skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In any case, the US cannot default on its debt because it is denominated in US dollars and we can always print more dollars.

There's a name for that solution - it's called a soft default, and it's not a new idea. Clearly there is a limit to this, or politicians wouldn't bother with a budget or taxes at all - they'd just print money as required. It dilutes the value of existing currency and is a dangerous game which is not sustainable. Kingdoms and empires which have devalued their currency (and many have tried) have always paid for it in the end, with interest. It also punishes the poor disproportionately with inflation - which doesn't have to be hyperinflation to be damaging if it is sustained.

So anyone suggesting it should also be suggesting a way to balance the budget and get back to a sane monetary policy. That's not hard though - the US spends a lot on military budgets (much more than any other country in the case of the military), pensions and healthcare. You might argue how to cut and how fast, but there is a lot which could be done if necessary. Printing money is not a solution, it's just a stop-gap to avoid a hard default.
> From their articles, I was not able to identify a specific point that Gladwell has made that is false.

There are many such cases, easy to uncover. As just one example, his remarks about easy versus difficult problem solving relied on a preliminary study that failed replication when applied to a larger experimental group, a fact he omitted from his book.

> I was impressed by his unusual look at the David coming down the valley story in a new light including Goliath being a sufferer of pitiutary defect (hence the weak vision). Is that analysis somehow wrong?

To answer, I have to ask "is fiction wrong?" Can a fictional account about fictional characters ever truly be called "wrong"? Whatever novel conclusion made about the David and Goliath story must confront the fact that it's an anecdote about an anecdote.
DOD has made waterfall illegal
Apple iOS 7 iBeacon Is A New Micro-Location Platform Using Bluetooth LE [video]
Huh?

"His points are usually correct (though obvious to many); in this case his point is that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people."

No. Just no. Did you not read the article? The study demonstrating this "point" was a low-powered study. A more highly powered study failed to reproduce the result. Now, at best you could say that the result only applies to "ambitious people", but that remains to be proved - after the Canadian result, the null hypothesis has to be that making the task superficially more difficult has no impact on people's ability to complete the task. In other words, Gladwell's hypothesis is unproven and unjustified.
It's a market that's developed in response to the fact that nerds are addicted to feeling like they're just a little bit smarter than everyone else.

IMO, this is what appeals to many about HN....the desire to find share-worthy things that will help cement their image as the smart person within their social group. Nothing wrong with it, just an (unscientific) observation.
But what will I do with my hot grits?
I see. Nice feature.
I personally don't like the haters.. and of all tech companies, Sony is probably the only one I won't use because of politics against their brand/management decisions. They've done some cool things, and BluRay was a better format than HD-DVD, but the market was leaning towards HD-DVD when backroom deals killed that. (not to mention rootkits, etc)

Many people feel the same about MS. What I find issue with is that people will completely dislike a solution for the brand alone. I've seen this for years when I've suggested/supported Mono in Linux. .Net is a pretty damned good platform/runtime.

I think it's a perfectly valid choice to not run something because of the company that makes it. Lambasting something for the same reasons, in a non-technical fashion isn't so great.

Many of the haters will poo-poo on anything. In my household I have Android on my phone and tablet, an osx macbook pro for my laptop, a windows desktop, an htpc now running ubuntu/xbmc (was running win7 before). A NAS running FreeNAS (BSD), and a handful of other devices.

I'm not tied to any one platform, and like most people don't care too much about what I run, as long as it works. I develop software for a living, and most of that has run on Windows. I appreciate that there are great, brilliant, and wonderful people at MS. I also recognize that many of it's management decisions have been bad for the larger community. Not to mention the damage being done to some what could be better divisions at MS.
"However, C# uses the convention that capitalized "fields" are actually properties, and lowercase ones are true fields."

If only. In http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/ms229043%28v..., Microsoft advocates:

"The PascalCasing convention, used for all identifiers except parameter names, capitalizes the first character of each word"
I've done a fair bit of interviews with our own asynchronous video interview tool (Interactly), and I always offer people feedback on why I decided not to proceed with them.

Only about 20% of people actually want to hear feedback. One of the challenges of giving feedback is that you want the decision to be final, but if you give points to improve upon then they are inclined to start negotiating with you.

With asynchronous interviews it gave me a very clear record of how they responded, which made it easy for the candidate to also look back at their own input.

One sales manager we interviewed had a significant background, previously having worked at high level positions with large companies.

However, when I saw his interview he was incoherent in his story, made vague statements, made several statements diminishing the challenges of the job without backing those statements up, and most of all his style of presenting himself showed he would be overly aggressive for the intended audience.

I gave him the feedback and instructed him to look at his own video with this in mind, and he really appreciated it.

The thing is, people need detailed feedback to improve. To stay safe on the legal side it would be easy to just give binary responses, but if we're really looking at what would improve the world, it would be actually detailed responses that enable people to improve.
MonoDevelop is far from bad, actually. And cross-platform.
I think "Bitcoin ATM" should feature in the title.
I actually work remotely, but thanks! He is great to work with. Super nice guy, too.
Is this where you came across the concept of "insight porn"? http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/trying-to-see-...

There's an interesting possibility that our brain actually gives us a neurochemical "hit" every time we encounter a particularly juicy piece of insight porn. The reason for this is evolutionary: insights are basically the recognition of deep patterns that explain seemingly unrelated phenomena, which lets us "compress" our knowledge and so increase our understanding of the world. (It's not that our stone age ancestors were developing scientific theories, but they had many complex things in their environment to predict: the weather, animal behaviour, their own social networks, other hunter-gather tribes, etc).

The pleasure gained from studying mathematics, or listening to complicated pieces of music (esp classical, where complex pieces might be based on simple underlying patterns) are good examples. Humour might be a complementary reward circuit, giving us a psychological hit when we discover something that contradicts our worldview.

(I'm aware that the preceding paragraphs was themselves a piece of insight porn :)
I was referring to frameworks for creating modular code in PHP.. not a package manager called "frameworks"
This is a nice and polite email and I can't see anyone getting offended by it. The problem however is if they respond disagreeing with your conclusion.

Say, in your example above, the person responds with "I used D and Brainfuck in my custom-built editor to show that I am interested in new technologies and pick them up really quickly, and that I customize my workflow for maximum productivity. Aren't these great attributes in an early engineer? I had no idea you guys just wanted C to x86 - you should've asked!"

And now you're stuck. Do you respond to this as well, and if so, how long would you keep the chain going? What if the person was actually correct? Would you now go back to your team and reverse the decision?
On the case of useful emails http://five.sentenc.es/ is quite a nice idea, polite and to the point. There is also the shorter version, http://two.sentenc.es/ if you are so inclined !
Internal GPS should be reasonably junkie-proof, no?
I totally agree with the author. However I would argue that for his 6th point, trying IRC before subscribing to the mailing-list is in general a good idea.
Jared Diamond counter-intuitive? I'm with you on the other three but Guns Germs & Steel always struck me as very "D'uh".
First of all, good job.

Are you planning to add selenium support?
Apologies, his tangle was chiropractic not homeopathic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCA_v._Singh

My general point was two-fold:

1) he is an excellent popular science writer. He has a PhD in particle physics, and his books are well researched and well received.

2) we all want him to prosper from writing so he keeps writing :)
Just finished shooting a music video for Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The Channel Islands are not a 'tax haven'[1], though we sometimes get called this by foreign politicians[2]. It is easy to take a cheap shot at a few islands outside your voting district. A much easier idea for a politician to sell, than a plan to balance the budget at home.

[1]http://www.jerseyfinance.je/ceo-blog/it-s-official---jersey-...
[2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-jersey-23902431
Huh?

Roaminng charges are hardly going anywhere. And that would be in July 1st… And countries have opposed the measure.
> The problem with popular science books is that they are written by journalists untrained in science. It should be scientists who write popular works.

Yes, perhaps, but you need to realize something -- scientists who write popular books often pay a very high price. Not always, there are exceptions, but Carl Sagan is a perfect example of someone who did a lot of public good by popularizing science and scientific topics, but it ruined his scientific career.

Most scientists understand this -- to write a popular science book or article may send the signal to other scientists that you don't have anything more serious to write about. As a reward for such important projects as Cosmos, Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, something extraordinary given his actual scientific accomplishments.

For balance, we can look at Leon Lederman ("The God Particle") and Stephen Hawking (several well-received books) who seem not to have suffered unduly for their popularizations of science. But the risk is real.
This. China buy t-bills because they really have no other safer/better options. That they basically get a negative interest rate at that (due to inflation) is just a cost of not having the money burning a whole in their country's economy.
Color Hex - ColorHexa.com
Inflation doesn't punish the poor. It punishes the savers.

Balanced budget/deficit/surplus are tools and not goals. When the business don't/can't spend it is the government job to pick up the slack (deficit). And when business is investing it makes sense for the government to not compete for the same capital and labor with the private sector (balanced/surplus).
Obviously, before emailing anyone, you should first search the web for any manifestos or policy statements that they've written on the subject of communication. Not doing so is terribly rude.
I don't think anyone is arguing that if Microsoft blinked out of existence, no one would be inconvenienced.
What a lot of people ARE saying is that "if not Microsoft, someone else."

If Microsoft never bought the software that eventually turned out to be Office, someone else would have provided a solution. If Microsoft hadn't bought (and resold) QDOS, someone else would have provided an operating system for IBM, and people who make chairs wouldn't have seen a big difference today.
You should be ashamed of yourself (I jest)
This sure is handy. Thanks. :)
Listen to a brain seizure turned into music
sorry to say this, but this is exactly why MG is dangerous for the society. Because people start perpetuating myths and fictions passed to them in entertaining tone as facts. They start narrating them to kids and gradually turn them into common wisdom. To whoever reads this shit as entertainment. Please don't. Go watch a movie, listen to standup, watch porn, whatever else makes you feel less board. Pop science is perhaps even more important than scientific journals and shouldn't be crapped on the way MG does. I just can't fathom why people are such entertainment junkies anyways.
Building Or Licensing Big Data Technology - Video
One of his ideas is that the development of agriculture was "the worst mistake in the history of the human race"[0] contra the popular belief that agriculture improved food yields and freed people up to spend time developing science, technology and art -- and could therefore be considered one of the greatest achievements in the history of the human race.

I'm not saying that his argument is wrong, but it definitely runs against the prevailing wisdom. Similarly "Collapse" (the idea that the success or failure of societies is predictable) and "Guns, Germs and Steel" (the advantages of old-world people over new-world people in the 1500s were due to the influence of geography and climate, not inherent superiorities).

Maybe those things are obvious to you, but I don't think they're obvious to most people.

[0] http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
Actually, you (and the jealous author of the critical article) are comparing apples to oranges. It is a safe assumption that a group of random students at a public Canadian university are not nearly as ambitious as a group of students at an impossibly competitive university such as Princeton. The study does in fact show that adversity often breeds success in ambitious people.

So, the results were as expected. The ambitious group was inspired by the challenge. A group of average public college students were neither inspired nor deterred by it. And I would bet that my house that a group of homeless people would be significantly deterred by it. It is an apples to oranges comparison that in no way disproves Gladwell's hypothesis.
Think the trick to overseas is to get a local pre-paid SIM card, and use that number locally. As pre-paid SIM cards are getting more pervasive around the world, normally this works out as the cheapest option. Naturally, there are some countries where purchasing a pre-paid SIM is near impossible, or costly enough that sticking to roaming with your current provider works out cheaper.
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>> I disagree with this one. It's possible to live too close to work. If the commute is less than 15 minutes or so, or perhaps more to the point, if it isn't far enough to feel like a separate place, I'm less happy. I need the separation.

I totally agree with this. I once lived a 20 minute walk from work and that was great. When I moved closer and as a 2-3 minute walk I really didn't like it. I'm not too sure why, possibly it didn't give my brain time to adjust to the two modes.

The brain 'down time' is quite enjoyable and very important to forming thoughts and plans I think.
Really? I'm kind of amazed by this whole thing - I never thought there would be a desire to purchase bitcoins in real life with physical cash. I always thought of it more as a online thing people would do via exchanges, smart phone apps, etc.

If you don't mind me asking - Where was the machine? Why were you buying bitcoins there vs just using an online exchange?
It's funny, because from his point of view mailing lists are awesome.

But from the point of view of everyone else they're pretty terrible - it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value.

For most open source projects, the correct way has been to find the backchannel - the mailing list is only a source of frustration and bikesheds. You must either contact maintainers personally or find an IRC or other real time method.
Here's an idea: instead of lazily relying on people to come up with clever ways to say things for you, come up with your own ways of viewing the world. People who rely on baseless aphorisms to make themselves seem more interesting belong in the same circle of Hell as those who name-drop. The example that the author uses, "the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty," isn't even useful or palatable.
Exactly. Think how many polite one-liner 'please post this to the mailing list' replies he could have written in the time it took to create this document. But instead, he expects people to waste their own time reading his position piece. Narcissism.
Founding your own startup – The other side of the story
After years of bugs/viruses/bloat and what not, Microsoft finally got the OS right with Windows 7. I personally know many people (including myself) who were/are quite impressed with it. Then it goes ahead and inflicts Windows 8 on the users.

Just when you got something right, after over a decade, and had a chance to build goodwill/positive response from your users, you go ahead and royally screw it up. I won't even go in their predatory/arm-twisting business practices.

The worst thing about Microsoft is that they never seem to learn from their mistakes or, more importantly, care.
I recently started downloading podcasts from BBC Radio 4, They have some really great programmes on science, finance, politics and comedy. I just work my way through those once in a while, much better than music.
Agreed, that's essentially what I was doing in the US, I just got it with a cheap phone too so I could keep my normal blackberry up and running with my UK number.

But stuff like the Vodafone deal within Europe are awesome, as it saves the hassle of needing either two phones or sim swapping.
Bill Nye the Science Guy Show: "Rules"

Objective: Change the world.

Produce a TV show that gets kids and adults excited about science, so that the United States will again be the world leader in technology, innovation, and sound management of the environment.

For example, when our audience is of age, we'd like them to produce the best transportation systems in the world, e.g. cars, electric cars, trains, and aircraft.

Rules of the Road

- The show is entertainment first; curriculum content and presentation of specific facts come later. Ideally, school curricula will follow us.

- All the science we see has to be real science. No fictional “molecular resynthesizer“ machines that perform magic tricks, for example.

- The science being explored provides the drama. For example, there is no time spent looking for someone's stolen lab coat.

- Science Guy is always himself.
He could play another character as the Science Guy playing another character. He wears a lab coat and safety glasses for a reason. If he takes them off, it's for a reason.

- Science Guy's reality is television. He can jump from place to place the way a viewer would expect anyone on television to be able to do. There is no need for something like the “Way-Back" machine or the “Transporter” or the "Door to Anywhere." However, the “monitor in the field" can show us supplementary video, e.g. condensation after the walk-in freezer sequence in the pilot.

- Host interacts with guests. kids, other scientists, and celebrities, as peers: E.g. “Hi, Joey; Hi, Michael; "Hi, Cindy; Hi Hammer." / "Hi, Bill."

- Show takes place as much as possible in the field. The world is the laboratory.
Funny you should mention Erlang, as I think that in its own way, it's treading the lisp/smalltalk path of getting a few things really, really right, and being head and shoulders better for certain kinds of applications. And yet, at the same time, doomed to sooner or later have enough of its goodies ripped off by programming languages that are more mainstream, that will far surpass it in functionality. Go and Scala, for instance, nabbed some of the concurrency stuff, although Go is still missing some of what makes Erlang really distinct.
Maybe, but non-junkies will cover the antenna before they rip the device away... Which will be difficult since the internal steel vault is bolted to wherever the device stands.
OK- I have had terrible terrible experiences in India, where to date I have ZERO(0!) responses from any company on 'NO'. This frustrating includes not only Indian companies but also several 'Great to Work' places(The likes of Amazon and even Google)
This is frustrating and honestly interviewing is a pretty frustrating experience now. Anyone thought how to fix this?
If you are a recruiter, for god fn sake do write a one liner to the candidate expressing your decision.
P.S. This is the case with pretty much most people and Im not entirely an idiot
Vodafone Turkey is also really good. I can use my plan in any country that either have Vodafone or a company they have an agreement with.

And also I can call everyone from Europe with my plans as well. Unlimited land-line calls to nearly every country.
If an island has 0%/10% corporate tax it is considered an offshore tax haven in the minds of the people that pay 15%+, just like sometimes Ireland or Cyprus is considered that way even though their tax is not 0%.
If no one notices your project but it is genuinely interesting, just blog about it until they notice. I posted Asterank Discover on HN and it got 5 points. Then I wrote a blog post about it that made the front page. Go figure.

I think this might be that people tend to prefer reading about stories on products rather than a product landing page ?
Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together
We intuitively know that if the print is hard to read that more people will be successful at solving the problem?
The question was "What is the most innovative company?" Innovation is different than market penetration. And this article seems to aim to fend off a self conscious thought. Nobody thinks that people who work for MS are jerks. That is the author's own thoughts about himself. People just don't respect MS because of the lack of efficiency. Nobody argues about penetration, I am wrting this comment on a computer that runs MS. That does not take away my right to criticze the product.
He was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association for writing in a newspaper column that they promoted "bogus treatments".

Edit: Too late. I'd second the book recommendations though, they're excellent.
While Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for making unstable and insecure consumer software, think about any software you've used made by companies whose primary business was not software and ask yourself if Ford would have likely done a better job in-house.
But only by leaving the image model behind.

There are many Smalltalks without an image actually... GNU-Smalltalk, Smalltalk/X and Amber, for instance. GemStone/S uses a mixture between image and filesystem, so it can't be regarded as a traditional image-based system either. The only Smalltalks that still use an image paradigm (that I know of) are Squeak derivatives (Squeak, Pharo, Cuis) and VisualWorks.

That said, I believe the image is a very valid model, and I prefer working on a Pharo environment than anywhere else. However powerful text editors, IDEs and debuggers may be, you can never reach the same level of integration between tools and system if your tools, your language and your system are not the exact same thing.
Well, according to this great book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell (you might not have heard of him, but all the smart people are reading his stuff), one's first impression of something is sometimes amazingly accurate! So it's really not important that he read the book.