Hacker News Reader

Lambent_Cactuson An Idea for the Economy that will Freak Out a lot of People

"The Republican/ Tea-Party approach to job creation is to cut taxes. The theory being that more money in the pocket of individuals will cause people to spend more money in the economy thereby creating more jobs. Nope. Not happening. Why ? Because individuals have too much debt. Any money they get goes to pay credit cards, student loans and for the smart and fortunate into savings.

Individuals now have debt = to about 119pct of income vs historical levels of .17pct in the 40s, 55pct in the 50s , 65pct in the 60s and a high of 133pct in 2007)."

This is clearly wrong. Never mind cutting taxes, that's much too indirect. New plan - the government borrows as much as it can at negative real interest rates until it bids those rates back down to 0. Then it just mails checks to every American. Some will spend the money (probably with great efficiency! They know what they need!), but most will use it to pay down debts. This is a feature, not a bug. The debts that Americans owe have positive, and in some cases substantial, real interest rates. Bam! You have just accomplished to biggest interest rate arbitrage play in history.

Lambent_Cactuson Free icons for any object in the world

Is there a way to filter to show only the Public Domain icons without opening each shadow box individually?

Lambent_Cactuson What happened to all the female developers?

Whoa, where are good programmers in hot markets making more than $200k? Is that counting stock compensation, or actual salary? I'm seeing sub-200k salaries for Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-San... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Facebook-Software-Engineer-P... http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Software-Developme...

Lambent_Cactuson Ten Ways to Check if an Integer Is a Power Of Two in C

I hadn't considered #2, the Check All option. I love its refusal to be drawn into over-engineering.

Lambent_Cactuson Try to digest the Groupon story

Yes, 'rotten core' was a bit strong. :P I don't know anything about Groupon's specific case, and it's certainly true that in many cases the VC's will be the more experienced and better informed, and therefore more culpable party. Comity!

Lambent_Cactuson Try to digest the Groupon story

Making some people very rich is not the same thing as creating value.

If Groupon investors get rich at the expense of retail investors, that's bad. If the Groupon founders get rich at the expense of retail investors and later venture investors, that's also bad. In fact it's worse, because they have more information about the business than the investors do. The closer you are to the center of the business, the more you are implicated if it turns out to be a giant pump-and-dump scheme. The founders are the rotten core of that scheme.