skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In hindsight the present situation is pretty predictable: as the # of goods produced increases and the amount of specialization increases the value supplied by the intermediary network ("the financial system") increases.

The way the financial system is currently "architected" (a strange term, but I'll use it) it has as a class an inordinate amount of negotiating power vis-a-vis everyone else (!), and thus is able to capture much of what ought to be consumer and producer surplus.

As much of the value it adds is due to network effects just going to a gold standard (which is a popular cure-all on the internet) wouldn't change much, even if you thought that was a good idea; there's still the same tremendous problem of coordinating trade in the same complex, highly-specialized economy and the central switchboard is still ideally placed to extract most of that value.

The easiest-to-envision solution is to forcibly unbundle the basic storage-and-transmission of credits between accounts (full-reserve checking accounts, basically) and run that infrastructure as a public utility (a handful of mainframes in the fort knox). Let the private sector sell value-added services on top of this, but don't leave the basic infrastructure of value-exchange in the hands of the private sector, who will retain the ability to hold the country up for ransom.

It's an easy solution to envision but it's hard to see much happening; it is too radical a shift to go down easily (and all that surplus value captured funds a lot of lobbying) and it too closely resembles socialism and other bugaboos to be an easy sell to the public at large.

(!) Where we are now is pretty analogous to having the local power company -- which provides necessary services to its area of operation -- also involved in speculative ventures that backfired enough that its continual operation is threatened; having the ability to turn the lights off would naturally give the local power company a lot of leverage negotiating for a bailout.

Suppose that the "too big to fail" banks were allowed to fail, and there was temporarily a severe disruption in the banking system. How would you propose that federal, state, and local law enforcement and other "essential services" get paid? With cash -- dangerous and risky? With checks -- while the banking system isn't reliably working? Would you trust them to work without pay for very long?
Building With Whole Trees
Inventor of mobile phones says they have become 'too complicated'
What you're saying is that people will finally understand that thinking about a problem and preventing bugs before you begin is better than trying to fight fires afterwards.
If the purpose of your foreign key is to ensure data integrity, then no amount of denormalizing can help. The point of FKs is to enforce business rules in a central location (e.g. don't ship a part to a non-existent customer, if a customer's address changes then there's only one place to update, etc).

The alternative to FKs is to write your own "middleware" or "business rules engine" and guess what, that doesn't get you to market any quicker either.
There are some very similar fundamentals here to a lot of what "Gandhian economics" teaches.
"Integrity, justice, fairness, work-ethic, excellence--all have fallen prey to greed."

Greed is tempered by risk when the government can't save you.
TechCrunch has excerpted the relevant section of the video here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pi...
What if Defense Taxes Were a Line Item on Your Paycheck?
Step #1: Charge money($4.99-$9.99 a month)

Step #2: Get covered in blogs and get 100,000 visitors.

Step #3: Get 1% signups(1000 paying customers), get paid your subscription fees. Bam you are making $5K-$10K/yr

It's basically the "there are a billion people in china, if 1% buys our product...we'll be rich!"
Lisp's macros are foremost a cheap anonymous lambda - with-open-file, dolist, and the like don't need to be macros, but it's much more convenient and efficient than passing a lambda to another function.

Certainly, though, transforming code is more popular than introducing laziness.
It's natural for an SEO to be concerned with organic results appearing over the fold. It's the part that SEO's manipulate to their profit.

The rest of us should take a step back and think about actual quality of the results. Now there are a lot of ads on that page, but are the organic results going to be more useful then the Google Maps matches? For a query like "dentist" I think Maps could be a better source for answers.
Can people please stop using the "make adder" examples? Can't you come up with something original and fresh? The triviality of what is acomplished in such case actually obscures the usefulness and power of the concept. As a result, the novice will interpret the end product as some useless, magical mambo jumbo that doesn't give him much. So who cares if I can get a function that adds a number to something. I have a "+" for that. Give me a use case that I can admire...

Why do you want me to appreciate a ferrari if all you do with it is go pick up some groceries...
Do you remember what Web 1.0 was like before Google? Search engines would often mix sponsored links into their results with no indication at all that the link had paid for their placement. Google at least puts them in a separate section of the page, labeled.
Are you kidding? Most people are just looking to find the next bubble and get out before "the suckers" get in!
Reminds me of http://sivers.org/1pct
Millions of our non-ancestors stuck themselves in the eye with a sharp stick (or analogous operation). We have literally _evolved_ to avoid poking our eyes with a fork while eating! We have eyelid closure reflexes, withdrawal reflexes, avoidance reflexes: the system is as redundant as hell and all to protect your vision so you can pass your genes along. Those systems are always alert, even when you sit down to eat with a fork.

But an unattended machine that picks up bicycles and stores them is likely _not_ something that our genes will so easily protect us from. Of course our reflexes will do the best they can but one only need look at the history of man-machine accidents, indeed, to look around at the maimed among us to see what usually happens.
An extended period of unemployment will be very bad for a society based on consumption. Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the US economy and consumers are a dying species.

I see few signs that we are in recovery. What I see is boredom with gloom. People want the economy to be in recovery, so they find reasons to believe it so.
Closures are essentially a way to create private variables.

For example, in Javascript:

var fn = null;

(function(){

var temporary = 789;
alert(temporary);

var secret_private = 5;
fn = function(){
alert(secret_private);
};

})();

fn();

In javascript,

(function(){ ... })();

defines and executes kamikaze function. It's a function which dies as soon as its job is completed.

We can use the kamikaze to hide secret_private from all but the functions that we want to have access to it.

Since fn is defined in the kamikaze function, fn can access secret_private.

Since fn is assigned to a global variable, it can be accessed from outside the kamikaze.

When the kamikaze dies, it takes all of its variables with it, except for the ones that are referred to outside of the kamikaze.

temporary disappears because it is referred to only inside the kamikaze.

But, since secret_private is referred to in fn, and fn is a global, secret_private does not disappear, but now only fn can refer to it.

So sceret_private is essentially a private variable of fn.
That is not "capitalism at work", that is rent seeking and one of the many very common forms of government failure.

Just because the motive of something is profit, it doesn't mean it is capitalism, the motive of taxes is also profit (for special interests), but that doesn't mean they are capitalism at work.
Babies 'cry in mother's tongue'
Did it lag so much on the way down?
Now I have the urge to start an ice cream company.

(I would love to do a food-oriented startup or something. Probably a bad use of time/money. I invested in Foodoro, which was a good compromise. They don't actually make the food.)

I read an article in New York Magazine about ice cream "innovations," one of which was no-melt ice-cream. It has a lot of gelatin. I think Coldstone Creamery makes it.
What script did you use to generate this data? webkit2png?
This is even more true if you make the d stand for debugging.
The one billion apps App Store
Kamikaze functions? Sounds dangerous...
It's not no data. There are lots of data points to use, it's the choice of exactly which data points to use that is in question. The same debate rages over inflation as well.

The issue is who is and who isn't included in the definition of unemployed. The truth is, if you don't have a job and you need one, but you've given up your search, you're still unemployed.
'I'm Julie Larson-Green, and Windows 7 was my idea'
Julie Larson-Green, vice president of Windows Experience at Microsoft, oversaw the design and development of Windows 7.
I wrote my own spider in RoR (to manage a database of historical information since I run it weekly). The spidering is done by controlling Firefox using Selenium from the RoR application.
Personally, when I do a local search query, seeing short listings on a map with ratings and a phone number is pretty much exactly what I was looking for even though it doesn't meet the author's definition of 'organic'.
Greed would be tempered a lot more by risk if the government didn't save anyone.
I worked with this dude who would make changes to the CakePHP API without telling anyone and then I'd spend like a day trying to figure out why the documentation didn't match up. I tried to get him to at least make a prominent declaration and documentation every time he made a change that broke the API, but he didn't listen to me.

Shortly thereafter, they terminated my contract because my work was not "up to their standards". :C
Interesting. If you look at those numbers, the amount of people who used to work more is also declining, meaning people aren't earning as much as they used to from more than one job.
Using Objects to Organize Your Code
Two vectors are orthogonal if the addition of one of them does not affect the "amount" of the other, when using them as basis vectors. In this case, "(1,0)" and "(0,1)" are orthogonal; no matter how far in X you go, the amount of Y-ness doesn't change. (1,1) and (1,-1) are also orthogonal. In the metrics most people learn, this means the vectors are at right angles. (Forgive me this simplification, mathematicians, going further will only obscure things.)

Programmers tend to abuse this term to mean "the two things are totally unrelated", even though the term really only applies to certain mathematical constructs like vectors. Claiming that type-safety is orthogonal to garbage collection would mean the two are entirely separate concerns and that you can freely have none, one, or both, and that the two issues never matter to each other. Now, technically this isn't quite true, which is why I say we "abuse" the term, because the full meaning of "orthogonal" is that you will literally never be considering the effect of one while examining the other, and this is not true; type systems do some impact on GC, for instance. However, in many cases this is "true enough" for someone to say they are "orthogonal".

In this case, I'm not arguing merely that the precise definition is not met, because it pretty much never is, but that the spirit in which programmers use the term is also not applicable here, as the questions of "code quality", "speed", and "developer experience" are indeed tightly interrelated and so answers like "you always have to sacrifice quality for speed" are too simplified.
You could try an example showing what a closure does 'under the hood' by showing an equivalent non-closure example, like:

With Closure:

foreach (var obj in objects) {
AddButton("Delete " + obj.ToString(), () => obj.Delete());
}

Without closure:

class DeleteHandler {
public DeleteHandler(TYPE obj) {
_obj = obj;
}
private TYPE obj;
public void DoDelete() {
obj.delete();
}
}
...
foreach(var obj in objects) {
var deleteHandler = new DeleteHandler(obj);
AddButton("Delete " + obj.ToString(), deleteHandler.DoDelete);
}
JQuery for Beginners: Simple JQuery Effects for a Rockstar User Interface
I'm sorry if what I said didn't come out right. I was responding to Garry's suggestion that a masterpiece had to be the product of a single auteur's mind, which is an unfortunately common assumption. I thought the same about Citizen Kane, for instance, until about a month ago. After all, Welles wrote/directed/starred, right? But he worked with some brilliant people who had skills he simply did not have, without which Citizen Kane could not have been as good as it was.
To be specific, he's saying that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is wrong. I'm inclined to agree.
hey it works, as long as you can get enough traffic to your site, a certain percentage will buy it. Then you scale it till you are profitable.
"Differentiate or Die"

Google this phrase or buy the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Differentiate-Die-Survival-Killer-Comp...

My favorite passage:

"The best way to really enter minds that hate complexity and confusion is to oversimplify your message. The lesson here is not to try to tell your entire story. Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind. That sudden hunch, that creative leap of the mind that "sees" in a flash how to solve a problem in a simple way, is something quite different from general intelligence. If there's any trick to finding that simple set of words, it's one of being ruthless about how you edit the story you want to tell. Anything that others could claim just as well as you can, eliminate. Anything that requires a complex analysis to prove, forget. Anything that doesn't fit with your customers' perceptions, avoid."

with particular emphasis on:

Just focus on one powerful differentiating idea and drive it into the mind.

Why should anyone choose you?
Search results are their property and Google can do what it wants with it. I don't get it... Why are people so surprised by Google monetizing traffic? Wouldn't you?
Google Dashboard (of all your data)
That's it, I'm throwing away my G1...this whole time I thought it was a server.
That's why I use a counter as a simple demo - you see state changing with each call and it's done without using a global or passing in some kind of context object. It's not a lot more powerful than the adder, but in my experience it more often generates a "what the hell..." kind of reaction to the uninitiated.
My point was only that it seems the author of the post has limited experience with foreign keys.
From the article: "Update: it looks like Google claimed the phone number removal was a bug, but weird timing that the bug appeared at the same time they started selling premium local ads that appear on the regular search results."

Why is it weird timing that a bug would appear when a system is being modified? Isn't that pretty much when most bugs are introduced?
I worked as a reviewer and I'm trying to write a novel I would like attributed to my name. When I was a reviewer I worked exclusively on a computer.

However when I began writing novels there was much more inspiration involved. It wasn't an organised stream of consciousness like reviewing often is, and becomes more about inspiration and catching it when it strikes. I frequently have a small 3"x8" notepad stuffed into my pocket, I keep a large A4 notepad by my bed and I try to write anything down when I can, even if it serves no purpose in the end.

On the downsides of a computer, there are downsides of anything. I've mucked out my rabbits litter box as procrastination when the internet has been down. The main upside to not using a computer, is that when you procrastinate it actually saves you time later. The computer is the only machine where you can efficiently procrastinate and produce nothing whatsoever out of it. If you procrastinate by washing the dishes, well suck it self you don't have to do it later! You eventually finish everything you can procrastinate with early, and end up with nothing but writing to do. When you have a computer, you can piss about on facebook and your day amounts to nothing . . . then you have to do the dishes anyway.
I implemented anonymous methods in Delphi, and I faced a similar kind of problem trying to sell them, as it were, to the Delphi community.

What they are: functions with state.

Why they're useful: callbacks where a whole separate method or class would be overkill.

Motivating examples:

* Delegating work to a background thread. Captured variables are an easy way to pass along necessary state.

* A generic benchmarking routine. Benchmarking requires taking a measurement before the code, running the code to be measured possibly multiple times, and taking another measurement after the code. If you can turn the code to be measured into a callback, then the benchmarking code can be written once and reused elsewhere. But having to put all your benchmarks into their own methods, much less worry about state and possibly creating classes and initializing data in constructors, is pretty tedious. Closures avoid this tediousness.

(Yes, I'm conflating several concepts here, anonymous functions and lambda closures, for colloquial and didactic reasons. Nitpicking doesn't buy you much in terms of practicality when learning here.)
Yes. That's actually an important point that I only alluded to. There's a crossover period during which a hackhackhack coder will indeed have "something" out the door faster than me. If your startup fits entirely into that horizon, then, well, don't hire me. Or make it very clear to me that that's what the situation is. Some "startups" do fit into that time period, though as my scare quotes indicate I'm not sure that's really the right word for such an endeavor.

However, I've gotten my crossover period down to about two months on most projects. Some projects even less; a hackhackhack coder who goes for PHP with no frameworks is going to have trouble keeping up with me working in Django. (In this case, I don't intend this as a criticism of PHP, as the sentence indicates.) Of course an experienced developer will reach for some appropriate framework in PHP, but the entire point is that we're comparing experienced v. inexperienced.

(Separately, I don't want to make a separate post for this point, but: There is a tautological element to my argument here, which is that if a putatively experienced developer makes a bad choice on the do-it-right/do-it-fast scale, then by that very fact they have shown they were not an experienced developer. There's a bit of "defining myself the win" there, but I think there's still a point to it. And like I said, I've made that error and am trying not to make it again.)
I read that sentence as tongue-in-cheek. It's a jab at both the normal way of doing law and also the trade negotiators (they're still doing chicanery, just behind closed doors). The second part of the sentence also makes it seem like the author is laughing at the negotiators: whatever their scheming intentions, the plan blew up in their faces.
I'm sorry, but this is a bunch of SEO guys whining about the fact that their dubiously useful sites they spent lots of time trying to move up Google's ranking are no longer at the top of the page.

When most people search for "san francisco dentists," why wouldn't they want locations and phone numbers of some of these dentists presented right upfront? This is no different than what Bing, Yahoo and even Duck Duck Go are doing, and there's nothing wrong with making the result page more useful for people without them having to click away.

Sure, Google has been getting a little too spammy with the amount of ads in the yellow box, but complaining when they surface Youtube videos or maps is ridiculous. Nine times out of 10, that's exactly what the user is looking for.
> I strongly suggest this kind of risk to be dealt with at the human resources department.

Assuming that the only problem is that they are inexperienced...

On a team of that size, you're not only doing development, you are (or should be) grooming future senior devs. In the enterprise world, on timelines that run 5-10 years, with groups 100+ in number, you have an entire ecosystem to manage.

Also, in groups of that size, you're going to make mistakes in hiring. I've seen the same thing on small teams, where the whole team interviews someone who ends up sucking. With a 95% success rate, with 100 people, you're still talking five screwups.

Breaking things into smaller teams doesn't necessarily get you what you want, either. You end up with a bunch more management, turf wars, and a bunch of other hard-to-deal with crap.

Basically, at the really large scale, it is less about the code, and a lot more about managing people over a long timeline.
No, but it had been going down for a while before that so I'm not sure it counts (http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?series_i...)

The beginning of this is generally considered to be the Collapse of Lehman brothers and the dissolutions of Bear Stearns and Merril Lynch which all happened in Sept. 2008. The Unemployment rate in Aug. '08 was 6.2% but that was already up from 4.7% in Aug. '07.

So actually it was a predicting factor on the way down.
I was going to submit this a few days ago, but I don't like Rand-only discussions. However, I'd like to contribute to the thread with this recent Slate article, which abruptly reversed almost all my remaining positive feelings about Rand:

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/

Not only was she a hypocrite who ignored her own teachings when things got personal, she worshipped a serial killer who raped and dismembered a 12-year-old girl, because she saw him as a hero defying society.
Just to make my last paragraph a little clearer, I find that, while Java's prolixity hides (buries in mountains of syntax) the intent of the programmer, Ruby's flexibility hides a significantly useful amount of implementation information in order to make intent more obvious.

A certain balance is required between exposing intention and implementation information for one to easily grasp what is going on and how can one interfere with it.
Actually, that's $60k-120k/yr ;)

But it is an encouraging way to look at it: if you're a one person team, and you can keep your expenses pretty low (storage, bandwidth, credit card processing, etc. + cost of living), ramen profitability can come with just a hundred paying customers. That doesn't seem like such an overwhelming out of reach goal, even in a crowded market.
Get Everything Done - iPhone personal organizer based on Autofocus workflow
Hey guys,
Could you criticize my iPhone app? It's a task management tool based on Mark Forster's Autofocus System. http://gedapp.com
Am I the only one that found that two-frame, click the + to read the answer format really irritating?

Did I miss a link where I could've avoided that.

Good interview, otherwise. Just a PITA to read.
There's a fundamental flaw in your reasoning too. You can't have capitalism without some form of government and you can't have government without some form of taxation.
Anything distributed makes me wet.
They're incredible. They basically sold their company to eBay twice. First the name and the servers and then again for the technology. Pretty awesome.
You seem completely secure in your quibbling.
Of course! I was able to work out the WAD part.. but what I know as BFE didn't make any sense.

Thanks.
Do you also enjoy Employee Empowerment?
Except that the schools that have record enrollment are probably all state schools that rely heavily on state funds to operate. My school is such, and budget has been cut drastically, such that they will be lowering enrollment in the future.
Yeah, that's exactly why I posted it -- I figured people would find the hack interesting, whether you like MacHeist or not. Not to promote my app or something. More users right now just means more people with free licenses using up support resources :).