Spyro7

Thinking about the issue some more - maybe I was wrong to disagree with your edited initial comment. I really do think that the American public is both apathetic and ignorant, and the majority of the country's current problems derive from these failings.

They are apathetic, but they are not apathetic towards any specific issue. No, they are apathetic to anything that would seem to distract them from the normal course of their daily schedule. I do not think that it would be difficult for "ordinary" people to take a few minutes and become informed about what is going on. If I know, you know, and (probably) most of the people on Hacker News know - well, it can't be impossible to find out.

I think that, well, most people content themselves that party affiliation and straight-ticket voting are all that is necessary to ensure a functioning democracy. It just seems strange to me, that in a country where so many people pride themselves on being patriotic, there is so little intellectual curiosity with regards to how it functions.

The tyranny of the majority is usually used to refer to the potential for the opinion of the many to disenfranchise the rights of the few. I wonder if there is something more insidious than this though. What could be the side effects of the self-selected nonchalance of the many?

I was once told that to talk about a problem without providing a solution is not a good way to advance in society, but, really, I'm completely at a loss. How do you get the majority of people to be interested in something that does not provide immediate economic benefits (without resorting to indoctrination)?

I didn't down-vote you (I think that its lame to ninja down-vote - it defeats the purpose of conversation), but I think that your initial comment was just a bit hyperbolic.

I disagree with your edit too though. Who here in the US is pretending that there is no revolving door? I don't think that anyone is ignoring the problem. I just think that most ordinary people are completely ignorant of the problem.

Big media has very little interest in reporting on the extent of the problem (for obvious reasons), and most people don't read the kind of news sites that discuss the issue openly. For most ordinary people, the issue isn't ignored so much as it is out of site, out of mind.

The problem is that ordinary people make up the majority of the population. It is a real problem, even when the revolving door is a huge issue[1] it is hard to keep the interest of the general public. The general public is kind of like my cat; intent on stalking something for a few seconds then off scampering around after the latest amusements.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html

"With PyPy the performance will get better, and they also have a GC, so that hinder is removed. I don't really know if PyPy has a GIL, I would guess that they don't."

PyPy still has GIL:

http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/faq.html#does-pypy-h...

For more information about it, check these sources:

Official PyPy Status Blog - http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/05/threads-and-gcs.html

Thinking about the GIL (read the whole thread, interesting stuff) - http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pypy-dev/2011-March/006991....

"It eludes me why any developer would be using anything other than a laptop."

Based on my own experiences, here are a few reasons that I can think of:

+ Has a setup that involves 3 or more screens

+ Needs to use 2 or more hard drives

+ Likes the idea of having a video card that can be easily upgraded

+ Likes the idea of having a processor that can be easily upgraded

+ Needs to have two or more video cards

+ Needs to have two or more optical media drives

Thank you jswinghammer. This statement right here summarizes the whole problem with the OP:

"The only jobs that are sustainable are the jobs that produce something that other people actually want."

This is exactly it. You can not stimulate an economy simply by pushing up production on the supply side.

Mark Cuban's idea seems appealing on the surface, but he makes a serious assumption. He implicitly assumes a positive net benefit after you give these companies money and they create jobs with this money.

Look, if you transfer money from the government to the companies to the people then that is just a transfer payment. Moving money around like that does not create wealth within a country, and that is what we need right now. We need to spend money on things that generate positive net present value, and we need to curtail spending money on things that do not meet this criteria.

In order for Mark Cuban's idea to work, all of these companies must be employing the additional labor towards activities that are economically profitable. Here's a quick thought exercise. What is the likelihood of a company being engaged in economically profitable activities given that it is taking advantage of this program? (It is reasonable to assume that a company with a healthy balance sheet and a healthy income would not want to deal with government bureaucracy willingly.)

Also, as a side note, the following quote from the blog post is a bit inaccurate:

"(Stunningly, bailouts excluded)."

That the bank bailouts were repaid so handily owes very little to the bailouts themselves. Thanks to extraordinary measures taken by the Federal Reserve, the banks were able to borrow money at an interest rate of virtually nothing and then use this money to purchase U.S. bonds - effectively lending it back to the U.S. government. In addition to this, the Federal Reserve also took the unusual step of dramatically expanding its balance sheet (removing toxic liabilities from the banks themselves). That was the real bailout, and it was much larger than the pithy amounts that you saw reported by the administration.

To get a sense of the scale and size of the real bailout, please take a look at this graph:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/fed-balance-she...

Edit: Also, I forgot to mention one more thing. The current negative rates on U.S. debt would almost certainly change if we began to issue substantially more of it. As Europe is rapidly learning, the debt market is far from a static environment.

Quote from the page you linked:

"He also says they are working on ways to handle pseudonyms, but that will be a while before the team can turn on those features"

I don't understand. Wouldn't the implementation of this "feature" just boil down to not deleting or disabling people's accounts when they sign up with a pseudonym?

I just don't see why this would take so much effort to do. I really don't see why implementing this particular feature would take all of the effort and energy that they seem to be indicating.

I did not down-vote you (as a matter of fact, I up-voted you because I am not a fan of ninja down-voters and I think that you ask interesting questions). However, it is evident that you are not a formally trained economist.

Economics is not closely tied to politics. If you ever want to have a look at what real economics is, please go to http://ssrn.com/ and read some economic articles on subjects that interest you. One thing that you will rapidly notice is that politics has almost nothing to do with formal, academic Economics (and this consitutes the great bulk of the activity that goes on in the field of Economics).

It is worthwhile to distinguish between normative economics and positive economics. Positive economics, which constitutes the majority of the discipline, seeks to describe, explain, and record economic phenomena. Normative economics, which is the louder minority, seeks to prescribe solutions to problems by using economic theory.

The problem with modern Economics is that the loudest voices within the field are listened to because of their political viewpoints and not their economic expertise. Dr. Krugman in particular has the habit of mixing normative and positive economics without providing a careful distinction between the two. This is a huge problem, and it makes the entire field look bad. However, what can economists that are not popular do about this? The mass media has very little interest in impact studies of obscure policy changes done in third world countries, so we just keep churning away in the background.

While I would not say that George Box is wrong outright, I would say that this quote from him is not entirely accurate as it could be when applied to Economic modelling. You see, by definition an Economic model is merely a simplification of a real world phenomena. Of course, all simplifications are "wrong" because they are not intended to be "right" they are merely intended to be approximations.

Economic models are more prone to error than Mathematical models and models in the Natural sciences because they are, in essence, brutally simple models of Human behaviour. Their usefulness is not subject to their ability to be implemented, but is is subject to the context of the problem at hand and what the expectations are for the model.

For example, one thing that I did recently was to analyze some time series data to analyze a market for seasonality. The predictions of my model for the next two quarters were not even close to being exact, but the seasonality estimates were spot on. A model's usefulness must be determined within the context of its overall purpose.

"They were the only government to take a position of austerity"

There are several problems with the hypothesis that Germany's austerity experience is broadly applicable.

1. Germany is an export-oriented economy operating within a currency union with countries that are less export oriented. This means that Germany has the benefit of an exchange rate that is lower than it would be if Germany was not a member of the Euro currency.

2. Germany did not actually take an austerity only approach:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/27/germany-europe

http://www.thelocal.de/money/20090724-20807.html

As far as Washington goes, our first stimulus package was shameful. Our nation's infrastructure is underdeveloped:

http://www.economist.com/node/18620944

Our electric grid is woefully inadequate:

http://ideas.economist.com/blog/us-electric-grid-gets-less-r...

http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/fact-sheet/energy

Yet, about half of our $700 Billion USD stimulus went to tax cuts. Given the lack of evidence that economic output improved, it seems sensible to conclude that most of these tax savings went to either debt servicing or savings accounts, and I have no idea where the rest of that $700 billion went. It doesn't seem to have gone into any major infrastructure projects that I am aware of.

When your entire problem is a lack of economic activity, investments should be made that produce positive net benefits.

As a side note, to call Washington Keynesian is to fundamentally misunderstand Keynes. Truly Keynesian economic policy would not continuously run a budget deficit. A central tenet of Keynesian economics is that a Government saves when times are good and spends when times are bad. Washington spends when times are good and spends when times are bad.

Edit: Also, one thing that is very important to keep in mind is that the States have received only marginal amounts of assistance with their budgetary woes. With the States needing to balance their budgets on an annual or bi-annual basis, the net effect of the federal stimulus package may have been nothing:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Blogs/Bartletts-Notations/2010...

When you include the states in the picture, maybe the U.S. is not as far from austerity as we would like to believe.

There is a certain demographic that reads The Economist and it is not the mainstream. It is closer to the mainstream than Hacker News, but it still isn't quite there yet.

It is nice to see this issue filtering its way through popular media, but the problem is that some of the nuances seem to be getting lost along the way.

Maybe it's just me, but I would have liked to see a bit more background on this issue than what was presented in this article. Even just a little discussion regarding the problems specfic to software patents. (I.e. the question of whether software is even patentable.)

I guess the problem with that is the more details get included, the further from the mainstream you get.

Really, I think that it would take something really shocking to get the real mainstream into this. Something like an injunction against some popular piece of hardware (or software). Then you wouldn't need to include all of the details. You could just rely on people having knee-jerk reactions against patents in general.

The worst case may be coal, but the most likely case (for America) is that the additional electricity needs are met by Natural Gas. More specifically, natural gas derived from the oil shale deposits.

Here's a link with some interesting info on this: http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffmcmahon/2011/06/30/cheap-natural...

While this isn't the ideal solution for the environment (frankly, I then that solar towers with molten salt storage reservoirs are the best all around energy solution right now), natural gas is altogether far less damaging to the environment than coal.

Take a look at this study: http://media.kentucky.com/smedia/2009/10/19/10/HiddenCosts.s...

In a nutshell, coal is vastly more damaging to the environment than any other form of generating electricity.

I know that they have taken some heat for security issues of late, but, frankly, I love this company and their product and I am happy to see them doing well.

The magic of Dropbox is that it strikes just the right balance between simplicity and power.

When my mother deleted a book that she had been writing for almost a year (and its backup), I was able to show her how to retrieve deleted documents from Dropbox. It was incredible.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well Dropbox is magic to most of the people that I have introduced it to.

I know that there are other solutions out there that do similar things to what they do, but I have never really been able to find one that just clicks with so many people regardless of technical ability.

I have to say that I did not know about the inurl google search parameter.

However, this is indeed a very rough estimate because the parameter 100...100000 also captures the number that indicates how long ago a user account was created, so it would also count accounts that were created a while ago (over 100 days) but were inactive.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Ebay's last Q2 spooked a lot of investors due to their decreased income and margins. The Nasdaq as a whole is down today (so far).

I would suspect that Ebay is more negative than the market due to spooked investors taking this general market malaise as an excuse to bailout.

Given that I see nothing about #OpPayPal in the business news journals as of yet, I would be very surprised if the movers and shakers that hold eBay stock are reacting to it.

(This post does not constitute investment advice of any kind, and I do not hold eBay stock.)

I'll be completely honest. Prior to this I disliked patent trolls in a sort of abstract way, but now, I have a visceral feeling of disgust just thinking about patent trolls.

Lodsys in particular seems to have no shame.

I wonder if a few more of these higher profile lawsuits might pull the general public's attention from whatever the latest reality TV show is. Maybe then the political system could do something useful to stop the patent lawsuit insanity.

I love this technology a whole lot, but this is Hacker News so it is worthwhile to think critically about this kind of "press release"-style news posting. This article does a bit of hand waving with the numbers, and, while this is an amazingly cool project, I think that they are overselling its benefits.

First, let's get the terminology right. This plant has a capacity of 200 MW. That does not mean that it produces 200 MWh. The formula for converting MW into (annual) MWh is the following:

MWh = MWx365x24xCF

In the above formula, CF is the capacity factor. Capacity factor is basically the amount of energy that a plant is actually able to produce over the course of a year divided by the total capacity of the plant. Here are some common capacity factors for various industries (taken from a private document, so no sources but this stuff is easy enough to google):

* Coal - 65-95%

* Natural Gas - 35-65%

* Hydro - 25-65%

* Solar - 20-35%

* Wind - 20-35%

* Nuclear - 80%+

Capacity factors are never 100% for various reasons:

* Plants may need to be taken offline for refueling, maintenance, or inspection

* For renewables, the wind isn't always going at full speed and the sun isn't always shining

* A whole bunch of other things that I am too tired to list (read the references below, they have some more in them)

Now, let's look at this new project, and one of the claims made in this article.

According to the article, this plant will be able to provide power for 150,000 homes. According to the EIA, the average household annual energy usage is 10,896 KWh. Given this information and using a more generous solar capacity factor (35%):

Number of Homes Powered = (200x365x24x.35) / 10.896 = 56,278 homes

Hmm, well that's just a bit less than what the article claimed, so they must be assuming a really amazing capacity factor for this estimate. Let's solve the below for cf and see what we get....

(200x365x24xcf)/10.896=150000

cf = approx. 93%

Look, I'm all for scientific advancement and alternative energy, but can we try to be more sensible than this? This is a highly improbable capacity factor.

Documents available from Enviro Mission says that the simulated capacity factor will be more like 50%. When we plug that number into the equation we get about 80,397 homes, which is pretty sensible. However, we have to remember that these are only simulated numbers. There are no similar projects currently available that can be compared to this one, so the actual capacity factor may be either more or less.

Note: Please keep in mind that efficiency is a totally different concept from capacity factor. Efficiency is typically used to describe how well a plant transfers from its energy source into electricity^. The capacity of a plant is a number that already incorporates the plant's efficiency. The capacity factor is simply a measure of how much of that capacity is actually used on an annual basis on average.

^ I am not an electrical engineer. I am an economist, that is the best definition I can come up with.

Disclaimer: I am incredibly tired right now, so if any errors appear in the above posting please send me some coffee so that I can correct them before falling asleep.

References:

+ http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

+ http://www.solarpaces.org/CSP_Technology/docs/solar_tower.pd...

+ http://www.enviromission.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CP...

Edit: Formatting was all messed up the first time. Forgot to include some additional information. Added clarification on efficiency.

"I've never used a tool that has a simple method for me to extend the ORM bits halfway through the query building process with some custom SQL"

Well, I am not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but Django's ORM allows you to write custom SQL and then collect the resulting rows as objects. You can also circumvent the object layer entirely and deal directly with the SQL. Take a look at this page:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/sql/

I have found this functionality to be incredibly valuable for quite a few of the projects that I have worked on.

"It can just query requests over network like maeon3 suggests."

Of course, you do realize that requests over a network need a server to reply to them? Millions of people making such requests would need quite a fews servers indeed. That is where the mass deployment would come in.

Still, I wonder... If someone was crazy enough, they could probably accomplish quite a bit with data scrapers, regular expression matching, and some distributed computing fairy dust.

I agree with you, but Watson has some pretty hefty hardware requirements:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/what-makes-ibms-watson...

Bringing Watson to a large audience would be an immense technical undertaking. The real "next Googles" will probably be the hardware companies that make the mass deployment of a Watson-type system possible.

Edit: Formatting

I haven't compared the two projects, but the rubygame project is currently in a state of "indefinite hibernation":

http://rubygame.org/blog/2011/07/12/the-new-rubygame-org/#mo...

So it is good to have an alternative available.

I don't understand the point of this article (or why so many people are up-voting it).

The article says that unemployment is high and then it says:

"Maybe something is missing in the Valley and surrounding tech communities and that’s a stronger sense of responsibility to make sure that the vast majority of the country isn’t left behind by all this cool technology that we’re building."

I'm curious, what should the technology communities do? As far as I can see, by expanding their firms and hiring additional employees these companies are already doing the responsible thing for the national economy.

I realize that TC is not an economic journal, but I think that it is reasonable to expect a slightly more informed discussion of this issue without so much hyperbole.

The currently high unemployment rate is not due to the technology industries growth, and, as a matter of fact, it is the expansion of the technology industry that will likely provide one of the avenues that will assist in dealing with the high unemployment rate.

Just a few references:

- http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/03/how_much...

- http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1928261,00....

In economics a public good is defined as a good that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. In other words, a public good is defined as a product or service where the following are True:

- An additional consumer of the product or service does not impact the ability of others to consume

- It is not possible to prevent someone from consuming the good

A good example of a public good is something like national defense.

A bad example of a public good is university education. University education meets neither of the criteria necessary in order to be classified as a public good.

I think that what the author means to say is that there are positive externalities that are associated with the provision of public universities.

While your conceptual waiter with a degree in women's studies is a dubious example of the benefits of education, there is some evidence available that suggests that the availability of education is, in the aggregate, strongly correlated with certain positive societal outcomes.

This is a bit outside of my areas of study, so I am not able to suggest specific readings. However, I can point you in the general direction of a couple of Google scholar search results:

- Education and Crime Reduction: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=education+and+crime

- Education and Macroeconomic Effects: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=education+and+...

Of course, there is also some evidence that strongly calls into question the general purpose of post-secondary education. Is post-secondary education beneficial in its own right or is post-secondary education simply another useful bullet point on a resume? Is it a signaling mechanism or is it a valuable addition to society?

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) (Yes, I know that this is wikipedia, but it is a nice article.)

Edit: I clicked update too fast the first time. I nearly forgot to say. If the primary benefit of post-secondary education is that it provides a useful signal, then it stands to reason that there may be more cost-effective ways of achieving this end.

A great response! Let me see if I can shed some more light on this topic.

"This phrase is the anti-science. No science operates based on \"commonly accepted\"."

Exactly! And, there is a very good reason for this. Economics is not a science. It is a social science that makes some use of the scientific method. Within this context, meta-analysis becomes extremely important for drawing pertinent conclusions. This is just a side note, because it seems that we have crossed our wires somewhere.

"Consider how absurd it would be for any modern economist to claim that a form of money, which was banned in 1933, was the cause of prolonging the great depression."

I should have been more clear. I was referring to the global economic instability (generally manifesting itself as a number of depressions across the Bretton Woods countries) that preceded the collapse of the Bretton Woods System.

I have to apologize, but when I see "gold standard" I immediately start my Bretton Woods rebuttal. It is a reflex reaction from spending too much time arguing with Austrian economists.

Of course, the grandparent post was referring to the Great Depression. Well, all is not lost. Dr. Scott Sumner (my favorite practicing economist) has a nice starter post on the Great Depression:

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4161

Edit: The "depression" referred to in this post refers to the global economic instability that led to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System. It does not refer to the Great Depression. I was not able to address that due to time constraints. Please see child posts for clarification:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670994

"Many economists disagree, for example George Robinson..."

I have been studying economics for a while and I have never heard of this George Robinson. I tried to google for some information on him and all that I can come up with is line noise. If George Robinson was an economist of some repute then he should at least have some published research available, but I am unable to find anything.

Side Note: Obviously, there is no formal licensing process, but in order to call themselves an economist, it is generally accepted that someone should have a graduate degree in economics or a related field. If someone is discussing Macroeconomics, then they really should have a graduate degree in order to be taken seriously. Macroeconomics is an incredibly complex subject and a layman's knowledge is not sufficient in order to have a good grasp of it.

Just for the record, it is actually commonly accepted by modern economists that the gold standard was responsible for the severity of the depression, but stimulus was not the reason for this. The real problem with the Bretton Woods System was that it functioned as an implicit dollar peg for the countries that were in it. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was pegged (at constant rate) to Gold.

Thus, other countries in the Bretton Woods System ended up taking on the risk of America's monetary policy, and American monetary policy had to be managed in such a way that it was perhaps not always in America's best interest. This is the principle argument against a modern global gold standard. To properly manage such a standard for the benefits of all participants would require a superhuman amount of even-handedness and situational awareness, and all of this would be for a system that basically approximates the system that we have today (in which countries are, mostly, free to set their own monetary policy to benefit themselves).

Now, for the idea of a gold standard here in America. The principle objection to this is that it would tie America's currency to a commodity. This seems like an obvious observation, but there are some geopolitical implications here that I rarely see mentioned. Let me put it like this: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

Yes, a lot of people have disagreements with the Fed. You can voice those disagreements, and we can make alterations to the Fed's structure as needed, but if the dollar was set on a gold standard tomorrow, then America would lose control of its monetary policy. Voicing your disagreement at that point becomes a little bit more complex.

That last line sounds a little bit extreme, but you need to think about it. Constantly, I hear people talk about gold as though making the dollar dependent on it would alleviate all concerns about the monetary supply. People seem to think that we adopt the gold standard, then, poof, suddenly there would be no monetary policy. This is completely untrue.

Like dollars, the amount of gold in the market at any given time is a mutable value. Gold can be added to the market and gold can be taken out of the market. If the dollar depends on gold, then we would still have a federal reserve bank. The only difference is that it would not be based in the U.S. and under American jurisdiction.

Now, here's a question to think about. Who would comprise our new federal reserve board? Let's take a look at the top ten board members[1]:

    Rank	Country/Region	Gold production (kilograms)
    1	    China	        320,000
    2	    Australia	    210,000
    3	    South Africa	210,000
    4	    United States	205,000
    5	    Russia	        205,000
    6	    Peru	        180,000
    7	    Indonesia	    140,000
    8	    Canada	        95,000
    9	    Ghana	        90,000
    10	    Uzbekistan	    80,000

Hmmm, looks like a bunch of countries that are unequivocally in favor of Americans' best interests. Of course, these are just the chief board members. There are many others. In fact, any country or organization with cash can weigh in on the market, and with the stakes being so high (the monetary policy of one of the most powerful nations on the face of the earth), you would be naive to think that interested parties would not take the necessary actions.

[1] Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_produ... (which in turn is sourced from the Economist)

Note: Originally, I intended to debunk all of the "points" raised by this George Robinson, but I am not able to due to time constraints. Time constraints also ensure that this is a much more brief post than would be necessary to fully argue my point. However, I hope that I have been able to provide a helpful angle on why economists are leery of a return to the gold standard.

"Some of you probably know that Python is currently at a bit of a crossroads. Python 2.x was the stable Python version for many years, but recently it was replaced by Python 3.x."

Python 3 has not "replaced" Python 2. The reality is quite a bit more nuanced than this, and it is hardly a bad thing that Django does not support Python 3 right now. To give this section the heading of "The great divide" is just a tiny bit hyperbolic.

From the top of the python.org page dedicated to the subject[1]:

Python 2.x is the status quo, Python 3.x is the shiny new thing

Also from that same page, here are some of the key things in Python 3 that are not in Python 2 yet:

* function annotations

* syntax for keyword-only arguments

* extended tuple unpacking

* non-local variable declarations

There is nothing in this list that a developer must have in order to develop their app, and there are no Python 3 exclusive projects that do not work with Python 2.

The fact that few major Python projects are currently ported to Python 3 is not evidence of some tremendous looming problem in the Python language. It is evidence that Python 3 is only, really, an evolutionary transition from Python 2 and that this transition has a long time horizon.

The move from Python 2 to Python 3 is nothing like the move from Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 1.9. There are no dramatic speed or stability improvements that make Python 3 something that is terrible to miss out on, and there is no rush to get projects ported to Python 3. It will happen when it happens.

[1] http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

I feel like I've read over 20 of these articles lately.

I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another since 1998. It works, trust me.

I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD. In terms of "desktop" experience, both of these operating systems are somewhat similar.

I understand his complaints about the driver situation, but, really, this just means that you need to do some additional due diligence on your hardware. If you think that is troublesome, try installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. Now that can be a real adventure.

What struck me as odd was being down-voted without anyone telling me what it was that rubbed them the wrong way.

The reason that I hang around HN is because I learn a lot by doing so. When someone down-votes something and then runs off, no one actually benefits in any way from that (unless the post that was down-voted was complete trash).

My extensive edit was an attempt to lure out the down-voters so that I could find out exactly where the wheels came off in the original post.

Looking back, I probably should have angled for a less confrontational tone in my edit, but I have a hard time getting tone across in these things.

You know, you spend less time typing each post than you would spend on a research paper or an email but more time than a text message. It is a challenging thing to get the tone just right. I much prefer face to face conversation any day of the week, but I like this place a lot.

The thing is that this is my first time actually not lurking on a site in nearly 10 years, and HN has its own unique culture.

Look, you've been on this site for more than an order of magnitude longer than me. Do you (or anyone else) feel like helping a newbie out:

When anonymous down-votes strike, is it better to reply to yourself, keep your edits small, or just walk away?

"does help generate inflation, though, which helps keep labor costs (our pay) down by effectively handing workers a little pay cut every year"

You do realize that wages are adjusted for cost of living changes over time? (This is a gross simplification of the actual process, but the fact remains that wages are not constant in the face of inflation.)

Take a look at this please (using median wage here to make this more clear):

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+occupations+median+...

However, here is median wage too: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=all+occupations+mean+wa...

It is also worth noting that the average wage back in the '70s was roughly $8,000.00.

Edited in Response to Downvoting:

Inflation is caused by rising prices, and wages are one of these prices. Your wage is simply the price of your labor. In the long-run, wages are flexible just like all of the other prices. Admittedly wolfram|alpha does not have extensive historical graphs available, but I am not trying to write a book here.

If you are down-voting because you have not received a pay increase lately, then you should be aware of the fact that wages are usually a bit more sticky than other prices in the short run.

If you are down-voting this, I would appreciate engaging you in honest discussion about the point that I made above.

The parent post said that inflation gives workers a little pay cut every year. Painting this wonderful image of a worker sliding into poverty. This is demonstrably false. Yes, a 1% or a 2% rise in inflation will impact your real earnings, but wages are not a static process and they do reflect the actual costs of living changes that take place over time.

As an economist, I am constantly amazed by how poorly the press discusses inflation and how little most people know about what inflation is and how it interacts with other variables within an economy. Please read this pdf for some discussion on wages and price inflation:

https://www.clevelandfed.org/research/policydis/pd1.PDF

It is an academic piece, but it is one of my favorites for illustrating the interaction between wages and the greater macroeconomy.

"While the idea that Fukushima would be responsible for a 35% increase in infant mortality anywhere in the U.S. strains ones credulity"

Credulity doesn't factor into it. I found their "article" to be insulting in its lack of statistical rigor. If you have not read it, then you should read it.

They compare two averages - each taken over a completely different length of time. They do not even make the smallest attempt to control for any external factors. Finally, they look at some dates and assume direct causation.

This doesn't even make it to my credulity. It stops short of it, landing somewhere between disgust and amusement.

"her being anti-nuclear is not proof of her being wrong"

No, but her shabby statistical methodology does nothing to help her cause.

Perhaps I should have put the link to their article first before I introduced their backgrounds.

"It's not like MIT nuclear scientists are \"disinterested parties\", either."

No, but they are in an entirely different realm when it comes to the rigorousness of their methodology.

It is all well and good to have an opinion one way or another, but I do not think that we should pretend that there is any equivalence between the MIT nuclear scientists and Dr Sherman.

If you want to see intelligent debate on the merits of nuclear power, may I make the following recommendation:

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/681

(Note: It is not entirely obvious, but you can navigate between the phases of the debate by click the dates on the "latest updates bar".)

"There are two competing effects at work here, and it's hard to say which is strongest: If you are biased one way or another, you probably will put more effort into finding facts that support your view. That doesn't mean that those facts are wrong"

Are we talking about facts or opinions? Facts, by definition, are true. With that definition in mind, facts can not be "wrong".

I should hope that if someone is making an argument they go through whatever efforts needed to find and report the facts that support their case.

"just that you have acquired a self-reinforced, biased view of the world."

If you see two sides in a debate and both sides have strong, compelling arguments then it is the responsibility of you, the individual, to make your own choice.

However, just because someone favors a certain perspective on an issue does not mean that their viewpoint should be discarded because they are "biased".

Bias is not as simple of a concept as you make it out to be. Any issue worthy of intelligent debate and discussion is likely to be extremely nuanced.

There will be an interaction between the nuances of a complex issue and the personal values that people place on certain things.

In other words, it is possible for more than one group of people to be "right" on a certain issue. However, I think that the key point to remember here is that building an argument based on facts is a prerequisite to correctness.

"But saying this argument is like pointing out \"motive\" in a trial seems like a stretch. Motive would usually include financial or other similar types of gain. If saying things you believe are right makes you liable to a charge of having motive to lying just because you have an opinion, then you can't trust anyone except completely ignorant people, which is not a step forward."

Actually, I completely agree with you here. I read the comment describing my initial argument as "motive", but you would figure that in order to have a motive someone had to have committed a crime.

Maybe this is a good explanation. I suppose that from my perspective their "article" was a "crime against statistics", and having elected myself judge, jury, and executioner all that I needed to do is come up with their motivation.

I probably should have made my perspective a little more clear in my original post, but I was trying to be succinct. Unfortunately, in my quest for succinctness, I created a post that may be construed as suboptimal.

"In the US, physician Janette Sherman MD and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano published an essay shedding light on a 35 per cent spike in infant mortality in northwest cities that occurred after the Fukushima meltdown, and may well be the result of fallout from the stricken nuclear plant."

Somehow, I'm not surprised by this. Janette Sherman is an anti-nuclear activist:

http://janettesherman.com/

Joseph Mangano is the director of the "Radiation and Public Health Project":

http://www.radiation.org/

They are not exactly disinterested parties, and it is fair to say that their article would never be published in a peer reviewed journal:

http://www.counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

Side Note: This is not the most scientific graph in the world, but (in the event of another panicked radiation article) it is always worth linking to the xkcd graph on radiation:

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I think that designating ORMs as "anti-patterns" is a bit strong. Perhaps my understanding of what an ORM is supposed to accomplish is different from the author's, but I think that some of the criticisms that the author levels against ORMs are a bit off.

Inadequate abstraction - I would make the argument that it doesn't make sense to expect an ORM to be able to completely abstract away from the underlying database. The reason that the documentation of the various ORMs is sprinkled with SQL concepts is that the ORM is providing a window into an SQL-based environment. I would never

Incorrect abstraction - I actually agree with this point, but this does not really seem to reflect on ORMs. This point has much more to do with the ongoing debate between the NoSQL movement and relational databases.

Death by a thousand queries - I hardly think that this is a knock against all ORMs. Different ORMs have different solutions (or a lack thereof) to this problem. I use Django a lot, and Django's built-in ORM offers a lot of "frills" that can help to protect against this (lazy loading, selective loading of columns, selected loading of related models). I know that, in the Ruby world, Datamapper seems to have some ways of dealing with this problem as well. It really isn't as simple as saying all ORMs do this therefore all ORMs are bad. The reality is more nuanced.

Ultimately, my principle problem with this piece is that it seems to conflate its argument for NoSQL and its argument against ORMs. NoSQL is wonderful, but it seems to be somewhat orthogonal to the value of ORMs.

ORMs are not perfect, and there is plenty of room for improvement; however, writing everything in SQL solely due to performance fears will usually turn out to be a case of premature optimization.