skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. A positive inflation (and a stimulus policy) make by themselves a case for waste. A negative inflation might favor resources conservation, or at least a better management.

It's a complicated topic - there was a great discussion about the inflation tax in a bitcoin article recently - http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4621674 where I was exposed to interesting new ideas by enki and snikto:

using up resources is not valuable by itself. forcing someone to spend on anything, anything at all, does not lead to a good allocation of resources. it might increase GDP, but it does not create value.

under inflationary interpretations of value creation, building a road circling back onto itself - not connected to anything - in the middle of a desert that no one ever visits - increases GDP and thus helps the economy. the better if you afterwards tear it up and rebuild it a second time.

on the other hand, in a stable currency system, if someone holds on to their capital, they actually free up resources for those who do spend. this means the purchasing power of those who do spend goes up.

in such a system money flows away from those who spend on things that have no return (consumption), and towards those who create (value creation by seizing and creating opportunities).

Maybe when comes the day where technology has not progressed enough to sustain economic growth and the extraction of resource should be rationalized (like say if we aren't mining asteroids in 100 years), there could be a case for a negative inflation rate.

IIRC 0 inflation was also an idea of Milton Friedman - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_rule
Given that only radicals are against all taxation, I don't think that it is accurate to describe "taxes" as a leftist position.
> I’ve built a thing.

> And unfortunately, I haven’t found a succinct way to market it or even just describe it.

My first tip is to stop using such vague and obnoxious phrasing.
Doesn't have to be gold. We could have many competing currencies. Some stable, some more speculative. Use your imagination.
Thanks. :)

A sound, stable currency is an essential component to a free market. When a currency is manipulated it can drastically upset the natural balance within a marketplace.

When money is cheap (i.e. artificially low interest rates combined with Fed pumping new money into system) it leads to malinvestment.

Consumers buy things they wouldn't normally buy. Companies invest in projects they normally wouldn't invest in.

There is an initial "boom" (i.e. asset prices rise) that comes from people spending the easy money. But it can't last because the spending didn't come from savings or underlying productivity increases. It came from artificial stimulus.

I'm glossing over a lot of points here, but it's called "business cycle theory" if you care to investigate.
This smells like bullshit to me. Google's search results are generally extremely good from the "customer's" point of view.

People whining about how they're hurt by losing search position inevitably turn out to be spammers or other lowlife that have been trying to use "SEO" or some other shady practice to artificially inflate their search position.

So yeah, Google is bad for con-men. Darn.
Every time one of these rover photos gets posted I find myself scrolling around the high res version looking at rocks for a while. Amazing that this is coming from Mars - seems worth it to not to let this kind of thing become routine.
Show HN: js object mapper generator from db schema
I've been working on this for a few days now and it's my first version, basically it generates a Javascript object mapper from your mysql database schema, would you use this? i call it, OBJEKTOR, lol

I want to hear all the negative feedback, ready, set GO!!!!!!

The good shit matters, but i wanna hear the bad shit because the bad feedback is what is going to make this better.
Surrounded by Humans, Elephant in South Korea Learns to ‘Speak’
No one cares about your lawnmower (or in this case software). They only care about their grass...
Hmm I wonder if Nextag's traffic is being affected not by Google's algorithm changing to hurt them personally, but rather to include more localized results.

Example: Whenever I want to do comparison shopping I would type in "{{product name}} price canada". A few years ago Nextag would always come up first and I would click on it, only to be frustrated by the fact that the retailers listed were all American. Now not too long ago more and more of these services cropped up that offered Canadian listings (shopbot.ca, canoe.ca, and now even Canada Post has their own website that does the same thing). Now imagine this happening country by country all over the world and it's not inconceivable that Nextag's traffic would be shrinking. Also I've just realized that Nextag also has a .ca destination but for some reason I've NEVER seen it come up in my results.
Ask HN: Why is 20% of the Front Page NY Times Articles?
As of Saturday, at 9PM, 6 posts on the front page are NY Times articles.
> this is the single best idea I've heard recently!

Taxes aimed at changing behaviour are generally considered to be bad taxes.

Firstly, you may not like the outcome. Changing the entire time-and-capital structure of an economy is Serious Business and is going to be utterly unpredictable (if it were predictable things would be more stable. They're not).

Now, suppose it turns out to be a dumb decision. For example, say that some unforeseen feedback loop pops up between overdraft facilities and capital now sitting long-term because of tax changes. Suddenly overdrafts become even more difficult for small businesses to obtain and voila, new cash crunch.

Even if it does more harm than good, you've created a powerful constituency for it. Bond market funds, index funds etc are now all in favour of the new tax rules and will lobby with great vigour to keep it.

Now, this is true of every tax ever. But the reason economists counsel against taxing for non-revenue policy purposes is because every tax has externalities that are unrelated to the direct incidence of the tax. You want to minimise those as much as possible.

Incidentally, the tax system already has consequences. For tax reasons that I simply don't understand, Australian corporations tend to be keen on paying healthy dividends and American corporations focus more on driving up the stock price.

> But that is only a mechanical property of the progressive tax scheme (lower tax for lower incomes), which makes the redistributed money more likely to be spent

The Australian experience has been that instead of spending the money, Australians are using it to pay down debt. Fine as far is it goes, but hardly the pump-priming that everyone was hoping for. There has been a seismic shift in debt/spending preferences across the population.

> but a new kind of shock based on a slowdown of the progress of technology

The long term trend of American GDP is stunningly linear[1] (edit: log linear -- actually exponential, I fail graph-reading forever); the only real deviation in the past century has been the Great Depression and WW2, a pair of connected economic earthquakes. We're talking about the 120 year period which included the widespread use of radio, television, highway systems, air travel, computers, the internet, modern medicine including antibiotics ... the list of literally revolutionary changes that quickly become blasé is very long indeed.

Yet what we see today as monstrous fluctuations are within trend. Perspective matters (cue someone talking about the past 5000 years ...).

[1] http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/27/the-ever-sharpening-c...
They provide for "bursting" of shared resources as needed. If you are under your resource cap, you're fine. But if you're constantly needing bursts out of the shared resources, you need to move up to a higher-resource tier with more dedicated resources.
Modern vehicles in coordinated patterns can go fast safely. Modern drivers, not so much.

Evidence suggests otherwise (http://www.iihs.org/research/fatality.aspx?topicName=Overvie...).
Why My Kid is an iKid
> why do we rely so much on google ? because we became lazy

Because google delivers amazingly good results.

[Oh, and FF certainly isn't "obsolete because of chrome." Both are fine browsers, and the competition has proved beneficial to both of them.]
If I may use a single data point, US fiscal and monetary policy is broken. Compare the US experience with Australia: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/29/time-enough-for-succe...
Very cool! BitcoinStore.com's sidebar hover animation is totally weird on Chrome though... like it's stacking them. It could totally benefit from .stop(true, true) on that hover event before it executes said animation.
I'm not saying there aren't alternative structures. I'm saying there is no one correct structure you can label "pure capitalism."

The monetary system is an engineering problem. The goal is to keep enough new money flowing into the system, but not too much, and make it robust in terms of political pressures, etc. Unfortunately, the debate over the issue is always reduced to ideological handwaving. That's not how engineering problems are solved.
Social web use in 2009 (built in d3)
Ask HN: With N numbers, determine if a tie is possible?
So I was thinking about the election and I was wondering if you had N numbers, what type of algorithm would best be able to tell you if a tie is possible? I know that the sum being divisible by an even number doesn't necessarily mean there is a way to tie. This was inspired by thinking of the up coming election. You can assume all numbers in N are positive and that there may be numbers repeated, think electoral college as an example.
This is why your first few statements should convey the overall message of what follows. It's just effective style. Then you don't need a TL;DR.
Experts are bad at predicting political outcomes, full stop. Even the "best" experts are absolutely stomped by simple statistical models[1].

And what does Nate Silver use? That's right.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/07/29/review-expert-political-judg...
You seem to have fallen off of an ideological deep end to the point of resisting basic facts, and an unwillingness to accept any position other than your own as "leftist".

The IR absorption of CO2 is well-known. As is its longevity in the atmosphere, and the amount being put up there by people.

The IR absorption of H2O is also well-known. As is the fact that it tends to precipitate out of the atmosphere, and is not being released by human activities in much greater quantity than was the case historically. (However it is released as the climate changes.) Furthermore H20 has multiple effects - in the form of vapor it is a great greenhouse gas, in the form of clouds it is a great reflector of light, as it precipitates, it removes other things that can cause global warming, if it precipitates as snow, it causes cooling, etc. In any detailed modeling of climate, it is very important and difficult to get the impacts of H20 right.

However in your world global warming is false, and anyone who believes in it is an ignorant leftist. And you think that you can argue this from an IR curve that I guarantee has been thought about more deeply by scientists than you have ever thought about it.

I also suspect that your understanding and my understanding of "private property" is different than yours. You would claim my disagreement with your viewpoint to be ignorance. I, most Americans, most lawyers, and legal historians all disagree with you. At some point you should consider whether it is more likely that you're the lone genius who knows what is right, or whether you're out of touch with reality.
I definitely am enjoying Heroku's free-tier to test and practice on. And I have gone through a good bit of Michael Hartl's tutorial, at least enough to get up and running. I do like being able see my end result immediately with little setup..for now at least. I'll be sure to check out Webfaction. Thanks!
This analogy doesn't hold true in reality. Pure capitalism doesn't mean no rules, just no rulers. Look at Github, for example. Spontaneous standards, conventions, communities, etiquette, etc. happen all the time. Now, I know the Fed is private, but is still hugely influenced and tied to the US Gov. Why can't we have competing currencies in the market? And then we can see what kind systems & rules evolve and come into being. Fiat currency is like a single point of failure.
Much like another poster, I walked into the AT&T store and asked for a prepaid SIM. I handed over $10 in cash and got a SIM card with $10 credit on it. By logging in to their website, I was able to allocate the $10 between voice, texts, and data. When that's used up, you can go and add more money to the card. All in all, it was pretty damn convenient.
The folks at Nextag (which by the way sells product listings without disclosing them and then complains about google: http://searchengineland.com/given-nextags-lack-of-transparen...) are telling the same sob story to every reporter who would listen. Their complaint is that they keep getting less free traffic from Google as if they are somehow entitled to it, they insist that they are living in a "Google world" and then go on to contradict that by saying that they are diversifying.

It’s frustrating that the reporters are trying to cast doubt over every instance of a website getting demoted in rank as if the web is static and Google’s code base is unchanging, and they don't even give much consideration to inevitable errors in large and complicated systems. They offer no proof just speculations and innuendo.

But what I find to be most frustrating is that this article shares the same blind insistence with Google’s opponents that search engines must only rank blue links, and only links to other websites, which is not only an ati-innovation stance but also an unintuitive one. As IBM’s Watson and to a lesser extent Siri has shown, search interface is about immediate answers, and the ultimate answer to these accusations still stands: if you don't like Google’s results use another service, if you can't reach a certain website via Google you can go directly to their website or get their smartphone app or follow them on Twitter or Facebook or bloody Instagram.

It is also worth mentioning that the NYT ran editorials urging the government to investigate Google, and I think a disclaimer mentioning that ought to have preceded the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html
The entire concept of currency is that there's a single shared medium of value used for exchange. "Competing currencies" is an oxymoron. Plus, once the government decides which currency is used to pay taxes or to pay damages after a civil suit, you're pretty much set.
why not just use pulseaudio for network streaming?
I doubt there is a mean biological predisposition towards pessimism (assuming that's what you meant). For the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of people lived horrendous lives relative to our own.

Imagine.. for hundreds of thousands of years, we had no idea how the universe operated, we feared death and the dark.. natural disasters were thought of as acts of god and most people died by 30 or 40. And unlike most other animals, we somewhat comprehend our predicament... that we and the people we care about aren't going to be here for long. Yet most humans still attempt to do something with their lives, and to leave a better world for their children.

We never gave up as individuals and societies and persevered until we improved our material conditions significantly. That's a pretty strong indication of a species wide predisposition towards optimism.
Definitely a smooth install and setup for Heroku. Michael Hartl's tutorial is great. I've actually been going through it today!
I can see your point, but, taking a longer-term view, what happens when we hit hard limits to global growth?

In a world in which every country is developed and wealthy... where in the world does that material wealth come from? I can't conceive of how such a world could exist without some kind of significant technological breakthrough or massive social change.
Myth about Introverts and Marketing
Fine-Tune Your Outbound Sales Formula To Help Save Your Startup
The chemistry isn't a mystery. But certainly sealing a battery so it doesn't short when submerged in seawater isn't rocket surgery either. It's an engineering goof, and a pretty severe one. Figuring out how it happened is worth investigation, and given the context some of that is going to appear in the mainstream media.
> Firstly, you may not like the outcome. Changing the entire time-and-capital structure of an economy is Serious Business and is going to be utterly unpredictable (if it were predictable things would be more stable. They're not).

I already don't like the outcome of the last change to the "entire time-and-capital structure of [the] economy," which wasn't that long ago, and is due to expire anyway.
I'm eagerly looking forward to your paper that is going to disprove the current consensus on climate change, once and for all.

Until then, if you allow, I'll stick with what the IPCC and the PNAS publish on behalf of over a thousand scientists from dozens of countries.

They were probably all bribed by the Solar industry and Tesla Motors, but I'm afraid it's the best we have until you get published with your revolutionary findings about CO2.

Science doesn't work by majority.

Yes, and tobacco does not cause cancer. It's all just one big lefty conspiracy.
The post is cut off at the third paragraph, is there a way to read this on mobile?
It's because it's a glib fucking comment.
> When money is cheap (i.e. artificially low interest rates combined with Fed pumping new money into system) it leads to malinvestment.

This assertion is observably false in the current economy.
Surface vs iPad [Lockergnome]
I like the irony: posting on craigslist looking for someone to build a site like craigslist.
Ah, non-falsifiable assertions, the best friend of economist and preacher alike.
This is one part of Apple's model that I swear people just don't get at all. Apple, as a company, refuses to operate in unprofitable hardware markets. So, they make a $329 7" tablet instead of $199. They make a $400 tablet with "outdated" hardware, they make a $500 tablet that is top of the line. They won't sell a sub $999 laptop.

Apple then focuses on selling as much of those products as they can irrespective of market share. They don't deep discount just to gain "mindshare" or "marketshare".

Engadget and others could moan that it isn't fair, but to be fair the only company that has been able to build and sell even remotely comparable hardware at comparable margins is Samsung, and frankly that is largely because Samsung supplies the same parts to Apple, so Apple is effectively subsidizing Samsung's overhead.

Other companies could play Apple's game, there certainly is room to do so, but it is a low volume/high margin strategy traditionally. The anomaly is Apple's been able to take low volume/high margin to very high volumes while leaving the high volume/low margin business to everyone else as prices fall downward.

I don't feel bad for Acer, LG, ASUS, Sony, Dell, or HP because they've all become so bad at designing, building, and selling a premium product that they really don't deserve to be competing. Ironically, much of iPhone's design was inspired by Sony's design heritage, and yet, Sony is still yet to truly match it.

To put it another way, you know it's kind of a sad state of affairs when Microsoft can put their own team together and ship a legitimate competitor to the iPad in a very short period of time and Microsoft isn't even a hardware company.
> It's largely by stealing from future generations that we've been able to solve many short term problems

This seems to be a fairly unjustified claim. What exactly have we "stolen" from them?

It rather seems that we've given greatly to future generations. We've discovered ways of producing orders of magnitude more food from the same plots of land. We've taught ourselves a good deal about how the universe operates, and (through technology) how to gain control over our lives to a great and growing extent.
Not being intimately familiar with US politics, I can only assume this is somehow connected to income tax schedules (which I understand is a hot topic there).

The thing is, however, that tinkering with capital is more important than income. Why? Because capital dwarfs income.

In fact, the more advanced an economy is, the deeper its structure of production is. That is, the more of it is involved in capital instead of income.

Income is the golden river for taxation purposes because it is what is left once capital has done its thing. It is easily identifiable, easily to calculate and easy to extract . It also exercises people's political instinct because most folk, being wage-earners, are far more personally familiar with income and expense than asset and liability.

But that doesn't change the fact that fiddling with the capital structure of an economy is, in the long run, probably the bigger deal.
I'm really sick of people ragging on the BSD's for their bad user experience. Dragonfly BSD has as its explicit goal to try develop ideas for a cluster operating system. Where did you get the idea that they were trying to deliver BSD on the desktop? Try PC BSD if that's what you want.
Apparently, Cisco also makes servers these days. No clue how good they are in any department (performance/reliability/costs), but they exist.
did something similar in school a couple years ago. Basically was a web server and an arduino connected to the apartments buzzer and door unlock system. When you were at the front door you would be connected to our wifi network and could then go to a url that would open the door. Never thought to sell the service to others in the building - would have been a good idea. although when the maintenance guy came in and saw an arduino hanging down from the intercom/buzzer box he was a little pissed. lol
Red State Blue State
Microsoft Is Why Samsung, Dell And Others Didn't Invent The iPad
What are some empowering innovations that we can expect to see developed in the next few years? The only one that immediately came to mind for me was 3D printing.