skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I see some good points, if the US was such an inferior place to start software companies, I think we'd see more US-originated entrepreneurs setting up shop in Canada, Europe, or other places. I don't hear of that too often, but I do hear of the reverse frequently.

The US' corporate taxation policies are an improvement on those in many other countries. We're not Singapore, but we're closer to them than many of these other nations when it comes to heavy taxation.

Most law firms provide a proxy server? I seriously doubt this. And though they don't ask for 5%, they ask for a dollar sign with some numbers to follow. 5% is cheap if you're starting with almost nothing.

Dealing with VC's? Seems like it could happen.

Stripe and Braintree are two among dozens of technology providers who are unavailable, more expensive, and/or more time-consuming if you're overseas. Seems like 5% to save a few months of red tape (and in many cases a few thousand dollars) may not be such a bad deal for a number of startups. Would be really nice to get a foreign entrepreneur's take on this.
I gave you 2 facts, referring to CPM and FAT, which apply to the Windows 90% of the PC market.

Unix is irrelevant; nobody used Unix until Android came along. Unix is in fact the other 10%.

Furthermore, relational databases are the work by Professor Stonebraker, that I already conceded in my original post.

I haven't got the time or inclination to argue

No, what you lack is the time and inclination to apply reading comprehension to my posts.
No I'm pretty sure I'm snarky in real life. It's a problem.

Basically "I completely agree with you, but wish to do so in a humorous and sarcastic manner." Apologies.
Exposing The Truth Radio with Sean Tilley from Diaspora social network project
Not inherently; this is just another example of "correlation is not causation". There are plenty of ugly things/websites easy to use, and pretty things that are hard to use. There are also plenty of pretty things easy to use, and ugly things hard to use.
I think part of the problem is the popular perception that a nation's economy is just like a household economy: i.e. in a household if credit card debt is high, you gotta pay that off before you can spend more; or if you're earning $1000 per month but spending $2000, you gotta cut down on your cable bill and nights out.

That's a tantalizingly simple and intuitive comparison that everyone can understand and relate to. Unfortunately a nation's economy is so utterly unlike a household economy that the comparison is downright dangerous, because it leads to harmful false assumptions like "national debt is always a bad thing", "a nation must always 'earn' more than it spends at all times", and "an economy can never grow in a nation with debt".

I'm no economic wizard but it really surprised me that how everyone in Europe and many in the States are prescribing austerity, when basic history from this very century frequently demonstrates that austerity can lead to economic damage. Yes you can always find programs that can and should be cut back in any developed society, but considering debt to be the central and only problem in a situation where the debtor defines the very money it "owes" seems a little shortsighted to me.
You referred to it as a "boondoggle" which, if it wasn't even a bug, it also was not.
You don't understand my point. I agree that one can try to derive pleasure from such things. I know I do. But that pleasure doesn't encourage people to eat more, and a lack of pleasure doesn't compel you not to eat. The pursuit of pleasure exists independent of necessity.

Even if you couldn't afford lavish meals, you would still eat what you could afford, because eating is a necessity. You wouldn't starve yourself just because you couldn't eat at at 4 Star Michelin restaurants every night. Conversely, you wouldn't gorge yourself just because you were at a 4 star restaurant.

So yes, my argument does apply to eating as well. In fact, eating is a pretty excellent example that proves my point.

An obligation can also be subject to hedonistic intent. What is you point?
I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, but I am also very particular about my pens and paper. When I want a pencil, I only use a Pentel P205 0.5mm. I've had a single P205 for over 4 years now and it's never been lost or broken. For pens I've finally settled into the Pilot Hi Tec C 0.25 or 0.3mm in blue or black. I have two all-metal bodies for the cartridge I got from Kickstarter, the Render K by KarasKustoms and the P1 by PremierePen. I find that having a nice pen encourages me to write down my thoughts more often and makes my notes much more organized. For paper I'm less picky but I like Muji products for random notes.

TL;DR get a nice pen, it's the best.
In principle yes, someone could compile clang into JavaScript exactly like in this project other LLVM tools were. It's just a matter of whether someone thinks it's worth doing and takes the time.
Ask HN: Anybody want a hosted email API?
Its really hard to set up an email host﻿, I have tried doing it myself and it was really too crazy to set up. I had a problem where I was serving email across about 40 domains and I needed something that would work for everyones different DNS settings.

So we outsourced, got it done but its still very clunky, its hard to administrate and monitor and I couldn't build on top of it.

I was thinking of maybe building an API service where people can build their own email hosts really easily without buying hardware, getting a system admin etc.

If you dont know, IMAP and POP are so hard to work with programmatically but if you had an API where you just ask for /users/134234/mailbox and got all your data, you pretty much just cut out 2 months of programming.

Plus: People could build apps on top, like shopify
Plus: We wont have to rely on google anymore!
Plus: Google doesn't seem to let you do this or anything similar, I might be mistaken though.

Just to clarify, this is not a transactional email service, its a fully hosted imap server.

Thanks!
You are correct, I edited the comment with the right video.
eBay doesn't let sellers give buyers negative feedback anymore (they did for a time).

It's the philosophical equivalent of "everybody gets a gold star".

The 80 characters can come in useful if you're on the fence about an auction- if the negatives come in the form of "didn't get here fast enough" left 3 days after the auction end, they're easier to overlook than "item was used, dirty, and broken instead of new, fraudulent seller".

It does allow sellers to squelch bidders with less than a certain number, reducing the ease of creating throwaway accounts for nonpayment or shill bidding purposes.
The Dictator's Daughter: Tweets from Gulnara Karimova
I can see lots of problems with it. The first thing that comes to mind: Eat your usual crap AND then also down an apple to boot to get the rewards. Great way to encourage overeating.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of what I see, but since my initial post was lost in cyberspace, I am taking that as a hint to be brief this time.
You're paying for the SaaS, which not only receives the measurements from the device, but processes and stores it, while giving you a UI to access it. And then they maintain the servers, fix the bugs and add features.

So your only gripe really is that they're selling it as a service, instead of a single box install. Which is fine, but let's not pretend that this isn't a legitimate business model and probably the prevailing way of making a dollar in our industry. It's completely legitimate to sell SaaS and allow access only on a subscription basis.

Why shouldn't you pay to have your data stored and compiled into reports on an ongoing basis? And if you don't want that, as I've said, the serial protocol is completely hackable by even noobs.
Congratulations, if you have statistical relevance on those numbers, you've just clustered your clients into too different populations.

Now, you just need to discover why one of the populations had better results than the other, and act acordingly. Don't forget to do actual A/B tests to verify your hypotesis.
weird. i opened the link and played it, cannot reproduce :(
The Gigantic Aeroscraft Is Ready, and It’s Awesome
A self driving car. Google is positioned to do anything and everything. Love it.
Just to clarify - are you saying everything Paul Krugman has written is true, or everything Paul Krugman has written is false?
Anything that can't go on, won't.
There are a number of valid ways to run and analyze A/B tests. Bayesian approaches look rather different than what you're describing.
Where's the apology part? Oliver Blanchard was not an austerity hawk before, so still not being one is not some sort of shocking turn.

edit: to be specific, he claims to be a non-fairweather Keynesian: stimulus on the downturn, austerity in good times. They seem to have a cyclical lifecycle and are all off somewhere spawning when it's time for the cuts.
This is slightly off topic but does anyone know of a resource to get the odds at gametime historically for NFL games?
The Federal Trade Commission closes its antitrust review against Google
Why can't all of these countries take a page from Iceland? I mean, in 2008 it defaulted on the ridiculous amount of debt they had, and now, 4+ years later, are improving their international credit rating, and building their economy. I would speculate from articles that I've read that they're at least back to where they were prior to the collapse.

A Link: http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/dan-white-the-econo...
The point of the "multiplier" discussion in the article is to explain to you that if Greece had cut more, it would have been in an even worse position. Democracy isn't the problem, it's power concentrated in the hands of people who think they can get by on pure ideology and an ignorance of macroeconomics.
I think the real pseudoscientific idea is that debt-financed stimulus is the cure all for any economic ill. The argument that Greece needs to get further into debt to solve it's debt crisis seems insane to me. At this point how much good could a stimulus really do (even if they could find someone to lend them the money to do it). I know the standard Krugman/Keynsian style argument here but it doesn't seem to make much sense in Greece. As another poster said it seems the only real cure for Greece is going to be inflation, probably and unfortunately similar to what happened in Argentina.
It depends on your POV. Arguably, playing pool for money is acceptable because it is a competition of skills, whereas poker is not acceptable because it is a competition of chance.

As for poker addicts...yes, there are very many of them. during the first online poker crazy of the early 00's, many fellow classmates got put on academic probation b/c they couldn't keep their poker habit under control.
What's inside America's banks?
LuaNode - Asynchronous I/O for Lua
Where did I misplace my +100 wand? Great post, combinators are a not-so-hidden passion of mine and they inspire a lot of really practical applications in JavaScript and Ruby.
Well, you made two points. One is that having a nicer pen wouldn't (shouldn't) make you want to write more. Two, that a $60 pen has no value besides making you feel opulent.

My response was to your second point where I assert that some people derive pleasure from things that others perceive as mundane. Eating at a 4-star Michelin restaurant for example can be loosely (very) compared to writing with a $60 pen. So it's not bizarre.

To your first point, deriving pleasure from doing something does indeed encourage you to do more of it. Even eating - compare eating a mediocre meal at a food court to a scrumptious meal prepared by your mother (or whoever cooks well in your family!). Sure, writing is not an infrequent exercise, so perhaps the analogy goes only so far, but the point remains that if you enjoy it, you are likely to do more of it.
Thank you for the insightful elaborations and clarifications.

Regarding the expansion of copyright in the near future, do you think that the general public of the US will simply allow things to get out of hand before making concessions like you suggested (GFDL/GPL), or will the internet (software?) as we know it simply be overtaken, with the only recourse to simply use another paradigm for open communication and sharing.

My opinion is that, with more and more older people adopting technology, and younger people being born (obviously, right?), we'll in a general public sense, shift our priorities to a more logical and open copyright system. I would give it 20-30 years though...
I remember reading this article in high school for a biology assignment, the graphics helped a lot.
I mean, not everything Krugman has written is true, but I think that he makes the best case for returning to sane macroeconomic policy that has, for all of its faults, at least some historical backing.

I'm definitely pro-Krugman.

If you're interested, there are some particular blog posts about the history of the austerity movement and why it's ridiculous:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opinion/02krugman.html -- is a good place to start.
Greece needs to start throwing millionaires in dingy prisons to make any headway with its problems. The Greek crisis, more than anything, is the result of massive tax evasion.
Password security in Deus Ex
What I mean is, there are certainly better ways and worse ways for individuals to reach the desired weight and maintain it. The idea that all you have to care about is the net deficit is pretty useless. If the deficit is all that we care about, why not just eat nothing then? Drink water and take vitamins but don't consume any calories. Because psychologically speaking, it's damn near impossible. And even if you did succeed, it'd be hard to maintain since you'd have to start eating again which would be a big change in what you were doing.
>> "I do not understand why you’d want a notebook that was not spiral bound."

I don't like spiral bound and I have several different types of Moleskine. The spiral bound break too easily on me and the pages often accidentally tear out.
This is exactly why I experiment with pen and paper combinations every now and then trying to find something I like.

I tried many combinations of pen and paper in my early 20s, but I never found one I preferred to a keyboard. And not the fancy keyboards either, as my favorite keyboard is a laptop keyboard. The most important feature is that I don't have to think about my input device, my writing surface, or how to draw letters -- only on the message I'm writing.
The programmer in question wasn't selling gambling services to consumers, he was selling gambling software to "retailers and wholesalers" who in turn served gambling consumers.
I find the assumption behind this statement offensive, deeply offensive. Nobody is saying "Nominate less qualified speakers," people are saying "Don't overlook qualified speakers who happen to be brown, beige, female, and/or fifty years old."

If you could find someone beige AND fifty with 40,000 points on hacker news, a popular blog, and experience keynoting conferences, that would be great, wouldn't it?
More so, the economic disparities throughout the US are far less than in the Eurozone. In the US, per capita GDP between states varies by about a factor of 2 (from mid 30k to mid 60k). In the eurozone the difference is closer to a factor of 3.5 (from mid 10k to around 50k). However, even that statistic is a bit misleading due to population because a lot of the lowest per capita GDP US states also have fairly smallish populations compared to Eurozone countries. If you add up the populations of all the US states with per capita GDP's less than 40k you get a total population of about 42 million. If you do the same for the Eurozone the total population is about 140 million, or nearly half the population of the entire Eurozone. Similarly, over 30 million people are living in countries with per capita GDP less than 30k, whereas even the poorest US state is higher than that.

Also, the wealthiest Eurozone countries are not as wealthy as the wealthiest US states, by a fairly significant margin. On the whole the Eurozone ends up being on average about as wealthy, in per capita GDP, as arkansas. The whole system is in need of far greater management than the US dollar but lacks the power to do so, and in total has far less wealth to be able to spend their way out of the problem.
Web Essentials - A Visual Studio extension
I'm kind of joking about ugly (and completely serious about the names[1]), but using real photos in your mockup will give you a much better idea of how it will look in the real world. Sometimes the lack of consistent polish will make the whole thing fall apart, so something that looks great with high-quality stock photos will look terribly with everyday average photos. I'd bet that would be the case here, with the focus on "clean" design.

Of course if you're making a website for models or photographers, then ignore that completely. The take-away here is to know your audience, and design accordingly. Facebook should be (and currently is) optimized for getting a quick pulse on what's happening in your social circles, and the designs presented here are a poor way to accomplish that.

[1] Long names cause weird word-wrapping and overflow issues in many designs. India seems to have a high density of (by my standards) unusually-long names, so if you expect to have a lot of Indian users that kind of thing is really important to consider.
Completely agree. If Paul Krugman isn't enough to sway people, Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel laureate, has echoed his analysis. So has Dean Baker, who is the first economist to my knowledge to predict the housing bubble and the resulting crisis. Basically, this was easy to see and well-known to economists that aren't neo-liberal demagogs.
Fair enough. A policy of stricter enforcement of tax laws sounds like a better plan than stimulus to me. Maybe they should start there instead.
I leave the WYSIWYG for the designer - it quickly falls apart for actually programming complex UIs. My job is to translate PSDs into working UI. There's a good reason we abandoned WYSIWYG for web design years ago and a modern mobile app is no less dynamic.

I can change the underlying grid size, padding and item spacing for every screen in my entire app in one line. Have fun doing that in iOS.
English actually comes from West Germanic (not Latin). But you're right; there are lots of shared words between Latin and English, and this is mostly due to the historical relationship between England and France.
I don't think that's what Krugman et al are saying. You can make arguments for and against stimulus being the correct answer for a particular country's recession. There are valid points in both camps. However, cutting spending during a recession is another matter entirely -- this fix goes against some of the core things we've come to believe about aggregate demand.

I don't think Keynes' model is perfect. I'm excited to see what new kinds of models emerge after this depression -- we have a lot more data to play with. However, at this stage, it makes a lot more sense to stick with models that have kind of worked sometimes rather than to just operate off of pure, baseless speculation.
What is the Pinterest stigma?
I recently came across this blog post from an Icelander that paints a more complicated picture of the Iceland financial story. Long, but worth a read for a different perspective.

http://studiotendra.com/2012/12/29/what-is-actually-going-on...
> Taking in more debt to pay for old debt is not sustainable.

Of course it is. Rolling over debt securities is everyday practice for both governments and private companies.

> In no way can western states sustain the entirety of their assumed obligations (to bond holders, social beneficiaries and special interest).

That depends on what kind of economic growth we have going forward. Your statement is certainly true if countries keep auteritizing themselves into deflationary death spirals. It is probably true if countries keep relying on upper-income tax breaks and labor market "liberalization" for growth - arguably worked 30 years ago, but returns on that strategy seem to be diminishing. It is not necessarily true under all circumstances.

> People are getting stiffed on old debt, it's only a matter of who, how much and how soon.

It's generally been the case that inflation + economic growth have made old debts shrink as % of GDP. When both of those are negative, debt-holders make a lot of real money, but risk of default goes way up.
The size of the cuts in Greece could not avoid damaging the economy. No serious person debates this; the only debate that ever was, to the degree there was one, was over how much damage the cuts would do, and how quickly Greece could bounce back. This article is arguing that the damage was worse than anticipated, a lot worse.

Many public sector jobs have no private analogue (so people fired from the bureaucracy would be relatively unskilled in the private sector, i.e. likely to become unemployed), and cuts to welfare programs reduce the income of the very people who are most likely to spend all their income, i.e. poor people, with knock-on effects in the rest of the economy. Are you seriously suggesting that this effect could not only have been avoided, but the cuts could have been even deeper?
What you do is spam, by definition. If you're not a mind reader, you have no way of knowing what people want or will value by looking at their email addresses. If you are a mind reader OTOH, then please drop me a call at +36 20 ... oh, wait you already know it. :)
Austerity in europe is essentially the only politically viable option at the moment. On one side you have Germany and a bunch of nations who refuse point blank to essentially write a blank check for the nations who need it, on the other you've got public opinion which is in no way ready to take the quantum leap of political integration necessary to make fiscal transfers meaningfully possible within the eurozone.

So the default action is austerity, the IMF signed off on it because they feared that the euro's breakup would be catastrophically worse than almost any amount of austerity in europe.
Hate to be that guy, but I'm guessing black people don't use facebook?
That's a hypothesis, but it seems unlikely since there are four other European economies facing identical problems - Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland. Spain in particular was a very reasonably managed economy before the crash, running surpluses and growing. So, your hypothesis would require that you attribute the problem in each of these economies to separate causes, which is probably wrong.

This is not to say that there wasn't gross economic mismanagement on the part of the Greek government, but focusing on that distracts from the real solution.

UPDATE: I'm in complete agreement with everyone pointing out that the problems aren't identical. Perhaps the question is whether, if you were to summarize the causes Euro crisis in broad terms, you ought to mention Greece's economic mismanagement first or the overall crash of the financial markets as the more important factor. My assertion is the latter, mostly echoing Stglitz's analysis here:

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdP-Fab8JX8

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ezn8Sgzxd8