rvkennedy

Agreed - and while most of this is obvious, and some insightful, some of it is just baseless opinion: "Never underestimate how much havoc you can create by indenting with tabs instead of spaces..."

Conversely, never underestimate how much havoc you can create by using spaces for indentation. With tabs, the level of indentation is clear and atomic. With spaces, it is arbitrary, and, wait for it...

hard to maintain

It's clear actually, that the US must increase spending, increase taxes. You spend to get out of recession, or you cut and make it worse, as has been demonstrated in every recession since records began. The failure to spend has brought us to a double-dip. For some grounding in economics, try the following: http://www.amazon.com/Macroeconomics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/dp/071....

Update: For a more specific analysis of an analogous situation - the Japanese "lost decade", try: http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Grail-Macroeconomics-Revised-Rece...

But they do. Because unlike most people, bank executives don't spend most of what they earn on housing, clothing and feeding their families. Even in the best of times, the rich spend less of their income than the others. Right now, they're spending even less than usual, particularly in terms of investment, because of the bleak economic outlook.

I guess I prefer to think of a state as being like a piece of software. It starts out as kind of a kludge, doesn't do much, and what it does is like a blunt instrument (capital punishment, debtor's prisons and so on).

Like a piece of software, over hundreds of iterations and modifications, assuming the developers are good, a state can become pretty good - powerful enough to give its users what they want, but not monolithic and overburdened with features.

Features we need: environmental regulations, food safety, building codes, healthcare.

Of course, you can tell you've got feature-creep when your state starts building stealth bombers.

The trouble with these "micro-states" is they're starting from scratch. For the first hundred years or so, you'll be able to buy toys that can kill your kids, you'll have buildings that randomly explode, and a broken/nonexistent healthcare system.

Fortunately for the sane, we don't need to risk our families' lives and wellbeing in an unproven, buggy state. Mature, well-tested states are available!

I love the "libertarian" basis for it as well - loose building codes, few weapons restrictions - just what you need in an experimental floating structure thousands of miles from help!

Been there, done that, bought the recession. Regulation, of course, isn't "solving the NP problem", it's modifying the boundary conditions to prevent the system from getting too far out of whack.

Feedback is not advice. This article is saying "don't ask your customers for advice before 1.0". I'd say, "never ask your customers for advice". But get feedback - preferably from a small sample size that you can talk to in-depth about their experiences. But you're looking at what they're experiencing and trying to learn your own lessons. You are not asking them what they want.

Seconded: may I hereby propose a new standard for email, the "bite me" button? Something to throw the entire company in question down the memory hole.

Watch out for GPS time: it ignores leap seconds, and is currently, exactly fifteen seconds ahead of UTC.

Julian Date FTW! Seriously, JD is much smaller than Unix time, so it's less wasteful of numeric range for most practical purposes. And its use would eliminate a barrier between the computing world and that of science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

It's a fact of life that describing someone as a 'serial' anything rarely inspires confidence.

The article misses one of the more interesting recent developments - that via OpenGL ES, GL is effectively doing an end-run around the whole Direct3D roadblock. As several posters have mentioned, GL ES is the standard in all the major mobile platforms. Now WebGL is threatening, not without some MS pushback, to become the standard for native 3D on the web.

Almost by default - simply because DX is a Windows/Xbox technology, and these platforms (particularly Windows, but also the traditional consoles) are fading - and GL is ruling the new world of games - online games, Facebook games, web and so on.

It's rare indeed on HN to see much talk of Microsoft's continuing dominance, because in the web/tech world, that dominance doesn't exist. Games are changing too. And it's games we're talking about here - OpenGL has always run the show in serious applications of 3D, and that shows no signs of abating.

First thought: the Swedes are doing well! Why is 60% of GDP the target? What does this do?

If demand is low, no-one will miss them much when they strike. If they are missed, basic market economics dictates that they should get paid more. Further, there are two sides to the demand curve. There is supply - how many people are prepared to do the job, and there is demand - how much those who pay them, directly or indirectly, appreciate what they do. Now, clearly there is some variation in the demand - you perhaps have little demand for their services, whereas some commenters value them more highly. So I guess in the fullness of time, perhaps with the aid of a strike for clarity, we'll see who's in the majority.

This is a very recent discovery - the findings come from sequencing the Neanderthal genome by the Max Planck Institute.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8660940.stm

I'd love to know what the imagined risk would be - as far as I can see the only additional capability from WebGL against regular JavaScript is to send commands and data to and from the GPU. What harm can that do?

I've seen that movie - Avatar I think.

Thanks! This improves it a bit though for me the slider is now above its track on Firefox. I'll keep at it - my GL skills are a bit ahead of my CSS at this stage!

This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/or..., but wanted to do something in 3D.

Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE.

I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I won't say I have the perfect solution, but the general approach is to use a conventional HTML5 canvas, then copy it once per frame into a WebGL texture. There's something funky going on in this process - the textures get corrupted, and resizing the window leads to slowdown.

For the future I'd like to make the planets clickable and zoomable, maybe put in a search box to zoom to objects of interest. I'd like to build it up to a full catalogue of the Solar System - comets, the larger asteroids, dwarf planets - and maybe add the capability to put in known space mission trajectories.

Because Republicans are always campaigning, I would guess. Same reason they are disproportionately highly represented on the Sunday talk shows.

A key result of this analysis is that there's an element of feedback. If you're the only investor in the world who's using this strategy, it may work. But the larger the proportion of investors who do this, the more locally unstable the market will become. It's a far cry from the "perfect, self-correcting market", which we can think of as the zeroth order long-term behaviour. But feedback effects are not sufficiently local that they cannot have destructive effects over a multi-year timescale.

It's a general law in fiction, going back to Frankenstein, that any development that challenges the status quo will prove harmful. Mary Shelley didn't call it "The Modern Prometheus" for nothing - the implication is that to challenge our limitations offends the gods, or God, or Nature. It's a great way to make people feel OK about mortality or failure. And a guaranteed trope - when a TV episode or movie starts with a new development in science with great promise you know 100% by the closing credits that the scientist will have been punished and the status quo ante restored.

I would guess that when the first crazy experimentalist tried putting seeds in the ground instead of foraging for fruit, there was a cave painting about how the Spirits would punish the whole tribe for its arrogance.

Yes - high inflation (i.e. too high, not 5%), substantial currency devaluation (not hyperinflation but worse than a mere annoyance), and especially high unemployment - higher than we have now under the market-focused orthodoxy. But it needs to be compared to a useful control. For example, if it's limited to the 1970's, it would be hard to isolate from the impact of the oil crisis. And if it's limited to the US/Britain, you need to explain why the high-spending tiger economies can be discounted.

I'm sure you know this already, but I think the best ideas and the ones that you will be strongly motivated to work on are those that solve a problem for a lot of people, but principally for you. Something in your business life or elsewhere that you have found frustrating or lacking, but that has no good tech solution. But I'm sure I read it elsewhere and it made sense that it's easier to find solutions than problems. Don't look for a solution, look for a problem, a tough one, then cast about for ways to solve it.

I'm sure this is very good but I'd much rather have a formula for the main artifacts - the actual radial spikes, instead of the minor horizontal pattern.

I'm afraid I just find it a little bizarre that Keynesian economics is considered in some way "left", or partisan. It's really just based on observation, and does not endorse any radical redistribution of wealth - it's designed to encourage growth and minimize recession. Right-wing economics is very real, however, and seems to be based more on a kind of moral outrage against the very notion of taxation than any empirical measure. And it seemed to be working - Clinton and Blair endorsed the very assumptions of this approach - but is looking somewhat tattered now. Has Keynesianism ever been shown to have failed? I've not seen evidence of this.

This article summarizes my approach to just about every technical challenge I've encountered since school. In grad school in particular, I could never get my head around the approach of uploading code to a Unix server and running it blind overnight. Instead, I would write it in Windows, but with a graphical display of results coming out in minutes rather than hours. The errors would then stand out glaringly. This is not to argue Windows v Unix as of course you can do it either way on both platforms. But calculations you can see working are priceless.

I knew there was a reason I hated that word - it always sounded phony.

While we have the OP as a fine example of my point, it might help to provide an example of your own. In developed economies, nationalization has historically occurred when a business that the public relies upon has become literally or effectively bankrupt. Can you think of an example of an inefficient nationalized industry in the UK, the EU, or the USA? And in what way has nationalization contributed to that inefficiency?

In many cases the services that have recently been privatized were never nationalized to begin with - they were public services, like garbage collection or public transport, that have no obvious market competition model to follow.

Your definition of "rent-seeking" is also incorrect. Rent-seeking behaviour is when an economic agent attempts to manipulate public policy for private gain. A government body cannot engage in this behaviour by definition, as it does not take a profit, and is not private. It can fight its corner though - seeking more funding - but then it must spend that money on things like schoolbooks or hospital beds. This is considered a horrifying waste of resources to the private sector, which knows that those funds could better be spent on yachts and hookers.

You should try the hilarious spoof app on Android called "TheTrainline", which introduces such innovations as:

- its own, dysfunctional keyboard - because Android's keyboard was just too, er, fast. And didn't have a bright green tick button.

- an occasional feature, where after entering a timetable query a progress bar appears, and the app commands you to "Tap the screen" to make the bar advance. Once you have danced like a monkey for them, the app finally allows you to see the result of your query.

- no information about trains that depart in less than five minutes, or have already departed. Because why would you ever want to know about the train you're already on?

It really is a masterful satire of everything a corporate, money-grubbing app commissioned by sociopaths and authored by embittered misanthropes would be - an app that simply hates its users.