skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why on earth should the average person make an investment with significant leverage? The only reason, ever, to make an investment with leverage is if there is some arbitrage opportunity that requires a large amount of capital to make money from. But by definition, the average person is not going to be able to identify arbitrage opportunities in the housing market.

The real reasons to invest in housing are: a) diversification (so not everything is in bonds or stocks) b) excellent tax treatment c) excellent political protection d) interest rates that are often lower than the monetary inflation rate (by monetary inflation rate I mean growth in M*V - nominal income growth). However, at this point, all the above factors are already capitalized into the price of housing. So at this point there is not much of an economic benefit to buying housing.
This article helps articulate this deeply creepy feeling I have about where online business is going.

Does anyone else think using "addictive" or "habit-forming" to describe your product design goals is deeply immoral?

And yet this probably appears in a lot of Powerpoints pitched every day in the Valley. I had to sit through just such a presentation a few weeks ago, and I work at a non-profit. The whole thrust of this Valley drone's presentation was that he could get users to value anything, any behavior that the customer wanted, by means of psychological tricks and social rewards. Now that may not even be true, but when your Powerpoint starts referencing Pavlov and Zimbardo I think you have to take a look in the mirror.
Renting vs. buying is a very personal decision and has a lot more to do with lifestyle and personal choices than financial soundness. Says someone that bought a home.

I want to walk to work and there are no homes for sale in my area. So even if I make 500k / year home ownership would still bring significant negative for my lifestyle. When you consider commuting costs, home ownership is both risky and far more expensive for most young people.
The origins of selflessness: Fair Play
Do you post your opinion of the article afterwards?
You can always switch from renting to buying, it's much harder to go the other way.
or tsukuba(http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~clz/Exam1Real.jpg) in stereovision
has anyone used both R and matlab/octave?

i've used matlab but not R. For machine learning, I found matlab great because of its great matrix support.

what's the pros/cons of R? what advantages does R have over matlab?
It's a pathetic fake I would have thought beyond even Engadget.

Error level analysis on the backside shot indicates that the logos and text were 'shopped. Also, the montage they added to the original post has a backside with a completely different, non-Apple logo.

http://errorlevelanalysis.com/permalink/2986851/
Kings Of Flow Ayer La Vi - Download Free Files
It's generally for finishing and publication. For rapidly updating graphics, the libraries lattice and ggplot2 are both good enough looking.
Optical illusion of motion
Bob ong quotes
Lower is better, max height for a restart depends on the engine but is 20,000-30,000 ft
It depends on the context - selling items on eBay is addictive and habit-forming. So is running your own business, or running marathons.

I notice that you have 2258 karma. I think it's safe to say that you've formed a habit or even addiction to HN, but hopefully a rewarding one.
Visor - a system-wide terminal accessible via a hot-key
Well, you are talking about $145k, in Bay Area or in Seattle, for example, you can't buy any house at all for this price. Would you still buy this house if it would cost you 600k?
How's that? Sell house, sign lease, you're done. Only a problem if you're underwater and I'd strongly advise against buying for anyone in a position where winding up underwater is a strong possibility (ie anyone with less than, say, a 20% deposit).
Agreed.

re: "It always seems to me that the author is simply trying to justify the fact that they rent." - this always seems to be the case. The few renters who seem to do well financially would also do well financially as homeowners but for some reason have convinced themselves that the numbers work out better for renting. Maybe it does for those people, maybe it doesn't. I'll come back to that point in the next paragraph. In the meantime, however, the vast majority of renters one might speak to are just pissing away money, are no further in terms of savings than those with mortgages, and have none of the equity built up that those with mortgages have, even those who are pretty new to their mortgages.

Now, back to whether or not those "smart" renters are any better off. First off, I'll readily admit that my single data point is just that, but it bears consideration nonetheless. I bought property in 2005. In a neighbourhood with some growth potential, in an overall market with generally upward movement. Nothing bullish, just generally upward movement. In fact, that movement had been slowing a bit at that point, and continued to slow somewhat more afterwards. We all know what happened next. I sold early this year. I wonder how many smart renters could have done this _well_, even given the shitty few years I happened to own before selling: I paid $500 more per month than what I would have paid to rent the same space (in other words, put me up against a smart renter with $500 to invest each month), for a total of $30,000 "invested" progressively over those five years. I sold for a net profit of $125,000 after all fees, commissions, etc. In a hesitant market still recovering from the nasty troubles we all know too well.

Find me a renter with that kind of ROI on their investments over the last 5 years and I'll congratulate them over a nice lunch which I'll be happy to buy for them.

(crickets)

Yeah, I thought so.
Sounds like a peculiar area if it doesn't have any homes for sale. Still, there must be just as many areas which don't have any homes for rent, right?
And this guy seems like he could be hired by Apple's Official Blog -
"So, it's not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, 'Oh my God, Microsoft didn't aim high enough.' It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'"

Bill Gates on the iPad (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/12/ipad-bill-g...)
Really interesting point. While I love Fake Steve, it's hard now to imagine Real Steve as having so much to say. Minimalism seems to pervade his very being. Will Fake Steve have to change his schtick?
It's an interesting experiment to see how long you can try one of the zynga offerings without creating some sort of invitation to a friend. These guys have really squeezed the heck out of their viral loops.
Apple is in no danger of losing its image because of Steve Jobs expressing himself too much. Christ, just the opposite.
This is basically what Reddit does.
Doesn't iTunes support PDFs as well? I remember seeing http://lifehacker.com/240447/geek-to-live--organize-your-pdf...

As about Zotero, I have mixed emotions as well - it's a nice feeder for Mendeley from firefox. Other than that, not too sure. Also, checkout Mendeley and this http://lifehacker.com/tag/document-management/

Hope that helps. Let us know what you learn :-)
Exactly. It seems to me that the only people who really need to worry about the economics of renting vs buying are those for whom houses are very expensive; either because they live in an expensive area or because they have low incomes. If you can buy all the house you need for $150K and you're earning at least, say, $50K then by all means go ahead and buy a house for the lifestyle reasons. But if the house you need costs ten times your annual salary then you need to think a lot more carefully.
For the record, my apartment is not rent controlled and as far as I know, most apartments in SF are not. The landlord is constrained by market rents.
It bugs me. You know, here's somebody pulling words out of his ass, "Oh, yeah, that 40 percent--it's all Avon ladies, and here's why..." and he pulls some reason out of his ass, "Because in the 20th century the vacuum cleaner revolution was a direct cause of...the Avon company...and the like. And that's where the 40 percent number comes from."

Citation not needed.

Obviously, it doesn't matter why or how the number actually came from, but would it really have killed you to research for 2 seconds to find out that the Avon company was started in the 19th century? And that if you looked into your numbers, Tupperware and the like would be a negligible cause of female startups. I mean, has anyone even had a Tupperware party in the last 30 years?
Chirp - A Developer's Perspective - Part 1
Then you're placing bets on inflation vs home price appreciation that are, at best, difficult to predict.
You misunderstood the (already answered) question. I wasn't asking about binary search and its complexity.
Youv'e been downvoted. Give hand. Good dog.
The fact that you got lucky and timed the market doesn't mean other people should attempt to do the same, or that they will have any success doing so.
Maybe you should have instead posted your retort when someone claimed that Git's commits are as simple as taking tarball snapshots?
I know people who write and deploy code in Objective-C on Linux. So while mainline GCC hasn't accepted the patches, keeping the compiler free did help the community.

I don't believe that the FSF's tactics are correct in all cases. I think that they could do better about encouraging and not alienating certain developer communities. But software freedom is a very important goal, and they are one of the few groups out there truly dedicated to software freedom.
The US does have a higher per-capita gdp (probably; the numbers are subject to a lot of interpretation) but that is in no small part due to the fact that the rest of the industrialized word was mostly leveled in WWII. As of recently, I believe West Europe's gdp growth numbers are comparable to or exceed those of the US. But again, the devil is in the details in these things.

As for birth rates, well... that's a pretty wild speculation. Demographers have a decent handle, as far as I know, on the causes of low birth rates. Do note that America has a declining population ex immigration, and that the birth rate for white people is below replacement rate and has been for 30 years.
"they're anonymized not because they are horrible, but because they are probably rather typical."

Why's that reason to anonymize? Racism was typical once. You have to start somewhere. Or are you claiming there's too many such un-anonymized stories in the media? I don't see that.

"the culture here in startup-land is so vehemently anti-anti-sexist that you feel a need to express worries about retaliation."

I was describing the consequences whistleblowers have to deal with in general. It's good for the potential consequences to exist; they prevent frivolous charges and increase the impact when a real whistleblower comes forward risking such stigma. None of this has anything to do with sexism in particular.
Why shouldn't 'if' allow a break?
If I were lucky or if I had made any effort whatsoever to time the market, you might be right. On the other hand, I know of lots of data points like mine, even with the crapfest of the last couple of years. (Sensationalist news articles and statistics about idiots lending too much money to other idiots really shouldn't hold much water to the HN audience, if you think about it.) Regardless, find me that renter and I'll buy them a nice lunch. If I could have made $125,000 during those years then by their own arguments all of these "smart" renters should have been able to do the same through some alternate portfolio of their choice.

As an aside, am I the only person to notice that every time a renter posts these kinds of articles they always talk about how down the road they'll have enough money to buy a mortgage-payer's home but they never actually bother to mention how their investments have been doing for them in the meantime? I suspect there's an obvious reason for the omission.
> The roman catholic church has rules and nobody is forced to follow those rules.

This is wishful thinking.

There are many heavily (90%+) Catholic countries with a culture that does not take kindly to outliers. You are forced to follow the rules, if not by threat of violence or social ostracization then by prosaic reality such as low to non-existent availability of condoms.

Further, much as I wish everyone would think for themselves and so on, if you've always been taught that the church is not just right, but divinely infallible, and disobeying the teachings will score you an eternity of damnation and some nice hellfire, for many, many people disobeying will not be quite as easy as saying "nobody is forced to follow those rules."
I disagree that these things can be conflated. Just because you find something rewarding, it does not mean you are addicted, or (more broadly) that any of one's reward systems are being manipulated.

If my internal reward systems are telling me that running is good, for the most part it's because running is good.

Even on HN, there's a fundamentally useful activity -- contribution to discussion. The measurement system is distributed to users, but that's because the benefits are similarly distributed.

Things cross into "drug" territory when most of their value comes from tricking your reward system. Even drugs can be beneficial from time to time, but when too much of a person's activity is about chasing simulated rewards, we start calling that person "addicted". Most drugs manipulate the brain's desire for pleasure, or the rush of excitement. If we believe the author of the OP, FarmVille manipulates our desire for social connectedness.
For me, it has been about 1.2k from HN, and ten times that much from reddit.
Recipe - Pad Thai
My favo(u)?rite phrase from the article was "a bit like negotiating one's way up a badger's arse". I'll be looking for an excuse to use that in my next business meeting.
The Luckiest Address in Silicon Valley
So, for the longest time my bookmark landed on YC homepage. And PicWing started with this one picture with an empty noodle bowl and my mind automatically has been assuming it was probably Pad Thai for the founders livin' on ramen. So, there you go HN'ers, take out 25 minutes out of your hacking to make some decent noodles for once :-)
That wouldn't be controlling the encryption; that would be giving whoever runs the webserver your data and a key and hoping that they actually use the latter. Controlling encryption means you do the encryption.

Edit: Provided I'm understanding you correctly, of course. I might not have.
As someone who's done shipbuilding in lightbulb glass, I need to add this:

DO: Wrap the bulb in a towel and hold it that way when you go to break the back end of the bulb off. I have a 3/4" scar between my right thumb and my wrist that says this is a good idea.
Iceland volcano: Airlines 'to lose $200m a day'
While your quibbles are true, the numbers for female-founded more-than-one employee businesses are much smaller than the numbers of female-founded one-employee businesses. (And no, a single-employee business is not a "startup", and neither is a ten employee business unless there is some expectation that the business will be worth millions of dollars in less than ten years.) The phenomenon of otherwise-housewives starting single-employee small businesses is where a large part of the numbers come from. My mother, for instance, was a Kumon instructor.

I think there are huge market opportunities for women to start actual startups, of course, but statistically that's not happening for whatever reason.
I've been debating whether to buy for about a year now, and you make an excellent point. For me, it boils down to the choice between a sense of freedom and a sense of home.
So here's a hypothetical question: let's say you have a programmer who knows next to nothing about statistics, knows how to navigate around Excel fairly well, and once allowed himself to be scared away by R.

Let's further assume he's suddenly inherited a large volume of load testing data and a mandate to "make something out of it."

What's a starting point? I, I mean, he hears about the great visualization stuff in R and understands the importance of it but has no clue where to start.

Would HN have any advice for him?
I am surprised people would even take it seriously. Rational speaking, half of the law/principle out there are stated as-is without any warranties.
Looks like this meets YC's RFS #5 :-) http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
The mortgage is structured for a given term. If you pay off a 30 year mortgage in 2 years, you're still paying 30 years worth of interest. There's no gain, in fact, you lose because you lose the time value of money.

Paying straight cash for a house, or buying a house on a small fixed interest and a short term already baked into the mortgage, can gain you something. Paying off an existing mortgage early gains you time and the psychological benefits of not worrying about making the mortgage next month. If you're about to die, it lets your descendants take their time selling the house if they can't afford to make the payments.
I naively contend that advertising is currently at a local maxima, but not at a global maxima. I contend that for a really successful advertisement framework two things must happen:

(1) Ad relevancy must be above a very high threshold, else users will filter out all advertisements, even if some are relevant. This threshold is demographic dependent. (For HN crowd, I contend it would be around the 90% mark...I, for one, still ignore gmail advertisements).

(2) Users must trust that the advertisement will give a good deal, else they will just go to Amazon, eBay etc to buy the product instead. I think trust is an often overlooked aspect of advertising, and is a difficult problem to solve.

If ever I get around to building an advertising framework around my app, I will attempt to err on the side of not running advertisements rather than risk losing the relevancy and trust battle.
George Washington's $300,000 library book fine
Nope, just apps/games/sites like Farmville (i.e. click games or maybe trance games?). As neilk said, the end result is not really 'fun' or learning. I know for a lot of people it is just something to pass the time, but there is so many other things that are productive like reading/watching where you either learn or feel something.

Maybe the easiest way to sum it up - I would not be sickened by anything that someone would enjoy telling me about. Tell me about a movie or book you like. Tell me about the the chess game you lost. Tell me about the five miles you ran. But if someone told me they clicked 20,000 times and enjoyed telling me that, I would call bull.
Adobe CS5 Master Suite Pirated Copy Leaked
Everybody knew that Adobe Creative Suite 5 cracked version will be out within days after it starts shipping, but pirates have once again scored releasing the fully cracked Adobe CS5 Master Collection (the costliest version with all features) while users who paid are still waiting for their pre-orders to ship.
I thought this was the luckiest:
http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-...
You would have to think farmville would have a high churn rate to, I played it casually for about a month before I realised there was little point continuing. Even some of the most dedicated amongst my friends eventually stopped after a few months. If anything the achievements in the game seemed to keep people coming back, even though some of them were just arbitrary large numbers of things done.

I don't think it is really a fun game at all which makes me think how successful a similar game would be if someone got the fun factor right, something like a civ for facebook or something.
I applaud such moral rectitude. After all, people who regularly accept grants from the military in order to develop, say, automatic target recognition systems, cannot possibly blemish their immaculate reputation by publishing a cropped image of a tasteful, artistic photo of a gorgeous naked woman.

Looks like all the rumours about the academics' lack of testicular fortitude have been confirmed...
The bit about retaliation was in regards to "(I'm a little concerned this may be too outspoken for my own good, but here goes..)" -- not the body of your comment.

"Why's that reason to anonymize?"

Giving their names makes the story about a couple of exceptionally bad eggs; omitting their identities makes the story about a broad trend.
I like the sound of "Code Writers." How about "Codies"?
If the problem originates in school where math and science are perceived as the boys areas, then changing the attitude of venture capitalists isn't any solution. If men outnumber women 10 to 1 with the qualities that are needed to start a tech startup, then I'd expect any tech company to reflect those ratios.

It's like saying there's a shortage of tech startups from equatorial Africa. It's not because venture capitalists are racists. It's because you're unlikely get the education and experience when growing up in a screwed up society.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses.

I couldn't disagree more with this. Ever glimpsed at WoW guild politics? Many people get involved in this game because it's possible to keep up with the Joneses in-game, if not in real life. This is not a small nitpicking point. Games like these develop complicated social webs and social capital because they create a reality preferable to the one we live in, one in which anyone can see a path to success, a path that they are in control of. The real world is more ambiguous.
Just because computers are involved peripherally does not make it CS.
Hacking Ticketmaster
Denying Shakespeare
For such a "green"ish feeling that this project exudes, I am going to say that you should just wait for your existing bulbs to die and then use that instead. In fact, I wonder if bulbs could be recycled in this manner and spur a new business.
Daniel, I always thought the principle was that out of all the different various tasks you do, 80% of the benefit comes from doing 20% of the tasks -- rather than working on a task with 80% efficiency or effort. So, technically what you might be observing with improved efficiency is that the extra output comes from focusing on the most productive tasks.

Also, can you please tell me why the plain text and images aren't visible on your blog without javascript enabled?
Even if you aren't underwater, it still sucks to lose a quarter of your down payment because the value of your home dropped 5% in a year.

Also, you lose 6% total from real estate commissions; consequently, it is much harder to move between owned homes and rented ones.
Apple only starts to care what you do with javascript in a webkit view if you poke holes in it to expose Cocoa APIs, like PhoneGap does.

They would not view a language implemented in Javascript using the normal DOM APIs as anything other than just Javascript.
The purpose of HR, in a nutshell, is to protect the company from its own employees. In practice "the company" means "senior management".

They have a secondary purpose as well, which is to perpetuate their own existence. And, that's all.
So you can't be addicted to running? Or posting on Hacker News?

You have a fair point, the dictionary definition of addiction includes words like 'damaging' and 'pathological'. But the mechanism of addiction is very similar whether the ends are beneficial or not. And a lot of the people use the word to apply to things that are not terribly negative.
It is possible that it will rise, but it seems to lack the NY/SF factors of limited supply (land) driving prices through the roof. In SF, there is only so much space, so the affluent can keep driving prices higher. Around Sac, there is plenty of farmland ripe for development.

(example: Austin, TX is a great place to live overall, but it remains cheap due to "endless" land).
Jack Welch of GE, when asked about corporate loyalty, replied "It's Friday, you got paid, we're even".