skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Given that the entire point of the Federal Reserve is to promote inflation"

No, that's not what they do. Too much inflation is bad, but you need a little bit. So they seek to maintain a "healthy" amount of inflation. Typically around the world this is something like 2-3%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_targeting
The first time I ran this something went wrong I somehow didn't manage to even boot in to windows but found myself at the command line, with only the DOS floppy disks available.

The true Windows 1.01 experience.
Back in Windows 8. And improved in Windows 8.1.

EMACS, of course, never lost it.
tl;dr Supply limits due to high barriers to entry due to regulatory capture by ISPs.
If you want to play this game, you can go back even further and find that they built on work done by privately funded individuals during the Victorian Era and during the Enlightenment. Go back even further and you'll find that much (but by no means all) of the wealth that funded that was acquired thanks to Feudalism.

I therefore credit feudalism for the creation of the transistor.
Thanks! I thought there was a name for this, I should have done a bit of Googling!
I don't see the similarity.
Very nice to see a blog post with this headline that isn't full of sarcasm or finger-wagging or self praise. It was a good reminder to me that positive messages, simply put, are worth the little time it takes to write them. I need to keep more of my own rants in my drafts folder. :-) Thanks Guido!
Realizing your author platform
There has been a lot of debate about what an author platform is, but everyone generally agrees that its not so easy to develop your own. This site is a place to help authors develop their own platform and to monetize their work.
The Mac is great -- just as I remember it when I was a little kid. Actually, not exactly -- the emulator seems faster than the Mac we had. Also, I tried to get it to crash but wasn't able to.
True -- but then there's nothing stopping the datacenters from having a "warrant canary" either.
Turn your iPhone into a high-power digital microscope for around $10
I'm the "head guy" at the ISP I work for. I'm also the "owner" (single member manager) of two LLCs that I've formed but that are mostly inactive at this point.

Unfortunately, I've been delayed (due to a fairly major motorcycle versus Jeep accident that has me laid up) but I've been considering offering a similar service (as well as Tor relays, including an exit node or two).

For those of you who (might) use such services, what would it take for you to trust a provider? An AUP/ToS stating "we don't log", a so-called "transparency report", a warrant canary, payment via Bitcoin?
Sejje, its because you are use to of using it.

I am left handed and using mouse with my right hand from past 10 years, since i started with a PC.

its same problem with keyboard with 2 hands.
I haven't though about it till now but just realized how proficient I am with my right hand in operating mouse.
Just edited my comment for clarity.
I would invite you to look at gold prices over the last 20 years.

I only wish I could go back in time and tell my 20 year old self to buy lots of it back when it was in the $300/toz range.

Right now it's sitting pretty at $1351/toz.
My friend Allen says, "Some days, I can't decide whether I should fire myself, or just quit."
Exactly. Continuous inflation is frankly the only plan the government has to deal with the national debt. Borrow now, and in the future when your currency is weaker and less valuable, the amount borrowed will seem smaller (and in pragmatic terms will be by that point).

Of course it's destructive to the average person / taxpayer, but who cares about them? Nobody does who's in charge, that's for sure.
> people who claim to follow science, are actually practicing some sort of modern-day witch doctor magic.

Maybe this is just phrased poorly. In that essay Feynman is saying some people (namely advocates of pseudoscience) are invoking "science" to give credence to their claims but are abandoning scientific rigor, this is what he calls cargo cult science. Not all people who claim to follow science.
UK is smaller than Oregon. Oregon has a population of 3.9 million. UK has a population of 63.2 million. It is cheaper to get Internet to concentrations of people (more income per line).
To quit would have been a bad idea. It looks very bad on a CV. In the UK you are told that you shouldn't criticise a former employer, no matter what.

I developed an awful cough due to the amount of ten year old dust lying about (I was once yelled at for "not paying attention", when I had a violent coughing fit that resulted in me having a large amount of phlegm in my mouth. To avoid a situation, I had to swallow it).

The two brothers were smoking inside the building, which is against the law. This was an optometrist's laboratory, with a fair amount of hazardous chemicals stored within the small building. This included white spirit and methanol. I would be asked to close the front entrance for them so the public couldn't look inside.

The company in question also commit product plagiarism, and I was expected to keep quiet about it.

I once got very angry at one of my coworkers for shouting at me, saying that I "don't listen", calling me "very immature", making fun of the clothes that I wear and one threat (this would occur on a daily basis). I got into a lot of trouble about that. The finance manager said that I shouldn't be aggressive at work, because I could be put on some sort of "employment blacklist", which would mean that I would never get a job ever again.

In eight months I estimate I had endured between 800-1200 separate incidents.

Criticism is a form of opinion, merely stating what you have seen is not. Even so, if I had mentioned any of the above in an interview, I would have instantly failed. Employment law in the UK is reasonably good, but can be very poorly implemented.
> Minimum wage where I live is 80% higher today than 10 years ago. Average wages are much higher too, though by a lesser percentage.

The way they adjusted for inflation is suspect. [1]

This [2] is how the wages look if you measure in amounts of gold. Of course, gold is not the end-all of monetary policy. But it's way more stable than the USD.

[1] http://business.time.com/2013/03/12/if-theres-no-inflation-w...

[2] http://pricedingold.com/us-wages/
Ask HN: What one thing you criticize about BitCoin?
Show HN: Please review my MVP: Quill.org (Interactive Grammar Web App)
http://www.quill.org

We are a nonprofit organization, and Quill is a free, open source tool. We are looking for feedback on our user experience and our code optimization. Critical feedback is appreciated.

If you'd like to check out the code: https://github.com/empirical-org/quill
That being said, LinkedIn are neither of those. They are just spammers.
What's interesting is that you point these out as good examples, but in Europe these would typically be seen as evidence of supervisor malfeasance, or at least raise some eyebrows. If a student you're supervising has published this many articles in top journals and conferences in the field, has been in grad school for 4+ years, and has still not graduated, someone is going to wonder: why not? They clearly are both smart and accomplished enough to have graduated. So why haven't they? Are you milking them as low-paid labor instead of letting them graduate? Are you taking up all their time with grant projects unrelated to their dissertation, so they haven't had a chance to finish it? Etc. Questions get asked!

The idea is that the top grad student shouldn't be above a certain threshold, because if they are, they should have a Ph.D., not be artificially held back.
That's exactly what a meme is.
Bitbuffet, Cerizmo, dbox, DPD, Pulley, Fetchapp, Plimus, ejunkie, payloadz, Sellfy to name a few.

There must be hundreds.
New Data Center Outage Hobbles HealthCare.gov
And oil prices have gone up just as much. Once upon a time oil was a dollar a barrel...

Come on, inflation increases the value of all commodities, gold, silver, oil, corn, wheat, etc...

It's not like gold is special.
In the MS-DOS Executive, click the A-Drive, and the double-click on BASICA.EXE (Basic Advanced).

QBasic didn't come until MS-DOS 5, the demo uses MS-DOS 2.
Hey Doug, thanks for the feedback :)

I am in the US. I'm trying for $10 a month 3 month min., but I'm very much open to being flexible on that.

For now, I'm just going to ship in the US due to the reasons you highlighted. If you subscribe and refer someone else as well, I'll throw in some free salsa!

Thanks again
You're right, however things can take a long time to run out of steam. Also, it's very interesting how much of economics relies on everyone believing in the system.

I'd recommend checking this video out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH9YPtk5VB4. This is what many people think. While some can definitely brush it off, many aren't.
South Korea may be inexpensive, but they're among the worst in the world when it comes to IPv6 deployment (0.00%, versus 4% in the United States):

http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...
I would say it's a euphemism for debasing just enough to keep a small minority enriched without the masses discovering it via overt price inflation and/or without the masses outside the US realizing that the value of their goods and services are being debased for the same reason.
I'm not sure how this casts doubt on the Austrians or supports the Keynesians, or vice versa.
Inflation can take a long time to trickle out from the major banks and lending institutions and down to businesses and finally down to average consumers.

What no economist can tell you though is how those irrational consumers will truly behave.

If you throw more money at me, I'm not going to spend more money, I'm probably hold on to it and invest it in other assets.

I guess I'm breaking the system.
Came here to admit the same failing. I can't believe even Windows 1.01 can beat me at Reversi.
I like the idea...I have several friends who'd appreciate having this as a gift.
Time Machine is a great "enable and forget about it" solution, however it has some limitations too. For example, it can only backup to a drive, not to a folder within the drive. Also, in my case, I wanted to backup the Users folder of my Windows Bootcamp partition but it cannot be done. Excluding files during the backup is also not possible. The nice thing about a small bash script to handle all this is that it can be easily customized to your needs.
The other important thing is to reduce uncertainty as much as possible. You don't want your inflation rates to bounce around like crazy from day to day. Instead, you'd like to be able to keep them within certain limits so people can plan ahead to the future.

If I'm not sure what inflation will be day-to-day, I can't make an accurate prediction as to whether I should save my money or spend it.
Inflation is only theft if you insist on storing value in cash--a financial instrument that is not designed to hold value.

A major reason to manage for low, consistent inflation is to train people to put their money into real assets.
Jacobin is such an annoying magazine. Every time I commit to seriously reading (as opposed to skimming) one of their articles, I still come away with the same conclusion: that it contains almost no substance. Though I guess it's a pleasure to read the flowery language if you already agree with the premise.
>Rising prices help companies increase profits

I don't get this. It's people spending more because they have more money through inflation that increases profits. Not prices themselves getting higher, that's just the affect. In any case what does it matter since you have more money, but money is worth that much less. The total wealth is the same.

>rising wages help borrowers repay debts.

Right but it's a zero-sum game. The borrower benefits but the lender loses. Also only works once. If lenders know there is a chance of inflation they will proportionally raise their interest rate they are willing to lend at to make up for the risk.

Inflation is just a tax on the entire economy as everyone that owns money loses some of the value of their money. In the case of printing money, all that value goes to whatever group receives the printed money.
I had the same problem in chrome on Mac, but it works fine on firefox.
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
I pay $80/month for internet + basic TV from comcast. It's just BARELY worth it for me; I've been tempted more than once to cancel it but haven't. There's no other choice for me, other than satellite which is far more expensive.
I just found my new Burning Man outfit!
Study the career as Fed chairman of Arthur F. Burns, chairman from 1970 to 1978, appointed by Richard Nixon, before you blame stagflation on Carter.
I think it's slightly biased because the US has an extremely strong CS founding, it's world leading without a doubt. This is pushed by a large number of excellent departments and groups like Microsoft Research and IBM (hell, even Disney) which churn out top tier research.

You cannot judge people on long lists of conferences. The people you cited have enviable CVs but only three or four peer reviwed journal papers (prior to 2010) between them. This is comparable to anyone in the EU. What are the impact factors of those journals? I have no idea and am unqualified to judge. It depends entirely on your field and what the big places to publish are. For me, an imaging PhD student, it usually starts with ICCV and CVPR (and of course SIGGRAPH), however the actual citations come from journals, not the conference papers.

I have been chastised by my supervisor for citing proceedings before - a lot of people don't consider them peer reviewed and that makes a big difference.

I know people who got papers in Nature or Science during their PhD posts. In astrophysics, people regularly get four-five peer-reviwed papers over the course of a PhD because it's a publication-heavy area. A single Nature or Phys Rev citation is worth a lot more than five conferences you attended. I probably won't publish more than a couple of papers in my field, but I'm not expected to as some of it is commercially sensitive (though I may get a patent out of it instead - and more importantly, a job!).

At the end of the day, does it matter? Very few PhD students are genuinely top tier. Most of us are happy making a dent in our little niche and will probably get comfortable jobs afterwards. Unfortunately things inevitably become a slanging match :(
Looks neat. I was casually checking html source and found that there is some HAML code visible as comments (http://i.imgur.com/TNDRHNy.png).
I'm saying calling something Austrian or Keynesian is inherently political. We should come up with economic models, whether they're Austrian, Keynesian, alien, or dumb, test them against data to see if they hold up, and refine until we get close. Aka, what scientists do.

Great article the other day from Krugman about this very topic. Economics might be a science, but economists are not being scientists about it. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/maybe-economics-...
I think you may have this flipped.

Inflation is, more than anything else, a tax on cash (and last time I checked, your average person didn't have a whole lot of cash on hand). Practically speaking, it helps debtors at the expense of creditors by shrinking the value of liabilities on the books.

The debt hysteria we see isn't because the elite don't care enough about inflation - it's because the costs of it fall more heavily on those who write big checks to political campaigns.
Academics being funded by Keynesian politicians has surely nothing to do with it.
It was a very good article and I agreed with most of it except that people who decide to leave academia after PhD still have learned a lot: self management, self motivation and critical thinking as well as learning how to think are several of them. I would say that thinking of PhD as a wasted time assuming that the person is not pursuing academic career is something I don't agree with.
Judge OKs class-action suit against Apple, Intel, Google, Adobe
Where do you think cash goes if not into someone else's hand? It's like a game of hot potato constantly tossing it around to someone else so they hurt from it losing value, and not you. But in the end everyone handles it for some amount of time and gets burned the same amount.
Can you risk 96% of your revenue (or whatever is your modern-browser userbase) because your site looks outdated for them?
do you have any other reference for data mining (specifically for statistical interpretation)
Except the average person sees the exact same benefit, ideally. It's the same platform William Jennings Bryan campaigned on way back in 1896 - expanding currency helps people who have debt.

Inflation makes the past matter less. It erodes both the wealth of the super-rich and the debt of everyone else (the farmers who had to mortgage their farms in 1896; the normal family now who has a home mortgage as the norm). That's very attractive to a lot of people, not just those managing the national debt.
Look where that got us...
I've been using Xubuntu for the last week, after some setup i've begun to fall in love with XFCE. I tend to flip distros every few weeks since all of my programming is done through Vagrant + offsite Git.

As far as servers go, we've been using CentOS and it's slowly built up to become a pain in the buns. I'm considering trying out Debian for our servers, but I don't want to bring my desktop distro habits over to our stack.
Lead Scoring in the Age of Big Data
Gold is special. It's easier to carry than a barrel of oil, and stays fresher longer than a bunch of corn or wheat. That's why gold tends to get used as money over and over in history.

But you're right about one thing... inflation increases the value of real assets.

Or to put it better, the value of real things doesn't change (a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread) but the value of the dollar weakens in regards to it with inflation. Bringing us back to the beginning of the argument that inflation steals the purchasing power of people.

If I bought gold 20 years back I would have paid $300 for 1 toz. That same 1 toz of gold today costs me $1351. The gold hasn't changed. The US$'s purchasing power has.

[EDIT: I should mention that inflation isn't the sole reason it takes more money to buy gold than 20 years ago. There are of course some other factors.]
I cannot possibly think of what actual relevance there is in that.

Not least of all because if I don't have IPv6, there's plenty of ways to do that, even from the end-user perspective, with no support from your ISP, no capital expenditure and no great ongoing cost, if any at all.

Now let me know how I can get let's say 100 Mbps upload speeds as easily as hooking into IPv6 assuming I have 1 Mbps at the moment.
How is this a response to me? I just pointed out that deflation generally goes along with terrible circumstances.

> deflation is bad unless you already have a lot of money.

Deflation is bad even when you do already have a lot of money, for the reasons you describe. This is a good place for the argument "a rising tide lifts all boats".
More importantly, FFI 1.9.1 was released today (http://rubygems.org/gems/ffi) and completely broke knife-solo, returning a huge stack trace ending with:

You may have encountered a bug in the Ruby interpreter or extension libraries.

reverting back to FFI 1.9.0 did the trick.
Whether it helps or hurts someone depends on how much debt they have compared to their (rising) expenses. It also assumes that the interest rate on their debt doesn't go up as inflation rises, which it certainly can (e.g., for credit card debt and variable rate mortgages).

For investments, it depends on the type of investment. For example, if you own bonds, the interest rate is paid based on the purchase price of the bond in pre-inflation dollars, and the higher the rate of inflation, the less your interest payments will be worth. By the time the bond matures, the amount you may have gotten back in principal and interest may be less in real dollars than what you paid for it (and you'll still need to pay taxes on the interest). Same for savings accounts: if they don't pay an interest rate that's above inflation, you'll be losing real dollars after inflation and taxes.
"science is a creative pursuit much like the arts"

While surprising this statement gets at something missing in science today. Until relatively recently basic science was not dominated by a big institution monoculture but by curious and creative individuals working in a great variety of situations often in near isolation.

I wonder if much of the effort to institutionalize and "professionalize" science has been counterproductive. I can't imagine most of the great figures in history of science thriving in the current environment. Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs?

I know this is a bit of a rant and I know times have changed. But perhaps something similar to the open-source revolution in software can get science back to its roots.
Right, forgot the footnote:

[1] http://s48.org/
I am not a linkedin employee but I wonder what an employee should do or in this case have done when business was insisting on developing such a feature?
Are you in a location where an antenna would work? I have one set up for watching locally aired TV shows and local sports now and then. Most of my viewing has shifted to Netflix / Hulu, so this works great for me.

If you aren't a huge sports fan, it's worth a shot, and OTA channels are 720p or 1080i, and uncompressed.
Such a shame that the author apparently didn't read all of the linked "facts".

eg. "This cause and effect is now beyond reasonable doubt; science shows (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8043072) that high levels of cholesterol cause arterial damage and this, in turn, causes coronary heart disease."

The linked paper and the comments to that paper disputing the findings completely contradicts the author's "beyond reasonable doubt" argument.

I don't have a "team" in this debate, personally I wish scientists would put their pride aside, stop the furious debating and find a definitive answer. I'm just pointing out an obvious flaw in this response.
Who cares. There are more important things to care about than who is in your friend graph. Like the fact that you have a friend graph.

I would rather have Web Rings back than join Facebook.
This can be done. Here's some links http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4012352/linux-dual-mice-m...

Using both hands is pretty tricky. I'm left handed, and it's much easier for me to do mouse stuff with my left hand than with my right. Using both together would mean my right hand is under moving, and my left hand would be over moving. Working out what pointer belongs to what mouse would be tricky too.

It would be a bit like one of those "brain training" games where they display the word RED but in a blue colour, and you have to say "Blue".

Also, multiple monitors still suck, even though they're commonly used. I can only image how bad dual mice would suck.
Yogurt is one. I don't know about the previous sugar levels, but it is extremely difficult to find anything other than low or no fat yogurt, and they typically have what I consider to be very high sugar levels, even many brands of plain yogurt.
Average income grows faster than inflation because of real economic growth.

In the U.S. we've had positive inflation numbers for most of the last 80 years, which has coincided with significant across-the-board improvements in standard of living.
Coconut oil is perhaps the best with its anti oxidant and microbicide properties. More often than not, it is the lifestyle that causes health issues.
Stanford Named Top University Producing VC-Funded Entrepreneurs
George Washington University Rejected Students Simply Because They Were Too Poor