skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, it's a rather poor summary of Keynes. The author seems to be writing it in order to cheerlead government intervention, not because Keynes is particularly relevant to the current causes of the financial crisis. A great deal of ink has been spilled since Keynes on topics like the endogenous money supply and debt deflation. The author doesn't seem to show any awareness that there are both post-Keynesian and non-Keynesian insights that significantly complicate his neat little package.
Inane or not, you should be aware of the false analogy you've presented: rails is not obviously cyclical, as spring is.
"Ugh, why don't fat people just eat less?" and other inane comments
Thought you guys might like this. It's become popular (especially online) to think that cutting spending or eating is simply about willpower, when it's really more complex than that and involves motivation, social psychology, and many other outside factors. I've included links to several pieces of research.
I recently started using Django for a personal project. I wasn't really aware there was hype around it.

I remember when it was launched that it had some hype as it was touted as a Rails alternative, but earlier versions like 0.95 were awful anyway.

It's a cool framework though. I like the plugins available.
Some people did get caught in the cross-fire, but that's because they bought into variable rate mortgages, which are just stupid.

I don't have a variable rate on a credit card even though I never go into debt, so why would I want it on a $200,000 up-front debt?
While it's correct that a mortage note holder (bank, pension fund, etc) going bankrupt doesn't cause the folks on the other end of said note to lose their homes, renters can be forced out when the home owner defaults.
I wonder why Russia scores so high in those.
I've never thought we have any non-trivial number of rails activity.
Rejoice my fellow Twitter Whores!
Reminds me of the Human League song 'Being Boiled' about silkworm usage.

Good article!
It's a direct summary of Keynes' book _The General Theory_. Have you actually read it? Keynes has often been misconstrued by later writers.
I agree, they both seem to be great frameworks, I've used rails and love it, and I've planned a project to learn Django with as it's peaked my interest.

Why can't we all enjoy the differences and enjoy them for different reasons? Do we spread ourselves too thin when we bounce around learning the basics of different frameworks? Or are we simply stocking our utility belt with more solutions to problems?
My thoughts exactly, but I guess it did. The article linked to certainly makes it seem that way
JavaScript: jQuery Event Handling in FriendFeed
Depends how long a lens you're using. You'd need a pretty fast shutter speed at 600mm+.
SLRs use phase-detect actually, using separate AF sensors. Contrast-detect is used in compact cameras (non-SLRs) and optionally in live-view mode on some DSLRs.
"history repeats itself, try and you'll succeed. never doubt that you're the one and you can have your dreaaams. you're the best... around..."
Perl is pretty big language and build of not very orthogonal parts. I've read somewhere an interview with Larry Wall where he said he was not planning to make the language very clean and orthogonal from the start - but instead he wanted to watch the way people use the language and then cut off the unused parts (the actual analogy was with building pavements along the paths that people made in the grass instead of planning up front how they are going to commute). I think that cut off phase never came. After some 10 years of programming in Perl, there are still areas that I don't know really well - I just don't use them, and when reading other peoples code I still sometimes need to lookup something. I can see why this can be annoying. But eventually the size of the libraries that you need to memorize when programming is still much bigger than the language itself, so it does not matter that much.

My prediction is that other languages will not build their CPAN equivalents soon. It looks so easy to copy, especially if you believe you have a better language, but what people don't see is the complex network of things that enable CPAN existence. It's not just code repository it is a complex ecosystem.
I don't think so... it seems like the centers of gravity are just shifting around a bit. Look at github:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.djangop...
IMHO not many of these factors have changed. Which ones don't you agree with? Which ones you'd like to add?
Microsoft could have hired him or someone like him.
Huh? Lower interest rates are the result of an increased supply of capital -- by the government printing money.
Try adding "-Reinhardt" to filter some of the musician results out.
To the submitter:

1) Please don't editorialize. The original article doesn't say "Satan buys cardigan." anywhere.

2) Microsoft Press != Microsoft Software. MS Press is actually _top_ notch: few IT publishers are in its league, perhaps only third to Addison Wesley and O'Reilly (I said "IT"; for technical stuff you want Springer Verlag, Elsevier and CRC Press.)
Last time it came up people were complaining how they don't use it and hate it. This is not a debate, it's nagging.
Personally, he's done nothing wrong. It's public, openly available information that some people want.

If that information is tampered by the underlying company, then people will probably want less of it. If companies want to pay Seth to put up alongside that content, how is that bad or wrong? Isn't that just like having sponsored links alongside Google SERPs?

Has Google 'brandjacked' IBM if it allows sponsored links next to IBM related search lookups, especially if those links are to Dell's site? Thus if Godin has brandjacked, then Google definitely has. Also, Google spiders IBM's websites to get this information. The result: IBM can advertise next to Dell's SERPs and Microsoft and others can compete with Google.

Why get angry? It's just a freakin' mashup. It's not like he's letting competitors to cross-post on one another's listings.

If Godin starts to make money, then competitors will come.

His site is like Alltop - a commodity service, nothing special, but there's probably only enough room in the market for 1.

People who are angry or jealous, don't get mad, get even and compete, there's nothing so far unethical I've seen.

(edit: in fact if he really want to cause a stir, why not just let competitors trash each other on each other's pages? So far that's not possible, and props to him for not allowing it, I could easily see that happening in competitive markets.)
You and Sam_Odio are both correct, it is a semantic argument (and I do realize at the end of the day its all stock...)

I consider Buffet's traditional buy-and-hold strategy to be a different form of investing then those that tend to buy based solely on the expected performance of the stock price.
Oh let us all cry for those poor people that cheat on their taxes. It is very simple, the bank assumes that your income is what you put as your income on your tax return. If you cheated on your taxes and said you have no income then the bank will assume you have no income.
I believe you're thinking of Zawinski's Law.
People use "this begs the question" to mean "this begs [you to ask] the question", and while it's not historically correct accurate, it's modern usage.

People 100 years ago would have thought that Americans using "mad" to mean "angry" instead of "crazy" was equally reckless.
Not true on both accounts. They rank for over 125,000 keywords.

Source: http://spyfu.com/Domain.aspx?d=4637578045168633002
I think the author was thinking more about DRM. Fortunately non-DRM audio files are now selling on iTunes.
"The Dullest Company At DEMO"
you're missing the modifier which is they key to his sentence.
Anyone who's self-employed should be professional about it, set up an LLC or corporation of some sort, and pay themselves a salary out of the business' net earnings. You pay taxes on the salary, but the business gets a deduction for it, so that's no excuse not to do it this way. And complaining that you can't claim the income as a deductible business expense and available to spend on a mortgage at the same time is just whining: it's a cost of doing business or it's profit in your pocket; you can't have it both ways.

If this is too complex, and you want the simplicity of being a self-proprietor, then accept the consequences, including not having documented proof of steady income.
And the guys who wrote the Squirrelfish VM for safari weren't all famous VM researchers. From what I read, they just picked all the low hanging fruit in classic VM design and got great performance - better than IE8 for sure. Their code is even open source. MS could just read through the source and copy the design.
Microsoft has no lack of talented engineers, what they do lack is vision.
"How idiotic can you be?"

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
+1 for leaderboard!
Yes, which is what the parent said:

"all of the things you punted, ignored, assumed, patched over, and otherwise haphazardly threw together in version 1.0"
Not really very relevant. Anyone who knows what a benchmark is is already running something other than IE. And who would install a Chrome plugin for IE when they could just as easily use Chrome?
Well, the simple fact is that the above quote from the article is completely wrong.

The 80ies was one of the longest periods of sustained US GDP growth (and the 40ies&70ies weren’t that magical). During the 80ies the USA tacked on the equivalent of Germany’s GDP to itself.

This article is poorly written and a waste of time. I suspect that the author’s motivations for it are more political than it is economical.
http://www.blogmybrain.com/stock_apps/graphical_economy/NIPA...

http://investintaiwan.nat.gov.tw/en/env/stats/gdp_growth.htm...
Remember, this is just one guy's melodramatic opinion. He seems to complain TOO MUCH. He complains about the debugger and I've had no problems with it. He complains how OS upgrades on the Mac and iPhone have caused him problems and I've had no problems. Then there are the many reader comments that state opposite experiences to his. And then he suggests developing on Android which, I've heard, sounds like a nightmare to develop for according to another blog ;). Add to that how zealous he is to respond to each little criticism and I think he's hysterical.

Yeah, I've had my problems writing my iPhone application but it's getting easier and I'm in a much better place after only two months than if I'd read his blog and given up iPhone development before I even tried.
The bank is being unreasonable by pursuing this at all.

Whatever the outcome, they should contact the people with the accounts involved and start changing details, and should update their data handling practises.

Even in the best case that Google logs prove the user did not open the email, it's still been through who knows what unsecured SMTP servers and is who knows where in Google's replication and backup systems and available to an unknown number of system and mail administrators.

What do they hope to gain?
You do yourself a grave disservice if you discard information out of hand simply because it isn't new or part of the latest fad.

Yes. Technology changes quickly, it is true but the principles of communication do not because humans and human wiring don't change nearly as fast as technology does. Newer =/= better.
It seems you are suggesting that the best solution to a stalled economy is not to have government stimulation, but to let it "stabilise of its own accord". Has this been tried? Any examples? For some reason I thought that there was a general consensus that the government needed to prop up banks and stimulate the economy.

edit: Honest question, btw.
This is called event delegation, they are probably using jQuery's .live() method.
When has it failed? Keynes has not really been followed since Reagan. It is the neoclassists and the neoconservatives that are failing now.
Wow, this discussion is way deeper than we have ever gotten into at AggData. In fact, "frig", I think we may need to hire you. :) We have been very particular in the type of data we collect for some of these very reasons, and we feel that the location data was enough in the public domain to protect us from infringement allegations. We don't currently have much in place to pursue those trying to resell our data, and it hasn't really been a problem yet. I think, like mentioned, it doesn't make much economical sense.

A couple of other quick responses: yes, we know our search is kind of lacking now, and we're working to fix it. Also, we have major plans of offering bulk data and specific regional data; we're currently just working on expanding our library, though.

Thank you, everyone, for your insight!
-Chris Hathaway, AggData LLC

(and seriously, frig, send us a message on our contact page, I have more questions for you)
Linux Family Tree
Ah, I hadn't realized that the individual website had control over whether Chrome Frame was used or not... That is a terrible idea. If the user elects to install Chrome Frame it should render every page except for exceptions set at the user's discretion.

I absolutely agree. Letting the website choose is just adding attack vectors.
Do you mean that his theories caused this downturn, or that the government stimulus is a mistaken way to recover from it? Or both?
Please read this for some basic understanding my dear non-"idiotic" friend:

"The root cause for the current crisis seems to be the excessive use of leverage.

To take an example, a company with a net worth of US$ 25 billion borrowed 26 times its net worth and creates leveraged funds of US$ 650 billion to invest or lend them. When a small portion of the company's investments turns bad, as is the norm for the industry, the company's capital is under threat. To put things in perspective a 3.8 percent misjudgment in their books was enough to wipe out their shareholders' capital of $ US 25 billion."

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/Financial-Times...
LPI - Linear partial information
Best practice as I understand it is to use emails that have the TLD "invalid", or one of a couple of others that have been explicitly set aside as "never will be issued" by RFCs. They also have the advantage of looking very out-of-place, where @test.com may slip by.
Semi-Dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839231
Uncle Bob seems to be confusing spirit with conclusion. JWZ and Joel are arguing against "[using complex technologies] for their benefits", where simpler tech would suffice. When you're designing a browser, C++ and multithreading do have benefits, but "Duct Tape Programmers" would argue that they aren't worth the design overhead when you're facing a tight deadline.

Same with COM, unit tests, design patterns, etc. Obviously, Joel doesn't believe these have no benefits and that they're only used because they're cool. He doesn't endorse them because he doesn't believe they are worth it.

It's fine if you disagree with the duct tape mindset, but don't construct strawmen to show "we all really agree".
Okay, the "comet" bit, I can see that--why conflate those?

To clarify--we're going to build a comet framework _on_ diesel, but diesel itself is more of a general async I/O system with cluster messaging features. We intend it to be applicable for building arbitrary networked application using similar patterns to what you'd do in erlang--message passing.

We just _happen_ to be focusing on building a comet framework first and foremost on it. That will probably be called "dieselweb".

So, the "comet server" portion of our framework may not, in fact, utilize any of this message-broker stuff. But other components might. We're actually going to try to build something fairly unique here, but I don't have all the details ready to put out there yet.
If Linux Were a Song
Breaking Through JVM Memory Limits
The composer tells me he wrote it in 1999.
Exactly ... when I'm searching for an aswer re:RoR, I don't think I've every included "Ruby on Rails" in my query.
So what did he do with the 18k? Buy ice cream? You probably mean that he didn't finance the whole house with this money but this does not mean that you can't do it.
2009 Nominees - Science - Thomson Reuters
That doesn't follow. The supposed blackmail value of anything a site like this might publish diminishes the more sites try to publish it. A site will have to actually add value instead of selling the illusion that you can truly control what is said about you online. Whether Squidoo/Brands In Public is adding value now is debatable, but time will tell.
Maybe users who must use IE because of the policies of their company?
The iPhone certainly has the highest number of quality third party apps. That the App Store is flooded with absolute crap does not change this.
But don't you have to add/remove/edit your comprehensive unit tests after you refactor? Refactoring would have have to include this work needed to keep your unit tests comprehensive.
> If you travel to socialist countries, you will observe this in effect.

That is so true. There are countries in which government jobs are the most prized jobs (high salary, flexible working hours and extremely high job security).

This for me at least is a sad phenomenon.
Hmm... 7f inc?

"Park" is clever: nice use of the technology at hand.
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=django+-restaurant+-Reinha...

That looks more realistic, but there's still a significant amount of noise pre-2005, which is when Django was released according to Wikipedia.

If you mentally subtract the fairly steady amount of traffic pre-2005, you'd have a pretty accurate estimate I would guess.
Misleading yes but a valid point still. Microsoft could use WebKit in IE but instead their deep hatred and mistrust of open source software is standing in the way of providing their customers a better product.
I don't think this is flexing a lot of muscle, though I could be wrong of course. The VM was written by one very talented, experienced guy and his assistant. Let's say it cost $200k. The plugin probably cost a trivial amount (there is for example an open-source IE plugin for Firefox that is pretty small sourcecode-wise: http://ietab.mozdev.org/). So all in all a small bet with a large potential upside.
The majority of these packages link against non-system libraries, and the ones that don't are there to be linked against by other packages.

OS X is unique among modern unixes in that absolutely nobody distributes app bundles that have external dependencies on non-system libraries (except for a few that are too freetarded to bundle ffmpeg).
Does anybody know the kind of timeframes Twitter is looking at before they are expected to make some money?

By my estimate (based on absolutely no knowledge or skill) it would seem that they're looking to do something in 3-5 years or so.
Don't Put All "Emails" In One Basket
Gmail and Google Apps users are realizing that you shouldn't put all your "emails" in one basket today. The logic of diversification has been applied to many circles of life, but it is now proving to be good advice in communications, especially email.
Good article, but a bit dismissive of the claim in the Wired article that things like MP3 are preventing people from discovering "real" quality.
Sounds like an excellent approach. Thank you!
I can find no link or detail or reference to what exactly is the CRTC's decision.

From a few mentions in the text, I suspect it is related to making broadband internet access an essential service that should be available to all canadians. Right now, many not so remote communities don't have broadband internet access and the situation is stagnating.
"And what about sitemap.xml, atom.xml, and other typical files that could also be redirected?"

Why not try it? As of this writing, both of those go to other places.

I checked the other one that lept to mind, favicon.ico. Bit.ly appears to have hardcoded it (probably in apache configuration or equivalent for whatever server they use), however, try http://bit.ly/faviconico and look at the resulting URL. Looks like a few things were tried by the same guy. Now, pwning the favicon would have been cool.
Yeah, Joel is definitely, definitely wrong about unit tests. Not in the TDD/BDD/Agile koolaid kind of way, but in terms of ancillary tools, automated testing in general could only be second to version control for what it does to long term productivity.

the dangerous path you get on is "always shipping" without paying attention to what maintenance means

The Joel article glosses over this too much. Why? Because this is what the unwashed masses of programmer wannabes attempt to do all day every day. You know these people, the ones that just have no business being programmers. In other industries there are standards, credentials and transparent performance evaluations that prevent people like this from even getting hired. Yet in the programming industry they make up a disturbing percentage of the work force. That's one extreme--the most common one.

Joel is more focused on the architecture astronauts who need code to be a little too elegant. I know first hand that these kinds of people can really damage your ability to ship a product if given too much control, but I think it's wrong to draw a distinction and favor a "duct-tape programmer". First, because most of these people probably have the capacity to ship amazing stuff with a little guidance and the occasional reality check from more "duct-tapey" colleagues. Second, because these guys push forward the state of the art. They often see the big architecture picture in a way that others don't. They may waste a lot of time by short-term metrics, but their work is the only kind that eventually leads to long-term dividends. Occasionally some of them may be so obsessive compulsive that they just can't be forced to ship. Fine, they should go get Ph.Ds and do great things in academia, but they're still infinitely more valuable than the people who don't even really grok programming.
I think the problem with Joel's post is that you have to read between the lines to understand what he's advocating. He knows that a strong voice makes for a more compelling blog, but that caused his message of balance and tradeoffs to get muddled. As a programmer who can engineer to a fault, I found Uncle Bob's post much more useful.
"Inspecting the stimulus money for waste is so ridiculous — waste is perfectly fine, the important thing is to get the money into circulation so that the economy can get back on track."

The implicit goal of inspecting for waste is to reduce moral hazard. Repeatedly, all over the world, we see that corruption and a lack of trust in government can have significant negative effects, including both high rates of tax delinquency and divestment from domestic assets.
Give this a better title.

Forgotten languages learned as a child, are not really forgotten.
This reminds me of the infamous comparisons between the M16 and the AK47 assault rifles. The M16 is a superior weapon by almost every standard - it's crafted out of lighter, aeronautical materials, it has a beautiful, elegant design, it's far more precise and has far less recoil.

Except nobody cares. What people want is to pull their weapon out of a muddy hole after it's been there for a week, and have it reliably shoot thirty rounds.
I think the article explains it just fine. Nothing wrong with expressing agreement with 3 words.
37Signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold vc investment