mdemare

When social security will pay out more than comes in, the difference will come out of general tax revenue. There are no books to balance. The retirement age may go up, but reducing or eliminating social security is electoral suicide.

True, but the murder rate within the U.S. is wildly uneven. There are nine state with a lower murder rate than Finland, while one, Lousiana, has 5x the finnish murder rate.

Well, this is weird. I created this question when StackOverflow was just out of beta, hoping to steer it to more broader questions - guides, if you wish. This question really took off, but the format didn't, and SO mostly became a stack of incredibly specific questions and answers.

And now somebody, but not me, has submitted this question to HN. Under my name. I'm puzzled...

Nonsense, only in California are there more than 10 million voters. In Virginia, there are 3.8M, 1.9M per party. If the candidates are 2% apart, there's about a 1/100K chance of casting a deciding vote.

Also: http://what-if.xkcd.com/19/

The Iraq war, at $4 trillion? These things add up.

Also, over 4 years, the U.S. GDP is $60 trillion, $6 trillion is 10% of that.

How much better do you think that your preferred candidate will do? 5% better? 1% better?

Here's some context for British papers from 25 years ago (Yes Minister. "Hacker" is the minister, not an actual hacker.)

Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers: The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; And The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

That's right - I'm in the beta and it works really well.

Exactly. Window is folder and tabs are files, that arrangement feels completely natural, and Vim never got there with all its own buffers and windows and tabs and so on. Nothing else ever got there (on OSX) until Sublime.

> The fact that there wasn't another editor that fulfilled all those "needs" at the time (mainly: simple, native looking) does not mean that it deserved it's success. What I'm saying is, it got its success not because it was better than the competition but because there was no competition.

What kind of doublespeak is that? If there's a race, and you're the only one who shows up, you deserve to win, period.

< In many countries, the standard payment problems have been largely solved locally, at least for the local markets. In the Netherlands, a wide selection of payment providers will give you the ability to receive payment through virtually any method.

Is it really? Sometimes I feel the Netherlands is the only country where it's been solved. Who of you live in a country with a satisfying, cheap, standard local payment provider?

It's Chalkboard actually.

10 terabytes of fanfic? I thought that you could fit the Library of Congress in less. 10TB is 20M novels of 100K words, unzipped.

Is this venting, or a bug report?

Imagine a typing tutor website. You start typing a few warming up exercises, then the system recognizes you and selects the material according to your progress so far. No need to log in whatsoever.

I think HN should take a page from SO, and introduce meta.news.ycombinator.com and chat.news.ycombinator.com. Then again, there are lots of things I'd change about HN, but it's not my site and it's free.

That's not a bold claim, that's a very safe claim. Learning C won't hurt anyone, except for the missed opportunities, which are invisible. But if you take all the "everybody should learn X" claims literally, you'll spend all your time learning.

So here's my counter-claim. Most Java and .NET developers will do just fine without knowledge of C.

I see this usage of "literally" more as a dereference, or an unquote. I mean, it takes a dead metaphor and tries to bring it back to live. It means "hey, pay attention to this metaphor!"

If you'd say, "the financial system was melting down", that is such a stale metaphor that it might not even trigger any associations with nuclear reactors. "Literally" forces you to stop and think about molten goo and radiation.

And as such, I approve of it (although it is much preferred to use fresh metaphors than to resurrect stale ones.)

So stackoverflow should remove all links to github? Unwise.

Most of them are from the era before 1password - also, I didn't realize until now how bad it was.

My linkedin password is an easy one. Then I checked 1password to see how many other sites I use that password on.

74 sites... including gmail, openid, facebook, skype, amazon, dropbox, reddit and this site.

Hear hear! Finally an article placing the blame where it belongs - on our shoulders. It is naive to expect Congress to figure out what laws are best for the nation. Instead we should be forcing the laws we want down their throats.

All that the MPAA/RIAA can offer to congress is money, but we have something they want much more: votes. When the NRA or the AARP cough, congressmen sit up and listen. The reason? They have millions of members.

Now what about the organization representing our interests? Pro startup, pro contractors, pro net neutrality, anti censorship, anti patent? Why isn't there such an organization with a million members?

We hackers are smart, we're prosperous, there's no excuse for being so damn unorganized.

https://www.eff.org/

Is it much better than iPhoto? Because that's laughably bad.

For "extremely meaty", try King of Dragon Pass, an indie PC hit from 10 years ago just released on iOS.

I meant iDeal, which will allow you to reach most Dutch internet users, as opposed to PayPal or credit cards (relatively few Dutch people have credit cards).

I've stopped bothering.

Anyway, payment processing is a solved problem in the Netherlands. Which other countries have sensible, cheap payment, easy-to-implement solutions that are widely used?

All those women who "opt out of the marriage market", who choose a career over a family, these women won't have any descendants. To the extent that this behavior is genetic, it will disappear within a few generations.

If there's one trend that you cannot extrapolate, it is this one.

I'd say the tech part boils down to "it's untested crypto so it may be hacked". A successful currency is worth at least tens of billions of dollars - do you really want to base it on untested cryptography? And the transaction part looks much shakier than the bitcoin generation part.

Yeah, I submitted the same link earlier, and it was killed after 15 upvotes. This is not an article that deserves flagging.

That has never happened to me - I only use MacVim when I need the power features. I'd love to have vim-style modal editing, but my eyes overrule my hands. MacVim is simply too ugly.

So why did you need permission to post on my wall? As soon as I saw that, I closed the window.