skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People did things, no doubt about it. The wisdom of those things is another matter. The ERA was a protectionist measure that is today cited as worsening affairs. Reconstruction finance was a good idea, but started in 1932, after 2 years of financial disaster. Hoover's initial responses did not take aggressive action to shore up the money supply or failing banks.

Of course debates on the causes of the Great Depression are endless. Which is why I was careful to say that the Great Depression followed, but was not caused, by that action. However many prominent economists including Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke have concluded that the primary cause was the contraction in the money supply.

In their view the Federal Reserve did not act fast enough to counter the shrinking monetary supply or to prop up failing banks. The result was multiple rounds of bank panics, the closing of over 40% of all US banks within 4 years, and (after Roosevelt came in) the declaration of a national bank holiday, and an executive order forbidding private speculation in gold. The rapid loss of 1/3 of the money supply was both a cause and effect for the general economic disaster.

Whether or not you agree with this theory, understanding that Ben Bernanke believes it will help you understand why he took the actions he did last year.
Wasn't loading for me either. Went to the homepage of that domain and scrolled down til I found it. Article is 8 months old.
Look at the first graph (django vs rails)

Django the framework wasn't released until 2005. So if you assume the level of searches for "other django's" is consistent then about half of django's traffic isn't for the framework. You can almost tell when the framework was released by the upward trend in the graph.

Of course this is with a very rough visual analysis ;-P
See http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list for the latest version of Quicksilver. It works well with Snow Leopard alongside with its invaluable clipboard and shelf plug-ins. It's very fast (and looks great).

If alternatives are demanded, have a look at Butler, as well: http://manytricks.com/butler/ (freeware).
"Assuming what you are supposed to prove"?
Create great employees
I think the great majority of people wouldn't know real quality if you showed them an example side-by-side with the thing they know. I think we often use price queues to figure that out.

And I think people have different needs at different times. I listen almost entirely to MP3s and Internet radio, except when I go to the symphony. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube and Hulu, except when I go to the movies.

High quality isn't something everyone wants all the time.
I don't think the announcement of a new govt. office is something to be proud of in and of itself. But as a counterpoint to your argument, the SBIR program, also run by the govt. seems to be working really well for startups I personally know without political influence or corruption. I wouldn't say it's the most efficient funding source but it is definitely a net positive.
Yes- I render out graphics to SVG and graphviz and do stuff to interact with a web browser to display it.
I'd pay $1000 for one millionth of Twitter.

(Hmm, when I put it that way it sounds crazy.)
Vote on Google's Project 10 to the 100
My gmail account happens to be my first initial and last name. I get more mail addressed to other P. Welch's than I get addressed to me, but probably because I don't really use the account (I foolishly got it back when gmail accounts were considered a status symbol and used it for online file storage).
So, to open iTunes, all I type is ctrl-space, and then the letter I, and then enter. Since iTunes is my most used application starting with the letter I, it doesn't need much typing at all. Similarly, Aquamacs and Firefox are also just one letter away from being opened.

Or just make them triggers. That way you get a global key combo to launch stuff. I have Cmd+Shift+W to open my home folder in Finder. Cmd+Shift+S to open my Web browser. And so on. It works everywhere. I've switched from Quicksilver to Butler for doing this, but it's the same deal in both.
I tried to make it accessible to beginning programmers, but some advanced stuff is covered in this text and I it would have been hard to assume zero programming knowledge and cover everything. I think you'd need at least some programming experience in some other language in your past to feel comfortable with this book.
Not loading for me either... so not sure what it's really about. But if the headline is any indication, it seems like sort of a strange sentiment. Didn't TechStars Boston just have their first demo day recently? And isn't Venture Cafe set to open soon in Cambridge? And aren't there are a ton of successful (subjectivity alert) startups in the Boston-area (Compete, mZinga, Communispace, gamerDNA, HubSpot, Xconomy... just to name a few)?

From a semi-outsider perspective, the entrepreneurial community in Boston seems fairly healthy even without YC.
who are trevor and robert? :)
Nah, this is no worse than making IE skins for Firefox, which have existed for some time. The .NET Firefox plugin was significantly more invasive, since it was automatically installed without user consent. As long as this plugin is voluntary, there's nothing serious about it imo -- it's more a fun prank that people may have developed with or without Google's help.
I tried to make it readable for beginners, but I'm hesitant to say that it would be an easy book for someone who truly has _zero_ past programming experience.
Freeman Murray seems like a cool guy. iAccelerator doesn't seem to be bureaucratic like the other incubator type things I have seen in India. The best part is iAccelerator is also in my hometown of Ahmedabad. Go iAccelerator, I am rooting for you.
DailyBurn Announces FoodScanner, iPhone Diet-Tracking Software via Tim Ferriss
Loaded for me just fine at first, site now seems to be a bit slow :)

Anyway, the point he's trying to make is that it doesn't matter much where your start-up is based in today's day and age.
Perhaps there's still something to vitalism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Driesch#Experiments_in_emb...

Experiment showing that irregardless of sea-urchin embryo part grown, it still developed into a full sea-urchin. Hans Driersch thought this evidence of some kind of vitalism in nature.
They've built a many-core microprocessor and architecture specifically designed to run Java at scale. The article would have been better if they'd mentioned that or some details on what they did.

See here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806894 for some links to technical details and discussion.
See, I think the value in tests would be that they are reusable. If you're smart enough to write a test for a situation, then you're smart enough to code for that situation in the first place (and conversely if you miss an edge case in code, you're just as likely to miss an edge case in testing). If you're constantly rewriting your tests -- what's the gain?

Now certainly writing everything twice is actually a great way to catch errors. NASA does that with the shuttle. But I wouldn't argue that its faster.

I prefer to just liberally sprinkle my code with run-time assertions. We have a small defect rate even after pushing out massive structural changes to the application. The bugs that we do have tend to involve an unpredictable set of conditions that no automated test would ever be written to find.
How come there isn't a REST API? Java, JRuby, Jython. Ewwww. This isn't how outfits are doing things anymore...
The Art of the Referral - How to lose a win-win situation
Apparently the bank didn't want them to know about it. Pursuing the gmail-account owner is their way of dealing with the issue.
Regulating the internet: ICANN be independent
A few weekend events would be great...I have been to a grand total of one, because I have a day job(I suspect I am not the only one), and have to drive from NJ
Is anyone here applying? What are living expenses like in Bangalore? 5 lakh (500,000 Indian rupees or ~$10,000) is a lot of money, isn't it? It sounds like they have literally copied YC, forgetting the difference in living costs!
This is not necessary. Games prices factor in the value they bring to the first purchaser for their ability to resell it. Blocking reselling (whether by making it harder or flat out banning it) will result in either lowering the price the game can sell for, or, more realistically, lowering the number of games sold. Making reselling more expensive lowers the value of the game to the customer, and this won't be made up for in any other way. (If the used game purchasers were willing to pay full price, they already would be; they are demonstrating their price consciousness by not doing so.)

This plan won't result in raised profits for game makers; it will lower them.
Drat you, space power! I will make you PAAAAAAAAAAY!!
People did things, no doubt about it. The wisdom of those things is another matter.

Exactly my point. In the beginning of the great depression, they did things. They didn't try letting things stabilize on their own.
iStockPhoto

Acquired for $50MM by Getty Images. Projected revenue of $200MM this year.

No VC funding that I'm aware of.
Isn't bizspark setting a pretty big deadline? Free for three years, but hope you can pay multiple salaries in licensing fees before your time's up.
In fact, the Great Depression followed the beginnings of the first major attempt to actually "do something" about the bust portion of the boom-bust cycle that had been going on for a long time. It's arguable (and argued by Rothbard and some other economists) that government intervention greatly lengthened the Great Depression.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=840876
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841458
The used game market already gives the developers money, because a market for used goods increases the value of new goods. It comes into play whenever an item retains at least some of its value after being used by the primary consumer.

For example, take home prices. If there were no market for used homes (say there was some strange DRM on houses) very few of us would be willing to put down the huge sums of money required to buy a house, but we do because we know that we can recover a lot of that value later if necessary. Additionally, houses loose very little value over time and land rarely loses value, making it worth buying a $100k house even if $90k is just tied up as value that you can get back when you sell it.

Video games, now that we're beyond the days of cartridges, never actually degrade. There should be a perfect market for used games, though popularity and time take their tolls. I'm willing to copies of good year-old games for $30. If you buy a $60 game and then find me a year later it is almost like you only paid $30 making that other $30 more like an investment required to get the game earlier.

If developers continue to try to restrict games to single systems or other ways of limiting the amount of resale, that makes the game worth LESS to me, as I lose the ability to resell or loan out the game. A healthy used market actually incrases the first-sale market.

Perhaps someone else can provide a citation, as I'm unable to find a relevant link via Google.
Is the guy on the right wiping his nose on his shirt or sniffing his arm pit? Not to be picky but that immediately shot out at me when the page came up.

In any event, the world needs more of these.
37 Signals Valuation Tops $100 Billion After Bold VC Investment
Indeed, as long as actual fraud isn't involved. The only way to prop up failure is to punish success.
Nambu Gets Better and Shortener User Tracking is Undermined
Why is federal money--which is distributed based upon bureaucratic and political whims--better for investing in capital than private investment, which has incentives to invest as profitably as possible? Wouldn't it work just as well for the government to lower taxes (or to spend more on public goods, i.e. healthcare) and allow that money to do what it was going to do anyway, more efficiently?
Good read.

One glaring issue I see is that if you redistribute wealth and "give it to the poor, who will spend it on something useful, like food and clothing", then the next time they need money for useful things, where do you think they will look?

This logic assumes that the poor will take the money they need, then go forward continuing to look for employment as if they'd never been given a handout. This is not practical.
It is not a net positive because they tax successful parts of the economy and, through a political process, redistribute that money to favored businesses and connected insiders.

Anyway, the U.S. government already operates SBA ($28 billion) and SBIR ($2 billion) among other programs...

And those startups blessed by govt subsidy get an advantage over all other startups...these programs should properly be viewed as hostile to the HN community, because they disadvantage the majority of startups with higher taxes and an unlevel playing field.
"insecurity driven development" is probably a good alternate title for TDD, but instead of taking it at it's trollish face value it can generate a good analogy.

If you start walking down a dark alley - you start feeling insecure. You've got a few options from that point.

You can back out of the alley and hey, no more insecurity. A little embarrassing but you're feeling OK, you just have to go the long way round the block.

You can push on through the alley in the dark - something bad could happen or you could get through fine. You don't really know until you've popped out the other side.

Or you could carry a god-damned torch. Obviously when carrying a torch, you don't have it turned on all the time, just when you wander into darker areas where you're less sure of the environment. It lets you walk at full pace without stubbing your toe or getting mugged or whatever.

In more concrete terms: I'm a bit of a poor-weather TDDer (same with pair programming) If i start working on something that could be algorithmically challenging, cuts across multiple layers of our app, touches something scary (like our accounting code, because i don't want to lose any of our $$$), or am just plain stumped - I write a test. It fails. I make it pass. I write the next. I make it pass. I realise my code looks like ass, I refactor. The tests still pass.

I can give an actual example from this week. Our app is a large RoR app that serves multiple sites from the one codebase based on an internal DSL we have. We're in the final week of a must launch redesign (date was set because of a bunch of marketing, etc) and I get an urgent and large last minute change dropped on my desk (i'm sure you all know that feeling). I'll admit my first move wasn't to go TDD, I just went for the quick and hopeful move of quickly adding some code that looks like it should work to our DSL.

It didn't. So my very next move, knowing that I have a deadline I must hit with a risky technical change, was to start writing tests. If i hadn't, I'd have to be verifying my code works by checking around 3 different pages after a server restart which is both slow and 4 layers away from the changes. So it was faster in real time.

I'm not a big fan of TDD zealots, TDD is just another tool in the box. But TDD haters really get my goat. You're willfully shutting yourself out of a tool that can make your life easier, and help deliver code faster.
http://news.ycombinator.org/submitted?id=tihomir

totally mystified as to why you're submitting this kooky garbage.
Uh, what? I thought the draw of MTurk was that you could offer up several hundred $0.01-0.05 tasks, get a decent response for $10 or so. Unless SMS prices are significantly cheaper elsewhere in the world, this would cost the user $0.20 per job, so you would likely have to be paying some place in the realm of $0.30+ to get any real completion rate.
car insurance doesn't automagically make you accident-proof.

driving defensively is a better approach -- you probably will never need insurance. that's why insurance companies give discounts to those who took defensive-driving course.
Twitter to Raise $100 Million From Insight, T. Rowe Price, Other Investors
none of whom?

clearly there are some
Ah, it randomly loads them.

In that case, this one: http://iaccelerator.org/wp-content/themes/primepress/headers...
It'll be very interesting to see the kidn of start-ups that come out of this venture, even if its not useful to compare it against what Y Combinator has produced.
It's been 5 years. I think it's time to let it go.
John Maynard Keynes’ great insight was to see that all of this was nonsense. The job market is a very special market, because the people who get “bought” are also the people doing all the buying. After all, why is it that people are hired to farm wheat? It’s because, at the end of the day, other people want to buy it. But if lots of people are out of a job, they’re doing their best to save money, which means cutting back on purchases. And if they cut back on purchases, that means there are fewer people for business to sell to, which means businesses cut back on jobs.

Except this applies to all other markets too. If people can't sell stuff, they won't be able to buy stuff, and this effect can balloon in the same manner. Good luck with your economics, Aaron.
Unless of course you need to hire someone who doesn't telecommute 100% of the time.
0) no test is perfect
In http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html Paul Graham brings up the testimony at http://app.cypress.com/portal/server.pt?CommunityID=201&... for why another attempt by the Federal government to direct money towards high tech innovation was counterproductive. That testimony is as relevant today as it was in the early 90s.

I do not fully agree with that testimony, but I completely agree with the point that if taxing the private sector to raise money to fund startups only works if the public sector is better at predicting success than the private sector. And I think the public sector is worse at that.

How should this affect government policy? Let's take green energy for my example.

First I accept the proposition that basic research benefits from government funding. Why? Because commercialization timelines from are long, research benefits from sharing knowledge, and free sharing of knowledge causes economic benefits to accrue to different people than the ones who did the research. Therefore capitalistic incentives don't work so well. So I'm behind NSF grants into basic science.

Second I accept that carbon fuels have significant externalities and cause global warming. By all means have some kind of carbon tax, or a cap and trade system to make oil more expensive to use. Economic theory is solidly behind this method of making private companies properly account for externalities.

And that is where the government should stop. If the price of gas is high enough, consumers will demand that companies meet strict fuel standards. Additional fuel standards regulations are an admission that the incentives are wrong. If the economic returns are guaranteed to be there, then the free market will throw up solutions. Direct investment in green technologies is an admission that the economic incentives are not there for alternative energy, and breeds companies that are dependent on that direct investment.
He basically discovered multipotent stem cells. No magic in sight. Nothing related to long standing superstitons either.
And an even better way is to do both. You've created a completely false dichotomy.
Mellanox kicks off race to 40 Gigabit Ethernet
"I'm guessing the 8+ submissions of the 37 Signals/Twitter satire were killed due to fatigue."

interesting. I guess VCs don't like it when they're not needed?
this is kind of unfair. the lessons microsoft and the development community have learned from working on browsers were all things that the Chrome team gets for free. they also get to start from scratch, whereas the IE team has to work on an outdated codebase and provide lots of legacy support.
you should care less about security so that you have to hire matasano to care about it, right?
Why is that? There appears to be nothing resembling unanimous support for "founders visa" among entrepreneurs.
these great doers who shape the world don't seem to like unit testing. i'll follow them, at least because they are smarter than those bloggers.
Yet another misleading headline - it should be something like "Why google apps is not reliable" or such.

This headline reads like Google violated some privacy stuff...
Pretty sure I made the case for the opposite of that with this talk.

People who don't put security extremely high on their list of priorities don't tend to commission app penetration tests

You are, in fact, exactly the audience for this talk. I'd love to know more about what you didn't like about it.
Um, the title is missing an important "!" as in "!=".
This appears to have been corrected in either the site or Chrome itself since I last looked.
AlbumMixer is a pure itch-scratching app: I wanted album shuffle badly enough to pay Apple for dev program membership. Now I'm letting the market pay some of that back to me, if it wants to. I might never write another iPhone app, unless I happen to come up with a cool idea that's well-suited to the medium.

Getting back to 1.2, it won't be possible to differentiate the UI changes from the significant feature changes: the filters were the single feature that users of 1.0 requested, and I couldn't see shoehorning them into the single-view UI. I would expect the new feature to have a larger effect than the new UI, but I can't see a way to test that theory.
We're trying to build that perfect market for used games at http://www.dawdle.com. No, seriously, we have market orders and limit orders (we call them StandingOffers).

The best cite was an OMX report that $1 billion in U.S. new game purchases were funded through the proceeds received through used game sales.
They did things. But they did not immediately try to shore up failing banks or stabilize the money supply, which are both parts of the recipe that we use now.

On a related note, the full crisis only hit last year after the Fed decided to let a major financial firm fail.
37signals Valued at $100 Billion
To put it simply, direct investment plays a lot better with business owners' incentives than lowered taxation.

It's a false corollary to expect lowered taxation to immediately equal greater spending - especially in times of economic flux, that sort of government action mainly encourages /hoarding/ behavior, which isn't good for the economy's health.

On the other hand, direct investment in startups gives an immediate incentive to spend - spend and grow.

Spending more on public goods like health care helps - the money we'd save with a public option is obvious to anybody that isn't a far-right ideologue. But that's /saving/ wealth, not /creating/ wealth. When you finally snip away all the excesses and waste generated by the current model of health care coverage, you still need something to pay for the cost of the improved system itself.
They're trying to improve global welfare as much as possible, and this is what they come up with? Improved online banking? Seriously?

Ranking global priorities is a hard problem, but it's one that a lot of smart people have already put a lot of thought into. The Copenhagen Consensus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_consensus) has come up with what I think is a pretty good set of answers.

Here's one item that I'd add to the list, which Copenhagen didn't consider: autonomous vehicle research. Car accidents kill about 42,000 people per year in the US alone, and injure 2.9 million. Sufficiently advanced autonomous vehicles could prevent virtually all of these.

Then of course there are all the "Singularity" ideas: prevention of aging, Friendly AGI, consciousness uploading, and so forth, but most of these aren't going to be accelerated much just by throwing more money at them.