skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're referring to a simplified description of the effect of a 10% reserve requirement on the money supply. If you deposit $10 into a transaction account, the bank may lend $9 of that (not $90), and only if you assume each dollar lent is deposited into a transaction account with the same 10% reserve requirement do you get the net effect on the entire money supply (mostly through other banks) of +$100.

In practice this does not happen. And in any case, no one lends money they don't have, as you put it, unless you have strange ideas about what constitutes money.
What? X Combinator?

What's that all about?
This is an excellent point that I'm amazed no one has made. It's entirely possible to dress very well but without wearing a suit/blazer/wool pants, etc. There are tasteful, well tailored, yet casual clothes all over the place.

A slob in a suit is still a slob.
I bet if everyone thinks long enough, they can come up with enough reasons why their city / state / country is great for startups.

While I do believe that location plays a large enough part in the life of a startup, once the product is up and running, do people really care if the next cool product was built in eastern Timbuktu and not in the Bay Area?
No - it just reminded me of that concept, and I babbled about it. As I said, I did not have the patience to actually try to understand what Zed wrote. So I can not know if it was babbling or not.
I dress in old t-shirts and cheap jeans to keep away the people who would judge me so shallowly.
Insider Selling Jumps to Highest Level Since 2007
Probably, but they still managed to make it far worse (generics, annotations, ...).
Two trolls within 10 minutes?
Sometimes, the newer, simpler languages are new versions of the older, more byzantine languages. I think that's basically the Perl 6 approach, for instance.

It's called "evolution", in some circles.
Resource for begining programmers
http://seasteading.org/mission/intro ;)
I agree with the problems you mention, and the likely unintended effects. My point was that it might be a least-worst-option alternative. I suspect there are no perfect solutions that can be imposed onto the Afghan people from outside.
Very true. I'm not even sure I would trust a coder in a suit and tie..
It also means that unless you're starting out with at least $xx million dollars, you have no hope. It can take _years_ to get a business started if you're unlucky enough to choose a field under heavy regulation (something with it's own Cabinent-level bureau, like the FCC, EPA, or Fed).

The paperwork takes a long, long time to process, the processes are laden with significant fees, you have to pay staff (usually lawyers, not cheap) independently to prepare all of the forms and offer guidance through the process, and you have to be able to afford to wait for everything to go through, and that assumes a completely clean process with no need to contest, appeal, or resubmit anything.

The megacorps already initiated to the oligopolies hope that this is enough to prevent any significant or innovative new competition, and it usually is.

Sadly, those with the most innovative ideas are usually not those with the most $xx millions of dollars.
I read your blog, and i found the idea behind biz teen interesting, but i think you're targeting a rather small market (the world doesn't have as many young entrepreneurs as it needs).

If you don't mind getting an idea from a complete stranger, why not do a social networking app for people within the same age range but focusing on something that appeals to a wider crowd (parties, traveling[backpacking through the world comes to mind], choosing the right school, etc).

Best of luck.
It's the constant battle between those who are widely interested in the world and those who are interested in one or two little areas.

pg seems to be of the latter stripe, so it's no surprise that Hacker News reflects this bias, and will continue to do so in the future.
I was wondering about this too; I did not even go to college. I graduated HS at 14 and started working for companies developing software.

Will this put me at a disadvantage if there are lots of MIT, Stanford etc... grads that apply to YC W10.
Deductions tend to grow over time as lobbyists tweak the system. Yes, they always point to loopholes closed..while opening 5 more. So historically there were fewer deductions to go with the higher rates. So including deductions makes the picture even more stark.

Which brings me to my favorite tax deduction ever. If you go back to the 50s, the most useful tax exemption available to the rich was that if they donated at least their annual income to charity then they didn't have to pay taxes. (This was called the flying nun exemption because the law was passed for a very rich nun who was sworn to poverty and hence donated her whole income to the church.)

How on earth was that useful? Well donations were valued at current worth, not what you paid. So invest large amounts in assets of increasing value (eg art), then a few years late donate the asset to a charity. Asset valuation could be made to grow by the simple expedient of donating large amounts of money to a charity you ran so that it could afford to buy a piece of artwork from you at inflated value. Then that set the valuation for the other pieces of art you chose to donate.

If you've ever wondered how art wound up costing so much, and how America's great public museums acquired so much of it, wonder no more.
This kinda looks like a linkjacked version of that:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777666
Robots evolve to deceive one another
I see that the poor implementation of generics is an issue, but what's so bad about annotations?
Well, I'm embarrassed. I've always been told that my last name means "From Marco", not "Son of Marco".
Doesn't help that my first name is "Mark".
Oh man! Thanks a lot! That was so nice of you!!!

I realized that, yet to be honest I'm looking in creating an actual SaaS startup. Something that provides values and that actually solves a problem. Thank you for the tips, I hope your business is doing well.

:-)
That may be true, but that is not a strategy that would apply to writing a PhD thesis. That is just such a great amount of work, and with no real end-date.
Even then, the fear of not finishing on time will very likely come too late with such a big project.

I think the best advice in that case is just to think about how you eat an elefant: one bite at a time.
I think you can instead try to fight this by using a long-forgotten tool of the mankind called 'common sense'. I believe that, being very difficult to make a computer understand common sense (hence the setbacks on the AI field), many people on the IT field decided to take the same approach and rule out common sense of their lives.

Bitching, retribution votes, flames, crap-flooding is exactly what made the other once great sites the crap that they are today. But pretty much like the spam, one has to start it. If you do NOT start it, it will not happen. Since it is already happening, if people of common sense do not do it, we can trace it down to a handful of people and weed them out properly. And the site will remain great.

And the only tool the site gives you is the flag button. And it is the only one you need.
We could just change it every year. The increase in police will help boost the economy.
At each state of the union address the pres could announce that this year Jolt and Ibuprofen are banned and you would have 24hours to consume it all before the police raids start.
Google-AT&T-Apple fight over Net calls draws FCC interest
Simplicity of use is what seems important, not necessarily simplicity of design. Though JavaScript is more complicated than C in the sense of having more features, those features generally result in source files that're more succinct and faster to write (since you don't have to, say, roll your own hashtables).
Many, many more here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/writersrooms
I never use GPL'd code in any of my projects, because I publish code under a copyfree license (http://owl.apotheon.org). My code often gets reused in proprietary software for resale -- and I'm happy with that, but the GPL simply cannot exist there.
I was hoping this was going to be a real breakdown and analysis of why things turned around for this blogger. For example, topics he wrote about then which he doesn't anymore or how his user base has changed compared to then.

Unfortunately, it lacks any real content and depth - it may as well have been written for Reader's Digest.
The whole point of Safebank seems to be to have it be safe. How safe a is a week-old bank started by some guy with a blog who doesn't know the difference between retail and investment banking?

People don't love their banks? I do. Bank of America gives me ATMs everywhere and pretty awesome online banking, and the credit union gives me unbelievable customer service and great interest rates.

On a sidenote, do compare the HN comments with those on the site.
Wool? That's a dirty word here in 100 degree+ Austin, TX. Otherwise, matters of style/taste are subjective, or, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Pretty much everyone in our office wears jeans and, shrug, it just doesn't seem to have any negative impact that I can observe.
I'm not a python or django developer, so I can't comment on the technical merits of what either of you are saying. However, this exchange has left me with a lot of respect for both of you. It's been very polite and professional, and hasn't fallen into the usual vitriol and holy wars.
Please someone contradict me and make a more reasoned argument.

The FARC sells cocaine. The Afghan warlords sell heroin. There is no constellation of American political interests for which "Legalize cocaine and heroin" is even remotely conceivable as an achievable policy option.

Incidentally, no matter what you legalize, smuggling remains a viable option for whatever it is you don't. FARC could just as easily be the world's largest kiddie porn or sex slave ring. Afghanistan could sell slaves.

(I am not speaking hypothetically. There are nations which do both. A willingness to do evil plus a local monopoly on coercive force makes for a very profitable combination.)
Ask HN: How much does education matter?
Someone in a previous thread mentioned that they noticed that many of the people from YC companies come from Harvard, Berkley, MIT and other top schools.

Does going to one of these schools make you more likely to be accepted by YC?

What if you did not go to college at all? I graduated high school early and started working for software companies; does this make me less likely to be accepted into YC?
. . . which falls apart for people who don't allow JavaScript to execute in the browser. This would definitely impact some Websites more than others.
Digg.git
Thanks for the post - very thought-provoking.

Not to be the local pedant, but just a quick note on the "monkey" quote. Don't know where this came from but "temeas," to my knowledge, is not a Latin word - "teneas" is and signifies "may you hold," which in the quote would roughly translate as "may you hold my monkey" (I don't believe this has any notable usage in historic Latin).

"Teneo" (Latin: hold) comes into English with words such as "tenor" (one who holds (a note)), "tenacity" (the quality of holding on doggedly), "tenant" (one who holds possession), many others.

Well, I guess I am the local pedant (see, e.g., http://grellas.com/article_word_origins_fero.html).
Summer weight wool is cooler than cotton.
http://www.autismawarenesscentre.org/book-review/the-hidden-... is apparently a book on exactly this. http://www.parenting.org/behavior/socialskills/ is going to be the level they're talking about, though.

I don't know if I'd be diagnosed autistic -- Taking the test retrospectively, I would have scored 39/50 on http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html as a kid and teenager, but score 25 now. I also do not have the classic difficulty deciphering faces, but do not know if that was always true or if I've learned.

My trick? I ended up in an intense, somewhat abusive religious group that had a focus on evangelism. It was an environment where people were forced to interact positively, and I ended up learning hordes. While I had to completely relearn social interaction after leaving the group, I at least had a set of heuristics to follow.

I've struggled to figure out a way to bring this without the religious system, and haven't quite figured it out yet.
BSD code used in proprietary software is not "imprisoned" -- the original work remains free no matter how someone uses it.
As a factual matter, lots of Baby Boomers can bear the thought of legalizing drugs. Most HN participants are too young to realize that the Baby Boom generation is still rather young compared to their living parents, who are very influential in politics because they turn out to vote.
It's like sketching with pencil. Your first version is complicated and gets a lot wrong, with stray lines all about. The final one is cleaned up and simple, yet that simplicity is a direct result of that messy progenitor.
"Android does not support a full-featured version of Skype...Google's explanation would seem to suggest that T-Mobile requested the block on Skype, but the carrier says that's not the case.

And as per AT&T's comment regarding the app store, "AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store."

Those damn apps, blocking and disabling themselves!
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777302
Well, it would probably be an interesting experience... not that I would care to find out. That's why I said the killer application would probably not look like money to us.

Take Youtube, for instance: people go to considerable lengths to create videos that others find interesting. Then they sit glued to the screen watching the view counter go up. There's a currency: people paying with their time (which everybody only has a fixed amount of) for someone's work creating videos.

Now have some ISP give extra bandwidth to people with Youtube videos over x thousand views. It doesn't cost them much "real" money since bandwidth is more or less a fixed cost but you have turned "virtual" money into a currency.

Granted, the example is a bit contrived but you can see where I'm going with this.
More about HTML 5 in http://www.xul.fr/en/html5/firefox-3.5.php
Japan's Homegrown Operating System
A few hundred bytes is precious space on a floppy.
Just found some interesting stuff about the decriminalisation of illicit drugs in Portugal in 2001, seems to be doing them a great deal of good. But there was mention that NO country has ever rationally considered legalisation as this would open up an economy and a power hierarchy the likes of which the world has never seen (hyperbole, yes, but I think we could all imagine the darker side of a legal drugs industry. Off the top of my head, the vast sums of money that can be made would cause a global gold rush where "Prospectors" vs. "Indyuns" would be woefully unbalanced. The "Indyuns" are already there, have assets invested, have militias and are less than ethical business people... bad medicine.)
I'd be wary of posting something like this online.

Someone might take that dissertation, post it in some blog as their own...and then your thesis gets flagged as plagiarism and you get screwed.
I don't think you understand the direction we were going in. We would largely agree with the assessment on purely voluntary donations - and we were evolving to be a general purpose payments system. You could mandate payment.
I think it was really a joke he played on the Rails guys. The original presentation is here:
http://www.zedshaw.com/repository/rubyenrails2008/build/ruby...
and it seems to me that it'd be easy to realize it was more or less a joke; the tone of the presentation didn't seem very serious ("Sounds like Erlang, so it's fast!").

On the other hand, maybe that's how Rails presenations typically are; I was never part of that scene.
My grandmother gave me Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior for my bar mitzvah. The Miss Manners books are not only fun to read and full of rules, but they are also interesting for some of her meta-level essays about general principles of well-mannered behavior.
I think the bigger underlying problem is that HN forces those groups together without any kind of safety valve.

There is just the 'flag' option and that's about it. Whereas flagging normally is used to control spam but on HN it is used to control the topic of conversation. With a narrowly scoped site on-topic and off-topic are whatever people will use as a definition for those terms.

Here it seems that (and that's based on the current front page) a wide variety of subjects are perfectly ok for the homepage. And yet, in spite of that with some regularity there are discussions with 10's of upvotes and lots of people participating that get ruthlessly shut down. I don't think that proves that 'the system works'.

Enough ask PG and ask HN posts have been devoted to suggestions for improvements without so much as a rebuttal that I'm not holding my breath for change.

And telling people to leave in one way or another seems a very drastic solution, I'd basically conclude at that point that HN has failed.

I'm wondering how much of the resistance to improving the user experience on HN is grounded in arc, after all it is hardly a standard platform so every little bit of code has to be hand crafted for this one-off site.

PG has a lot on his plate (company, family) and probably has his hands more than full. This would explain the fact that his appearances here are relatively rare and that the development of the site is not keeping pace with the growth of the number of users.
The fact that these people phrase it like that - or believe that there's something supernatural about it - isn't something that increases the probability of it being true, IMO.
Fair point - in fact, I suggested on my blog that it may be a bit simplistic (or a confusion of correlation/causation) to simply say "my blog is successful because I stopped trying to make it successful": http://ashotofjd.com/post/168062040/marco-i-now-have-a-decen...
"Excuse me, sir, have you heard the good news about Emacs?"
It is a stupid comment, without much content. Like the other reply, even if I agree, this is no way to say it. Our announcement is essentially saying the same thing, but elaborating to add information.
It would be pretty sweet for us if we could convince them to grow biodiesel.
In the US:

I wasn't currently at the point where I could get the subsidized price for my iPhone 3G when I bought it, so I had to pay full price.

It's also, as far as I know, fairly impossible for me to (legally) get it unlocked so I can use it on, say, TMobile.
Its not that one place or another is a great place for startup xyz it is the fact that Omaha is in the middle of the country and no one associates it with creativity, entrepreneurship, or technology. But there is a growing group of people in those scenes here, and we have as much to offer talent wise as the bigger cities.... If you can't tell I am biased because I live in Omaha and know most of the people they are talking about in the article. But you are right there is no reason why some city should not be included, so make it a point to be the one that gets these people together in your city and make it happen. That is what so many of the people in this article are doing, growing a community, and making things happen.
April 24.

If it was relevant, any strategic maneuvering that one might do to avoid this catastrophe is probably now deep in the past.
That entirely depends on how early, right? Advisers can definitely be worth more than a single engineer.
Best thing to do is output a .swf animation from a 3d tool and import it into your flash project:

http://www.erain.com/Products/Swift3D/
#7 is very relevant to the HN community.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

I'd much rather spend marketing dollars hiring a community rep and put up a site like spreadfirefox.

Sounds like they are also having a lot of success with a 100% volunteer based campus rep program. ("Any student that is committed to helping the Mozilla marketing team spread Firefox and the Mozilla mission through active participation in various campaigns and projects, both on campus and in their local communities.")

Probably not the right kind of marketing for all startups, but it is something to consider.
Programmers are pretty normal people :)

When counting sheep in a field I'll count 1 sheep, 2 sheep etc.

When counting variables I'll say one variable, two variables and so on.

No difference there.

When placing items in an array I say this value goes in to slot '0', this will go into slot '1'. The slots are labelled with their index. And I will say there are now two values stored in the array, one at 'position' 0 and one at 'position' 1.

I think the whole problem disappears when you think of 'rank' as labels and count as the actual number of elements.

The first sheep is just a label you stick on a sheep to identify it, that makes it different from the other sheep.
> Do you have any idea how juvenile and tasteless you look in cheap jeans and sneakers? Do you realize how much dramatically better you look with proper shoes and well cut wool pants? To give up that advantage just indicates idiocy to me.

I won't deny that dressing up is a social advantage, but sometimes people care about some things more than strictly getting ahead. It's entirely possible that an individual could place more value on being comforatble than on getting that raise or promotion.
Make a Print Friendly Version of any WebPage, save Webpages as a PDF
I'm much happier with jdk 1.5 than I was with 1.4 or 1.3 or 1.2 etc.... Not sure why you don't like the new additions. In general you don't have to use them if you don't want to.
Would you consider a person who cannot hear to have a disease?

In other words, do you dislike the use of the word "disease" to describe that something is missing compared to the "standard human", or do you disagree that there's anything bad about being deaf or autistic?
Following rules isn't the worst thing, but their use is limited to not offending people in obvious ways. (Unless you try to follow rules about body language, which ultimately will creep people out.)

The main thing in a social situation, geek or non-geek, is to be as relaxed and open as possible, without any expectations or worries. Easier said than done...
Heroin and cocaine both do really bad things to a very high proportion of the people who take them -- scrambling their brains to the point where they don't really care about anything except getting more drugs. They're not really comparable to alcohol or nicotine, or even to marijuana, in terms of the amount of harm they typically do to their users.

As a libertarian I am very grudgingly in favour of drug legalization, but you can't deny the harm which would probably come from having all these drugs freely and cheaply available. I can't say for sure whether it would be greater or lesser than the current level of harm, but it would certainly be substantial.
Even if the data is represented in the same form as the code, mixing the two isn't really a great idea, in my opinion.

edit: . . . and if that's all the data they've added, they're moving too slowly.
An index is a label, a convenient way of finding something when you remember where you left it. You can start your indexing at any offset, you don't even need to use numbers (you could for instance look at an associative array where you store stuff based on a hash of some value).

index = position, label

The count is the number of occupied slots and is totally independent of the positions or labels.

Otherwise how would you count the number of elements in a sparse matrix ?
This is a great idea.

To keep a standard subset for lightweight implementations (which are better suited for embedded systems, or for being embedded as a scripting language). How cool is this?

Edit: not to mention that a greater portability among the full featured implementations would be even more cool.

I'm so happy to see Scheme alive and kicking.
Websites Using Popping Colors