skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Deflation means you can buy the same amount of goods (sustaining the same sized economy) with less money.

That less money means you have more surplus money to spend on luxuries. More people will have more disposable income, which likely would mean they buy more goods, and could sustain a larger economy... leading to economic growth.

Plus-- the goods you're buying are made by companies who are buying materials at a lower cost, and thus if they lower prices slower than the materials prices are going down due to inflation they have more margin.

Businesses as well will have more flexibility, the ones that are borderline now will last longer, might turn things around, etc.
I'm sorry, I don't follow. What do you mean by "growth" in this context? What is growing?

I don't think I need to enumerate the counterexamples here, as any long-lived extant species would suffice.
Smart Meters Kill Wifi, Not People
Don't let it slow you down. Think about things practically. If you didn't get accepted now, that only means you won't receive money from them for now. You can still always get in touch and ask questions and hopefully get answers. The most important part of YC is that you have an intense drive to get work done without being distracted. You have a [petrifying] sense of accountability and a demo day to get ready for. If you can set these up for yourself, then it could be just as good. The only thing missing would be to get in touch with partners who'd otherwise have more time to speak with you and meet you in person. Email your questions. You may get answers and you may even build meaningful relationships eventually.
I don't think a large number of architectural registers is necessary - look at what people have been able to do with the highly-constrained 6502 in the C64, for example. If anything, it's the compilers and compiler writers that need to be more intelligent about how they approach the problem, since humans have been better at writing Asm than compilers for... ever since compilers existed.

I think MIPS is a good example of how trying to make a "dumb and simple" architecture to cater to compiler writers, with the promise of cheap, tiny, and fast CPUs that required far less effort to design for the same performance, didn't work out so well:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-show...

On the 2nd page of that article are the interesting results, and there's also this odd sentence: "Loongson also struggles, possibly due to poor compiler optimization."

...but isn't MIPS supposed to be one of the most compiler-friendly ISAs, with a very orthogonal and large number of registers (32!), and a uniform instruction format? In many compiler courses it is the "model architecture" of choice for its easy code generation and "better performance", but in the real world its only real advantage seems to be being small and cheap - and ARM, which is a bit more complex, is not far from it but surpasses it easily in efficency.
Is it just me or does the application to YC feel like a pitch to an investor? I understand that for very specific cases they might be different in that they can see some early potential. However, if you're not one of those lucky few, then it feels like if you're at the point where you can convince YC to invest, you're already not too far from being able to convince an investor to invest. E.g. I've gotten the advice from multiple people at or affiliated with YC: "get users and show growth". But, for me specifically, if I had users and growth already, there is little more that the money that YC would help me raise can do. If I got into YC earlier, I would have hired people to help build the product which people want. Yes, there is a lot of work to grow post product, but in my case, money wouldnt really help that much (my case is desktop software, so I dont really need more server capacity or have scaling issues like other companies do).
Today is easier to get a beautiful template and customize it than building something ugly from scratch.
Just wanted to confirm that Orbital's mention of insurance does not help the customers at all. It is up to the various companies to insure their own payload.

Also, it might be fun to note that no one on that launch gets a refund. Generally you pay for something like 90% before the launch (in different milestones leading up to the launch) and only 10% after safe delivery to orbit.
Lots of people will give you money if they think you will turn it into more money. VCs, YC, techstars, rich people, angel investors, your parents, your dentist, etc. Having dealt with many varieties of these before, they all generally share those principles:

- You get a lot more 'no's than 'yes'es

- They don't give you a lot of feedback when they pass

- Having a previous relationship with them is helpful

- The more successful you are, the more they want to give you money

Unless you are starting a non-profit, this is just how it works. These people are investing, not donating to charity or your team's self-development. Get some traction and/or revenue and the game will flip around very quickly.
For those that do not understand why deflation is considered dangerous, let me describe it this way:

It is effectively like cash earning tax-free interest. And since it is cash, that "investment" is virtually risk-free because you'll always have the cash.

As a consequence, simply holding cash starts competing with the expected return of investing the cash in other ways, like real estate, government bonds, the stock market, or a startup. Relative to some traditional investments, you might maximize your effective risk-adjusted returns by doing nothing at all!

This sounds great (at least for people with cash) until you realize that this "investment" is one of the least productive investments possible. No infrastructure is built, no technologies invented, no products are created for customers. While people with cash might be nominally wealthier, there is greatly reduced investment of cash in things that improve the productivity and wealth of the entire economy.

Furthermore, real investment is how many jobs are created. Several million jobs in the United States are paid for with funds from speculative investments. If it no longer pays to make speculative investments on new technologies, new startups, or otherwise changing the world, what do you think happens to those jobs that are tacitly funded by that investment?

Mild inflation, for better or worse, incentivizes anyone with a bit of money to use that money to fund companies, infrastructure, technology, and jobs that may ultimately return higher value than the loss to inflation. Yes, if you sit on your cash in an inflationary economy, you slowly lose wealth. It incentivizes people to attempt to apply their assets toward productive ends.

Lastly, there is the question of what about people with little or no cash in an inflationary environment? On the surface, it looks like they get screwed. In practice, the productivity and technology advances created by the investment by people with money are often effectively neutral or deflationary. Not only are they more productive at their jobs, assuming they have one, but the costs of many goods decline thanks to the investment. This doesn't apply to all goods but it applies to many that almost everyone consumes. That said, if an economy inflates too fast it can quickly outstrip the earning potential of the people that operate in it. The flow of money through an economy has a significant viscosity and in extreme cases that causes much suffering.

In summary, the reason mildly inflationary economies are commonly preferred by most governments is that, on the balance, it optimizes incentives to maximize real investment which not only grows the economy in real terms but has quasi-deflationary effects for consumers as well. There are always tradeoffs but this is widely believed to have the "least bad" set of tradeoffs for a currency inflation/deflation policy.
Yeah, leverage is probably one of the best/worst concepts to ever happen. It's why an airline goes bankrupt every few years, and the primary reason why banking crises happen.

But leverage is also the thing that allows me to buy a house or a car on credit rather than outright with cash.

Leverage is kind-of like guns. I want me to have it because I'm responsible and can handle it appropriately. But I'm not sure that anyone else should be allowed to have it.

(I'm personally for arming people more rather than less, but it seems like it'll hit home for a lot of folks)
Or put another way, with inflation government can promise and raise funds for political programs that help win elections, that they would not be able to pass if they had to raise taxes (or cut other programs) to pay for.
You have to submit a team video.
Show HN: A basic generic multi layer perceptron
Consider what happens with significant deflation going on, say 3%. t is then impossible for real interest rates to be less than 3%. Then purchases get pushed into the future, and the economy grinds to a lower equilibrium, with lots of unemployment. Sound familiar?
Not sure that's a very good example to be honest. Why would you need to create an entirely new CSS file for this?

And adding a single comment line in addition to your style sheet isn't exactly going to break the bank.

What if your client comes back to you in a few weeks/months and says "I want another playback progress bar on another page"?
Njal's Saga was my favorite, so far. With others I've read (Canterbury Tales, Decameron, 1001 Nights) it was mainly the wow-this-is-pretty-different factor keeping me reading.
Dissapointed, got very positive feedback from an alum prior to applying. But alas, that was not enough. :) I do find that international founders are at a distinct disadvantage due to lack of networking opportunities (which definitely plays a big part when each application probably receives 5 minutes per reviewer). That said - you could argue that any great entrepreneur would not allow that to be a barrier hehe!

Best of luck to everyone who has an interview and those who don't.
Anyone who is worried about deflation in the US right now is a moron. We printed (we actually don't even bother printing it we just change numbers in a database) more money since 2008 than in the entire history of the country. The Fed owns over a quarter of the whole bond market. http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/11/25/the-fed...
The website you're describing already exists. In fact, you just posted on it.
It would be more like coming out with a sports car with a name ending in "ri", which is meaningless.

Also from the comments on that page:

>I am not a lawyer, but on the surface this case looks similar to one the Supreme Court just decided recently in which Victoria's Secret sued a sex-toy company called Victor's Secret for trademark infringement because of the soundalike name. Victoria lost---the Court held that you must present strong evidence of serious harm before you can sue for trademark infringement over a similar-sounding name.

I doubt there was any evidence of "serious harm", or that any of the players thought it was actually a Blizzard product. A big disclaimer saying "not associated with starcraft, bizzard, etc" should be more than enough to stop any confusion if it existed. But they didn't ask for that, they asked for them to take down the whole thing.
I made this choice and went with Affero GPL. This theoretically satisfies: (1) other devs building libre software, (2) non-tech-savvy customers who can still buy service, and (3) tech savvy entrepreneurs who want to limit lock-in and also need a compelling reason to spend money (limit licensing liabilities).

Some people are adamantly opposed to AGPL and prefer GPL or BSD. In my view, it's either because they fall into bucket 3 above or they simply prefer freedom to make software non-free. However, my outlook is that AGPL is the only actually free license and it also coincides with my business model (which involves essentially selling extra license rights or SaaS).
WhatsApp is/was an XMPP client in disguise. Facebook sits on top of different data at a different scale with a different problem definition.
I understand the position I think, we're balancing the Empire State building on the tip. You'll get plenty of folks suggesting that is why gold backed money was better. Heck, that is why we are FDIC insured up to $250k, that covers 99% of Americans right? Doesn't sound bad on the surface, but I've not been alive long enough to witness true chaos.
Exactly. The development of rocket software is a very precise business. Here's a Reddit AMA from the SpaceX software development team.http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap
Is there an argument for applying late (taking note of ~5k applications on last day or so)?
You can configure the number of hidden layers as well as their sizes.
What happens if a rejected company from this batch submits a late application. Does this paradox cause the universe to implode?

Haha - honestly though , is this acceptable?
Pretty fun site and a bit addicting. I just wish you had this for Javascript syntax... I would spend hours.
Casio SE-G1S ECR Single Roll Cash Register
Open Web Platform Milestone Achieved with HTML5 Recommendation
The limits in our world today (which can we break?)
Yes, I meant free in the sense that a certain basic level would be free OF CHARGE to everyone physically using it. Free basic level of food, water, education, medical care, internet, police, etc. There are good economic reasons for this.

Subsidized isn't exactly right because it sounds like the customer still has a copay. I mean wealth redistribution, but only to provide the basics for everyone.

One can probably achieve this by a basic income calculated in terms of the "minimal cost of living" in a certain area. If people want more than that, then they can start a company, pay taxes, go work etc. But those taxes would go towards ensuring the minimum.

In short I'm arguing for a very well-defined minarchist position that I can defend.
Upcycling Weapons of Conflict and Artifacts into Jewelry
This has nothing to do with health insurance. Google doesn't even sell health insurance. And if I understand correctly, health insurance companies aren't allowed to discriminate any more anyway.

Not that it's wrong though. Imagine if you said the same thing about fire insurance. That it was unfair that they were allowed to set higher premiums on wooden buildings. Or a better analogy, if the fire insurance companies wanted to come into the building and inspect the materials, foundation, the wiring, if the fire alarms worked, etc.
And what was inflation over that time period? Answer: less than 5%, with the target of 2% getting meet a great deal of the time.
If possible try to take a 10 / 50 / 1000 year perspective. Can you figure out what would matter to you in those cases? I'd guess it won't be the same things that you're worried about now...
Gotta love programmers and their abilities to solve awesome problems like this :)
Those logins are not hooked up while we are on the development server. We will open them up with the launch of our beta. The URL I sent will allow you to post recommendations for that specific trip. I'll post an update here once the beta launches.
There is a good chance that VR done right for mobile - Samsung Gear via Oculus being the first - will change the game.

I have played a bit with a very preliminary version of "Virtual Desktop" (1) and it is shockingly usable even at the current low res of Oculus

With a properly built out VR desktop that allows for multiple "monitors" or workspaces + mobile VR tech a few piterations out I think it's in the cards that our current Pc form factor dramatically changes or blends towards truly mobile hardware

(1) https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=8...
If I actually felt like engaging, I'd probably just buy the original donator a gift subscription to The Nation or something like that. I regard the actual organization as being much like Glen Beck - either a completely cynical huckster who doesn't actually believe any of the crap he spews, or someone so dissociated from reality that discussions are pointless. Either way, I'm not going to convince them of anything, and after an initial unsubscribe I just mark anything further as spam and be done with it.
This is an issue of decision making on what you should do with the information to get the best outcome. There is nothing inherently bad about collecting the data itself.
1) read this

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populat...

2) realize why populations "stabilize" ... (which for all species but humans and domesticated species means that the rate of die-off is equal to the rate of exponential growth. It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially).

There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.
but batteries?
If you are not a White or Asian male, don't even bother. Someone needs to start a fund for African Americans and women.
Your argument may have merit, but it oversimplifies an important point (in my opinion)

If money is "hidden under blankets" it is taken out of circulation. The value per unit currency still in circulation increases (due to lack of supply) and this will boost the purchasing power of the money remaining in circulation. For this reason the idea that "deflation causes a liquidity crisis" is a bit misleading- It causes a liquidity crises measured in "face value" but not in "purchasing power" of the currency. (Though some of your prognoses are probably still true but occur because of other, somewhat different mechanisms)
Why not just use jsx though? It's almost always easier.
When you're using ftp interactively, at the 'ftp>' prompt, you can optionally supply a local file name to the 'get' command,

get remote-file [local-file]

and that local-file can begin with a '|' to indicate that you want the remote file piped to a command, e.g.

get README |less

Apparently this handling of the interactive local file name was mistakenly applied to local files names derived from remote file names after an HTTP redirect from the command line.

(Incidentally the interactive modes of ftp and telnet, with their 'command>' prompts, are the last vestiges in unix of TENEX on the ARPANET.)
I get YC makes mistakes (as does everyone else) but I expected / wished / hoped that the response would be figuring out how to make fewer mistakes; maybe an improved process to reduce the risk of mistakes and not just a blog post throwing their hands in the air and wishing everyone that fell on the wrong side good luck. I think they owe that to their stakeholders, if not all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there. This makes it seem like they don't really care...
Attack of the Week: Unpicking PLAID
Interesting. I'm helping my sister with Differential Calculus this semester. I made her calculate the rate of change of Sin(x) between different sets of points for her to see that it can have different values if the "traditional" rate of change rule is applied. It's then easier to justify the derivative concept of "slope at every point".
CSV on the Web – Working Group
I take it you're not familiar with Windows Server...
Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.
That's a great theory, but what are the actual limits? Why not introduce throttling to everyone at once only at times of actual spikes instead of forcing me to sit through a week of having an essentially useless phone until the billing cycle goes through?

More importantly, why the hell are millions of people paying for something that they were promised but aren't getting?
> Mild inflation, for better or worse, incentivizes anyone with a bit of money to use that money to fund companies, infrastructure, technology, and jobs that may ultimately return higher value than the loss to inflation. Yes, if you sit on your cash in an inflationary economy, you slowly lose wealth. It incentivizes people to attempt to apply their assets toward productive ends.

One other point: inflation is actually beneficial to people who are in debt[0], as it reduces the real value of their debt. (In other words, the dollar that they use to pay off the debt a year from now is worth less than the dollar today, so inflation literally allows them to use less money[1] to pay off their debt).

Conversely, deflation is terrible for people who are in debt, as it effectively increases the amount of money they have to spend to pay off the debt (this is on top of the compounding interest; it is looking at the real value of the same nominal dollar amount).

So, one of the biggest dangers of deflation is that it harms people with negative net worth (people deeply in debt)[2].

[0] Assuming fixed interest rates

[1] In real terms, not nominal terms

[2] The people who 'win' in this particular context are the people who own that debt (ie, the bankers). But as jandrewrodgers pointed out, there are a number of other ways that deflation harms them as well, so deflation is really a lose-lose situation.
You make a good argument, but you forget one thing - app compatibility. There are two dominant platforms, and they're both based on ARM. "Competitive" processors won't be enough to make a difference - even clearly superior processors aren't going to be compelling.

Apple has shown a willingness to switch horses in the past, but now that they're designing their own chips I think we've seen the last of it.
Yeah it's a totally crazy concept. What you have to do is stop thinking about how many dollars a dollar will be worth, but think about the idea of purchasing power.

So if the interest rate is 0% and there is 10% deflation, in a year my $1 will buy 10% more stuff. If the interest rate is 10% and 0% inflation, again in one year my $1 will buy 10% more stuff.

If the interest rate is 0% and inflation is 10% then in 1 year my $1 will buy 10% less stuff. If the interest rate is -10% and inflation is 0% then in 1 year my $1 will buy 10% less stuff (provided that I don't take my cash out of the bank and hide it under my mattress/pillow/backyard/etc).

That's why inflation is so appealing for people trying to prop up the economy; it's very, very difficult to enforce a negative interest rate because nobody's FORCING you to keep your money in the bank. It's just that it's usually smarter to do so than not.

The problem with any kind of a negative real interest rate is that it punishes people for saving money. Saved money isn't just dollars in a bank account; it represents foregone consumption thus leaving extra, real resources available in the economy for people to invest into longer-term ventures. Those longer-term ventures typically involve capital equipment that will produce products which can be sold and thus both pay back the loan (with interest!) and produce a profit. This is how the economy grows. When people are punished for saving by having their purchasing power taken away, they tend to do it less. That leaves less resources for people to invest in new capital equipment, and that means we get less new products or prices which stay flat rather than fall slowly.

I personally like the idea of having a world where things slowly get better but there are very passionate arguments that people make for the short-term about unemployment and the like. I believe that while well-intentioned they ultimately delay the re-alignment of the economy to the new realities of the world and thus everyone suffers more unnecessarily. But of course there's no way to prove how this stuff works either way so at this point it's more speculation than anything.