skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you print and redistribute money to the unemployed on a means-tested basis, you are directly punishing the people who have accumulated wealth (the purchasing power of their money is eroded) for the benefit of those who didn't (that's why they're able to pass the means-test).

Why would rational people expose themselves to economies that do this to them?

Amongst other reasons:

- the cost (in terms of wealth taken) of redistribution is less than the cost of letting things sort out (eg in fallen asset prices or lost opportunities)

- (for those with only a little accumulated wealth) the prospect of attempting to accumulate wealth -- but failing at it -- is very likely and the consequences of failing at it are very high

...though as always a specific situation requires specific analysis, and there's no particular reason to believe the math works out one way or the other in a given scenario (and, also, to pretend to know the shape of someone else's preferences).

You might be able to do better than means-tested (flat-rate payouts to everyone! minksy-style "employer of last resort" arrangements!) but the underlying dynamic doesn't materially change: (loosely speaking) devaluing currency by X% takes away a lot more wealth from billionaires then from dollar-menuaires; if programs A and B both result in X% devaluation but A is means-tested and B isn't the difference in "cost of program" to the wealthy would be a rounding error.
Funny, I just bought the old classic that I never got a chance to read:

"Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norving

http://www.amazon.com/Paradigms-Artificial-Intelligence-Prog...

Guess Lisp is 'really' making a come back.
I've only been using QSB for a little over a week but it seems to be the fastest of the bunch for me (on both a Core Duo and a Core 2 Quad).
"The Ruby Programming Language" highly recommended. http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David-Flanag...
I don't use Visual Studio for work but I've used it for some side projects. What's wrong with that? Not sure why author doesn't like it. Agree with rest of the article though, to extent.
37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT
I have written some lisp-code in my days, what are those features missing in Perl?
YUP, and it's not quite why I guessed but the situation is pretty similar: non-copyrightable content (legal opinions), successful use of copyright claims over the arrangement.

Incidentally a good historical anecdote; in addition to many aspects in-and-around copyright I tend to think the thinking around public records laws is woefully antiquated (to our general detriment).

Thanks for finding that.
In that case couldn't you strip out the parts of Mono that aren't needed by Moonlight?
"As for Joel’s consistent dismissal of unit testing, he’s just wrong about that. Unit testing (done TDD style) does not slow you down, it speeds you up. One day I hope Joel eventually realizes this. "

Bullshit. I call TDD more like "insecurity driven development". Perfect fit for big corps, where mistakes are punished, and being fast is not really rewarded. *hence the myriad of processes to do even simple check-ins.

There is much better ways to deal with it:
1. Design interfaces, that implement the features you think you need. That's like the outline of your essay.

2. Have classes that implement them (put all messy code there). Write your essay.

3. Do some functionality testing on the features that are important, and can reasonable be measured (.ie. no functionality testing/unit testing in UI stuff). And make sure you use it. Unit test may catch only some stuff. Proof read it.

From my experience in my previous startups, If you have to ship in three weeks, unit testing is the very first thing that gets tossed out of the window.

At the end of the day, who cares if your product has few bugs. You got to ship something. And I am saying this from experience, where a product I worked is being used by over 2million of people. Buggy? Oh yes. Did the bugs kill the overrall experience, i don't think so. If we had missed that deadline, there was huge financial ramification for the company (apart 10s millions of dollars, it was a relationship breaker with the main client). We took our time to fix some of those bugs on subsequent releases.

If we had to do TDD, we probably would have never get done in time. Sure we might have found and fixed some of the bug earlier, but none of those bugs were detriment to the whole experience anyways.

The only time you really should care to test about even the most minuscule feature, is if you are doing some highly financial/sensitive stuff.
Most starts are not in that field anyways.
IIRC Kerpoof was acquired by Disney pre-funding (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/kerpoof)
We do this at TrailBehind too. The normal site is a huge Google map with lots of waypoints. The javascript disabled site, that google bot sees, is a google optimized list of links to pages about each waypoint.
It's not that they want to throw it away, but that they might be wrong. People have been wrong with a lot more than $100m at stake. $100m of other people's money at that.
AFAIK DRM works in Moonlight; I don't see why an official port of Silverlight would not include DRM.
The code and the tests go together. You don't just make a pile of code, and a pile of tests, and hope they all go together right.

You have some big tests that are general and test that all the components work together, but for each component you have lots of little tests, and if you are going to change the component you change the tests FIRST. That's TDD.

You deliberately break the tests before you change one line of the actual code.
It's done; Maemo 5 includes Flash Player. That's not relevant to Intel, though.
This is part of the reason I'm buying in cash right now. It used to be that it was insane to buy in cash because mortgage rates were way lower than average market gain. Now that's not so much the case.
It isn't clear to me that is it just comparing the javascript engines like for like. For all we know Google throws more operating system resources at processing the a single page than IE does natively. It may also be a battle of architecture (where each chrome page is a separate process with its own engine).

So it may not just be the skill of the engine developer, but competing architectures.
Linux (the kernel) has been aware of this result for a long time. Here's a thread from 2001, where Linus says

"I would, for example, suspect that a "correct" optimization strategy for 99% of all real-world cases (not benchmarks) is: if it doesn't have floating point, optimize for the smallest size possible. Never do loop unrolling or anything fancy like that. "

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-07/msg01543.html

and a similar thread http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0302.0/1068.h...

And the 2.6.15 (2005) changelog which exposes a configuration option to compile the kernel optimized for size http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/12/18/139
Dell/Microsoft

(http://www.entrepreneur.com/magazine/entrepreneursstartupsma...)
That's what some people want. Some of the time.
Which I believe is the point of the article.

Unless you know all the circumstances of what someone needs a weapon for, you can't say the M16 is better or worse than the AK47. (People who don't have to store their weapon in a muddy hole or go weeks without resupply may and do prefer the M16 for its characteristics)

Simply: there is no universal measurement of quality for any designed product.

Even hammers have trade-offs in their design that prevent absolute quality measurements.
Hopefully a lot, which is what the article seems to say.

Now I feel encouraged to build that 'dating based on your favourite music' website we've been thinking about.

http://www.movix.co.uk/muzixs.jpg
It does let them show people who say Yahoo is lame, that they do have some "hip" properties, that said, all their best stuff was bought not built. However, I'm not sure most people care except some who read tech blogs.
The Well-Grounded Rubyist is an introduction that will take you through to a Ruby pro in no time. http://www.manning.com/black2/

The official Rails guides are rough but a good resource. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

I wouldn't bother with the official Rails book.
Yes I have, and I enjoyed reading it quite a bit. I've also read Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, D'Annunzio, Polanyi, Hayek, Schumpeter, Kalecki, John Kenneth Galbraith, Friedman, Olson, North, a selection of other rational choice folks, developmental state literature, modernization theory literature, Gilpin's IPE, marxist IPE including a great deal of world-system theory (Wallerstein, Arrighi, Braudel), historical institutionalist political economy, constructivist political economy, and a smattering of post-Keynesians.

Just because I think his argument isn't relevant to the current crisis, has flaws, and has negative political implications, doesn't mean I haven't read it or don't think it's a brilliant piece of writing.

Like jpeterson said above, this piece takes a document that's been worked over by economists, political economists, scholars, and practitioners for the last 75 years and presents it in isolation, while nevertheless drawing conclusions from Keynes for the present day, ignoring everything that's come in between.
Tell HN: Philly Area Meetup Tue. 9/29 6PM
Could the Broken Windows theory be wrong?
No, sorry it isn't. Fred Brookes goes into detail when he coins the term "Second System Effect", and it definitely doesn't refer to half-arsed, half-debugged, haphazardly thrown together anything from version 1.0.

The Second System Effect is specifically about new features.
Paul Graham’s Y Combinator leaves Boston, entrepreneurs dive under the bed
He talks in his analogy of people who haven't taken off in their go-cart and are discussing design issues, and the people who took off and are fixing things with duct tape. There's a big difference between what I would call a "duct tape programmer" and someone who happens to keep a roll of duct tape handy. The former will run that duct-taped system in the next race, and will keep adding duct tape as problems arise. The latter will run the race, but then tear of the duct tape and look at why cart needed duct tape anyway and will then start debating design changes to get it to work better next time.

I think "duct tape programmer" should be derogatory, while "practical programmer" or "pragmatic programmer" would be more apt for Joel's idols.
What if they are trying to appeal to people who need less than 3 years to decide if their business is going to be successful? If it is successful, the money won't matter. If it isn't, the money won't matter.
Believe it or not, it's been 2 years since our first Philly news.yc meetup. This will make #23!

Our monthly no-agenda hackathon group has grown since then, but the core group still consists of the original members garnered from this news.yc comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42287

Anyway, if you are in the Philly Area, please sign up for the hackathon group. And if you are free next Tuesday evening, please join us in the city at the Cira Center (by 30th street) at 6PM. You need to sign up because the building has security and we need to put your name on there.

P.S. The "approval process" is really just a rubber stamp thing that prevents fake or obviously inappropriate members. If you want to bypass the whole thing, you can also email me directly.
For me this is nonsense, there were always people who had broad interest in all music and I think the identity with a particular style of music is partly marketing and partly inhibition. Many people I know have all styles of music, especially since the arrival of MP3.

It seems to me anyone who feels that a genre of music defines them needs to be in a band, or to relax.
I understand the reasoning behind that, but ultimately it should be the user not the website that has control over whether Chrome Frame is activated or not. A user can always visit an IE-only website in FireFox, so it's not creating a new problem there.

Allowing the user control, rather than the website, means the user will get the benefit of Chrome Frame by default rather than as the exception and will stop a potential attacker from getting to choose their attack vector...
Making space power pay
You know, if Yahoo actually took advantage of the fact that people have multiple accounts on its service, some active (Flickr, Mail), some dormant (delicious, upcoming), and really fucking figured out a coherent user profile strategy, they'd have something.
The rise in unemployment is due to the mass mis-allocation of resources caused by government intervention into the economy.

Principally, the creation of the central bank and it's long term policies of credit expansion (with moral hazard), low interest rates (underpricing of risk) and of debasement of the currency.

Also, the creation of government backed housing lending institutions (also with moral hazard) that made low interest high risk loans (expanding credit and risk) and tax distortions that encouraged investments in overpriced assets.
I believe for the most part that the effect of music is as a trigger for memories.

Most people enjoy the songs they heard growing up (especially during their formative teens) because the songs remind them of those times.

In large part, your taste in music is a reflection of the culture in which you grew up.
37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION
I would think it cheaper to send 32 ounces of water from Earth to the moon in a Dasani bottle, than to dig it out of a ton of rock. Maybe we can make a really long straw and just suck it up from the oceans directly.
I'm of two minds on that.

At the end of the article, I actually found myself thinking, "Hm, that really wasn't terrible." Then I came here for the comments.

The "techy hipsters" bit really wasn't an egregious journalistic error, but it wasn't real professional either. There wasn't really anything wrong with the article, but you also get the impression that, in terms of writing at least, the folks there are amateurs.

Not that that's a bad thing! Maybe it's unfair of us to hold them to the same standards as, say ... Macworld. ahem ;-)
I am in philly and i am interested. Can you tell me more about the event.
They don't have to exploit both browsers. They just have to exploit a browser. Their argument is that you now have 2 potential entry points for attack instead of 1.
not necessarily visitors, just searches.
The point of that app is simplicity. It's not innovative in the least, just simplifying what may be complex to people.

At first I thought you were being facetious, but then I saw your app. It would be interesting if you compared sales of 1.1 and 1.2 since they are so dramatically different aesthetically.
There's been some hype as an indirect result of Google App Engine.
Barack Obama Loves Startups: New Federal Office for Early-Stage Entrepreneurs
You have to seperate the IE's.

Plus, 5 is a little lo when you also take into account screen readers and other user agents.
Sure, we usually say this: "Hack on your projects with other members of the Philly startup community. As always, there will be free Internet & no specific agenda. So be productive, or not..."

It's really just a way to get together and hang out with other hackers. Unlike some of the other groups around, there is no agenda so you are free to talk about anything really. Or hack. There is usually of course a lot of tech talk and specifically about what people are working on.
Personally, it was great to see Microsoft spitting in the face of the company that is practically trying to save their product. However, this was by far one the greatest PR moves for chrome bar none. Lets see what kind of commercial Microsoft is going to use to attack Google for helping.
First-class environments
I don't think he sees a "duct tape engineer" as a "just get it done programmer." Like he said, they're pretty boys that just look pretty, ie they're rare and have a special balance of pragmatism. JWZ guys are the kinds of wizards you might never work with. We're also talking about a fairly specialized position Netscape was in, that was a company that made a huge amount of money. Have the twitters and facebooks of today made any money yet? Some of those guys at netscape got rich, what can you say to that? They've got scoreboard.

"Just get it done programmers" are a scourge. Most of them have no business deciding which corners to cut, let alone how much to cut them by. There is definitely a balance to achieve. Are you going to ship a "3.0?" Are you building a company to last 5 or 10 years? Or one to last as long as it takes to make the money back and sell? Is this a product you're prepared to get dirty fighting competition with or do you just not care? You never want to over-engineer but cutting too many corners is far worse. If you're a low investment startup with a decent idea, do you honestly think you can put out something that works 50% of the time and even have a shot at a 2.0? Maybe if you've got a proven wizard that spins money out of thin air you duct tape the whole thing like he thinks you should.

If you have investors and you slam out a mediocre 1.0 in like 3 months, will they really sit back for 12 months while you "engineer" 2.0? Or do they want 2.0 in another 3 months?
none get large without VC.
There's a hilariously detailed 50+ page internal style guide at Yahoo explaining exactly what you can and can't do to the logo. These kinds of decisions go all the way to the top at Yahoo! (exclamation mark obligatory), which says a lot about the company.
This will almost certainly blow over with a week or two. Remember when Flickr added video and there were mass protests?
Advertise much? I've been lurking HN since it was founded and never even heard of this. Shame I won't be in town that night. Would have loved to attend, and will try to make it to future events.
Weekdays are typically bad for me. Do you have any future events in KOP area or in weekends.
He was bluffing. ;)
They have to undercut all of them by doing it themselves. If big brands start publishing this stuff on their own sites, no one will bother with the other sites.
Oh, but it did work. It worked when it was actually practiced from the late 40s to the 70s when the US experiences the highest rates of economic growth in its history. During the 70s the US had about the highest average income levels in its history too (this was briefly matched during the Clinton administration but then incomes fell again).
The Bobby Tables guide to SQL injection
The dailygalaxy article makes it sound like this phenomenon is completely baffling to scientists - my first thought as I read it was "vitalism", they seemed to be saying that the sequence recognition just happens by magic. In fact, though, the original paper discusses at least two possible mechanisms.
Reminds me of the bit in Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance where he asks the Indian guy what sort of dog it is, and he says "its a good dog". Value judgment, not brand awareness.
If you're taking votes I'd love to see some OpenGL demos using something like the cl-opengl bindings.

I don't know the extent of your book, but navigating asset management has been a bit of a challenge. I know there's a few libraries out there but docs/examples are at a premium. I'm using cl-devil and looked at freeimage, also looking for 3d model importing and the like.
But you're already talking about two very fine guns. Just because you have to consider trade-offs at that level doesn't mean there's no qualitative scale at all, does it?
And when people discover new music as adults?
The sector may be anti-competitive but it certainly hasn't stifled innovation, at least not across the board. The province I live in is almost the size of Texas with about 1/24 of Texas' population. Yet we'll have 100% broadband penetration by 2011.
Murderers, however, aren't the people who demand, pay for, or influence the design and manufacture of new weapons. The people who do are involved in a professional capacity, so I'm not sure how laziness applies either.
Oh. It dropped my original comment.

This is a little something I whipped up last night. Wrapping it for the web took longer than the actual algo. Anyway, the algo is the questionable part. I think most glitches are fixed. For example http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma_dalai_lama_gray.jpg comes out properly.

Thanks for giving it a whirl!
Rocket Racing League X-Racer Test Flight [video]
My understanding is that Warren Buffett is a good stock investor and a great manager. If you look at his portfolio he likes to buy and hold companies. The CEOs of the companies that he buys unanimously say that they have learned a tremendous amount from him.

Therefore there is strong argument for saying that he makes winners rather than buying them. And the first big winner that he made was a textile company that he bought because he realized it was perfectly positioned to sell insurance instead. The name of that company is Berkshire-Hathaway.

Buffett has another key advantage. Many of his profitable deals are not publicly available. For example look at the Goldman Sachs deal he did last year. He bought $5 billion in preferred stock that pays a perpetual 10%/year, with a 5 year option for $5 billion in stock at $115/share. They then were able to talk up his investment as a "vote of confidence", and he threw his weight into TARP.

If we assume a 5% discount rate, he spent $5 billion for $10 billion in future earnings, with a 5 year option that is potentially worth a lot more than that. That is worthwhile even if he only thought they had a 30-40% chance of surviving. It isn't hard to come out smelling like roses when opportunities like that get offered to you.
The key is that sites have to add a meta tag for the chrome browser to be used instead. It is opt-in only. This means that all those corporate sites that require IE won't be affected, but a user can still get the upgraded experience for sites that desire it.
Let me try to respond more appropriately:

"Nothing you said about mortgages appears to be true".
Given how many small accidents occur in parking lots that just have 2d dimensions X and Y, adding the Z component seems like a bad idea. :)
If you are interested in data, here are some sites to get them from

http://theinfo.org/get/data

http://infochimps.org

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/kbcategory.js...

http://ckan.net

EDIT: Comprehensive list here
http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-...
Five Stars Dominate Ratings
Jep, the most impressive thing I have seen about this was when a coworker was able to squeeze the processing of (small) images into the CPU-cache only (and improving the steps used to get the image there). The speedup was a factor around 15.
What's your definition of large?
It is incorrect to conclude that Microsoft's lack of achievement in X implies (1) its lack of ambition for improving X, or (2) [as ancestor suggested] its determination to sabotage X.

Is it really so hard to imagine what life on the inside looks like?

Microsoft is a huge institution. There are hundreds of engineers working on IE. Their work is segmented and bucketed. Some poor engineer has probably spent the last several years doing nothing but maintaining the EOT font format. There are reorganizations, new decisions to realign the next release to meet the goals of other teams, etc. Every decision -- at any level -- requires buy-in from multiple parties with overlapping responsibility. There are, in short, too many cooks in the kitchen.

I'm not saying it isn't ridiculous. But this is how it is inside Microsoft.
Ummm... I'll stick to Flickr, thank you very much.
Great - one more signal to fake in interviews. If enough interviewers believe that this is a discriminating sign (because they read it in businessweek), we have no choice but to flash it.