skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that the tail wags the dog in California.

The California Constitution requires a 2/3 majority to pass the budget. The demographics of the state virtually guarantee a 60-40 split between Democrats and Republicans. It is virtually impossible to get any Republican to vote for a tax increase. Ever. It is hard to get Democrats to accept cuts to social programs.

This is a guaranteed mess and the budget process is therefore painfully difficult. Unfortunately the Republicans are so good on party unity that in the end the Democrats, despite their significant majority, wind up compromising far more.

To add to this mess, the voters can and do pass any measures they like through the referendum process with a simple majority vote. Once the voter initiatives have reduced taxes (prop 13 is a famous example) or mandated spending (prop 98 for instance), the legislature has to work around the resulting restrictions. Based on their votes, California voters have been pretty much oblivious to the effects of their decisions.

Ain't democracy wonderful?
Was just talking to David Hornik briefly about this today. I think it's fine. I wish I was smart enough and grew up in a good enough background to aspire to be CEO at 16. The thing to know is to work hard to live up to the title and be a GREAT CEO.

One thing that I want to tell them is to keep their eyes open and explore new interests. I hated the idea of business because I thought it was evil, but college opened my eyes to the startup world because I kept an open-mind and tried out different things. Since then it's become a big part of my life and I love it. =)
Actually Posterous seemed to be up but they were not processing emails (perhaps that bit is the bit hosted in the cloud ?). I had to post via the web...

Ironic that we decided not to host our own blog so that we would have a working communications channel if our main site got taken out....
TC was down - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/large-scale-downtime-at...

although I was a little more gentle with them on the phone than @arrington (check his stream)
It's certainly disheartening. These have all been power-related so far. Given the amount of money they should have spent on power systems, there's no reason this should happen. I've been to Savvis' facilities and they know exactly when a battery in their UPSes start to fail and how badly. Gensets get load tested regularly. Everything is fully redundant with instant failover. Yes, things can still go wrong, but they shouldn't be going wrong this often.
I thought about exactly the same thing. What is also worth considering, is if there is a lot of individual variation in the need to interact. In my experience many people are not the "self-driven" kind that are often considered ideal. What should one do with them? Even self-driven people are usually driven only to do some particular things, and these might not be the things that the whole company benefits most from.
I don't know why you keep wanting to "win" and talking condescendingly to me as though you have some personal stake in this argument when its readily apparent that you are not correct.

Can you go see what the S&P has done since that press release you cited? (Hint: its down 27%).

Now I'm not saying that you can't make a bunch of money on derivatives. Let's stop arguing about this.

The fact is that derivatives is about as moral as gambling except that you can gamble imaginary sums and the government will step in to pay with tax payer money because Goldman Sachs owns the Fed and the banks are "too big to fail". Even Warren Buffet has admitted that they are bad, and its not just one random quote.

Just because he is joining the club doesn't mean that derivatives have stopped being bad, it only means that he can't fall behind the other investment vehicles.
I don't think I get it, then. 10% of $2000 is $200. How is this 10% extra withholding if they're only taking $17/mo from someone who makes $50k? That's slightly under 1% of the average monthly pay.
You cite %change in GDP as a measure of economic growth in your third point, after claiming in your first and second points that GDP itself is not a good measure for quality of life/economic well being/etc, in points one and two. Does that make sense?

I think you're letting your terminology run away from you in your first point. It's true that "Disposable income" doesn't need to cover educational, medical, and other social expenses in Scandinavian welfare states, but those expenses still have to be paid out of tax receipts.

I don't see how the Scandinavian governments can get $35000 per person in value out of $25000 per person in income.
The coupons in Loopt actually help you save money when you're out and looking for food. Not a bad thing =]
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I don't really care.

As long as they don't punish everyone else by deflating the currency, they can sue each other just like any other industry.

Think about this. What other industry can you bet imaginary sums of money and have the government print it for you when someone cashes in?

In every other industry I can think of, if the money doesn't exist, tough luck. It someone can't pay you, they declare bankruptcy and you either get their assets or have them pay the debt for the rest of their life.
He's a bit...harsh is putting it lightly.

After the article on Facebook game scams, he was seeming to move past his previous attitude. Now he just looks like a raving mad man. It's not Rackspace's fault if you left a single point of failure on your site by hosting in one datacenter. If you want better reliability, then pony up the cash. You're making enough from just one of those ads to do it.
I definitely agree that it probably varies for different people - that seems like the biggest challenge of being a manager. Which people do you have to micromanage vs. which people will create amazing things if you just completely leave them alone. What about with co-founders for a startup - do you believe that they should always work together since it's so important that they mold the vision/initial product together, or is there any room to work separately if both people are driven enough?
I'm talking about a little puddle jumper. Just enough room for 2 people, the pilot and you.
Actually that's exactly what I mean by lazy (not willing to work hard, that is). Obviously there needs to be a balance. Not everything can be done with minimal effort, and not everything is best done with the most effort.

I'm sure you often hear people saying "if you just did it the hard way you would have finished by now" or some variant of that. But doing it the hard way is like hard coding, and the easy way is like doing a function.

It turns out that coding the function might actually take longer the first time, but it saves so much effort later on by being reusable.

The smart person is probably often unintentionally driven by the fear of repeating some difficult time consuming task to implement a more clever solution.

But this smart person is partially helped by the fact that coming up with a reusable or more clever solution is much more mentally stimulating, something they may not have anticipated before starting. And so it turns out that even though doing some clever solution is initially harder, the person ends up not even noticing the increased effort.

The smart person knows how hard copying the dictionary is, but it's often not possible to grasp the difficulty of something novel, like a scheme to copy it faster by using multiple pencils.

So rather than taking the known hard way, the smart person chickens out of fear of working hard and takes the mystery box (a new unknown method), only to find out that the sheer novelty of the mystery box was all that was needed to motivate him/her to work hard.
Except Goldman didn't eat the remainder. They told the government to bailout AIG, and AIG used that money to pay 100% of their obligations to Goldman Sachs.

However, note that the folks selling the insurance in these cases included pension funds, small cities in Australia, and the like. I'm perfectly happy with them losing everything (especially since the alternative is US taxpayers paying to make Goldman whole), but are you?

Yup. My investment in GS is 0 and I live in the US.
Actually, that's the perfect case for a VPS. Most modern virtualization systems will automatically failover your system to another host node if there is a hardware failure. It's all done without downtime or any changes on your end.
I don't think you grok sarcasm

(ok so let me explain. we are running with the joke that it was scoble himself that took the servers down.)
In the US the average worker works 1,777 hours per year, in Norway it's 1,328. That's a lot of extra time for family, friends, hobbies, etc. They've made a choice about their work/life balance and we (or our capitalist masters) have made a choice about what is important to us. How much salary would you give up in exchange for 25% less time at work?

Also, the Norwegian bottom 10% makes twice as much as the American bottom 10%. Again, it's a matter of choices, how much of your income would you give up to not have poor people in your community and the associated crime and social problems?
The study that compares the US to Europe (linked in another commend) does these comparisons:

- Compare GDP between US and Europe and show that US is higher per capita on average. No debate there.

- Compare private consumption between the US and Europe, specifically stating that it does not control for healthcare and education. From page 14:

Different countries’ choices of public commitment influence, through taxation policy, the scope available for private consumption, at the same time as high taxation countries, through their public sectors, offer some of the things recorded in low taxation countries as private consumption. There is no easy way of getting round this, but it is an important point to bear in mind when comparing private consumption.

- It does then compare retail consumption which shouldn't include any of these things and thus be more objective. That one still shows the US as higher than Sweden. Another table shows that US households have more home appliances. So on that count Americans do appear to be richer, assuming of course they are getting equal average amounts of education and healthcare on their private purchases as the Europeans are getting on their tax dollars. Otherwise you'd just be displacing money from healthcare and education into buying retail goods. An argument can surely be bade that this is in fact the case and that although the higher end healthcare and education in the US is top notch the average over the whole population is not as good as the average in Sweden. Anyone know of any good data on this?

I did notice however that the disposable income argument was made about countries within the EU based on another study. So it is possible that the public/private mix in the several EU nations actually doesn't favor Scandinavia in terms of efficiency. All these things are hard to argue because there is no comparable definition of the extent of public services in the economies and how those are replaced or not by private spending.
I definitely like this mouse a lot more, mostly because it feels way more "solid" than the mighty mouse. The mighty mouse felt almost cheap and plasticky to me.
It's a nice idea but I think they'd be better off teaching impulse control overall as:

a) Curriculums are already overburdened, and

b) Lots of people have a handle on financial management, they just don't implement what they know.

c) Impulse control is valuable across a range of domains (including financial).

The effect of better impulse control at an early stage was demonstrated famously in Walter Mischel's Marshmallow Experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow_experiment
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Uh . . .

Had to call this one.

Full Disclosure: Cancer Researcher here. I looked into how to analyze data over time to elicit better outcomes in a former life.

Cancer is a hard problem, REALLY hard. Hematological Cancers as well, super hard. It is less than wise to judge a health care system by its ability to treat cancer. Literally, there are often times when a patient is being attended solely for the purposes of learning as much as we can before she dies. Thus, hopefully, getting us into a better position to help the next person.

Let's try to confine the discussion to areas where you get the most bang for the buck. Primary care for instance.

Further disclosure: I am American. Limited experience with using UK health system. So 'good' or 'bad' are assessments it would be out of place for me to make. This is simply a post to add context to the discussion.
California's public education program has always been consistently ranked near the bottom last since I was in elementary school. (http://www.wavenewspapers.com/news/regional/37673589.html)
Remind HN: Election Day
In the US, today is election day. There aren't any major races, but there are likely some municipal issues.
For voters in San Francisco, the description of the ballot measures can be found at http://sfelections.org/vip/index.html .
No new IP adresses by next year?
I think it's fair enough to ask how come a country that claims to have one of the best healthcare systems in the world (the UK) has such bad cancer survival rates?
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If you interpret the government as providing no value to society whatsoever, then I could see your point.

However, if you believe the government does provide value, any baseline would equalize your income with everyone else in the population, thus not really decreasing the buying power of the money you earn.

The only part where this would not be the case is if the rulers kept most of the money to themselves (a monarchy) or to a select group (unfortunately happening with Goldman Sachs recently.).Then value of your money would truly be unfairly decreased.
I think it would be more useful to let a startup have a copy in a private wiki and rework it according to their specific needs. This would allow them to update and revise it for the specifics of a particular product and market, starting from a common template.
my slice power source is hybrid, so once the electricity went down, it switched to the solar module, unfortunately, it happened at night time, so this did not helped much
1) Malnutrition is not starvation due to not affording food.

2) Thats a whooping 0.0009 of all deaths.

3) If you are poor in America, you are most likely to die from heart disease from eating to many $5 Pizzas and other high caloric food because it's so cheap!
Right about now, someone is typing that the AIG pass-through wasn't a subsidy/payoff to Goldman because Goldman was owed that money and had bought "insurance" from third parties.

My response to that argument should be obvious.
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Could you supply some sources to back up your claims, particularly about the crime and social problems in Norway vs the US, and also work hours.
I can confirm that. I have heard the same logic from War Veterans (Iran/Iraq). During the war Iran had 2 kinds of rifles AK-47 for IRGC and HK G-3 for Army. G-3 was notorious for its ability to kill in 1 shot in torso which removed one enemy soldier from battlefield while AK-47 only caused injuries which in turn made a bigger tax on enemy manpower and logistics during an operation.
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Yeah the rackspace outage freaked us out a little. Seems like it would be nice if they could notify the customers before the customers discovered the downtime themselves. If Rackspace emailed their customers at the first sign of downtime, customers would probably be more patient.
I'm an American living in Norway, and I can confirm half of what you write: the costs you describe are pretty accurate.

However, you drop the ball when you write "It's not affordable unless you're absurdly wealthy."

The fact is, the salary range in Norway is high, and quite compressed. Everyone can afford to make lasagna.
One one hand it is still part of the system he dislikes. He takes what he can and doesn't "give" anything back. Some might call him a moocher. The idea of profit as inherently evil seems like saying atomic power is also such.

On the other, I can understand that one shouldn't feel grateful towards a system that feels unfair or is somehow harmful. I'm at work today and as I watch this cluster flux-up in progress I sometimes wonder what am I doing with myself? Are all jobs like this? Do they at least start out not like this? It's an insult to me and my co workers (we need to write less bugs, people) and even some of my managers but this is the way the project is put together by outside forces. It'll probably fail anyways but has a higher chance of doing so if we rush rush rush. And I'll get laid off anyways, no matter how much or little I work at it.
>You cite %change in GDP as a measure of economic growth in your third point, after claiming in your first and second points that GDP itself is not a good measure for quality of life/economic well being/etc, in points one and two. Does that make sense?

My first point was about disposable income which is a subset of GDP. My second one only said that high relative costs can just mean flat income structures independent of GDP (hence the two extreme cases of Portugal and the US with high and low GDPs both having low costs for pizza compared to Sweden. I never really argue that high GDP doesn't make you richer.

> I think you're letting your terminology run away from you in your first point. It's true that "Disposable income" doesn't need to cover educational, medical, and other social expenses in Scandinavian welfare states, but those expenses still have to be paid out of tax receipts.
I don't see how the Scandinavian governments can get $35000 per person in value out of $25000 per person in income.

I agree with you that the pure GDP comparison makes the disposable income point less important. But GDP by itself doesn't seem comparable either. If the Scandinavian population consumes on average more healthcare and education on a per-service not per-dollar basis than the US one, you can have a higher purchasing power just because you buy a higher percentage of Chinese goods produced with low wage costs instead of locally supplied healthcare and education delivered by higher-earning local wages (ever increasing since you are getting richer). But now I am way out of my league. IANAEconomist

All this discussion naturally forgets the next point of how much this added GDP/wealth actually drives happiness. From what I saw from Happiness research Europe has actually been obtaining gains in overall happiness while the US has stagnated. One theory was that productivity gains in Europe were used to reduce number of work hours while in the US they were used to increase GDP. Europe would be doing the better tradeoff as both were already at diminishing returns for money but time off had a good return. An interesting theory at least.
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> poor people in scandinavia don't really exist.

Poor Scandinavian-Americans don't exist either. (Poverty is not equally distributed.)
Also wanted to say that I just got my new MM tidy and I completely love it. It's really comfortable and I switched to the gesture behavior in a couple minutes. To top it off, the control-swipe to zoom is incredible. I spend a lot of time looking at minute details in web page alignment and this I s a killer feature.
I wish I hadn't read the phrase "palm cheese"; it just brings to mind eating something I'd rather not.
Someone making $50k would be getting $4167/month before tax. If an increase of 10% on state income tax is costing them $20/month, that means they used to be paying about $200/month in state income taxes, or about 4.8%. Afterwards they'd be paying $220, or about 5.3%.

Looking briefly at California's income tax brackets those percentages seem to be about right.
I'm sorry but that doesn't do the trick.

The right click + Open link takes way longer than a middle click.

The Cmd + Left click, while being closer to a middle click, still forces you to move your hand to the command button.
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This is probably a much more complex failure than just a genset not working or dead UPS batteries.
I like the MM, but I'm not completely sold on it yet. I still have my old Apple Mouse sitting on my desk in case I feel like switching back.

What irks me isn't the lack of expose, it's the lack of customization and center click. Why isn't two fingered vertical swipe and two fingered click options? I doubt a software update will add these, but I'm hopeful someone will hack out a solution. If I could set two fingered click to center click, and up/down two-fingered swipes to expose, I wouldn't miss the Apple Mouse one bit.

I probably won't be switching back, though, as not having a scroll ball to gunk up is definitely a huge plus. If I do switch mice, it'll be to something non-Apple.
> So on that count Americans do appear to be richer, assuming of course they are getting equal average amounts of education and healthcare on their private purchases as the Europeans are getting on their tax dollars.

That assumption is rather dodgy on a couple of points.

One is that a lot of healthcare and education in the US is tax-supported. Another is that a rational person may choose to spend money on things other than healthcare and education. Forcing them to spend it on healthcare and education can make them poorer, aka "less bang for same bucks".

> the average over the whole population is not as good as the average in Sweden.

How about we compare average cancer survival rates?

Relevant fact: a huge fraction of the "uninsured" in the US are eligible for free govt healthcare but simply haven't signed up. (When they run into problems, they typically, but not always, sign up.)
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> or our capitalist masters

This is why I flag stories like this.
In Scandinavia, drugs don't ensure that some people are poor.

Some people choose to spend the $30 on drugs instead of pizza, of course-- but there really is no poverty here.
Yeah, I have this preconceived notion that I can plug in my usb wlan stick and have it work. Silly me.

And I'm no Windows / OSX fanboy. I do have a Linux box at home. But pretending that Linux works fine on the desktop and that people are the problem is not going to do anyone any good. In fact, if that's really the case, the obvious solution is to offer the option of Windows-like behaviour wherever these preconceived notions exist.
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