

Thanks for the advice!
Let's not forget the second half of most modern songwriting - lyrics. Music certainly has MANY mathematical elements to it. There is no doubt that computers can do a lot of lifting in orchestrating and making arrangements just using basic music theory. Some of it may even be creative and useful. Most of it will be elevator arrangement trash.

Still, you're not going to be able to have computers write meaningful lyrics. A lot of "human" factors go into writting lyrics and the lyrical melody.
I don't think that's possible, but would be happy if proven wrong. I just downloaded the STM implementation and it seems to include some benchmarks. So that could be at least an answer to your question 4.
I don't think it is entirely wrong to be harsh on comments. What Tufte is trying to achieve is value on his site. Every comment that do not provide value is then removed.

The alternative option can give a worse signal-to-noise ratio. Bad signal-to-noise ratio will make all intelligent beings with little time on hand go to other places, because wading through all the noise is too expensive. In that respect, it might be worth being harsh on comments to keep certain commentors on the site.

I don't see it as censorship. You are free to make your own blog post condemning the view, start a comment-stream, use well-argued points, etcetera. In fact if the discussion is so vastly different it would probably be better served as a post of its own, laid out with good argumentation.
Einstein did not convert to any kind of deism as a result of seeing the great Intelligence inside Nature and concluding that there must be a Supreme Intelligence. More specifically, (1) he did not believe in a Supreme Intelligence (he explicitly disclaimed belief in a personal God, and likened his view to that of Spinoza who more or less used "God" as a synonym for "Nature"), and (2) there was no "conversion".

Antony Flew is not one of "the best scientists" for the simple reason that he was never a scientist at all. He is a philosopher. Also, there is much reason (entirely independent of his conversion to deism) to believe that his mental faculties are in pretty bad shape. Which is fair enough for someone in his eighties, of course, but the argument "this must make sense if an eminent philosopher is convinced by it" -- which is a pretty hopeless argument in any case, considering some of the things eminent philosophers have been convinced by -- really doesn't work at all when the eminent philosopher no longer has the sharp mind that made him an eminent philosopher in the first place.