skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a substitute for the falling dollar: hydrocarbons.

Here is an interesting thought experiment to try:

1) The Dow Jones Industry Average (aka "the Dow") is a weighted average of the aggregate value of 30 of the largest and most widely held public companies in the United States. In other words, think of the Dow as answering this question: "How many dollars does it take for me to buy a piece of the most valuable corporations in the United States?"

2) Now, try this: draw a graph of the Dow denominated not in dollars, but in barrels of oil.

3) In other words, answer this question: "how many barrels of oil does it take to buy a piece of the most valuable publicly-traded corporations in the United States?" (Also, try this for Gold -- "how many ounces of Gold does it take to buy a unit of the Dow?")

4) Answer this question for: (1) the present day, (2) 1999 -- the peak of the dot-com bubble, (3) 1980 -- the depths of the pre-Reagan recession, (4) 1933 -- the depths of the "Great Depression", (5) 1972 -- the aftermath of Johnson's "great society" and the Vietnam war.

5) Notice anything interesting?

6) This explains why may cash-rich entities, such as the sovereign wealth fund of China, are trading their dollars for stakes in petroleum producing properties. This asset allocation provides two benefits: (1) protection of their principal, (2) a steady cash-flow of fiat currency with which to acquire more properties, and/or finance liabilities.

7) Every time the Obama administration runs a deficit of US dollars and calls on the treasury and/or fed to increase the supply of dollars (and to consequently decrease the value of dollars in _your_ pocket), think of it as a wealth transfer to people in the Oil and Gas business; As well as to those who have the resources, connections, and know-how to allocate capital to the hydrocarbons industry.

There is a substitute for dollars, it's just not available to the average person -- whose net work will be steadily eroded, in real terms, as the U.S. continues to run deficits to finance: (1) two wars, (2) "universal health care", (3) "clean energy" subsidies

Every time you read a dollar-denominated figure, convert that to barrels of oil. It's a fascinating exercise -- especially when you have some historical perspective on this metric.

The thing with oil is that you can only consume what you have. Unfortunately, that is not true with dollars -- trillions of them have been created out of thin air over the past year.

Here's a radical idea: What if there were a country who pegged it's currency not to the dollar, or to gold, but rather to oil?
The University of Utah has an excellent CS program and a lot of CS history. Utah also has great state support so the program is cheaper meaning smaller student loans.
A high bounce rate isn't necessarily bad, as it is accepted for social media sites. However a bounce rate of 90% with 5,000+ hits, still means 500 users don't bounce and stand a chance of becoming potential long-term readers/users/whatever and for a new or small site, that can give you a good jump on word-of-mouth growth.
Relatively new to mid-level web developer wondering (if you don't mind) what type of project you undertook that paid you that much money?
Worse than that. We can't even measure success.

In the extremes of ultimate financial success or failure in the long term we can determine success, but that gives us something like 1 bit of data per 3-5 years per major software project. Is twitter successful? MySpace? Facebook? Was Netscape successful? Geocities? (The stock used to buy Geocities is currently worth about $2 billion dollars.) For each of those there are even more examples that are more difficult to determine. Modern software comes in a series of releases, how much can you attribute the success of a particular release to the existing code base, and how much can you attribute it to just the particular diffs for that release? It's a tricky problem with no easy answers.
Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth.

Yes, this approach will cool it! But what will happen next? The Earth is a very complex system and its behavior might be impossible to predict with certainty. The more we mess with it and pretend to be all-knowing gods the worse it will get.
I intend to recommend to my kids (and anyone that ever asks my thoughts) to ignore doing a CS degree and do some form of engineering undergraduate degree and then do CS as your postgraduate degree.

An engineering degree was the best choice I ever made (my particular field was electronics but I don't think it really matters) as it instantly gave me a lot of credibility and employability (my current employer met me for lunch to check I wasn't a psycho and hired on the spot).

This does have relevance to your question however: engineering taught me a lot about working hard on a project to get it up to scratch, iterative development, management (they taught us lots of management stuff - 60-70% of my peers went on into management post-grads.jobs), team work, presentations (SUCH and important skill).

It definitely prepped me better to run a startup than a CS degree would have. At the moment I am working on my startup idea at the same time as finishing up (well, 10 months left) a post graduate masters in CS from the Open University (distance learning; but the seriously top notch stuff). The end result should be maximum employability with solid experience AND CS training :D

It's not for everyone, and CS is a great choice too (if you pick a good one). But it's worth considering strongly as an option!

As I said I'm still "developing" this approach; in a few years we'll see how it really turns out!

EDIT: incidentally I think a really good Electronic Engineering degree can teach you a lot of great hacker skills. Skills like automatically wanting to look inside the "black box" to find out what your playing with come naturally to me where I know "pure CS" types sometimes lose track (the down side is I am shaky on some of the pure CS...)
"A couple of points buried in the talk: defects increase as the code size increases. The increase is greater than linear."

I went looking for these points in the slides, only because the slides got me in the mood to question my assumptions and try to follow citations back to source material - and it wasn't obvious that the presence of something on a slide meant that it was a known truth. (Example: the slides about Martin Fowler's claims about DSLs and productivity are in the slides as a skull on a pikestaff, not as a verified truth.)

After looking, I think you got the first point from slide 15, but I wasn't able to find a slide that mentioned non-linearity.

I like the question that you're asking, with regard to Python versus Java. I wonder, though, if that conclusion really rises to the standards of rigor that this presentation appears to advocate.

Even if you manage to dig up the right Lutz Prechelt citation, has the effect really been shown to be something that is completely unmitigated by static-provability?
Compiler Bug
Go some place with smart people and don't study computer science.

Teach yourself the CS stuff (on the side) and find something that will really challenge you intellectually. Math is good, philosophy is good, the sciences are good (physics, biology).

Hacking is about being clever and adaptable, and knowing CS stuff helps a lot certainly, but more important is being smart (or knowing how to hack smartly).

CS is still a new knowledge, and as such it is in flux. Anything that you learn about it in college will most likely be different by the time you leave college...

So I guess my point is to learn how to learn and be interested in things (and think about them, hard), as that will take you farther than knowing a bunch of algorithms, or a specific hardware (you can learn the algorithms and hardware when you need them).
You're agreeing with the parent. There are metrics to measure solving well-known problems, but no metrics for researching problems to make them well-known.
This approach seems really dumb to me.

1) Testing rectangles against paths is an easy thing to solve on the CPU.

2) On the first iPhone models if you're doing anything graphics related the bottleneck is likely to be the GPU, so why give it more work?

3) Having the GPU rasterize into a user surface (which by definition must be available immediately) is going to cause an ugly stall as you wait for the drawing pipeline to be flushed. (no lock semantics in core graphics).

4) Having the CPU block on results from the GPU mid-frame is one of the worst things you can do in architectures that feature graphics acceleration.
Oh I laughed pretty hard when I read it... it was funny.

I guess I asked whether it was negative because it was kind of hard to tell... but then you answered that.

Then I mostly used your answer as an excuse to talk about something that had been on my mind. I wasn't trying to start an argument or anything. ;)
I wonder if there is a special advantage for geoenginnering solutions like carbon sequestration where instead of perturbing a complex system and using technology to individually manage all the negative consequences, we use technology directly on the variable we are influencing. It frees us from calculating all the consequences.
Invest in Electric Battery Maker and distributor (Battery for Car)...over the next 5 to 10 year....10 fold
I have a client that is in the business of supplying equipment to studios in Hollywood, very high end equipment. The offices are tricked out to impress studio executives. The employee kitchen id full of SubZero refrigerators, commercial ranges, and the like. The theater for demonstrating the equipment is the size of a small movie theater but the seats are rows of leather easy chairs. Thirty or so fit in a space that would hold a hundred or more regular seats.

All the offices are taken so my space is in the projection booth above the theater. It's 6 or 7 feet wide with equipment racks along the wall behind me. The walls and ceiling are painted black. Whenever a demo is going on, and usually a demo requires several days of tinkering with the projectors, a projector is running and the door to the server room behind me is open. Do you have any idea how noisy a projector is? It competes quite well with the server room. And the lights are out, and the chief engineer talks very loudly, almost as if he were deaf. And projectors like temperatures similar to those of servers, because they generate huge amounts of heat.
How The Pursuit of Truth Led Me To Selling Viagra
I really thought this was going to be one of those linkbait stories about some underqualified guy who wrote a paper that isn't peer reviewed about amoebas, so the author forms a tenuous connection between the paper and some future possibility of a treatment.

But I'm impressed, this seems like a major step, and I'm sure it's going to impact the patients' lives dramatically. I really hope the changes to their condition last.
Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me.

Morally, or economically?

A 2% drop in world gdp would lead to at least as bad a recession (likely even worse) than the one we're in now.

During the past year the world gdp rose 3.1% (See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...) - which was about 2% lower growth rate on gdp.
Competitive devaluations seems similar to competitive tariffs in that both favor export over import through a zero-sum action (someone loses for you to 'win') that harms other nations.

The only way out may be to grow the economy.

Time to fund lots and lots of startups in hopes some find a value-producing and demand-inducing advance.
"they chucked the entire operating system nine years ago"

It's not like they built another OS - NeXT had one ready to go - even ported to x86. IIRC, all previous attempts to write a new OS to succeed MacOS classic failed miserably.

What advantage NeXT brought is that it's a very modular OS. Unix programs, traditionally, don't look the OS from too close and that makes swapping file-systems easy. Or, at the very least, possible.
Since we're sharing, here's my experience with the Reddit front page:

http://blamcast.net/articles/speed-up-drupal

Side note: check out the referrer list image. See HN in there? That's how I discovered this place :)
But the first person or team who realized that you could put a computer in an aircraft weren't solving a known problem - however they were using engineering methods, which is why it's very rare for avionics to (literally!) crash.

Here's my theory: we do know how to build very high quality software in a repeatable way. However very few organizations are willing to pay what it costs to do that, and that is why most software is so bad. Admittedly a lot of people writing code these days are "cowboys" (they don't care and neither do their clients, they just want speed) but that doesn't mean that the body of knowledge doesn't exist.
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You know in your gut who they are. If you haven’t read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell then read it. In our core we easily spot people’s inner character. We know VC Seagulls when we see them but we’re attracted to work with them because they have a brand name. They work for a prestigious firm, have sat on big boards, went to HBS and speak at lots of conferences. But if your gut check is telling you that they would be a VC Seagull and IF you have other options … run!

It is easy to fall into using things like "speak at conferences" or "work at the prestigious firm" or "have the brand name" as a proxy for making your own judgement, trusting your own instincts, and collecting your own data. These people got to where they are because someone else fell for that before you -- they have the brand name or got the position at the prestigious firm because someone also used once-removed qualifications like having sat on big boards or having gone to such-and-such school. Seagulls got to where they are because of the laziness of others or that other people second-guess their own judgement, and they continue to attempt to ride on that.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten it was GPL. Back to the 'ol drawing board...

I've an Octane at home, which is my main machine except in the summer when it makes my flat too warm :-)
My guess is Google found it useful, and wanted to share it, so it's their gift to the world.
You very much underestimate NTFS if you think UFS is comparable. Regardless of what you might think about MS, NTFS is a great filesystem (and Windows doesn't even use many of its features, such as what HFS calls forks, or using OLE to make the .xxx style file extensions obsolete). Reparse points make solving certain classes of problems very easy too.
I don't know about it being that difficult. It's stressful -- definitely. The thing I've noticed about San Francisco is the best apartments aren't available in advance. They go on the market a week or so before they're ready to move in. The frustrating part here is that you have to put in your 30-day notice at your previous apartment before you have a new place -- super stressful (unless you're willing to pay double-rent for a bit, which is often times economical given the rent break you get in the new place).

I've had pretty good luck with Craigslist, subscribing to feed(s) of the various neighborhood/price ranges I'm looking in and hounding that feed. A lot of places are only up on CL for a few hours before they're taken down or have a waiting list impossibly long.

On a related note: it may be much easier if you don't look for studios. While San Francisco is an older city -- most of the older buildings you'd expect to find lofts/studios in burned/collapsed in previous decades. The result is most of the housing in the city comes from split up Victorian/Edwardian homes -- one bedroom apartments.
> Large companies used Cobol and now Java because it is safe.

"Socially" safe, that is. Damned dangerous in other, more neglected, senses.
This week in search 10/24/09
This is my take on investing.

Fact 1: Most professional investors do not beat the market.

Fact 2: The market has returned on average 12% for large cap stocks, 18% for small cap stocks year-to-year (#s are not adjusted for last recession, but discount 4-5% if you want)

Fact 3: You are not a professional investor.

With those facts in mind, I have found that the best expected value for an investment return is simply to dump all the money into a mix-bag of ETFs that leverage the market (they pretend to borrow money so you gain double or lose double the market rate)

DDM, QLD, MVV, etc.

To balance that out (hedge) with the weakening US dollar and shift in world powers, I would probably also throw some money into an emerging markets ETF and/or China/India funds.

But, as a caveat, I am personally invested in nothing b/c the startup life is the riskiest investment anyone can take (generalized), and my hedge against that is to keep the rest of my money safe in CDs and online savings accounts.
Always save your buffers...

Money? eh? Getting paid in money is for suckers.

Get paid in goods and services.
(Nothing says wealth like a UHaul full of creamed corn).
Oracle owns BTRFS, Sun owns ZFS, Oracle owns Sun.

There's only one way this can play out.
Hindsight is 20:20. HFS was release in 1985!
> We are spending millions and billions of dollars on entertainment in the form of sports stadiums and franchises that only americans care about.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/177422

> Regarding business, the answer is yes. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that between 1986 and 2005, foreign sales of U.S. motion-picture and video products rose from $1.91 billion to $10.4 billion (in 2005 dollars)—an increase of 444 percent. As Dan Glickman, president of the Motion Picture Association says, "Among all the sectors of the U.S. economy, our industry is the only one that generates a positive balance of trade in every country in which it does business." The same is true for the TV and music industries, and the reach is far greater when piracy is figured in.

I rather wonder how much the figures increase when all entertainment is included (sports, video games, etc.).
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Ask HN: Statistics for hackers?
Hi again HN,

I've been trying to learn more about statistics of late, motivated by some really fantastic applications I've seen, like automated composition of music, medical models, and stock market tools.

Atm I've been going through the book Elements of Statistical Learning, which I got from the frontpage a few days ago. But it's kind of slow going, since without really knowing how things relate to each other all I can do is go through it sequentially. What I want is to jump in with both feet, and start writing cool code.

Does anyone know of good books or articles for someone in my situation? Or you give me sort of a minimal spanning roadmap for what I need before I can start having some fun?

I know about basic probability theory, bayesian text classification and hidden markov models, but that's about all.
> Spending about 2% of current world domestic product on CO2 mitigation seems perfectly justifiable to me.

Just for kicks, how many people do you think would die annually if we spent 2% of annual GDP? (Remember to include all the people who will die prematurely because of diverted R&D, less income for medicine, distracted governments & elites, car manufacturers favoring fuel efficiency over safety etc.)
Cornell. Having been to both Cornell and UMich, Cornell is vastly superior in CS. UMich does have a lot of support for entrepreneurship though, which is ironic because it's an absolutely awful place to start a business (the unions are ridiculously strong here.)
A very old gcc "bug"
GT's CS looks pretty good too. I'm a senior in HS and I'm applying there for CS with the same basic goal.

Tech has a college of computing, which I think will be nice (especially compared to being thrown in w/ engineering and having to do all those extra required classes). And they have "threads" where you specialize in 2 aspects of CS (and you do 1 thread if you do computational media), which is cool.
Billionaire (Sergey Brin) Aids Charity That Aided Him
And smart professors. I still talk with a lot of my undergrad profs on facebook ^-^.
>> that some dinosaurs insist on 20-year-old languages

> That would not be so much of a problem. Scheme is
> certainly older than 20 years, now. Python comes close.

I can't tell if you're misunderstanding things deliberately - certainly your profile and history suggest that you're not a troll.

The point isn't about age, it's about the popularity and maturity of the language, and through them, the acceptability.

But I'm pretty sure you knew that, so maybe I'm missing something deeper in your comment.
Slide 25: "Most Metrics' values increase with code size". The point about non-linear increase in defects is my (unwarranted) extrapolation. An earlier slide quotes a 25% increase in complexity gives a 100% increase in size.

No, it really doesnt rise to his standards of rigor. Everything that I have read, supporting that conclusion is probably anecdotal. The formal studies I have read have usually involved college students on short projects. Studies that are probably worth less than useless. Others probably suffer from the Hawthorne effect.
Search vs. Recommendations, or Authoritative and Related Sources in a Graph
From my perspective at CMU, Engineers here tend to learn processes and heuristic approaches to problems. Computer Scientists are forced to learn to do things with almost no heuristic guidelines whatsoever. The net result is less likelihood of experiencing a problem in real life and saying "I can't do this, I didn't take that class!" which happens all the time.

Beyond that, there's a heavy emphasis on the nitty-gritty technical stuff like writing an operating system and implementing malloc and even buffer overflows. You really go all the way down to system architecture basics and all the way up to functional programming/algorithms/logic/etc. I think the breadth is very helpful in that it gives you a big "tool kit" for when you need to attack much more specific problems later in life.
This is one of the two things I am now wishing I would have done. When I finished my CS degree many recruiters told me they don't hire CS grads, they hire engineers and teach them to program. I would have done an Electrical Engineering degree if I could do it again.

The other mistake I made was transferring back home to the state school. I didn't want to go in debt from school, which was what I was about to do. I started at New Mexico Tech (which except for being in the middle of no where is an awesome hacker school imo, it should be on the list; they control the VLA on campus btw).
I wonder what OP has seen to reach these conclusions because this is not my experience. Not even close.

What I have experienced in commercial environments:

- Software make/buy decisions are rarely made by programmers, but are made strategically with programmer input.

- "Everything else (95%)" can be many things. Sometimes you can plug in standard stuff (utilities, human resources, accounting), often you must write original code to handle your company's proprietary processes.

- In theory, existing libraries and frameworks are great. In practice, sometimes they make sense, but just as often they force you into a dead end. It may be tough to code at a low level, but the advantage is that you can almost always do what's needed.

- Having source code and being able to do something with it if often a huge competitive advantage. I forget how many times I've witnessed M & A scenarios where the acquirer bought the acquired because the former was able to change their business software on the fly and the latter had an unchangeable package.