skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's where the "leverage" comes in. The exact mechanism is a little confusing to me, but I think it works like this:

Say you have $100. You can invest that $100 at 2% interest and earn $2. You end up with $102.

Leverage is complicated, and I'm not totally sure I understand how it work, but basically it allows you to amplify your money.

Instead of just investing $100, you take out a loan of $10,000 at 1% interest: you know you'll have to pay back $10,100, but you've already got that much. Now you've take that $10,100 and invest it at 2%, and you get $202 interest -- you now have $10,302. You pay back the $10,100 you owe, and you end up with $202, having earned 100x more than if you'd just invested without leverage.
The Anti-For Campaign
Firstly, you're a factor 10 off: 10.8B is 2% of 540 billion. Secondly, 3% already reduces that to 360 billion. Thirdly, you missed the important word 'leverage' in the article.
without this process the gov wouldn't be able to fund itself

How exactly does one fund itself by lending money that is then used to buy bonds? The net result is 0 for the government. If they have money to lend, they would be better off just using that money in the first place.
Well out of date or not, for someone like me who's learning the sysadmin ropes and will be sitting for interviews very soon, this is extremely helpful.
And sure, I know the xenophobes are going to cheer my findings. They believe that foreign workers take American jobs away. But a growing body of evidence indicates that skilled foreign immigrants create jobs for Americans and boost our national competitiveness.

That's a bit of bait-and-switch. The concern shared by 86% of Americans is over illegal immigrants that take low-skill jobs away from Americans (particularly black Americans in the cities, where this is a huge and underreported issue), commit crimes at a disproportionate rate, and consume social services to the point that a number of US hospitals have had to close down due to non-paying illegals.

In the third sentence it's suddenly about "skilled" legal foreign workers, which is rarely the focus of the "xenophobes" (nice ad hominem!) These are two entirely different issues.

I should add that I'm married to a Chinese woman with an MD and an MS degree. Whenever I've raised the issue of living in China she stomps it down right quick. OTOH, her best friend's son when back after getting his degree b/c of the opportunities and he's doing great.
i am wondering why apple has a browser monopoly on his mobile os and microsoft can't?
I do not think this is a "puff piece." I think there is a legitimate concern here that falls - aside from phishing scams and obvious privacy implications - into the province of:

* Crooked cops and unscrupulous prosecutors - 1
* Defendant - 0

If even SMS messages can be recovered despite having been deleted, that's a lot of forensic trail nobody should have. Law enforcement investigating a person who is not currently accused of a crime and for whom an arrest warrant is not issued should be entitled to examine communications occurring from the moment they are granted (by a court order) a tap request and it is implemented, NOT communications having occurred prior to that point.

This dangerously changes the balance of power.
What is the number and distribution of the regular programmers in the world?
I'm not really in favor of SEO in that it seems to be a zero-sum proposition (if ten companies hire ten SEO "experts" to get the number one position... nine of them aren't going to get what they wanted). Also, it's not about building new stuff, creating new wealth, but more about (in the non-evil cases) repackaging something that already exists. That's not really my cup of tea.
Crazy
I had to come to this web site....ll....just returned home from a night at the casino with friends..and this stupid ass commercial was on my tv for this website.that chic in the commercial that "started up" the company is ugly as shit..and so are just all the models in your commercial....it is so cheesy...if you have any "real"male members i would be suprised.
Hi,

I'm the author of that article.

I'm studying Computer Science Engineering in Paris and also working at Netvibes.com as web developer.

I can assure you I just need one TextMate window most of the time, for web or system development.

Pretty sure everybody has a different use of virtual space and windows arrangement, I juste wanted to share some tips that worked very well for me.
> I can't take this sort of writing seriously in an article like this.

I flagged it - it doesn't seem very germane to hacker news, and comments like the one you cite seem to set people off in directions that meander ever further away from the topic. And that includes 'intellectual curiosity' as part of the topic; mine certainly isn't satisfied by politicized ranting.
this is probably trivial economics but it always eluded me:

when the govt is giving out amount X money, and wants amount X + INTERESTX back. how can that work? where should INTERESTX come from when they only gave us X?
This is the geek's way of looking at the world, where we are God Lord and Master of all bits on our computer.

The average user is not. They do not understand that the browser and the operating system are separate. For that matter, they don't understand that the browser is not the Internet or Google.

(If you've ever done technical support for a web application with non-technical end users you end up answering many, many fun questions such as "I signed up for your website at home -- can I also use it at school? My email address there is different.")

Asking users to make complex install/update/etc decisions is asking users to fail. They should be presented with sensible defaults and a minimum of fuss. Windows Update is quite sensible: "This comes turned on. Turn it off only if you understand what you're doing. As long as you keep it on, we'll keep you mostly covered." Installing ActiveX, Java, Adobe PDF Reader, and Flash by default is also very sensible, because otherwise many users will have "The Internet is broken!" experiences.
I'd agree that it starts out as rather polemic, but if you start reading from "The roots of short-selling date back to 1973...", it's quite an informative article.

It's also amazing that we have to turn to Rolling Stone for this kind of investigative reporting. Where is the rest of the Fourth Estate?
I would recommend hosted crawling/scrapping solutions where you don't need to dedicate your own hardware resources. Also monitoring and maintaining the scrappers/harvesters can be a pain.
Shameless Plug: I work @ beevolve (www.beevolve.com) and we provide hosted crawling and scrapping solutions. PM me if you are interested.
Not until they fix their default vim configuration.
Arrows, pgup/pgdown, home/end should work out of box in both modes.
Hacking Prowl and Irssi
There is Azul Systems, that produces massive servers for Java applications.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_Systems

I don't know how successful they are economically though.
I mainly use Fedora because their community is targeted at contributors rather than users. I switched to Fedora so I could contribute to their infrastructure team and get to play with all their webapps. In Fedora you can become anything you want. You can play with all of the servers, the build servers, updates, wiki, blogs, planet etc. given you've proven yourself.

I've recently begun contributing packages as well. The processes are a lot more complex than Arch for example, but it's all very documented and sane once you get over the steep learning curve. Packages get through a lot more filters before they get accepted and there's also the "send all patches upstream" mantra which makes Fedora special because we are contributing to other distros as well this way :)
Why would you need a tiny bittorent image when the first it would download would cover the fattest image, ten to one?

Come on, bittorent is for flacs and movies.
I'm not talking about tehnical aspects here. Firefox had no known security holes before the update. They clearly modified it in some way. How they did it is irrelevant. They should be liable, whether they modified FF direcly or indirectly via plugins etc. What they did fits the definition of malware to the letter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware

(Oh, and for the record, I'm not a anti-MS zealot, it's just kinda scary to think about the power MS has, to push updates to HUNDERDS of millions of PC. I think with that power should also come great responsability)
Windows 7 unfortuantely, I'd be using Arch if they didn't put a crap Broadcom and ATI cards in my laptop.
> So the naked shorts make Company B look less attractive which drives the price down further

It's not even a matter of attractiveness (although false rumors would definitely fall in that category).

If you have more people trying to buy a stock than those willing to sell (at the current price), the price will rise until more people are willing to sell or fewer people are willing to buy.

Likewise, if more people are looking to sell (at the current price) than to buy, the price will go down until people are either no longer willing to sell, or more people want to buy.

Naked shorting creates excess supply. You suddenly have A LOT more 'shares' being sold, without a corresponding increase in buyers.

As such, the share price declines. Couple this with nasty rumors, and the declining share price doesn't entice any new buyers (which is normally the case when something gets cheap). As the price caves further, and the rumors persist, existing owners start to worry, and decide to get out before it gets worse. Now the downward spiral is in full force. Everyone wants off the sinking ship.
That depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're competing for #1 on [credit cards], yep, its a zero-sum game and most people will lose. SEO is about so much more than just winning on one term, though. (Do we say marketing is a zero-sum game because There Can Be Only One, e.g., pizza shop for any given delivery?)

Concrete examples:

1) Over 25% of searches are globally unique, and the results for these are often suboptimal. (Google has a very good handle on what [credit cards] there are, but does not necessarily know a [good class activity for Halloween].) Proper SEO for your site to target those things is mostly just about getting links and writing your onpage content better, and creates value for the searcher.

2) Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.

This was the #1 page for [biology bingo] three years ago:

http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/blankbingo.html

(Its a blank bingo template which says "biology" on it. Yaaaay.)

This is the #1 page for [biology bingo] for most searchers now:

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/biology

There are 43 activities there created by a teacher to mesh well with common lesson plans (people really like the Parts of A Cell one for whatever reason), and an option to tweak any of them to exactly what you need for your lesson. Those 43 activities have helped teach well in excess of 80,000 students. And they all exist because I saw SEO value in creating new stuff.
You should've noticed three things before writing it:
1) His background is C++/Embedded.
2) He does that successfully for a living.
3) He really knows what he's talking about.

This leads me to a conclusion: Maybe the subject of your last phrase is YOU?
> 2) Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.

Could be, but are "SEO experts" actually doing the content creation?

You should not be paying someone more than 5$ an hour to tell you to "create good stuff". Like the article says, most of this isn't hard to figure out. Did you have to hire an SEO expert to get your biology page built?

Also, marketing is about much more than just 'selling stuff'. It's about identifying potential customers, understanding their needs, and shaping the direction of development to meet those needs.
Verizon Droid Is The Real Deal
Notes from lessconf
Bill Hicks on Marketing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
I didn't really agree with the article. I saw his experience, but to me it doesn't look that minimal - just his way of doing things. His way of doing things works for him. Is using a site that just shows the youtube video in question minimal? Would using darkroom instead of textmate be more minimal? Would using a 386 instead of a Mac be more minimal? Would using vi be more minimal?

I'm not having a pop at the guy, he's made a choice and it works for him. From where I sit (typing this on Vista/Firefox but also using Arch/Awesome elsewhere) it seems some of his choices (to me at least) seem a bit more ocd than minimal.

But I'm glad he has something that works for him and it's always good to see other people's setups.
That's not anti-ms. That's just good security.
I'd like to know when something is messing with my browser executable.
Absolutely, I was under the impression that they had for the first time.

Also, were they really making enough money in 2005 for it to be described as 'gazillions'?
"How about bonds? "Naked short-selling of stocks is nothing compared to what goes on in the bond market," says Trimbath, the former DTC staffer. Indeed, the practice of selling bonds without delivering them is so rampant it has even infected the market for U.S. Treasury notes. That's right — Wall Street has actually been brazen enough to counterfeit the debt of the United States government right under the eyes of regulators, in the middle of a historic series of government bailouts! In fact, the amount of failed trades in Treasury bonds — the equivalent of "phantom" stocks — has doubled since 2007. In a single week last July, some $250 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds were sold and not delivered."

That passage is a little alarming. A run on US government debt could be triggered by American financial firms themselves.
obligatory "Software Transactional Memory: Why Is It Only a Research Toy?" link: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1454466.
I've been using Linux for longer than I care to remember (and 386BSD before that) and after a few years on Ubuntu I was amazed at how much of a breath of fresh air Arch is.

Ubuntu always worked well compared to other distros, I could do stuff and it'd just work or there'd be plenty of help and support. I put Arch on an old P3 850 with 256mb of RAM and it just flies. I can be logged into my desktop from cold boot in the time it takes for my dual core Vista laptop to go from login to desktop. That (and discovering awesome wm) are the reasons that Arch gets my vote. Yes there's a learning curve as with any new distro or program but it's definitely worthwhile.
Open source collaboration done right
Hedging is one use of derivatives that is not gambling.
I agree, for the most part, but as a hacker, and putting out products, I don't have the time to optimize every query.. my only goal is to put something out, see how people like it, and figure out where to go next. To overlook the time benefits of going with an orm in the beginning would be foolish.
I did not hire an SEO expert for the same reason I did not hire a programmer.

(More broadly I think that most people should not hire "SEO experts" because any one you are able to afford is less competent than you need, but that is another discussion altogether.)

There are many people around these parts who think SEO is useless, dirty, dirty-and-useless, or totally obvious. Those people could benefit enormously from broadening their perspectives a little bit.

For example: I have over 700 bingo activities. I suppose they could have been posted chronologically, like a blog, or alphabetically, like a directory. They aren't -- they're "siloed" into categories, with each category being thematically coherent, and category pages linking to related activities and activities linking to related categories. That is sort of the tip of the information architecture iceberg for my site. It has clear usability and SEO benefits. (If you're looking at Parts of a Cell bingo right now, you're rather more likely to be interested in other Biology bingo activities than Japanese culture bingo.) You might think this is obvious, and indeed, it is that special kind of obvious that no one in my niche bothers to do.

There is also an algorithm for promotion of popular content. (If you took a quick gander around my site right now, you'd notice nearly every page links to a Halloween bingo activity. That is not an accident.) Does "build good stuff" imply to you "You should probably make the link graph on your website dynamically change in response to market conditions and analytics data, because that will maximize conversions and also deliver great SEO benefits"? No, thats just solid SEO -- a bit of marketing, a bit of usability, a bit of tech, and a bit understanding how to play an important game whose umpire makes unquestionable calls according to a rulebook only they can read.
> Honestly I think every major institution should have a public-option competitor.

This was a common line of thinking from 1930 to 1980 or so, and lots of world governments had public run businesses. England is a great example actually - the English government owned a lot of business that got preferential treatment in the UK. Under Thatcher, most English government businesses were sold off and most public housing was sold to its current tenants. Here's a short list of some of the businesses that were sold off, you can click on each individual business to see how they fared and the changes to industry afterwards. Generally speaking, it was a very positive thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher#Second_govern...

--

"British Petroleum was privatised in stages in October 1979, September 1983 and November 1987; British Aerospace in January 1981 and 1985; the government share in British Sugar in July 1981; Cable and Wireless in November 1981; Amersham International and National Freight Corporation in February 1982; Britoil in November 1982 and August 1985; Associated British Ports in February 1983; Jaguar in July 1984; British Telecom in November 1984; the National Bus Company in October 1986; British Gas in December 1986; British Airways in February 1987; the Royal Ordnance in April 1987; Rolls-Royce in May 1987; the British Airports Authority in July 1987; the Rover Group in August 1988; British Steel in December 1988; the Regional Water Authorities in November 1989; Girobank in July 1990; and the National Grid in December 1990."

--

On a personal note, I'm an American, and the worse service I've ever experienced have been at the hands of U.S. government run institutions: The various state-run DMVs, TSA, Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Post Office.

About the Post Office, by the way: I was frequently traveling 3-10 days at a time for work, and my mailbox would get completely full and my mail would get wrinkled and ripped and crushed. I ran into my postman one afternoon, and asked him, "Hey there - if I leave a note on my mailbox, can you stop delivering the bulk mail/junk mail? I don't want it, and my mail is getting ripped up and crushed from my stuffed mailbox." He said that the Post Office is paid to deliver the mail, and I have no say in what gets delivered. But, I could request the Post Office hold my mail and pick it up when I get done traveling.

Now, can you think of any private business that runs like that? Could you imagine the outrage if FedEx dropped off junk samples at your door without your permission and refused to stop? Look at how outraged we get at email spam - but you're both legally required to have a mailbox, and can't tell the Post Office to stop spamming you. This is what happens when a business can't go out of business - they hold no respect for their customers. I mean, how much nicer, more efficient, and pleasant would the DMV instantly become if they had a competitor for licensing and registering cars?
I am in the market for such an application and my budget is up to $150 per month but I find the 'action based' pricing model a huge turn-off. If I am paying $50 upward, I want to be able to automate tests freely and run them nightly without ever thinking how many 'actions' I have left.

The UI is decent, it lacks support for pages that require authentication from what I can see, and I couldn't find any features for running tests regularly (e.g. nightly).

I find it hard to imagine that anyone would sign-up and pay that much money to be limited by an 'actions' meter and for an application that is not mature by any means.

If you adjust the pricing and address some features it could be a good application though.
> I think it could be done easily in Haskell, or Erlang, or Common Lisp, or even Java.

Real life example needed. I hear a lot about what could be done in those languages, but in the end, the programs that get the work done are written in C or C++.
there are much better places for you to be looking on the internet late at night when you want to find a real man.
Does anyone know how PostgreSQL's built-in full-text index compare with Sphinx and Lucene?
If ten companies bid for the no. 1 position in sponsored search or advertising of most kind, nine will be disappointed. If ten washing powder companies advertise, they are probably not going to sell much more powder between them, they are just fighting to divide the pie. Similar could be said about much if not most economic activity. Along the way, value gets created.
Everything you are pointing out as "SEO" seems to either not really be the same thing the "SEO experts" are selling or actually is nearly "totally obvious" to anyone in the web business. I think the only thing I've ever really seen that struck me as "real work that is non obvious" connected with SEO was A/B testing.

Once again, trotting out Halloween specials in October is not something you need to hire an SEO expert for.

> unquestionable calls according to a rulebook only they can read.

That's something else that bugs me about the whole "SEO expert" business. They're on the same playing field as you are, and since Google changes and adapts as well, "years of experience" don't really count for a lot.

No one is questioning the value of paying some attention to this stuff - you ignore it at your own peril if you operate on the web. What people find dubious are the "SEO experts" who sell that and only that. If someone's a good web developer, they're going to be able to tell you the same stuff anyway, and probably add more value elsewhere to boot. And all of this commentary is ignoring the genuinely shady operators who have also taken to using the "SEO" moniker, who further muddy the waters.
Non-government deposit banks are legally allowed to create money (up to some reserve ratio).
IMHO the big elephant in the room is that global warming is just one of the large environmental problems we're facing. There's also eg overfishing, deforestation, ocean acidification.

So even if we could "fix" global warming through geoengineering (and from all that I've read, signs point to no), there are still so many other problems that the only way not to mess up the planet completely is to change our habits and consume fewer resources.

You may now begin complaining about how the fact that the world is not infinitely bountiful impinges on your rights.
Arch here too, I run it on my home and work computers.
Playstation games blog
We were all born with a silver console in our corners. Whether your weapon of choice is from Nintendo, Microsoft Xbox360, Sony PS3 or the humble PC, nearly every household in the country will have some sort of console.
Here's How My VC Timeframe Works (as opposed to yours)
Archlinux. It has literally proved to be an end to my distro hopping. I've had crazy experiences with Ubuntu. And IMHO, the only 2 distros that are fun to work with, are Arch and Gentoo. I just dont have the patience to compile each and every package, so Arch it is. :)
If it made IE vulnerable to a drive-by owning, and was installed without the express permission of IE's users? I find it hard to imagine an argument against blacklisting it. So far all we have is conjecture though.
50 years of space exploration in one info-graphic
Gnome-cups-manager README