sethg

21 ms·

181.
by sethg 15y ago
I can only borrow money (or sell stock in my company) if someone else is willing to save (or invest). A healthy economy requires a balance between borrowers and savers.
182.
by sethg 15y ago
If houses got cheaper every year, very few people would want to buy them, and people stuck with mortgages would have a powerful incentive to walk away from them. If cars got cheaper every year, then people would put off buying new cars for
183.
by sethg 15y ago
We just got back from a family vacation in Vermont, and I think the day at this museum was the highlight of our visit. We live in Boston, so we are familiar with the Museum of Science there, but Montshire can teach the Boston folks a thing
184.
A Vermont museum worth taking your geeklings to(montshire.org)
1 points by sethg 15y ago|1 comments
185.
by sethg 15y ago
Different printer models could have different features (color/B&W, selecting output tray, “print” an outgoing fax, etc.), and you could make each PrinterDriver subclass responsible for generating the appropriate UI code for frobbing tho
186.
by sethg 15y ago
As someone who has learned classical Hebrew and Aramaic up to the “if I torture the page for long enough it usually confesses”, I love the root-and-pattern Semitic grammar, up until the point where I have to look a word up in a dictionary
187.
by sethg 15y ago
Were the Israeli soldiers in question first-generation immigrants from Russia or the US?
188.
by sethg 15y ago
Also, the whole SRFI project ( http://srfi.schemers.org/final-srfis.html ) is an attempt to create APIs that are not part of the core language, but are common across implementations that choose to support them.
189.
by sethg 15y ago
One of the points of the original article is that when you take depreciation into account, you can afford to give a developer his or her dream work tools for just $100/month. According to salary.com, entry-level secretaries in Fog Creek’s n
190.
by sethg 15y ago
Obviously, what you needed was a heated keyboard: http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/23/heated-keyboard-keeps-fin...
191.
by sethg 15y ago
If there is a risk that the US will significantly inflate the currency, then that risk should be reflected in the ratings for all dollar-denominated bonds, not just Treasuries. But there are still AAA-rated corporate bonds. Heck, S&P
192.
by sethg 15y ago
The debt ceiling is not analogous to your credit limit. Your credit limit is imposed by the institutions that loan money to you. The US debt ceiling is imposed by Congress. The closest analogy to your credit limit is the interest rate for
193.
by sethg 15y ago
Obama has wound down the Iraq war and is planning to wind down Afghanistan; the Reid spending-cut proposal takes these into account when projecting how spending can be reduced over the next decade.
194.
by sethg 15y ago
Just a couple of illustrative data points: If you want a Verizon individual plan that’s compatible with an iPhone, you will end up paying at least $70/month, plus taxes and what-not, and at least $30 of that is for the data plan. The cheape
195.
by sethg 15y ago
If it weren’t for this mishegas with the debt ceiling, there would be no doubt that the US would be able to pay its obligations, and even if Congress doesn’t act in time, the 14th Amendment ensures that the bond-holders would be first in li
196.
by sethg 15y ago
When I was an education major, other people in the field told me that it was great that I, as a man, was going into education, because I would be serving as a male role model.
197.
by sethg 15y ago
I don’t see upvoting as giving something to a beggar; I see it as an exchange of value. You give me something I like (something interesting to read) and I give you something you like (karma).
198.
by sethg 15y ago
They don’t have to sell the information to their partners. They could, for example, buy information associating last names and ZIP codes with estimated income levels, and then tell advertisers, “if you pay us $X we will put your ad on th
199.
by sethg 15y ago
That would be a bug, not a feature. If you see a comment or article you approve of, you should upvote it, regardless of how popular (or not) it is among other people. If there are 529 people who approve of a certain comment, then it comes
200.
by sethg 15y ago
The distinction between “pass by reference” and “pass by value” started with Algol, if I recall correctly, and made sense in that language, where you can declare which arguments of your function are passed in which way. It also makes sense
201.
by sethg 15y ago
Did the TSA determined that nine-passenger planes aren’t big enough to do anything significant if they’re hijacked, or did they determine that anyone who can afford to fly on a 9-passenger plane is too rich to suffer the same screening that
202.
by sethg 15y ago
I would actually do it the other way around: since there are fewer corporations in the US than there are people, it is harder for a corporation to evade taxes than for a person. So it makes sense to raise the corporate rate, and either red
203.
by sethg 15y ago
Kenan Systems, where I worked a decade ago, might provide a cautionary tale. Kenan Sahin built the company up into the 800-pound gorilla of telecom billing software without giving up any of his equity in it. Then he looked at how he wante
204.
by sethg 15y ago
We have to balance the budget in the long run, but this is a hare-brained way to make it happen. If anything, a default will make it harder to balance the budget in the long run, because if the markets get spooked into higher interest ra
205.
by sethg 15y ago
Sorry, US$ 2000 . (Which is still amazing, given the size of the box, but not so much.) I got it from the “Recent liner freight rates” table on Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#Freight_market ) and misread the captio
206.
by sethg 15y ago
My impression is that the majority of global trade is either in the form of services, which involve only transporting bits (e.g., a US hospital emailing X-rays to an Australian radiologist); capital, which involves even fewer bits; and phys
207.
by sethg 15y ago
But this did not happen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-GNP-per-capita-1869-191...
208.
by sethg 15y ago
I don’t think you can have a stable financial system without a government that is willing and able to step in when things go pear-shaped. (You might say “if the government weren’t doing that, then lenders would be more careful with their mo
209.
by sethg 15y ago
If I don’t have a lot of work to do—or if I know the work that I do have could be done by someone fresh out of college—then I assume that the next time there is pressure to reduce staff, my name will be on top of the “to be laid off” list.
210.
by sethg 15y ago
Every thing in Wikipedia has “a significant cultural effect”, because just about any fool can put down the TV remote long enough to add an item to the “In Popular Culture” section of a Wikipedia article. The riots were a big deal when they

More ›