unrealwh
unrealwh on Hacker News
for the last time, delicious does not run on erlang. erlang was used to in part of the migration of data
name one yahoo property that bought completely new hardware for a new version rollout
haha thats the way it was done at yahoo. go ask HRC now, they'll probably tell you that you are being migrated to a VM-based platform. i'm not speaking derisively, its long time yahoo and other web companies backed off of the ridiculous policies of acquiring servers on a daily basis. the $40mln spend on hardware for panama won't be repeated
i believe not only will this be worse than the depression for the US, it will indeed do in the US entirely. a nation's most important piece of paper is not its constitution (you can burn and rewrite one of those anytime you want one), it is its
currency. you can only burn your currency once.
there is a very strong historical parallel - the french revolution. no matter what interpretation of this event you find in literature, they will all point to excess debt as one of the key, if not the key motivation for the revolution. weimar germany is another scenario where excess currency abuse literally did in the nation, and incidentally ushered in nazism.
there is no way the US can now get out of debt or even hope to slow down deficits. the rate of growth of the debt is astounding. one must wonder where the death bond lies...that dollar of debt that we issue that is rejected by all buyers and signals the end of the US. once the US dollar is rejected by all buyers, the US govt immediately ceases to exist by definition. police, army, firefighters...none of their paychecks have value anymore, so none of them will report for work.
how much is too much? our debt is around twelve trillion now, my guess is that at around twenty five trillion, its game over. we will reach that point by 2018 at the latest. the US is gone by 2020 at the latest. if any political structure survives, it will be helmed by an american stalin who will gorge on the nation and utterly obliterate it.
it will take the world one hundred years to reconstruct after the obliteration of the USD-backed fiat-debt financial system. pax romana was nothing more than a promise and a hope...once it went away the west lost centuries. the USD is no more than the pax romana of our era...a idea backed only by faith, not values
$200/barrel is indeed wrong, its a lowball number. i expect $500 or more. where do you think all those trillions the Fed is printing up now will end up? what happened the last time the Fed printed up trillions in 2002? commodity bubbles! excess liquidity ALWAYS creates inflation, and inflation always chases up the value of finite stores of value, namely commodities. nothing goes straight up or straight down...the thirty year commodities ultrabubble is just getting started, and has experienced its first (of many) breakdowns towards an eventual higher price once this pocket of deflation is monetized. zimbabwe here we come!
china will be as doomed as the rest. what do they hold? US debt. its toilet paper. their economy is coupled to US consumption. they are developing a domestic market but to do so will take another twenty+ years....the tidal wave of debt is crashing now
I keep saying it - things are fine. Real value has not been wiped outactually $50 trillion in paper wealth was wiped out in the last twelve months alone.
The fundamentals of the economy are fine.
no they are not. the comptroller of the US govt estimates our own unrealized debt at potentially $70 trillion. outstanding derivatives total over one quadrillion USD. that is not a typo. global total debt is over one half of one quadrillion USD. the house of cards of global debt financing is only beginning to unwind.
take back the production
short of world war three, that manufacturing base is gone.
not surprising that python is competitive...afaik haskell also crushes erlang in lightweight threading benchmarks (supposedly the core strength of erlang).
well if you are in emacs you could just start up erc...
is this a web frontend to bitlbee? looks very similar in functionlity.
are you trying to tell me aff somehow predated yahoo? i'll file this story under "bs" and you should too
more like "why i want to be a pseudo-intellectual". the author seems obsessed with name and meme dropping with the intent of dazzling us with the contents of his browser bookmarks, few of which he probably even understands, but he knows enough to drop it into a blog post. why hasn't he done the obvious and cited "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal? if you don't know the significance of this paper, don't reply or mod me.
whats the surprise? in good markets, excess risk makes you rich. in bad markets. it kills you. the able manager knows when to realign the portfolio
interesting but not in the way you intend. once people watch a "sure thing" like aff flounder from its first trading day, it will indeed be a bullet-proof confirmation that this is a nuclear-winter economy...not like you need aff to confirm that. look at the previous big "sure thing" ipo, private equity group blackstone:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BX&t=2y&l=on&z=m...
does levchin really have the midas touch? are slide and yelp ever going to be viable? yelp missed the boat, they should have sold out in 2006 when the hype over "local" was peaking. slide will be indeed likely end up as the king of the widget makers...for all that matters. yelp's site and reviews data will likely get bought for a song within the next three years....slide will slide into irrelevance as the widget market flames out
totally the opposite! i can't think of one region that has benefited more from the Fed's policy of moving us to a bubble-based economy. the economic model of silicon valley in the last two decades has been predicated on transferring massive amounts of wealth from speculators to equity holders. normally this is a get-rich-slowly model. the Fed turned it into a get-rich-in-two-years model.
everyone will be cutting back...why?
firstly, the climate permits it. i assume now that any company holds a latent 10% rif in good times, just waiting for a bad market so it can lose the 10% to throw the market a bone
secondly, consumer/business software and the web are exiting the innovation phase and entering the cost phase. yeah this will get all the yc types in a tizzy, but its true. the consumer web has been "built" as far as 99% of users are concerned, and most of the major platforms have evolved to the stage where large headcounts are not needed. business software hasn't changed substantially in years. the winners have been picked and now that margins are shrinking, the way to a better top line is most easily achieved by moving the bottom line.
oh well the fun had to end at some point. between moore's law making any idiot a passable coder, oodles of great free and open code, and winner-take-all economics, my opinion is that coding won't be a desirable job within a decade...even in startup land it is about the gimmick more than the code these days