skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually missed that because I essentially scanned this.

I didn't know Sam had any particular expertise in economics something that confounds people with pretty deep intellectual understanding and academics. That have been observing things for many many years. It's a black art.

And I tend to pass on anything that starts to mention facts and figures which can be made to achieve any point you want.

I did note that it ended with this of course:

"I think the path from our troubles will involve finding a way for economic growth to continue." Obviously a rising tide lifts all boats. But finding "a good lawyer" (to go all cliche here) is the problem.
i am a bull. i just think that we should talk about what the problems are. ignoring them is not a good way to fix them.
Is there anything wrong with discrimination against tall people? It has nothing to do with their age, race, gender or sexual preference, so I think height and weight may actually be fair game.
> Drivers already pay for the cost in lost time. It's a 'natural' market.

Except it's not: unless you're extraordinarily prescient (or have access to real-time, accurate-to-the-meter traffic data), the driver cannot act as a rational actor because he has imperfect knowledge about the transaction. And that's assuming he'd act like a rational actor anyways -- and anyone who's studied real life instead of theory will tell you that most actors are not rational except, sometimes, in aggregate.
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The pill can be nerfed by interactions with other drugs. Modafinil, for example.
Data Origami – Data Science Screencasts
The Unexplained Fear Of Remote Employees
I see it as basically Malthusian: people will keep driving until it is so unpleasant that they don't want to do it any more. The tipping point for most people is around 45 minutes. Here's a book with a footnote that mentions that the same 45-minute rule applies worldwide and though out history: http://books.google.com/books?id=uuqIA-ce1CoC&pg=PA408&lpg=P...
Yes, it's a work-around, but it totally makes sense, at least until the city comes up with a better solution for the parking issues in the city.
A lot of people call this a chicken-egg problem. For some reason, that's supposed to make it seem hard to solve, when in real life, anybody could start a chicken farm very easily.

You simply buy chickens.

If your question is how do I start a chicken farm without buying chickens, then you have made the problem unnecessarily complex.

The thing is, though, when you buy a chicken, you can be relatively sure that you will get eggs. And you can be sure that if you have eggs, it's not too hard to get chicks.

Your real problem isn't how to get content (that's simple, you buy it), but how to then get users that want that content. And then, how to get some of those users to make content.

(to answer your direct question: StackExchange was seeded by JoelOnSoftware and CodingHorror readers -- it was a closed beta until they got enough content. In other words, Joel and Jeff already had chicken farms, and they donated a bunch of them to StackExchange)
> At least 8 ounces per waking hour for me.

That's 3.8L per day [(24 hours - 8 hours sleeping) * 8 fl oz = 3.8L]. Recommended intake is 2-3L[1]. Just be careful of water poisoning...

[1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healt...
I wanted to take this further to get some utilization numbers.

1. In 2012, Americans spent 1 hour/day travelling (where work travel is about half of that). That's about 4% of their time. [1]

2. There were 253M registered vehicles in 2012 [2].

3. There were 313M people in the US in 2012 [3].

So a first-order approximation of vehicle utilization: (253M vehicles * 1 year) / (313M people * 4% time travelling * 1 year) = 2.2 trillion vehicle-hours / 110 billion travel hours = 3.4% utilization. So that "90% of the day turned off and taking up parking space" is more like 96%.

It would be interesting to take this further to expenditures. Consumers spent an average of $9,000 on transportation in 2012 [4]. If we increase vehicle utilization to, say, 21% from 3% using a subscription/micro-rental service like parent described, and assuming per-vehicle costs are constant, how much would the average consumer save on transportation costs? And how much would we save on parking space?

[1]: http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst/most-tim...

[2]: http://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles... See also for similar 2009 data: https://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1096....

[3]: http://www.census.gov/popclock/

[4]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
Natural resources are finite, but so long as we can improve our efficiency faster than some rate N, we will never run out of a given resource. Thank you Zeno's Paradox.

(Recycling also plays a part, though I don't know if it should be considered increasing the supply, or increasing our efficiency)

The only one that is a real problem is energy. Thanks to the laws of physics, we may not be able to forever increase our energy efficiency, and energy cannot be recycled.
Labour markets/Employment figures tend to lag other indicators.
Then clearly we can make traffic flow more smoothly by shrinking existing roads. Right?

What? No? It doesn't work that way? Hmm, what a coincidence, it appears we're already at the sweet spot on the traffic-flow Laffer curve.

Either that, or what the authors of the study are trying to optimize is very different from what the typical driver is trying to optimize.
Well, there is the same concept in LA, the 405 got "pool" lanes, usable for free when you got 2+ people in the car. The issue with this kind of lane is that it's the farthest left, and if your trip on the 405 is only a couple miles you gonna struggle most of your time to reach this lane and then leave it and reach the right lane before your exit when the road is jammed!
Shitting my pants and sharing odor that with the rest of the cabin will still be free, right?
>Public Transit does too. Cutting up neighborhoods, noise, pollution all happen with busses and light rails. The externalities are almost identical in either case.

Very true! However, they are significantly lower per person transported.
Ranking Retrieval Systems without Relevance Judgments [pdf]
A local guy created a smart-phone game that wants you to look up, not down
There have been 25 total successful missions for PSLV. 23 of them have been successive / consecutive. Considering that "successive" is not a word used commonly and that the fact that the number of "successive" missions was wrong, I thought it was a typo.
> The endgame is "Computer, build me a Mars round-trip ship".

I think nobody would argue against that endgame, in the broad strokes. But I think Go can be understood as a response to [what the Go developers perceive as] overly expressive languages, languages that have overstepped our ability to responsibly abstract details, languages whose abstractions hide details that are still important and necessary to make explicit.

Go is "lower level" in that it purposefully eschews those abstractions, but I think it does that successfully, without a significant loss in expressivity, and with a more-than-commensurate gain in understandability, maintainability, performance, etc.
Interesting that they don't keep them in TAI. I would expect having the hw clock of the PC be in TAI to be the most pain-free option. Or is that not possible?
I wish you a resounding success, thank you for making more art and artists in the world.
Yes, I had the same problem with the article. The lawsuit just seems to be cherry picking which part of Barclay's paradoxical claims to trust, not creating its own self referential problems.

If Barclay's could get HFTs out of their products then their situation wouldn't be much different from diet cola and they could raise a fair amount of FUD against the competition irregardless of quality of evidence. But you can't sell the same product yet claim you have removed the "harmful" component. Claiming you know it is not really harmful just means you were up to 2 fraudulent activities to deprive the market and your customers of a better arrangement.
Do not upset the authorities responsible for the distribution of time.
The first sentence prophesies 'collapse', but then reading on you see a recipe for a continuing mild recession.

Where does the collapse come in? (if it's nebulously caused spike in treasury rates, I'm not going to be convinced)
I wish, LA had a good public transportation network but it doesn't. I used to take the bus, I had to change twice and spend at least 1h traveling, while it takes me 12 to 20min using my car (20min on exceptionally busy days). It probably is one of biggest city that doesn't have an underground metro! I guess that's one of the rare thing I miss from NYC. Being able to move fast without owning a car!
The financial press often defines recession as a technical term, meaning any two sequential quarters of negative GDP growth. NBER has a slightly different definition [1].

[1]: http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions_faq.html
It's not just greedy with land use: it's literally hostile to humanity. In places in the US with a large driving culture it is almost a death wish to walk anywhere (because none of the drivers are expecting to have to watch out for a pedestrian).
New Horizons will be doing a close flyby of the Pluto/Charon system next year - that should be pretty good.
> any better ideas yet

Progressive tax on incomes >$1,000,000. This won't slow anyone down except the ultra-wealthy.

As of 2009, it's 236,883 people. That's less than 1 in a thousand. With more income in a single year than most people in the U.S. earn in a lifetime, they'll certainly still be much more than quite comfortable.
Every single real or perceived slight is a result of one's gender/color/orientation. We all know that white men are never slighted.
And possibly Russia? Can anyone comment on how VKontakte is doing?
No, its much more complex than that.

Adding road capacity makes other types of trips possible. It's not a simple "hey, I'm taking the bus today because they built a lane". It's more like "Hey, I don't need to worry about uprooting my family or spending 6 hours on the bus to get a job in place X vs Y."

Think about it in computer networking terms. Netflix and Office 365 didn't exist in 1995 because it wasn't possible to make those sorts of solutions work then. Today, we need to worry about network congestion because millions of people are streaming movies.
I don't think those examples were of people trying to communicate with a crawler. I think they were examples of comments that the owners knew would be thrown away by crawlers.
Google Will Control UI For Android Wear, Auto, and TV
You can reduce it, and you can try to amplify other motivations. But if you're developing a new drug, why wouldn't you market it to people who can pay you more for it?

You can't save every life - no one is immortal. And in the decision of what care to give to which people, money will always be one factor. This is probably amplified in non-life-threatening situations since personal trainers and nutritional consultants will probably not be covered by collective health plans.
Does Allwinner actually manufacture router-oriented chips? Ralink (now owned by MediaTek) has been making networking parts for over 10 years now.

> The only non open hardware on Allwinner chips is the ARM-licensed Mali GPU

I seriously doubt that any part of Allwinners chips can be classified as open hardware. Just to clarify, this is wikipedias view on what open (source) hardware means:

> The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e. mechanical drawings, schematics, bills of material, PCB layout data, HDL source code and integrated circuit layout data), in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released with the FOSS approach.

> Both are very inexpensive Chinese chip manufacturers that use ARM-licensed MCUs

The chip in this device has a MIPS core. Besides, MCU != IP-core != SoC.
Uncrate is curated by a staff, and lacks the grassroots legitimacy that I always saw in Svpply's contributors.
i prefer universal essential services (healthcare, education, etc.) over a guaranteed basic income.

with basic income, you run the risk that the receivers spend it on shiny objects (especially in an economy like ours with rampant consumerism) instead of things that benefit them and their families long-term.

of course, what constitutes "essential services" can be the subject of a lengthy debate.
I find this to be a very delicate balance, and it of course are heavily dependent on the tasks at hand. On one side you want peace and quiet, in order to concentrate, on the other hand you want close communication with your colleagues.

I think 37signals from lot of good answers to these concerns. I highly recommend reading from 37signals, Remote.
I think what they are saying with the chart is that if they see anyone who is trading in that upper right quadrant (high one second alpha, high take percentage), they can kick them out of the pool, or at least that institutions can set some flag on their order entry port that will prevent them from matching against those parties.
A large component of 70's stagflation was just supply shocks for oil. Why this never gets brought up, or is just brushed aside casually is beyond me.

> do modern industrial economies actually tend to oscillate between demand constrained and supply constrained failure modes

This is probably a pretty good way to look at it. The solution is something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_finance

The meat:

1. The government shall maintain a reasonable level of demand at all times. If there is too little spending and, thus, excessive unemployment, the government shall reduce taxes or increase its own spending. If there is too much spending, the government shall prevent inflation by reducing its own expenditures or by increasing taxes.

2. By borrowing money when it wishes to raise the rate of interest and by lending money or repaying debt when it wishes to lower the rate of interest, the government shall maintain that rate of interest that induces the optimum amount of investment.

3. If either of the first two rules conflicts with principles of 'sound finance' or of balancing the budget, or of limiting the national debt, so much the worse for these principles. The government press shall print any money that may be needed to carry out rules 1 and 2
That particular problem is not specific to null pointers. It's specific to normalizing functions.
I hate to be that guy but should we be charging people more (effectively punishing them) for something outside of their control? Sure it may be "fair" in terms of economics, but it's a slippery ethical and moral slope if I've ever seen one.
As many engineers, I'm attracted to the "innovation" aspect. I've worked on that capacity for a number of years and it can be very rewarding, e.g. participating in congresses, keeping up-to-date, leading proof-of-concept projects and evangelizing.

But it has a downside that it can be frustrating because new tools, processes, architectures, etc. are not easily applied at existing business units, for a number of reasons, even when management and employees would like to use them. There's a lot of inertia and hidden costs to be overcome, not to mention risks associated with the changes.

It's not a bad job, but the security job offer sounds better, being also in a reputable company, with better salary and clearer career path.

Even if the results of the innovation projects are successfully applied to the existing teams and projects, and produce measurable gains, it doesn't sound likely that any raises you'd get in the, let's say, next 2 years, would offset the advantage of starting at 20% more in the next job as initial compensation, with room for further progress.
This is very consistent with my experience shopping in Van and Seattle... Meat, produce, dairy, and alcohol are all exceptionally more expensive than Stateside.

I may be biased in my priorities, but a 6-pack of decent beer costs $7-$8 USD in Washington and about $15-$16 CAD. Exchange rates are still nearly at parity. I find myself bringing a case to support the drinking habits of my Canadian friends every time I drive up... (No wonder they like it when I show up.)
This article forgot the very worst use of robots.txt:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

Those two lines mean that all content hosted on the entire site will be blocked from the Internet Archive (archive.org) WayBack Machine, and the public will be unable to look at any previous versions of the website's content. It wipes out a public view of the past.

Yeah, I'm looking at you, Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/robots.txt

Banning access to history like that is shameful.
So, the 0% interest is a catalyst for startup investment? Do institutional investors or big banks directly fund incubators and the like?

I read somewhere recently that global bank income was up 29 billion from last year, does any of that profit come from startup success?
Agreed.

Further, there's little evidence that Debt-to-GDP over 100% (despite "feeling" meaningful, because, 100%!) has any kind of predictive value for the long term direction of an economy, particularly one that has unusually low interest rates. If Debt-to-GDP were a problem for the US, you'd expect higher interest rates, not lower ones, as investors would be demanding higher returns on US debt.

The fact that interest rates on Treasury bonds remain so low, despite our debt levels and despite certain political figures repeatedly attempting to force the US Government to default on that debt, is prima facie refutation of the idea that no one in the market actually thinks US debt levels pose a major macroeconomic problem in the short to medium term.
Uh, NTP needs to have access to the internet (or a specialized hardware clock).

GPS is also relying on a network.

Running a calibrated atomic clock yourself is definitely in 'fancy' territory.
If you're having trouble sleeping, see my previous comment on the issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5672023

I used to never be able to fall asleep before 5am.
True economic collapse, in which ammo becomes more valuable than money? No. Depression? Quite possible. I'd give it a 50% chance in the next 20 years (read my post on this thread, I explain some of why.)

The very long term outlook is positive; the short-term outlook is dismal. The global elite and the middle class have been at war and the latter is losing.
Curious. Were the downvotes for "off topic" comments or is josteink abusing his accumulated karma to downvote comments he doesn't like?

I'm quite an amenable person and would like to know precisely what it is I'm doing wrong here.
I mean that people report (and their activity data suggests) sleeping but that the sympathetic response - "fight-or-flight" - didn't seem to turn down significantly from being awake. The best analogy, I think, is that your body should flip to idle during sleep, but we see that you're still running very hot.
Actually, that's part of the torture:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
Am surprised there wasn't a more balanced discussion of bleeding and allergy-like symptoms with IUDs. Among our circle of friends, they all tried IUDs at some point and every one had issues - no pregnancies, but was a bad experience nonetheless. I have to wonder if this article is really a submarine - it mentions "moms" - maybe the IUD was such flop with that demographic that now they are doing PR pieces like this trying to target a different group of women?
they obviously DO increase quality of life

If you only consider the aspect of freedom, maybe. But there are more aspects of quality life to consider imo. Spending hours in a car, practically standing still, causes stress. More lanes? More stressed people, higher volume of traffic jam - is that still freedom, sitting inside a metal cage while you can't go forward or backward? Increased number of cars driving means increased pollution. More lanes means less space for buildings and nature. Etc. I get your point, but I think there is more to it.
Why will high Debt-to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession?

Do you agree that it is a problem at some point? If so then why not at current levels?
So just like any other post on hacker news by someone with a product?

The "my experiences with product X as diving board for tangential point" is probably one of the less annoying positions on a scale that runs all the way from "pitching hard" to "cleverly designed to disguise relationship to the product."

Don't get me wrong, a lot of them are incredibly gross to witness, but to me this one barely registers.
Not true in my experience. My R4400 and R10000 hardware always ran circles around SPARC workstations of the era and I wasn't a graphics developer.
Is it perhaps the case that folks like you are so rare that you might as well not exist?
Craigslist. It's still the best source if you're doing your apartment search remotely.

If you're local, another good approach is just to drive down the multi-family zoned areas in the valley (it's pretty obvious where they are if you live here, plus you can see them on satellite view in Google Maps), pop into the office, and ask if they have any vacancies coming up. Most blocks are pretty densely packed, so you can easily hit up half a dozen complexes in an hour and get a sense of what rents are like, how clean the complex is, how friendly the management is, what sort of people live there, etc. In my most recent apartment hunt I took a bike trip with my girlfriend - we just biked down a bunch of the residential neighborhoods in Sunnyvale and stopped at every apartment complex.

Another useful strategy is to take a short-term lease when you first move out, then once you're acclimatized, pick out the places you really want to live and ask if there're vacancies. You learn a lot of tacit knowledge about the area that way, eg. the California/Escuela area of Mountain View has a number of openings on Craigslist, but it also has a reputation of being kinda a bad neighborhood in MTV (nothing that'll put your personal safety at risk, but I know a couple people that were robbed while living there), and you'll only pick that up from living in the area and talking with locals there.
In this context, I hope at some point sama has a chance (if he hasn't already) to read the post "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" by Mencius Moldbug:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-alt...

The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.

It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.
Just to clarify, it seems that by "tech companies" you mean "software companies".

I think it is a little funny that a company like AirBnB would qualify as a tech company (even though I would classify it as a travel agency that uses technology) whereas GM would not (I would consider GM an out and out tech company).

But I agree that software will have more of an impact on vehicle sales performance in the future, I'm only objecting to the idea that software=tech.
> angels invest without locking down a valuation

I mean, if you purchase a percentage of a company at a certain price, you have implicitly "locked down a valuation". Right?