skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like you're suggesting that America should more often earn more than it spends. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Again I'm not a student of economics, but the fact that America in the 80 years since has become the most powerful economy in the world's history, while only being in the black 8 times, suggests to me that earning more than you spend isn't really as important as many think. Rather, it's the flow of money in and out of the economy and other factors that really matter.

That's why my original comment is about: Assuming that a nation is like a household--i.e., that at some point it obviously should earn more than it spends, because that's how a household operates--leads to conclusions that aren't always supported by history.

Weimar Germany's situation partly mirrors the one today. To deal with hyperinflation and a collapsing economy, in '31 Chancellor Brüning cut spending by 30%. It eventually led to a budget surplus but at the cost of 30% unemployment. Those events helped set the stage for what followed in WW2. Obviously the comparison is tangential, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/nov/24/debt-crisis-ger...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Re...
Start-up: Development of the Decentralised Currency Model
"Having followed the history of Bitcoins and the development of cloud and grid computing as a commercial tool through IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), I begin to wonder about whether the model of a digital currency cannot be improved to give it mass market appeal in the following way: given the success of such distributed computing projects as Folding@Home and Eintsein@Home and the voracious appetite of an increasingly large industrial and commercial sector for large amounts of computing power, does Hacker News believe that a model in which commercial users pay an IaaS provider for the use of processing runtime on a distributed network of private physical PCs, the owners of which are reimbursed with a currency "minted" by the completion of commercially-generated work units and underwritten (at least initially) by a proportion of the fees paid to the middleman company, is a workable one?

I am not a computing professional, and as such have only a mish-mash of self-taught knowledge of programming and the hardware of distributed systems, but accepting that issues such as security and latency would have to be addressed, are there any glaring faults that people can see in the theory and, more importantly, would you sell your processing time, idle or otherwise, in such a model?"
Urban Myth.

Santa already had a red coat with white trimming - at some unspecified point in the past he did have a green coat.

Coke took an already-popular meme with no trademark and co-opted it for their own marketing, popularising it even further. The expansion of the Coke-themed Santa led to the belief that they invented it.

Something to absorb for those who are trying to work out how to market things.

I know all this because up until 10 days ago I also thought that Coke invented Santa, until I realised I should fact-check that, and found out I was wrong.
HTML5 Game Development course starts tomorrow
No doubt that Austrian's avoided some of the neoclassical blind spots that caused many economists to miss the crisis, but then again Austrian's are always predicting crises and they certainly offer no crystal ball--see Peter Schiff's hilarious prediction of soaring inflation every year since 2009.

Schiff's misfire is especially relevant to this discussion, because it demonstrates the Austrian school's grossly flawed understanding of public finance and our monetary system (despite having valuable things to say at times).
Two reasons: 1) Iceland has its own currency, so it has a lot more discretion over its monetary policy. 2) If Greece defaults, investors would assume that Spain, Portugal, etc. will also default. Hence their borrowing costs will almost certainly skyrocket, forcing them to default. This would probably cause bank failures. Being part of the Euro magnifies the contagion immensely. The Economist has had a few articles about default and they've recommended it, but managing the process so that it doesn't cascade is tricky.
>So what would a negative temperature imply? That increasing energy leads to decreasing entropy.

This is not my field, but the first thing I thought about when I saw "negative temperature" is what it does to the equation for Carnot efficiency. Does this mean we can now theoretically have a heat engine which is more than 100% efficient? That seems... breaks the laws of physics-y, so I assume it's wrong. But can someone explain why?
I'm sure they wouldn't mind - the timing would obviously be dependent upon business but that isn't a consideration for the smokers I work with, they just leave their colleagues to take up the slack.
The Inventory List of Best Movies of 2012 (on DVD)
What are the top 10 movies and must-have DVDs in 2012? How to back up the best 2012/2013 movie DVDs in your collection? How to copy DVD The Dark Knight Rises, The Avengers, Argo and Skyfall?
Is Udacity making money?
Why we shouldn't set our expectations too high for the Kickstarter funded Ouya.
Looks great!

One note - I happened to have my screen quite narrow when I opened it and as the menu-bar wrapped around it obscured the "Import Chapter from Url" button. The introductory guide pointed to where it thought the button should be but it was just highlighting a corner of the "Feedback and Support" button.
If I'm reading you correctly, Quebec wouldn't apply, because Quebec is in Canada, not the United States.
Piracy RingLeader gets 60 Months while Irish SOPA Tries To Shut Down 260 sites
The original commenter was using off-the-shelf A/B testing software, so the odds of it doing anything other than a simple t-test are virtually zero. Not sure that the frequentist vs. Bayesean debate is the most relevant thing for him right now.

I felt it best to leave out nuance that didn't help him understand why his software was showing a statistically significant outcome for an A/A test.
It's not related to income. Moderate consumption of alcohol reduces the risk of heart disease.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage#Longevity
> Part of my problem with the statistics you link ...

You raise an interesting question, to which I don't have a conclusive immediate response. I'll have to dig deeper to really know. The numbers on the US do seem out of line with well-known facts. However, here's another ~30% estimate from Eurostat (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....). Given the conflicting reports, I can only say that it's theoretically possible that Heritage is right and OECD/Worldbank/Eurostat are jointly wrong. If I had to weigh Heritage's ideology and their likely expertise on European economic statistics, as compared to lined-up answers from OECD/WorldBank/Eurostat I know where I'd bet. Still, the 9% reported for the US does seem troubling. I have a research project for the evening.

As for the scale of tax evasion and whether it could plug the hole: it's really, really hard to have an objective opinion here. My inner Greek is saying of course SDOE claims that tax evasion is the main problem. I can't prove that they're wrong, and I don't want to pollute the discussion with personal anecdotes. I'll only add that the SDOE claims don't link to any examinable research.

Thank you for an interesting counterpoint :)

[Edit: the Eurostat data shows Greece parallel to Spain but way behind France... so at this point I'm going to tentatively retract the comparison to France pending further research, but I think I am still persuaded that Greece has a tax base that commands a significant-enough fraction of GDP for them to manage responsibly]
I agree that it's good that the vulnerability has a transparent framework level fix, and I myself would rather see 2-3 more framework level bugs than a whole new bug class like mass assignment. Bug classes are usually worse than bugs.

But that is not what people mean when they say this isn't a severe bug. They mean, "I read some article where some guy said you needed the right HMAC key on a cookie to exploit the bug", and I think that article is wrong, and thus the assertion about severity is wrong.

It is a severe bug with an easy fix. Unfortunately I think there are some other bugs orbiting around it that don't yet have fixes.
802.11ac: what you need to know
Agreed, we actually would love to hire more females at my last job, but there are just not enough qualified women in tech. Most candidates are white young guys.

I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average.
Ex-felon entrepreneur works to provide Internet access for inmates
As far as features go, diminishing returns at this point.
Zimbabwe's war ended in the 70's. Horrific mismanagement by Mugabe and his cronies is the biggest culprit of the hyper-inflation now affecting the country.
Oh, I'm not saying that default isn't an option, it might even be the best option. But the idea that it's a good or even "ok" option is a faulty one. The game right now is finding the best bad option to work with.
Makes Groupon look good.
Yeah, if I look away hard enough racism and sexism will just magically disappear!

You people make me despair. It’s always the same shit.
Polaroid Fotobar
At the core I will be building an API that hooks straight into an IMAP server. So instead of making an IMAP call from your application you make a much faster API call.

I always thought that Sendgrid was a transactional email service, not so much a business oriented and more full featured email server.

This would make building new applications that use email as a feature much faster to build because you only have one endpoint to hit.
Why not WebGL? I can't imagine you can do all that much with Canvas 2D.
> whereas people only write for utility.

> When people write, they do it because they have to achieve some
> end.

I write stories for fun. There is no obligation to do so. Anecdotally,
I'm not alone in this as several of my friends do the same. The only
utility we ever get is that occasionally we turn these stories into
games for each other or backgrounds for characters. So again, no
obligation since a game ceases being a game when you _must_ do it, and none of us are obliged to run or play in them.

In that context, I've found that some writing instruments simply feel better. The Pentel Sharp mechanical pencils are particular nice -- for me -- vs other pencils, like the cheap Bic mechanicals. Same for pens, there are some 5-10$ pens that write so smoothly it's like they're gliding along the page versus many ballpoints that seem to drag along. Having a pleasant writing experience with good paper and pen leads to more nights or lunches spent just writing to write.
I am presuming that the moat being in this case the high locked in prices paid for solar power at the peak of the 'we must create renewable energy' frenzy.

It is unlikely that new solar plants would be able to get the same types of long-term power supply contracts that an existing plant might have got 5 years ago. At the residential level, most solar FIT have been slashed as government programs ran out of money and public enthusiasm waned as the non-participants bills went up.

But yes, a solar power plant is a utility, and if it has locked in contracts (I admit I have no idea if it does) it would be a good buy, if nothing else but for the inflation hedging as power always follows inflation but many other revenue streams do not.
Agreed, but it would miss the meaning the word has for 99% of people.
Android really needs Adblock. It is madness.
The amount of local connections that each person has in this situation is amazing. But... where are the connections to the victim? Where is her "aunt who works at the District Attorney's office"?

How can you get anything resembling a fair investigation and trial in a case like this? It seems impossible.
The comparison between states of a country and countries in europe is in no way as straight forward. The marcoeconomics is way more complicated when you're talking about highly varied countries, each with their own governments.

Besides the eurozone is already trying to adopt a central bank style system:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/business/global/eu-leaders...
I've been using Rackspace hosted email (actually was webmail.us before being bought) with my own domain name for over 8 years and my experience has been nothing but excellent. It's $2/month/mailbox now, but unfortunately they now have a $10/month account minimum, so not a good option if you just need one mailbox.

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/...
The primary dealer banks will always be a ready funding agent for the US government--why wouldn't they be? Treasuries offer a risk free place for excess reserves to earn interest. It's literally free money.

It's instructive to remember that we match our deficit spending with debt issuance by legal fiat and not for any real operational reason. We could just as well deficit spend freely with no debt issuance (and no, it would not be more inflationary.

Of course, treasuries are a risk free savings vehicle for the private sector and world at large, and they play an important role in managing the payments system (though not one that couldn't be replace), so I'm not suggesting that we stop issuing debt. But it's important to understand how the system works so we can stop with the silly notion that we are just scraping by on the good graces of Treasury buyers.
I see you're point about America's economy being the most powerful, but isn't that perhaps a bit like a marathon runner who sprints full speed the first mile and says "Whoa! Look at how much I'm ahead of everyone else!".

You may be right, but it seems there is more than just our current situation to consider. There are long-term ramifications of that debt. At some point, we can't just keep borrowing. It might be working for us today, but like the sprinting marathon runner, eventually it will catch up to us.
playigl.com seems to be down?
Let's imagine the outrage if they used a hunky Cosmo centre-fold "Nude Fireman" in their ads...

<crickets/>

...feminists, cry me a river
In New Zealand and (from news, not personal observation) Australia, it's rugby league that usually has this sort of disgusting behavior. Other sports have these issues, but rugby league, even at a very high level, does a pathetic job at managing its young, so called stars, behaviour.
It seems to me plausible but not obvious or certain that the explanation could be found in high schools.
I've poked around with Three.js, for now I'm more interested in making 2d web based games.
10 Best Infographics of 2012
Just tried it again and it still 'works' for me.
Android Jelly Bean passes 10% adoption - The Next Web
I read that wrong, a month from tomorrow
I would think that part of the organizer's response is due to the use of 'inexcusable' in what looks like the initial contact. If a stranger contacted me and used that word in reference to my actions, I would certainly immediately be on the defensive. This could have definitely led to the future lack of communication.
Toosell blog | To Choose a Great New Year’s Party Theme
Ok, but what's your point and how does it relate to the article?

Your original post points to smugness, a lax approach to security and incorrect statements -- none of which I witness or interpreted from this blog post.

In fact I'd argue this blog post actually refutes all of the points you are making. It's factual, detailed, to the point and it doesn't make light of the issue at all.
>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.

Additionally, a 3rd option worth consideration: letting individual countries default.
Have you never met someone who doodles and scribbles absently while bored? It's incredibly fun.
Ask HN: What service for contact forms?
I'm looking to add a contact form to a client's site and was hoping someone could recommend any good services or plugins?

I'm aware I could add a quick PHP mail, Python SMTP, or Ruby Pony snippet, but I wanted to check in with HN for alternatives. Currently, their site is static HTML on Apache, so solutions in any language are welcome. Thanks!
tptacek wrote No, he trolls, and you fall for it. You could help clean up the thread by deleting your comment, and then I'll delete this one.

I don't mind if you disagree with what I believe and what I express, but I do ask that you please argue against my points, rather than attacking me personally. It's not constructive to label people here as "trolls" just because you have a differing opinion or point of view.
I think your missing a huge opportunity. Help someone grow up in the way you didn't get to. Minimise and prevent the bad things that happened to you from happening to them. Do it the best way you can. If this is the only reason you're not having children, it seems a shame as your experiences can be used to better others lives.

Edit: argh, sorry, this was a reply to damn, who's comment is below and had me feeling rather depressed!
What Peter has actually discovered is that the pen market in the US is severely lacking compared to markets like Asia. No major US pen manufacturer is willing to step up and expand their offerings in office supply stores to match what they offer in Japan, despite the fact they are all subsidiaries of Japanese companies. Pilot, Uni-ball, Pentel, Zebra are all based in Japan and offer much superior products across the Pacific.

This is why 95% of my pen and paper shopping is done online with vendors that import products from around the world. Going to Staples or Office Depot is like watching Groundhog Day. There is zero innovation, just the same old office supply cabinet stuffers that we have been stuck with for years.
The Actively Managed Life
No, Greece could have defaulted completely on its bonds - which were held by the German banks.

Then Greece would be OK, and the German banks about to fall like dominoes. Then the Germans might have become more reasonable about a bailout.

After all, they would really be bailing out not the Greek people, but German banks that shouldn't have bought bonds from crooked Greek politicians and Goldman Sachs.

I don't see how any of that is the Greek people's fault, and in the mythical "free market" said German banks would have been allowed to go bust years ago.
This is so much fun :)

http://translate.google.com/#en/hi/Bill%20Gates%20went%20to%...
yeah well, tell you what. 70% of what i saw since coming to the us are enterprise .net applications(yeah, i'm not in silicon valley or nyc). the other 20% were dated oracle applications.

The security practices i saw are nothing short of ridiculous. If you'd take all the rails vulnerabilities and put them in a pot, and compare them to the holes i've seen in the little time i looked at them it's like comparing a secure vault to swiss cheese.

granted, saying x is secure, because y is inherently insecure is not a valid argument, but i've seen people first hand use these exaggerated advisories to justify that their bug ridden insecure enterprise stack is more justifiable for the enterprise. these people did not know pbkdf2, bcrypt, and even the sql injection whitepaper by microsoft(which btw is a joke).

wanna write secure code? NEVER assume someone else is going to secure it to you. fact is, good advisories and quick reaction to those are not a weakness but a strength.

You want to know the state of encryption in the enterprise world? Get a recent pastebin hack dump. Databases with passwords in plaintext, passwords in md5.

as for your sites basically collapsed? yes they did, it got popular during ruby 1.8.5 ffs. what the hell do you expect? it's slow? well, that's why theres lot's of custom c around. but anyway, since then many many things changed.

Java maintainable? In which world do you live? 8 different layers of OO abstractions 20 levels of dot notation, in which world is that maintainable? Notice how people move to groovy, scala, and other things, not plain java? ever wondered why?

You want highly reliable systems, your answer is not going to be java. Try erlang, but that one is GENUINELY slow.

Oh wait, did I even mention jruby? There you go, all the Java you want, kinda.
Variations of this idea have been discussed since the commercial spinouts of distributed.net back in the 1990s. One problem is that there are almost no commercial workloads that can run on your PC's idle time, mostly due to bandwidth or security constraints. Also, there are some aspects of behavioral economics such as the "crowding out" effect which make me think that some successful non-profit projects like whatever@home cannot be recreated commercially. In addition, creating a Bitcoin-like currency that is based on proof of real work is a very difficult unsolved problem.
I've found this to be the mother of all soccer sites

http://www.bari91.com/
72% of the Time, It's Random Every Time
It sounds great. But when fiscal stimulus plays such a large and persistent role, and you're clearly nearing the end of the road for more borrowing / more stimulus, the expectation of stimulus withdrawal starts to play an ever larger role in forecast expectations. E.g. at some point businesses stop thinking about additional demand today and the demand shrinkage in the future. They start develering and stop taking chances. And the more the government counters with short-term stimulus, the more expectations anticipates the end of stimulus in the mid-term.

And, "constant growth" depends on a structurally sound economy. Well, if the economy has been shaped to meet demand from a necessarily contracting customer -- the government -- its structure gets distorted. Add in the distortions from crazy federal credit policy (Fannie / Freddie). Now we have an economy that must reallocate productive resources to meet real demand -- but no one has a clue where that demand actually will be because we're so distant from the environment supporting it.

tldr; 40 years of government stimulus, in various dimensions, has fundamentally detoriated the economy's ability to deliver "constant positive growth." We've gone past the point where we can outgrow the debt growth needed to fuel this government stimulus growth model.
>Not all code is created equal. That 30% that needs to be rewritten for each device could be difficult to tune for each platform. Native widgets in iOS do not work the same as native widgets in Andoid. Unless there is some magical abstraction layer (which doesn't appear to exist), you're potentially rewriting the most difficult code for each platform.

Again, far better than writing ALL the code for each platform.

And in a lot of cases the GUI code is not the "most difficult", it's just the one that cannot be easily written once for all platforms (and still look native).

For example, if you make a music application, the sound engine, FFT, filters etc would be the difficult part (but it can be written just once) and the GUI layer is quite easy compared.
There is no joke because I was not including all of the time spent on 20% time as a gain in productivity. Read where I wrote that they could see an increase in productivity of up to 20%. I'm not quoting exact numbers because drumroll managers hardly ever think of hard numbers. Its all (gu)es(s)timates.
So it's just serendipitous that this isn't the obvious and massive vulnerability it initially seemed to be.
http://wufoo.com
Sort worksheet data using Saaspose.Cells REST API
> I don't think it's industry's fault that women choose easier majors and not Computer Science on average.

Easier majors like mathematics, physics, biology, the other "real sciences", medicine, etc? Those fields apparently don't have quite the same gender imbalance that computer science does.

I don't think it's that useful it is to be looking for someone to place blame on, but I doubt the reason there are fewer women than men in tech is because they are choosing easier majors than computer science.