skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wasn't mining really cheap when it first started? Who owns all those bitcoins now? The early-adopters have the lion's share of the wealth.
The $50 AT&T data plan requires a 24-month voice plan, which starts at $40 per month.

See footnote 6 on the page you linked to, then click on any of the plans, then click View Details next to any of them.
I think you're mistaken by one big thing, in a "pure" capitalist state, there would still be court systems in place to enforce human rights, contracts, lawsuits etc.

A privately-run court system which is prone to corruption wouldn't last very long, when a competitor could easily pop up who offers transparency and a lack of vested interests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#Law_and_orde...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minarchism
I have done the same thing, using a Galaxy Nexus. It's a brilliant combo - I got a brand new cutting edge phone for $350, and I'll spend only $360 this year for unlimited data and text on this T-Mobile plan (with no contract, to boot).

It's such a good deal that even with carrier penalties for breaking contract it is still much cheaper over the course of a year.
Ah, sorry dude, but you've got me wrong. What I said was just a humorous quip at the end of a blog post, and simply does not represent the whole truth. Please take it as a joke, it certainly was meant as such. Hope you're well in Brooklyn; I'm in SI. Rough out here.
Regardless if it stimulates investment in capital assets, with higher returns companies are able to absorb higher interest rates. It gets deducted off their taxes either way. The rates have been low for too long.
This is an extremely interesting and well written article. More like this please!
>What's the complaint here? Google makes changes that sometimes negatively impact someone's business?

As far as I can tell, it's largely a bunch of spammers trying to attack Google for downranking their spam.

The argument is that Google competes with them and so shouldn't be allowed to use its dominance to favor its own service. But it's pure nonsense. These companies aren't valid search results. They only ever got into the results through SEO, and then they wail when the algorithm improves to kick them out. Someone who searches for "kitchen table" is looking for a website selling or providing information about kitchen tables, not a search engine that allows them to search for websites selling or providing information about kitchen tables. The user is already on a search engine -- other search engines are not relevant search results unless the search term is in the nature of "XYZ search engine."

What the complainers are doing is the equivalent of going into the largest chain of retail stores and putting boxes on the shelves labeled with a brand that the major retailer doesn't carry, which don't actually contain any product but instead contain a map to other stores that carry the brand the retailer doesn't. And then complaining when the retailer doesn't allow the spam products to remain on their shelves, and claiming it's an antitrust violation because the retailer has the most market share and it sells its own competing brands of products.

Naturally that doesn't convince judges or sell newspapers, so the spammers scour the world for instances of algorithmic imperfection that give a bad ranking to someone else, who unlike the spammers didn't actually deserve it, and then play ominous music as they reveal the shocking fact that some Google engineer's 20% project or some little-known subsidiary responsible for 0.00043% of corporate revenue arguably competes with the disadvantaged website in some fashion.
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Not true. Bimetallic, and other multiple-basis monetary systems have and do exist.

British currency was initially tri metallic: copper (pennies), silver (pounds), and gold (guineas).
The same way we predict how the trillions of trillions of air molecules behave when we predict the weather: we build models of aggregate behavior, try to understand relationships, run simulations and test our predictions. We're not 100% right all of the time, but we now have the ability to prepare for disasters days in advance and re-route airplanes around storms before they hit. Weather prediction and the activity around it was once an intractable problem but now is a huge, huge benefit to society.

The things you bring up are not even the hard part… The difficulty is that the system is dominated by feedback loops. I still think it's within the realm of 'engineering can improve this'.
"raising the question of whether this latest incident is a sign of design flaws, of possible risks associated with plug-in vehicles generally or simply a result of the abuses wrought by extremely rare weather conditions"

That's lousy journalism - not mentioning what the specific weather conditions were, and making it sound like the seawater was some sort of simple throwaway answer instead of the scientifically obvious answer that it actually is.

"Why Did 17 Plug-In Cars Burn?"
"What caused more than a million dollars-worth of plug-in hybrid vehicles, including 16 Fisker Karma luxury sedans, to catch fire Monday night at Port Newark?"

It really should say what the other car was. It's impossible to guess at any sort of trend, because the other car could break it and we aren't told what it was. Was it another Fisker car, indicating a consistent problem with the company in this instance? Were there similarities in the design? All we know is that it was a plug-in vehicle.

Wikipedia, by the way, says it was a Prius: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Karma#Fire_incidents
I also call bullshit on this. Google is very open to webmasters,and has a giant like 40 page .pdf available to them strictly about what things get better search results and what things cause negative results or out right panda-ing. The article says right up front about the voting website that they had duplicated content on pages and no one linking to them to boot. Both are known negatives to anyone working in SEO or web today and it has been known for years.

The entire article seemed to be one giant raving contradiction of its self. Companies don't want to hire good people (or for some reason have ignored what they have said), chosen to keep doing things they way that keeps getting them negative results, then moan about it. What happened to the voting website is the very thing thing that Bing would do to them (and probably has done to them).

Now admittedly, Google tends to promote its services above services of other companies, should they be in competing markets. Its unclear if this is by accident (Google engineers probably know the best Google SEO methods after all) or by design. At worst, if it is done by design, then Google is no worse then any other large company. Remember when all the big super markets started producing their own products at cut rate prices? Before when you walked into a Publix, you had 10ft of shelf space devoted to nationally branded ranch dressing. Now you have 5 ft devoted to Publix brand Ranch dressing and 5ft devoted to everything else. So if you are Kraft, your seeing your [eye-ball] search traffic being reduced by half and your competitor now has a much lower price to boot.

Why is it that Kraft doesn't care about that? They don't care, because they have spent the last half decade building their brand and their customer pool. They know that if their loyal customers go into a super market they will see the cheaper supermarket branded ranch dressing first; then second they will see the high priced Kraft and buy Kraft. I can easily extend this analogy to many of the situations presented in the article. When Google enters a market, they are the underdog. Just like when Publix decides to copy another nationally branded product and sell it in their stores. Even if Publix devoted 9 ft to Publix brand Ranch and 1 ft to National brands, on the shelves, Publix still wouldn't capture 90% of the market.
The answer I gave indirectly was: economists. Taxes introduce externalities, often have indirect incidence and so on. The "ideal" tax is one that raises revenue without distorting behaviour.

Taxes are sometimes used for policy purposes. The classic example is "sin taxes" to deter smoking, drinking etc. But in general, if you want to modify behaviour, the tax system is a problematic way to do it.
>It's save to assume they don't.

Never assume anything with regards to your entire companies infrastructure being in the hands of a third-party.
I might be wrong - I'm quite new to macroeconomics

IS/LM and is not something that I would hang my hat on, here.[1] The reason is that the performance evelope of the firm must be considered micro-analytically. Ie, you need to take the perspective of the firm as a composite of capital investment projects. The aggregate value of the projects will be the value of the firm.

What impacts the decisionmaking of the firm? The spread between the cost of capital and the return on capital. For a fixed opportunity set of projects, a lower cost of capital will result in incremental investment provided that capital is available and capital projects are available that exceed the cost of capital.

How does one get these projects? In the real world, these are "hunted" like big game. These projects are either invented by engineering (new widget X) or they are extensions of current product (widget Y) that are sold to new clients (Z) by sales or bus dev.

Internally, the "green light" for these hunting parties is a hurdle rate (set to an average expected return-average cost of capital=some threshold level). Because there is uncertainty[2] in these big-game hunting expeditions, over time they will converge to the least amount of work necessary to clear the threshold. So, by this logic, the quality of projects will decrease over time as the threshold of project quality declines.

On the other hand, the external environment will also drive down this potential. Other companies will be increasing their hunting parties, increasing competition and reducing the probability of success.

The combination of these two factors, will over time decrease the performance envelope of the hunter/gatherer parties (be they engineers or sales/bus-dev). The issue is that this decline may have persistent effects (ie, learning by doing cuts both ways.)

________________

[1] See my footnote earlier. The IS/LM model assumptions and general methodology will not capture the recursive and inter-temporal effects on the opportunity set of projects that will follow from interest rates approaching zero artificially (ie, by fiat stimulus).

[2] And not insignificant cost.
I understand the math lesson and how it costs more to add each 9 to your uptime. All that will not help you convince someone who doesn't know these things. Its the difference between a sales ptich and an engineering discussion.

Redundancy is a great tool but its not a panacea. You mentioned many of the drawbacks yourself. I see too many people building gigantic RAID arrays with consumer hitachi drives and questionable controllers. It's exceedingly easy to think you're adding redundancy when you are just creating a house of cards.
There is no such thing as spending more than we had. The housing boom didn't consist of houses borrowed from a cosmic banker, whom we now have to pay. A nation cannot spend anything it doesn't "have" except by trading with other nations, and trade does not remotely explain the deficit.

As Friedman might say, monetary unsustainability is purely a monetary phenomenon. Even Keynesians know this and in fact that is why they tend to call for higher inflation.
Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a Internet forum.
AWS SDK for PHP 2 released, now based on Guzzle.
Noise per post on Google+
Linus is right. I agree with him. Engadget is stupid, corrupt and trolling in this case.

Lower prices aren't hurting consumers. Good quality Nexus devices around $200-400 ranges aren't hurting consumers. In fact, it encourages a fair competition. As a result, Apple/Samsung have to work hard to make their $600 & up devices feature-rich to justify higher price. Consumer wins!
That's how it works, the difficulty scales with the amount of computing power in the network. If it didn't, the entire currency supply would have been mined already.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply

The real conspiracy theorists are the people who (seemingly without ANY experience and explanation) accuse Bitcoin of being a ponzi scheme or whatever else. Ask me a technical question about it and I can explain _anything_, after researching it casually for years.

This is open-source so you guys better be able to back up your accusations.
Seems the Mars vehicle really lives up to its name.
I've been spending time in Black Hat internet marketing forums (out of curiosity). They hate Google. Google is consistently making their search engine better for the user and worse for spammers.
Are you sure it wouldn't be some kind of private arbitration circuit? I'm pretty sure that in a "pure" capitalist state, the preference would be to allow the market to discover a solution to the problem of injustice. Indubitably, the foundations of such a system would be, essentially, pay-for-play.

Those with means would prefer, rationally, to have a system where the measure of justice they receive is proportional to the means they possess. As long as we're buying and selling justice, who would want to pay more, and receive less justice? I'll take my business elsewhere, thank you.

I somehow doubt, then, that such a system would tend toward what most people consider fair and justice -- those notions today, at least ideally, embody the concept that all participants are equal, regardless of any other consideration.
The fact that this article has 38 comments by now is proof of his point. Noise will happen, you can't change culture. Nothing to debate here.
Actually, They are right.

I really think you should take the time to watch this video, understand it, let it sink in and totally mold your brain around it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc
This is usually filled by escrow services which I'm not sure this website has implemented. Even Silk Road has implemented this, so it's a deal-breaker for me.
>Here's some specifics:

>Anything having to do with the 2008 fiscal crisis. Anything having to do with monetary policy in general.

These are not specifics. Could you link to some actual examples?

I don't reject IP out of hand. I do think patent law needs to be reformed, but you paint this with a really broad brush. I honestly have never gotten a full-on all-anti-IP vibe here. I do believe most people here oppose software patents, but software patents are only a small subset of IP, and a recent one at that.
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So you talk about elegance. Okay, let's talk about that. Maybe this will be more helpful than the usual mud-slinging that comes with these sorts of discussions.

People tend to denominate their contracts in the base currency. In the old system before the Fed, the value of this currency in the US would fluctuate as much as 50% in one year.

It is hard to imagine with what bizarro world economic actors is this an elegant and sound basis on which to conduct trade, that a bank could find that all of its customers suddenly find it 50% harder to pay off their loans, or conversely, that its capital stock is worth 67% (1/150%) of what it was before. Now imagine how that feels for the customers, or shareholders. Imagine a society when the money can come or go in floods and what this means for every contract, every wage, every price.

Why would you want this? So you can satisfy some Rothbardian itch about an "elegance" constraint that means very little in practice?

The Fed tends to target price levels. In addition to being a very elegant basis with which to conduct trade and form contracts (as Milton Friedman pointed out), stable price level targeting has the advantage of actually working out pretty well, unlike 'free market' currencies or fixed standards. NGDP targeting is probably better but that's outside the scope of this discussion...
If you don't like Google’s results use another service.

Sure, but Google has two kinds of customers: searchers and websites.

Maybe you believe websites shouldn't hide from Google because it makes no strategic sense. Twitter and Facebook don't let Google index their content. Why would they let Google front-run ads on their content? It's not a catchall rule, to hide with robots.txt.

Maybe websites should just pay up: they should auction for higher results, if their business depends on search placement. But that's misunderstanding Google's role.

Google isn't a salesperson. It's more like a road. Both bring business to your door (literally), but the latter gets used by everyone for everything. And it turns out it doesn't matter how you pave the road (roads have been public since the Egyptian times, yet road-building technology has changed dramatically) or whatever.

To Nextag, Google is a utility. It is only by tradition that some monopolists become utilities and others do not. How do you regulate Google for what it is: a public utility?
The government helped create and prolong the great depression, from my understanding.

Great book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/FDRs-Folly-Roosevelt-Depression-ebook/...

"As already noted, major factors bringing on the Great Depression were the severe monetary contraction that the Federal Reserve presided over, unit banking laws that made it almost impossible for small-town banks to diversify their portfolios, high-wage policies that made it more expensive for employers to hire people, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff that throttled trade, and the 1932 tax hikes that took money out of people’s pockets."
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According to your link, 34% of freeway fatalities are speeding related[0]. I wonder how that compares to non-fatal crashes and drivers in general. For example, if 34% of all drivers are speeding, and speeding is mostly uncorrelated to fatal crashes, then it would make sense for 34% of fatalities to involve speeding.

[0] "Speeding was defined to include crashes in which the driver was issued a traffic citation for speeding or in which driver-related factors coded indicated speed as a factor (driving too fast for conditions, racing, or exceeding the posted speed limit)."
legos from the beginning .in elementary school they had a cool program in my neighborhood run by motorola engineers where you could take courses on logic design and build simple cricuits (combination locks, tic tac toe...). when i was 12 i built and electric go kart, 13/14 - a minibike. 15/16/17 - a solar powered car (from scratch http://www.sphssolarknights.org/). Moved into more CE/CS type projects now but once you start building you will never stop! Keep it up. :)
Huh, what's all this capitalism talk... as far as I know, his main pain in programming was just this:

> I enjoy the freedom and art and creativeness, but when things don't work, which happens a lot, I waste time on it and feel stupid and depressed. Feeling smart 1% of the time and stupid 99% of the time

Yeah guess what, that same thing gets at me ever since I started programming. I still like doing it, but that aspect is truly increasingly an issue in the activity since late 20s / early 30s now. How enjoyable you spend big chunks of your lifetime does matter after all, and you increasingly get that horrible nagging "time's flying faster every day now, I'm running out of a fixed resource one compiler error at a day" feeling..
> those notions today, at least ideally, embody the concept that all participants are equal, regardless of any other consideration.

Equality as defined by the government/state... which as we have seen, is susceptible to corruption and enforcement of laws that were created with influence from special interests.
Cough, $400 Android tablet with that screen. Frankly, I'm betting the Nexus 10 would be something Linus would be happy using if it were in a laptop form instead of a tablet. Super high res, it would be quite small for a laptop. Linux runs quite happily on ARM.
Capitalism is a system where bad ideas and companies fail. They aren't propped up by government.

The Federal Reserve has been shoveling money into large banks, literally lending trillions of dollars to them at times. Interest-free, of course. Then they lend it the US Treasury. Or leave it in their Federal Reserve accounts and collect interest there.

With such a sweetheart deal, anybody could make a profit. How is it these guys deserve bonuses?

One can only conclude that our government has been completely captured by these guys.