skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comparing Kiva loan recipients to subprime borrowers here in the U.S. is not a good analogy.

Kiva screens and follows-up with the borrowers, something which was noticeably absent in the mortgage loan market:

William D. Dallas, the founder and chief executive of Ownit, acknowledges loosening lending standards but says he did so reluctantly and under pressure from his investors, particularly Merrill Lynch, which wanted more loans to package into lucrative securities.

He recalls being asked to make more "stated income" loans, in which lenders do not verify the information provided by borrowers and brokers with tax returns, pay stubs or other documentation. The message, he said, was simple: You are leaving money on the table aEUR" do more of them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/business/08lend.html

If Kiva ever turns into a similar free-for-all, then expect their default rate to rise, too.
Sorry but that's like selling someone a car and saying "Oh you want the chassis to be made of metal instead of wood? Well you can change that can't you."

I agree. You should definitely take Arc back, demand a refund, and refuse to ever pay for it again.

In Javascript or Java however, Unicode just works universally

Yes, and what a great language Java is. You should probably keep using it.

I mean, thank god the Java 1.0 guys worried so much about character sets instead of, say, macros or closures or even regular expressions. Otherwise Java might be burdened with a lot of bolt-on special functions that add "hassle and verbosity" to the code.
I am absolutely stunned by the percentage delinquency for these loans. After going through the site for a while, I can't find a single loan that has been defaulted or delayed.

I don't understand why a paraguayan store owner would need $1075 to stock her store (http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about...), but it certainly seems like these kinds of investments are kick-starting entrepreneurial activity in places where it was traditionally impossible or exceedingly difficult.

I think Kiva is my favorite new business because it truly does raise the social welfare of the world while also being a startup.
Karma shouldn't affect what you have to say, and it shouldn't make you retract your statement; it just indicates that other people don't agree with you.

Your editing to remove the unpopular comment made me downvote you.
Scientology hackers? What the heck is a Scientology hack?
http://del.icio.us/apgwoz
Don't Blame the Business Plan
McDonald's Cures Lactose Intolerant Indonesians For Free
Death by design pattern.
"Jan 22, 2005 12:47:00 AM"
Looks more like a modified ouroboros - wee bit older than Firefox.
Three Digital Business Models That Could Rock Your World
Web disrupted 'across Mid-East'
That was three years ago. Everybody knows that since then Firefox and IE has closed shop and that the only browsers on the market are Opera and something that runs in Emacs.

Well, ok, not really. But it's been three years and FF doesn't have just ~5% of the browser market any longer.
slightly more high-quality journalism: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/30/asia.intern...
Say it ain't so.

But I'd have to play it.
But I must use CSS and OOP and code that can deal with any character set! I have a large programming ego to defend!
Haha, gotcha good spamming suckers.
The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville (classic Warren Buffett article)
I didn't downvote you originally but I will do it now for being a little gutless... why take your statement down simply because you're being downvoted?
The Gray Areas of Search-Engine Law
Is this a counterpoint to my comment?
Should have wrote it in Python to save a few lines :)

for x in range(500): print 'I will not throw paper airplanes in class.'

Or perhaps Arc!
"Programming Collective Intelligence" in Common Lisp
No, not exactly... I was trying to add that the borrowing being done on kiva is not the same as the "ho-hum" loans being taken out by "americans".

If someone really helps you get ahead then it's likely you will want to repay them and I think that's what you can see happening at kiva. It's not a big home loan or a credit card... it's a chance to really help improve their lives.

You should man up and repost the comment you made and then deleted...
Cofounders with better artistic abilities tweak the minute details of the appearance of my webapps a million times until they get it "just right" - without driving me insane in the process. I don't just want CSS to inflate my ego... I need it to keep me from going postal.
Why are bank security questions so monstrously stupid?
Dogen's insight (and the core of Soto Zen teaching) is that practice and realisation (here, 'enlightenment') are fundamentally the same thing. So, the act of sitting IS enlightenment itself.
Incidentally, for those who don't know, Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis is one of -the- books on value-based investing, equivalent to K&R for C programmers. Further, the 'g' of g&d has nothing to do with the 'g' in 'pg.'
Apple is a hardware company
Very fun, although it could've used more profanity.
Perhaps because he has accomplished a great deal and may have some advice for those who wish to as well? Seriously, he is out of touch with reality because he doesn't waste his time browsing the web?
How to cheat on reddit so that your site gets mostly up votes.
I'm assuming here that many users will be using a bookmarklet/toolbar to vote a site up or down.

The idea is to have two links associated with your site, a positive link and a negative link.

When a user is on your site, you have an algorithm to determine whether his/her experience is likely positive or negative. If positive, you use the positive link. If negative, you switch him/her over to the negative link.

A happy user will likely vote up on the positive link. An unhappy user will likely vote down on the negative link. And so your positive link makes the front page.
http://del.icio.us/gojomo -- of course
Accessing URLs in advertisements from mobile phones
From yay to nay in 16 minutes [Arc]
If you have to send a picture message or email in order to get a url back you might as well send a blank message. The most popular technique in the UK seems to be sending a keyword to a shortcode, eg "EAT to 2580"

There's an interesting breakdown of QR code usage vs blank message at http://whatjapanthinks.com/2008/01/07/accessing-urls-in-adve...
MySpace opens doors to developers
(for i 1 500 (prn "I will not throw paper airplanes in class."))

Although, I assume the kid forgot the \n in his printf.
What, he can't be brilliant and famous while also being a weirdo? This is like Daniel Day-Lewis' cobbler stint.
Indeed! And I think Stallman comes off OK in the full referenced OpenBSD-related thread, too. He's precise and peculiar, but calm and consistent, while the people responding to him get quite pissy.
Dell to close all 140 U.S. kiosks
Illegible.
Wireless auction concerns rise as some airwaves languish
Judge extends Microsoft oversight for two years
VMware's Troubles Hobble Its Parent
Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gates's Vision
eBay kind of, maybe, finally considering a Skype sale
Design Patterns Quick Reference
Gasp CNET values sales over editorial
Google TV advertising has only 200 clients
Woot.com tries haiku advertising
I've used a credit card to invest small amounts into my life and make it a lot better. Whether it helped me or not doesn't really affect whether I want to repay it though. I don't quite understand that.

The only ho-hum loans that I've seen people take out is 100k to 150k school loans for useless schools.
But the question is: is it over-engineering?
great news! ICANN++
Yes, you don't understand and you probably never will. I know I did a terrible job of getting the point across but now given your statement I don't think it would have helped much anyway.
Cool, I live in Harpswell, work in Portland.
So what you're saying is on top of being gutless you're also not funny? tough beat ;-)...

oh man, another delete?

run imsteve run!!!
Ron Paul is a bad example. Like it or not, the fate of nations hangs on the presidential election, and so one Ron Paul link has a bit more importance than a million [PIC]s.
Better late than never!
By the same logic, commenters should be able to put arbitrary HTML in their comments. Very large font sizes. Blink tags. After all, HTML support does not have to take that long: just pass the HTML straight through to the browser. If commenters could use very large fonts and blink tags here, do you not believe that some of them would?

The freedom of the citizen of Hacker News to express himself is being suppressed! Paul Graham, add support for blink tags now!
Complaining about Unicode support doesn't mean people haven't been reading pg correctly, it means they disagree about the importance of it.

I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.

Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is silly and unproductive.
You may well be right in what you're saying. But:

All of this anti-credit for Americans stuff makes me laugh. This is because, relative to other countries, I think the high availability of credit and investment capitol is the strongest economic asset the US has.
Hollywood:

Oh crap! Hackers!
They've already hacked through the proxy and subverted the primary firewall.
Blast! I'll reroute the encryption!

I'll set a genetic algorithm to protect the kernel!

The Trojan isn't working! Maybe a secondary password configuration!
No! He's corrupting the database! I'll lure him to blah blah blah

He's gotten control of the root account!

Reality:

Oh crap! Hackers!

-Unplug-
Just a suggestion -- upvote the comments of people with interesting del.icio.us bookmarks. It'll help pinpoint the ones worth reading.
Exactly. And in doing so that would tell me you will be more committed to your business. Interesting - someone should do it. Now, is anyone on here not busy?
It is a trade off. If you want to support Internet Explorer, some kinds of layout are not easily achievable without using tables. W3C cannot be blamed for the deficiencies of IE though, so I'm not sure if this is what PG is alluding to.
http://del.icio.us/poleris
OK, he's giving us a car with a wooden chassis. Might be a great car, fun to drive. But it will probably need the chassis replacing unless you want to crash.
http://del.icio.us/raganwald/weblog

Actually, that link is to a specific tag that I use for links I share with the hacker community. My full link feed is public, but don't read it unless you can stomache links about parenting infants, raising nishikigoi, rock climbing, and other personal crap.
I dunno, we're just expecting that this awesome new language he's promoting have basic functionality. Crazy, huh?
I don't think expressing yourself in your own language using your own currency symbols is quite the same as using html.
Nice try, but no.
Virgin birth: what private spaceflight may lead to
Would you mind elaborating on the persistence a little? What is the granularity of persistence? For example, does each submission get written to its own file with associated comments? Do you utilize a memory mapped file? Inquiring minds want to know :)
Okay, I'll bite...

1. Recursion and cons cells naturally complement one another. They can stand in for n-ary tuples, vectors, and arrays reasonably well for small values of n, and when your dataset gets large, well, you switch to a more efficient data structure. Hell, with Arc you even get 'push' and 'pop' as built-in functions. What exactly is the problem?

2. Again, I don't see how this is a problem. Macros are compile-time rewriting rules. In an eagerly-evaluated language like Lisp, they are pretty much a necessary evil to prevent unnecessary side-effects while still allowing for flexible syntax. I can imagine doing without them in a lazy language like Haskell, but I'm not aware of any popular, lazy languages in the Lisp family.

That being said, I'm interested to know if you've working with other languages where #1 and #2 aren't a problem.
How to Make Your Startup More Attractive to Investors
That is a programmer speaking.

Design is just like code, there is a version 1.0 that works, but isn't great and still needs some features. So you iterate on the code based on feedback and your own ideas. Design is the same, and if you include usability I think it is more important to iterate on your design than your code.

I did a consulting gig for a semi-large online retailer where we changed the design, the flow of the site, etc. Primarily design changes. And their turnover rose by 30% because of it.

That's how important design is.
jens alfke:

http://mooseyard.com/Jens/2008/01/96-characters-ought-to-be-enough-for-anyone/

i agree with all of that.
Storm ORM Tutorial
This Month tip:
"If you really want to know if your Web site works, ask your next door neighbor to try using it, while you watch.

(You bring the beer.)"

Taken from Advanced Common Sense (http://www.sensible.com/)
I really recommend the book.
Wish you were my neighbour...

Mmmmm... beer...
That is not true. A marketing campaign is based on a media-mix, where it is decided what ratio of money will be spent on what. For instance 25% print, 25% outdoor, 25%television and 25% web.

You reach different demographics in different ways with each channel. Marketers know this.
I don't argue that lacking Unicode support makes the language more artistic. In fact, I don't even argue that Arc is artistic -- only that its author(s) didn't intend to adhere to any particular standards or tastes of our own age (which is what technicians might do), aiming instead to create a useful tool for "sketching out" computations (which is what artists might do). That all seems very clear from the statement on the Arc site.
Point taken, but they make some pretty impressive software for a hardware company.
If I remember correctly, Ruby doesn't have Unicode support either. Shit, some languages don't even have built-in strings.
Nice, but I registered me2 because I didn't know this. A note to let me know would help.
Hahahaha, drop me a line if you ever come to Lima-Peru, I'll buy you a beer. :P
Why not use Erlang and make it concurrent? :)

[spawn(fun() -> print("'I will not throw paper airplanes in class.'") end) || N <- lists:seq(1, 500)]
The annoying part is about the "complaining", as PG's followers are entitled to anything, just because they feel they are part of the cult.

Guess what? You don't get the right to complain. Nobody does. Nobody has paid a support contract for anyone to include Unicode support on the language.

The guy wrote a language for himself. Not for you, not for me. And he does not want to work on Unicode support. I bet he doesn't want to work on database abstraction. Or Ajax widgets. Or whatever.

If those are so important to you, go somewhere else. But please, stop complaining.

EDIT: bad wording. As bct put it, complain all you want, but don't feel in the right to demand anything.
Yahoo OpenID service goes live
Yes, but they get peeved when cut+paste doesn't work the way they expect.
The Canadian IT Business Syndrome
It's really curious that so many people are so pessimistic about something they get for free...

Me simply is playing around a little every now and then, and it's giving me much, much fun! It brings me back the feeling when I first started learning Lisp!

So my summary is clear: nice!, great!, fun!! (And I'll omit a 'hallelujah' here...)
Ruby doesn't, but it's regarded as a mistake and (afaik) is fixed in 1.9.
I think that Slashdot has a niche that they stick to. Digg has grown wildly and as a result it is filled with crap that joe six-pack and his friends vote up. Slashdot values their core users, and it shows. They might not have as many articles or comments, but the comments on Slashdot are extremely insightful - i learn more from the comments on Slashdot than on any other social news site.
Now all he has to do is compile, link, and load!
I think the argument can be summed up as follows:
pg - Arc is an exploratory language, meant to appeal to hackers so they can create great things with it.
various sw devs - But we need Unicode support and W3C compliance

How do these requests support the goals of Arc? I think it's funny that people have started complaining about these things (which aren't core to a language) instead of thinking about what kind of cool stuff they can build.

Why does a language that furthers the notion of software as art have to conform to existing conventions?
> You don't get the right to complain.

Yes we do. What we don't get is the right to demand.
99 Free Online Classes on Entrepreneurship and Business
Things never go as planned.

That is what you have to plan for.
"I think the author fails to realize that Arc is open source and free. You want Unicode support? Write it in."

I would like to announce the release of my new language, Barc, as in the dog that didn't. My language is free and open-source. You want syntax? Write it in! You want a compiler? Be my guest!

I think failing to include Unicode is a valid decision, but yours is a weak argument -- if it's that trivial, why isn't it already written?
http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they

Interestingly enough, in the three months the above link has been around, I've found it germane to something like four threads on Hacker News.

This is open source, people. If you need something, add it yourself. This is a Lisp for God's sake, you can actually add syntax to the language!

In general, grumble, but don't be obnoxious about gaps unless you're paying the developer for the privilege.

The Tao of Steve applied to free and open-source software:

1) Be desireless; 2) Be excellent; 3) Be gone.
At least in the US, that pesky first amendment does give them the right to complain. :) I certainly agree that pure complaining is annoying, but bring on the well-articulated critiques!

Also, I don't think that PG wrote Arc just for himself. I think he wrote the language that he himself wanted, but that's not the same thing. If Arc was only for him, then why release it to the world? I think what he wants is the best of both worlds -- lots of users, with no support burden. Eventually, the users won't stand for this, but while Arc is still an infant, it makes a lot of sense.
I suspect the grandparent post was being a little sarcastic. My impression of Joel's opinion on Microsoft is that it's gone downhill after his time there. Note that I'm not implying Joel thinks it's _because_ he left, just that the essays of Joel's that I've read seem to show a consistent dissatisfaction.
Double dipping chips: Seinfeld inspires scientific study
Just look at http://checkout.google.com

It's a recently launched web application. The layout is just one huge <table>. There is no design to speak of. Probably because none is needed.
> If Arc was only for him, then why release it to the world?

To get people to stop pestering him?
save it for digg.
I actually did something similar when I was in middle school. The teacher wanted everyone in the class to write something like that 500 times and turn it in the next day.

I went home and ran the following program on my Apple IIe:

10 FOR X = 1 TO 500
20 ?"I will behave myself in class"
30 NEXT X

PR# 2
RUN

With the printer plugged into slot 2 on the machine, this sent the output of the program to the printer.

Needless to say the teacher was not impressed the next day, when I handed in several sheets of linefeed printer paper. I was impressed however.

He made me write it by hand about 100 times instead of 500.
Summarising:

> In Io, symbols, strings, and vectors are unified into a single Sequence prototype which is an array of any available hardware data type

> A String is just a Sequence with a text encoding, a Symbol is an immutable String and a Vector is a Sequence with a number encoding.

Pretty cool. Thanks for the link.
How high is there overhead?
Oh, I misremembered. Thanks for pointing out.
I had a similar thought. Try the sites that the article links too as "good design". In nearly every case each site was clearly made by an artist in the worst sense of the word -- The designs didn't map to what the page was trying to do, it was far too cluttered with pageantry, and there was far too much frill.

If the article's writer thinks those are the _best_ designs out there, then I suspect the opinions are somewhat limited.
err this is terrible mental masturbation.

We like it for exactly the reasons why it is bad -- it allows us to fantasize about a world where we are the hero and we are "cool" and all our enemies get defeated.

Not to mention that the girlfriend character reveals a lot of fucked up attitudes about women from the author -- the writer's idea of the perfect woman is someone who is easily controlled because she is dependent on him for financial support, she gets sexually aroused by the thought of making more money, goddamn she doesn't even have a name, she's not allowed to be a real person, just a fashion accessory for the protagonist.

If you really liked this story, you should examine yourself for unrealistic expectations of what you deserve to get from society and how much work you are willing to put in to get it.
Why 90% of eBooks Stink, Ten Tips to a Successful eBook
Um. Because writing to stdout will serialize the processes?
"prn"? Ick. Looks like 'porn'! Why not print, or put, or puts or out or just "p"?
The Nightmare Lunch With Your Venture Capitalist
VC Fundraising Manual: VCs Have Flashback Syndrome
In my post, Why You Might Not Get The Meeting, I listed three high-level reasons why you might get rejected by a VC. Another less common cause is the fact that VCs get flashbacks.

Experienced VCs have invested in lots of companies and inevitably some of those companies have failed. When a VC sees a new company that is similar to a previous investment that failed VCs tend to shy away. I'm not certain that this behavior is entirely rational or objective as some investments fail simply because they were too early to market, they had the wrong management or because they were just unlucky. Nonetheless a VC's scar tissue does impact their investment decision making and can therefore affect your fundraising prospects.

The good news is that few VCs have made exactly the same types of investments. As a result, you are not likely to encounter more than one rejection from a flashback.

Read more at: www.markpeterdavis.com
Ignoring the bad simile (which others have pointed out), adding Unicode support for someone who has done it in MzScheme before probably is no more than a couple days' work, if that. The changes can be done in the bowels of the implementation and then submitted as a patch, just like any other open source project. The PHP library problems don't have to occur, because it doesn't have to be in a library.

I agree with you that adding Unicode support on top of a language is a terrible idea. But when the language's authors have said that compatibility in future versions is not an issue, when they open source the language, and when one of them says,

MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets.

to me, that is coming right out and saying, "Hey, I didn't feel like figuring out character sets, but I know MzScheme has a way of doing it. I'd love for you to do what you need to in order to get this working, because it doesn't interest me."

Also, if someone gave me a gift car with a wooden chassis, I would be quite happy with it. I'd drive it while it worked, and when it got to be enough of an annoyance, I'd take the car apart and rebuild it on a steel one. I certainly wouldn't bitch about it.
Failing to include Unicode because you don't feel like doing it is a bad argument? So if I give you a gift certificate to go out to eat but fail to pay for your transportation, is that a bad idea, too?

You are the one with the weak argument. PG has offered up a language which is still being developed but already has some utility, and you're comparing that to a hypothetical language with nothing at all?