skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Replaced with a short link. Thanks.

Regarding gas prices, Bush's wars drove up the price of oil. And then just when our adventures in Iraq finally came to an end, the money printing began in earnest. Obama hasn't helped by keeping Keystone XL in political limbo, pushing offshore drilling outside the US, generally assaulting the energy sector with regulation, and setting fire to several more countries in the Middle East (Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, et alia).

If I interpret you correctly, you state that prices would have fallen if the Fed had sat around and done nothing. I believe we may simply disagree on the desirability of this: some may prize debtors, but I value savers. And I thus generally think of falling prices for household goods (the dreaded deflation!) as a good thing. However, the Fed looks at one of its primary duties as propping up the prices of mortgages. The ostensible purpose is to protect "underwater homeowners" who spent beyond their means. The actual purpose is to take toxic waste off the balance sheets of banks and to put this hot potato in the laps of dollar holders (not just taxpayers, but all dollar holders, including the Chinese).

Anyway, we can talk all we want about these macroscopic phenomena, but ultimately what it boils down to is that people want the Fed to "help the poor" and not simply stand there. And the optics look like they are helping the poor by diluting the dollar and thereby inflating away debts (i.e. the inflation which "doesn't exist" will soon be called a feature and indeed set as a goal by the likes of Krugman).

However, the Fed is also inflating away earning power, and the banks are the first recipients of these inflated dollars, thereby profiting the most from said inflation. The result is a policy that actually hurts the poor far more than simple inaction and rewards the very richest - not entrepreneurs or technologists but the banks that receive direct deposits from the Fed for its "purchases" of mortgage-backed securities (meaning $1 purchases of things worth $.01, or $0).

Bitcoin is a strike against the Fed and the banks by the Valley, perhaps a critical blow. It is very surprising to me that pg (or anyone) could think that USG could possibly have released something like Bitcoin, as it strikes at the very core of the US government's power: the ability to print money.
Tell me more how an inflationary currency would appeal more to the masses. You're being delusional - it appeals to Keynesian economists.
I was listening to a talk show on public radio a few months ago. The man being interviewed said it would be a great idea to build a defense against alien attack as a way to stimulate the economy. I laughed aloud and wondered what sort of crackpot they'd invited onto the show. When they returned from commercial the host announced "we're back with Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman" ...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/21/paul-krugman-alien-...
Could this be where pleasant political theory meets cold hard reality?
I suspect you may not know the way tenure works, especially at a public institution.
Starting a new project - A developer's feel.
While Bitcoin is certainly traceable, it is being used for shady dealings (silk road). His point about it being a way to pay for illegal goods online was correct. This adds little to his overall argument however.
During 1999-2005 I was a news junkie. I was constantly scanning popular news sites.

In 2005 I attended the first Startup School, which is incidental but sticks in my brain of course. I took my lunch break that day and went to the Harvard Book Store. I browsed around and saw a book on positive psychology that looked interesting.

I devoured that book. One of the biggest changes I took from that book was to avoid most of the news. It was for all the reasons mentioned in this article.

I've been pretty good at sticking to this. Not perfect of course. There obviously needs to be a balance. But removing the tie to the news has made me a lot more creative and optimistic about the opportunities in my life.

We should all spend more time creating than reading about other people creating and destroying.
It appeals to those that borrow money because it means their debt is being eroded through inflation.
Krugman: "I guess you could make that case if the money we actually have were misbehaving. But it isn’t."

Translation: "Our fiat currency hasn't failed this time... yet. Ipso facto, it will never fail. Anyway, it's not worthwhile to try to forsee future problems until they actually happen."

I'm not a fan of CNBC, but every once in a while they say something decent.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48349503
“'Every single fiat currency in history has collapsed, this time will be no different.'”

I'm not predicting the demise of any major currency. However, I can't say I don't have my concerns about current practices, and history does not bode well.
Not sure I buy the most persuasive argument,

bitcoins are the ultimate fiat currency, with a value conjured out of thin air, paper currencies have value because they’re backed by the power of the state

Dollars and yuan are fiat currency. What difference does it make that bitcoin holders aren't back by a state? Is anything going to change if countries convert their reserves to bitcoin? How many bitcoins does the US own?

This seems like an argument that will evaporate given enough time.
Thank you. That's fair, but I think a better metric of the success of Go - which is how this train of thought started - would be how much new stuff is being started with it, for just the reason you stated. It'd be nutty to rewrite a bunch of working code.
The fundamental fallacy in this article is to assume that risk management and avoidance of risk is unproductive, unhealthy and inherently worthless.

But it's not. The financial markets direct energy towards new ideas, old enterprises and value storage. To do that, they have to allocate investment and risk.

Good risk management (or at least moderately well done) generates the best growth for the least risk. Bad risk management can be seen in several countries' stagnating GDP curves.

Nature does this too, by the way. Imagine an ant colony: It grows exponentially, because the more ants are in that colony, the more food they bring in and the more larvae can be raised. But the super organism has to make decisions, with surprisingly intelligent mechanisms, how many of the current ants to risk for food foraging, how many to hold in reserve, how many larvae to raise etc. If they do it right, they grow exponentially, but if they for example risk half of their workers on a single day and loose them to a rain fall or predator, they falter.
The first dot-com crash and the housing crash were both painfully obvious, but things went on swimmingly in spite of the obvious foolishness of it all long enough for people to forget their skepticism and buy in. Then, there weren't anymore people to buy in and both markets crashed.

It's going to happen with the dollar too. Everything is going to keep going fairly OK, even though we all know it shouldn't, until the day it doesn't.

Just because it hasn't crashed yet doesn't mean it isn't capable of or likely to do so.
Anyone know what the deal is with Aceituna Cafe? Parked outside there are always Mazaradis, Porches and other expensiveness cars, and they are differenct almost every day.
Yeah, I was surprised to see there were buyers for such awful prices, though who knows how many are fronts for scams.
Extortion is a crime and tortious interference with business is tortious interference with a business. I don't think either of those would magically vanish upon the abolition of spectrum regulations.

One thing that bugs me about pro and contra libertarian debates is that both sides do something similar: imagine a kind of Year Zero world in which somehow all laws have been shipped to /dev/null. It's a dumb debate to have. Angels waltzing with strawmen on the head of a pin.
In the beginning focusing on the product instead of the name seems like a better investment of the time. I feel that sometimes it is just epiphany...you wait for it to come to you.

But until then anything that is easy to spell and easy to pronounce and possible self-explanatory is good enough as long as the domain does not cost an arm and leg.

I sometimes consult google translate to find quirky words in other languages which relate to the meaning in the name I am looking for.
The experienced outsourced QA team in India guarantees your code works properly.
Another way to put it.
AWS will require $50 Billion in Investments By 2020.
Profit potential uncertain.
Shareholders not worried.
Am I the only one amused by the Winklevoss twins declaration of "faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error"?

1. You don't need faith in math. That's the point.

2. Just because it's based on math doesn't mean it can't all come crashing down.

3. If you think you can invest money in math, please contact me privately about some exciting differential equations you may be interested in.
Who cares whose fault this is? It has to end now. If you feel overwhelmed but still want to do something, the least you can do is to support Amnesty International.
I don't think there is anything wrong with rent-seeking in buddhism. Ask Steve Jobs.

There is spiritual value in "rent-seeking" beyond greed. It's just not that obvious in our "rich is evil" kind of culture.
This section of the Wikipedia article does an excellent job of explaining President Obama's actions to close the detention camp, and how Congress interfered. They've made it impossible for the President to lawfully transfer the detainees to any US state or foreign country. There is realistically no way for the President to release them without being able to transfer them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guant%C3%A1namo_Bay_detention_...
The Constitution is supposed to protect the rights of Americans from the tyranny of "the people."

Alas.
Natural monopolies are, by definition, not created by legislation or regulation. They emerge from the features of a market.
I vote for PPCoin - the eco-friendly coin that promises to get rid with the $4.5 million per month power consumption.
Targeting specific emissions could significantly slow sea-level rise
I'm one of the afflicted; always looking for more information. One other thing I've noticed in myself after beginning to do a little mediation is a pervading and constant sense of "I should be"...

* I should be building my own business

* I should be better at this

* I should be earning more

* I should be living a 4 hour workweek

I've realised that these are caustic feelings that cause a low level pervasive feeling of stress, and worse distort the lens that I observe myself through.

I'm far from unsuccessful: I'm a self taught programmer and I'm good at what I do. Financially I'm up near the top in terms of earnings, despite only programming professionally for 5 years or so. Partly I'm successful due to that thirst for knowledge I guess.

So it's a difficult balance between healthy inquisitiveness and a desire to expose oneself to new ideas for their own sake, and getting stuck in a negative consumption/inhalation loop with no corresponding fulfilment/exhalation phase.
the sovereign nations have gold...
For example: http://www.webcitation.org/5jPWyaCDq

In a major rebuke to President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States and denied the administration the millions it sought to close the prison. The 90-6 Senate vote—paired with similar House action last week—was a clear sign to Obama that he faces a tough fight getting the Democratic-controlled Congress to agree with his plans to shut down the detention center and move the 240 detainees.

That's from 2009, but it's been an ongoing problem with defense funding bills since then.
App-Market Fit: If You Aren’t On My Homescreen, Your App Is Probably a Tombstone
New Leak Found at Fukushima Nuclear Plant
I suspect that you have no idea what you are talking about and like many others on the internet, like to marginalize good people with your 20/20 hindsight.

What does that even mean? What would Lincoln gain by splitting the country in half? Do you even bother thinking about points before you make them?
It isn't a meritocracy, but at least it is more meritocratic than many systems that have preceded it.
I was speaking with a friend just yesterday about how useful and easy it would be (if you're the CIA/NSA) to run, say, the VPN "Private Internet Access".

In that conversation I came to similar speculations as pg's about Bitcoin (I mean, the first client was written for Windows, which straight away seems decidedly not-hacker-y).

As for motivation: it's not as though this would be the first time that a spy agency found sources of funds extra-congressionally (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair). Perhaps, alternatively, they thought it was worth experimenting with, say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market .

Another explanation would be that someone at a gov't agency figured out that a crypto-currency was likely to come into existence at one point or another, and if/when one did, it would be very useful/necessary to buy a lot of it/get involved. If the currency was designed by someone else/a large open source community, it might (or might not) have flaws in it that could render the currency fundamentally unstable and make questionable any involvement of the agency in the currency (e.g., they'd have to choose which cryto-currencies to invest in, they might find it difficult to work with the authors to correct any systemic flaws, they'd probably have to buy a lot of the currency rather late in the game). Another reason is that, if the agency in question designed the currency itself, it would have a large head-start on putting together the hardware that could be used to disrupt it/eliminate it, if need be (c.f. US military control of GPS). Who knows, perhaps the RAND Corporation put out a report forecasting the introduction of crypto-currencies and showing that the organization/state that first introduced it would gain a significant strategic win.

If I were an administrator of the NSA/CIA/whatever, I can imagine being won over by arguments that a crypto-currency was inevitable, and that my agency/country would have a major advantage (financially and strategically) if it designed said currency itself rather than letting someone else do it.
California repoens trade office in Shanghai after 10-year closure
Seems like the article is true for "bad" news -- e.g. Daily newspapers, cable news, and nightly news (which I have gone without for over ten years). Most of the criticisms of news in the article do not apply to the news sources I consume, although perhaps they shouldn't be called news so as to avoid confusion.

My favorite is the New Yorker, which frequently breaks major stories despite being (or because it is) a weekly with long lead times. Similarly, The Daily Show usually does a better job of providing context than "serious" news broadcasts.
The President has the power and the obligation to publicly speak against this on the world stage.
Your talk experience works as well with football, basketball, cinema, HN, weather... Sharing a common interest with someone make talk a lot more interresting.
Perhaps the money shot for the article:

In short, we are asked to worry about something that has
never happened for reasons still to be coherently
explained. “Housing bubble” worrywarts have long been
hopelessly confused. It would have been financially
foolhardy to listen to them in 2002. It still is.

:D
Tenure doesn't work this way. The whole idea about tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue things that are controversial to the public - i.e., you can research controversial things without being tossed out by the angry mob. You can afford to go full-bore on your research rather than play politics and PR with the public.

Tossing one tenured professor out is a simple thing. After all like you said, it's not written down in the constitution.

The problem with removing tenure is that it destroys trust in the tenure system. If one professor is stripped of tenure for being controversial, then no one is safe. For this reason the only way to lose tenure is to do something illegal, since that's really the only line you can draw that doesn't move very much.

Tenure is an all or nothing deal. The entire effect of protecting your faculty is completely nullified as soon as you violate your principle for one guy. The floodgates open and suddenly every prof that's doing something controversial becomes a target.
I doubt GitHub reaches at all 1% of the code developed in all companies in the world.
Who's who, for those of you just joining in:

- Linus is the original author of Git, and he wrote it in April 2005. He doesn't contribute anymore, and is rarely seen on the Git mailing list these days (except when something like this happens). In number of patches, he's #4, after Junio, Jeff, and Shawn.

- Junio is the maintainer of the Git project. He took over maintainership of Git a few months after it was originally built, in July 2005.

- Jonathan is a very big contributor at #6. He doesn't focus on any one part of the codebase, and contributes to a wide spectrum.

- Jens primarily contributes to submodule.c/ git-submodule.sh, the current submodule implementation. Along with Heiko, he's one of the authorities on the current submodule system.

- Ram is a small contributor. He started out in Jan 2010 with two GSoC projects: one in 2010, and another in 2011 (neither were in submodules).
I agree with you in that I value savings more than debt (hate the current savings rates) and that the Fed does nothing to help the poor (but that's not their job or incentive to do so and I never thought of it that way ever). The Fed had to do what it did because the banks would have failed otherwise. And if the literally too big-to-fail (and prosecute and everything else) banks failed, then the recession would have been far worst than the Great Depression.

However, a lot of people who still held on to their mortgages do depend on the value of homeprices to stay up, (and the value of a college degree while we're at it since student loans recently overtook creditcard debt).

We're getting way off topic here though. I'll just close out with I think the best solutions are to:
1) Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act and don't allow Investment banks to gamble with consumer money
2) Once (1) is actually in place, then the next time a banking crisis comes around, let all the Investment banks fail and only prop up the ones that actually provide deposits, loans and savings. That will right a terrible wrong done 5 years ago.
3) I came up with this recently after reading Liar's Poker and a followup interview a few years ago of Micheal Lewis and John Merriwether: make all banks private (non-public) corporations again. The only bank that is not fully public is Goldman Sachs (yes, they went public in the 90s, but there are still partners who essentially control it) and is probably part of the reason they do better than everyone else.
The Kinesis Advantage is pretty good for coding, but it will take about two weeks to a month for you to get used to it.

Take a look at the key layout and imagine yourself using it and see if it makes sense for you.
> not that McCain would have ever gotten it instead!

How are you so sure of that? McCain's neither a saint nor a philosopher-king: his personal narcissism seems to rival Obama's, and he often seems to be successfully flattered and managed by those around him. But he erratically takes stands on principle, and he also has personal experience of both torture and prolonged imprisonment. And in fact he took an anti-torture position which, while it wasn't absolute, was well out ahead of other Congressmen and presidential candidates and was hardly calculated to win votes.

There's also the fact that whatever about McCain's personal inclinations, he or any other Republican president would have been under much sharper pressure from others on the issue. The people and institutions who were shouting so much about detention and torture and drone strikes under Bush and then became silent or muted under Obama (or indeed rushed to bestow on him a Nobel Peace Prize) would have continued shouting under McCain.
> Zenocoin argument stands. If you have access to the full bitcoin chain, can you write a mathematical proof that allows one account to transfer anonymously to another account, without using a "tumbler" mixed account?

Surprisingly, yes: that's exactly the accomplishment of Zerocoin, though it's currently too inefficient to be practical. (It still requires many participants, but the "tumbling" is global and does not require any trusted pool.)
My Lizard Brain is in Overdrive
I think the most important part about this OpEd is the comments appearing here and elsewhere:
Lots of righteous indignation for this poor fellow who claims that he's completely innocent of any charges brought against him and if he could only talk to someone they would understand. He feels the need to kill himself to prove a point, such conviction.

What do they say about a prisoner and his crime? oh yeah: there's no such thing as a guilty prisoner in Jail.
Nikon D7100 vs Nikon D300S: What is the difference?
Personally I don't use any of those frameworks, in my opinion they restrict too much. I'm fine with SASS + Compass or Stylus + Nib plus a grid system, typically The Semantic Grid which has versions for all common pre-processors. Every project is different, I don't think there's a library that you can re-use without looking too similar. I mean, look at most Bootstrap sites, you can tell it's Bootstrap.
> In any case, Google is heavily invested in Go. There's no need to "sell it."

Really?

That is why Go is part of the standard Android SDK/NDK. Oh wait!

That is why Go is part of the NaCL SDK. Oh wait!

That is why I can have first class treatment for all Google APIs with Go. Oh wait!
Howdy Kapura. (A bit of background knowledge: It might not be obvious if you haven't been here for a while, but the guy you're talking to is something of an expert in making systems dependent on cryptography do horrible, horrible things.)

It may be "common knowledge" that the bitcoin protocol is secure, but this is largely because a) most bitcoin users and advocates are not competent to make any determination of security, b) you should probably include an asterix to the claim like "Well, secure if you don't count the successful double-spend attack which necessitated a holy-shit-drop-everything-and-downgrade response by several mining pool operators", and c) acknowledge that one of the main reasons people don't attack the protocol is because Bitcoin exchanges have been coughing up everything one could possibly want, and more, with far less work.

I should probably write a blog post digging into what people mean when they talk about "the Bitcoin protocol", by the way. Bitcoin isn't a protocol like HTTP is a protocol. Bitcoin's entire protocol specification is the Satoshi bitcoin client, which you have to warts-and-all emulate to be accepted by the network, because if you ever disagree with the Satoshi client about the validity of any single transaction in history then you're suddenly building off a blockchain which is incompatible with the one used by all the businesses that one would theoretically want to spend Bitcoins at. It is entirely possible for "the Bitcoin protocol" -- the series of steps by which clients agree on the status of the blockchain -- to be bulletproof while the Satoshi client (i.e. the only instantiation of the protocol that matters) to get busted like a pinata via e.g. a buffer overflow attack. One would hope that when that happens, it does not happen on every computer using bitcoin simultaneously, which strikes me as a very plausible scenario given that the designed intent of bitcoin is to fan attacker-chosen executable instructions to every node on the network.
It's more likely he's apathetic to the issue.