skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A family member of mine is in the same position: they bought a house, and now they can't afford it. I'd love to feel as if the bank should be held accountable, but at the same time, I look at my family members, what he does, how they spend their money, and I can't feel sympathy. They dug their own hole.

And yet, the amount of entitlement coming from them is just insane. They feel as if it's not their fault; they point at everyone except for them. It's the governments fault they aren't getting money. Ignore the fact that they both dropped out of college, bought a house together before marriage, had a child before marriage, and are now on their way toward a second child, while basically unemployed.

I've tried to help. Bought them a computer for school, send them gift certificates so I know the money goes toward the kids. Bought them a washer for their clothes. But when they go out and spend $200 on a tattoo for a birthday gift (not to mention an iPod touch!), I can't help but wonder what they are thinking.

And still, the self-entitlement they reek of is horrible. My wife and I work hard, pay our bills, and still rent. We make more than enough to get a house, but we want to pay off the few outstanding debts we have, and save up money for a nice big down payment before we settle on a house. We look at them, and wonder how they were given a loan, how they could feel like they should get one, when we can't imagine getting one right now.

Maybe the lenders should be held accountable in some regards, but this doesn't excuse the borrowers. The worst part is the kids. With a second a month away, I just can't see how they'll be able to afford everything. I know they are using their credit cards right now, but spending it on stupid crap ($200 for carpeting for the new babies room.. seriously?)

Sorry. Long useless rant. Just had to get it out somewhere.
Is the volume a problem at the individual store level, or at the corporate, bulk purchasing and distribution level?

The volume is not the problem. It's the solution.

At the time I worked there (long ago), McDonald's did from 300% to 1000% the per store volume of any of its competitors. It was built for volume. That's why the food is cooked before you get there, with default condiments. Tomatoes and volume just don't mix well, too much labor and too much food cost.

Not sure if the volume ratios are still like that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
If you remove the word "criminal", which doesn't apply, and replace it with "bad actor", I'm going to go with: "they are both bad actors". Squatting in a $125k house you promised to pay for but now refuse to pay for is still bad.

This is the same lazy argument that runs though any discussion of any abuse of any service anywhere. "Sure, I stole 10,000 credit card numbers --- but the credit card companies are evil organizations that prey on low-income people, and they're the ones that are going to end up paying!"
I'm guessing their credit will be shot? But I don't really know how that system works. Would they ever be approved for a loan again?
If this means that animated advertisements and other ad agency annoyances will be coming soon to my iPad web browsing experience, put me down as a detractor.
The fact that some pundit somewhere drew a line between...

As Felix Salmon points out ( http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/11/30/the-worlds-... ), we're not talking about some random pundit. We're talking about the President of the United States, the Secretary of the Treasury, and a long list of authoritative figures in civil life.

Or, more directly: it's immmoral for businesses to violate contracts too. What's the rest of your argument?

Given finite resources for law enforcement, we should prioritize investigation and prosecutions so that a small number of random losers who made a bad moral choice that probably harmed no one get investigated/prosecuted after the rich and powerful people who decided to abandon their own underwriting standards and helped destroy the economy.
There are a lot of great comments in here.

I also see another possible angle on this.

What is the actual windows system usage at google currently? It might already be low enough to represent a serious time-sink for IT/security because it's already a serious minority?

It makes a lot of sense to maintain somewhat complex policies and management for a vast network of Windows based systems and servers. It is entirely different when you're looking at trying to keep a handful of systems in-line when they are not your primary focus.

Obviously this is purely speculative but trying to look at it from another perspective.
Apparently we agree about pretty much everything: (a) yes it's bad to renege on a debt, (b) it's probably not worth freaking out over.

I pretty much boil down to: "stop bragging about exploiting the system." I'm guessing you agree with that too!
- I print emails, when they contain some information I will need while say driving somewhere.

- I use colors which help with Question / Answer situations.

- I use single letter sign offs when on a cellphone responding.

- I use some txt speach when on a cellphone, not too crazy because sometimes thinking of a clever abbreviation is more painful than just writing the damn word out, also autocomplete helps. I also explicitly tell people that "u" is ok or "ur" or "k" or something in that nature, but things I can't figure out within 20 seconds are not.

So yea, reply to shitty txt speach "I dont get it, please say again without abbreviations" it annoys because they have to send it twice.

Reply to a shitty colored email with a massively colored one.

Single letter signoffs... wait what bothers you about this?
Nice to have some actual information in one of these posts. I'd be interested to hear the experience of android app developers who have had to deal with different phone models. Android's biggest marketing challenge is the disinformation.
Web Site Security With repoze.who and repoze.what
A lot of desktop applications aren't well suited for multi-core use. They have been written for a long time as single-threaded applications and making them multi-threaded is a huge task for a small gain. Some applications get worse when first made to use multiple cores and it takes a lot of tweaking and rewriting to get performance back to where it was.

2-8 cores on the desktop hasn't made a huge dent. 50-cores is a bit extreme. It's going to thrive in the server market where one system is typically servicing many requests from many users. Desktops are generally designed to only service one user.
Firefox 4: An early walk-through of IndexedDB
Substitute "President Barack Obama" for "some pundit somewhere" and I don't think my argument changes or loses any force. But, I agree: we shouldn't be creating a task force to go after these people.
Wow, this is sad especially since the author wrote a post defending Apple a month prior. Apple desperately needs reform in their developer relations.

1. Apple should replace whoever is in charge of developer relations.

2. Apple should open up a 1-800 developer hotline for any problems.

3. Apple needs to be more clear about app approval and rejection policies, and should give updates if there are any changes of apps they are rejecting.

4. Apple should be more in dialogue with developers.
This probably won't satisfy you because it's hard to quantify, but: In my experience, the general discourse treats individual debt as a moral responsibility and corporate debt as a contractual/legal responsibility. Which is interesting because people are pretty strongly moved by moral judgements about their actions.
Strategic defaulters will have their credit shot, but their credit record should return to normal after seven years.
I'm taking issue with your language. It's not "their house", it's the bank's house. They are squatters themselves, so they don't keep squatters out.

If you said "people who squat in homes they used to own may perform maintenance and keep out a worse breed of squatters than themselves", I would have had no objection.
This needs to be packaged as a firefox addon and be completely transparent.

It would be great.
One important point is how much misinformation there is out there over fragmentation - a lot of it written by people who don't know (and usually don't care to know) much about the actual issues.

One common meme is the Multiple Resolutions Problem - you know, the onerous problem a developer faces when he has to support both HVGA, QVGA and WVGA resolutions. Except, if you actually do write an app that works well across all those, you find out that managing multiple resources for multiple resolutions is trivial, and that correctly-placed layout weights will give you the flexibility to deal with slightly different aspect ratios.

That is not to say there aren't actual issues - one pain point comes up if you wish to target 1.5 so you can get the widest distribution possible, but are forced to use 1.6 as your target during development.

But just to illustrate my point, try a google search for the fictitious resolution "fragmentation" problem, then try one for the real 1.5 vs 1.6 problem.
I agree with you that the likely effect of them turning in the keys to their houses is that those houses will be vacant probably for the better part of a year, which will damage other good-faith occupants of neighboring houses and produce no economic good for either the lender or the buyer.

I think the only thing I could really wish for here is a system that captures some of the funds that these people are spending on trucks or business schemes and, in exchange for some long-term plan to keep them in their houses, get them to start paying back into their commitments. It is certainly true that the financial system shoulders some of the blame for this untenable situation.

A pox on all their houses, then.
Point-and-Click Installer for MongoDB on OS X
"At some point, I assume, a Google search for any popular book title will return an illegal source at the top of the page."

This is not true. Generally speaking, the easier it is for a 40 year old to find, the easier it is for rightsholders to find and sue. Furthermore Google tends to be pretty cooperative with removing links to egregiously infringing stuff.
Hard to believe that 10 years ago you would often hear your average middle class white person say "those black people need to get a job!" -- when was the last time you heard that? An atmosphere of entitlements is overtaking the middle class in this country and it doesn't bode well for our future. The housing crisis will resolve itself in a few years-- the entitlement mentality lasts forever -- and destroys civilizations.
> but when we were hiring people, refusing to answer would have been a HUGE negative.

that is really rough, though. it makes it difficult for people to jump out of their salary bracket if they basically got the shaft with their previous employment. especially in a tough economy.

one of the (many possible) reasons why people leave their former employment is because they feel underpaid, and to use that underpayment as a measurement on what to offer them next seems at least somewhat unfair.
I use Araxis as well. Cross platform too.
The entitlement mentality is hardly the only thing holding back the economies of Europe.
I wonder how many servers are currently CPU-bound? I've always been I/O bound (interchange that with memory-bound, depending on how much you would like to spend on memory).
Whoops. I meant SWF. I'm wondering the footprint difference between the converted HTML5/JS code vs the compiled SWF.
Unfortunately the software I wrote for this doesn't have the ability to do waiting lists yet. Maybe in some future event though.
I got so excited for this that I actually began thinking about writing interfaces to the game for other languages. It'd be fun to compete in a Lisp vs Python—maybe one language would lend itself to a certain kind of tribe.

I'll be looking at the source soon, but in the meantime I'm curious to see if other people would be interested in playing this. There could be a repository of genomes/tribes you can download and compete against, or perhaps this would be done server-side so your tribe's genome couldn't be cloned?

As a side note, it seems to me that (unless cells can be aware of their comrades' positions) global position needs to be availible in order to build walls, which is damn cool.

Cheers!
A Mathematician, A Physicist and an Engineer...
Code For America Open for Applications
It is not just the WAPO. I've seen the same appalling ignorance in many publications. I've also talked to journalists and I feel very confident in saying that people in journalism generally don't have the skills needed to fact checking in this area. Beyond that, "fact checking" as traditionally done is a very narrow activity that allows all manner of deceptions to be published. Your childlike faith in the utility of traditional news organizations to ensure accuracy by fact-checking is charming, but also ridiculous.

And McSweeny's certainly does have editorial standards. Libel is still a crime, which both McSweeny's and the attorney who wrote the article are very much aware of.
Beyond HTML5: Database APIs and the Road to IndexedDB
Maybe both parties are crooks? This is not a zero sum game...they can both be crooks at the same time.
Option A or Option B?
...had a child before marriage...

I agree with a lot of your comment, but this bit seemed very oddly out of place. What would be wrong with having a child before getting married? It's not something I chose to do, but most of the other things you mentioned have fairly predictable negative financial consequences, whereas I can't think of anything for this one.
My wife helps out. She finds job postings online and sends them to him. She does this often, even though we are in different countries. She doesn't understand why he can't get a temporary job right now in the mean time.

To be fair, he did get back into school and seems to be doing well, but still, until he finds a full time job in his field, he could get anything anywhere and at least make a few dollars more for the family.

Meh... I could go on. But yeah. Same tired story.
For some strange reason I cannot access the site. It is as if my ISP has it blacklisted(rogers). I get the same firefox response as if my internet was disconnected. I also tried wget using the url provided in the comments but that does not work as well.

I am stuck relying on google cache and cannot see the pdf. Any tips?

wget http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf
--14:52:00-- http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue1.pdf
=> `hackermonthly-issue1.pdf'
Resolving hackermonthly.com... failed: Name or service not known.

ping hackermonthly.com
ping: unknown host hackermonthly.com
Charlie Stross recently republished a post by Milena Popova titled "Why Content Is a Public Good" [1] that I quite enjoyed, and think is relevant to this discussion. It goes into some detail on the true economic nature of content, and gave me a framework within which to think about it.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-cont...
For people who like this, i would point you to the first such game i played -

http://www.corewars.org/
Really cool. This reminds me of a different "2 algorithms enter 1 algorithm leaves" type game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War .

Interestingly, Core Wars is from the age of multiple threads running on a single processor, sharing memory, whereas the more recent Cells represents a share-nothing distributed system with autonomous agents.
AIS "security" considered harmful - ESR
correctly-placed layout weights will give you the flexibility to deal with slightly different aspect ratios.

Slightly different sizes, yeah. But the problem for some people / designs, and ultimately for end-users, is that it makes super-designed apps like you see on the iPhone more difficult to make.

Not that that should prevent people from programming for / using Android. I personally plan to code a bit for it. But high degrees of polish are significantly more difficult than for a single screen size, and the iPhone has pretty much demonstrated that it does in fact matter to the average user.
Sorry, I should have said that they had an unplanned child that caused her to drop out of school. It also provided additional financial burden. A child before marriage isn't the issue; it's how they dealt with it. Consider that they didn't use any real birth control other than the hope and pray method. The second child was essentially for the same reason.
How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit
a system that captures some of the funds that these people are spending on trucks or business schemes and, in exchange for some long-term plan to keep them in their houses, get them to start paying back into their commitments

There have been several proposals that would accomplish this, including Dean Baker's Own to Rent ( http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/08/19/own_to_rent_... ); I believe all of these proposals have been vociferously opposed by the finance industry. One reason is that it would probably force banks to mark down the values of their assets to something more realistic. I believe these proposals would be very popular though with the general public....
I completely, 100%, understand and sympathize. I've been in a similar situation for a while.

I love my parents. And not all of their current situation is entirely, directly, their fault, but a lot of it is. They recently had a windfall, of sorts, a few months back. I was hoping that, considering the foreclosure threats, the destroyed credit, the really tough situation they've been in, they would finally see to it that the money was put to effective use.

But, no. Instead, they settled a few bills, yes, but several thousands went to my brother, so that he could get a shiny new car that he couldn't afford. My brother works hard, and I love him too. But, he couldn't afford it. He didn't need exactly that one. There were lots of perfectly reliable options for $1,000 or less.

Predictably, he's already behind on paying them back. Then tax time came, and that windfall suddenly added up to a huge payment back to the government -- money they, again, didn't have. Now they're selling one of the vehicles they have a loan on, at a loss, because they can't afford the monthly payments anymore. They'll still have to pay the difference, probably for around a year, and they'll be out of a vehicle in the meantime.

None of this stopped my dad from picking up a really great deal on an antique car, though.

It's maddening. It's definitely starting to put a rift in our relationship. I've tried helping, a lot. I made their car payments for a while (and in return got to drive it while mine was broken down, yet again). I've been paying their cell phone bills for around a year now, at least.

Meanwhile, I've bootstrapped my own business, with no savings. I work on my truck constantly. My girlfriend and I live in a small place; we get by, but it's been very difficult sometimes. Gradually though, we're getting ahead, and without much in the way of help. Mostly, we work at it constantly, and try to make smart decisions money-wise.

But my parents, and now my brother, do seem to feel very entitled. They would probably object to that, but if you listen to them, you hear things like, "I've worked hard all my life, I deserve this." Well, no. They worked hard all their life, but they squandered everything they ever made. Now their time has run out and they don't have any options left -- but still, it's someone else's fault that they're being forced to give up all this stuff.

I think it's the Boomer Generation Problem: they were told, "work hard, and you can have whatever you want", and so many people believed it. It was supposed to encourage them to do something meaningful with themselves, but instead it encouraged them to compete with eachother over ever more extravagant displays of wealth -- all of which kept actually making them poorer.

It's very sad, and I fear that not enough of my generation has really begun to realize this yet.
I tried this actually and photos, audio recordings and music are the only exposed things. The rest of the folders are empty. Granted it's an issue, but it's not that bad.
Sorry. Long useless rant. Just had to get it out somewhere.

1. Don't apologize. No need.

2. Not useless.

3. I have similar stories. I imagine others here do too. But I was too chicken to share mine. Glad you had the guts to be honest and say what you're thinking. Please keep doing that.
Will bartenders hack your Point of Sale?
...and if you are disappointed at the smaller set of packages available as opposed to other distros, visit http://slackbuild.org to get a broader choice.
Cool, this.

A very nifty (if somewhat detailed) complexity analysis of the Algorithm X appeared in blogosphere's festschrift for Knuth's 70, http://11011110.livejournal.com/128249.html

I've used P159 in my absolutely first assignment in the intro programming class. I was to make a N-queens solver. The assignment obviously asked for a 8-line backtracking program. But I was naïve. I went to the library and turned it inside out. My solution was ca. 500 lines, and also implemented a way to find the number of solutions without computing them (this was from IIRC a paper by Rivin), and had a randomized mode which would find just a single solution but for fast for very large N (this I found in Norvig's AIMA in a footnote referencing a paper by J.M., I don't remember the page or the full name)). Good times.
I love that you can edit the assumptions. That would be an awesome feature in a pitch deck.
I don't have a horse in this race, but the Nature article has some spin to it:

A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the
denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial
exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two
papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming
(S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003
and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003)
and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming
Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one
another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they
acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the
IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published
in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.

If you conspire to do something with someone else and don't act, it's still a conspiracy. It's the planning that makes it a conspiracy, not the actual act.
It was off the cuff but it was a great conference for open topics. There was a very positive vibe after this which shows how much the JavaScript community has matured (less of an inferiority complex at least). Of course, I had to beat them all with my monopod first.
Sounds like a good game to test out with Intel's new "Knights Corner" chip!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1395513

One cell per core? Ah, the future...
Blogs from the Southern Miss Oil Spill Response Team
Tony Hsieh of Zappos entrepreneurship advice video
I guess, in a few years I'll be working in HPC after all! At my home!
Considering there is 8 meg of cache for all the cores, this must be for CPU-bound tasks only
It is a normal question but not something you have to answer. I've not been offered a job because I did not discuss my previous salary with the new company according to someone that knew.

I'll put zero down if it is a required field. If it is in an interview, I'll deflect. If the company wants to offer me a job then we can negotiate at that point. And most likely my new job isn't going to be the exact same as any previous position.