skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's somewhat more complicated than that. However, the interest rates staying far too low for far too long was a necessary, but not sufficient part of the bubble. Or in other words, pulling the interest rates back up to sane amounts the second the economy recovered from the worst slump would have turned the loan market from a borrower's market to a debtor's one, and prevented the bubble.
>and not asking them on a date straight off. etc. (where you will likely get a slap).

Can't you/couldn't a woman just say "no"?
Since $250k is an arbitrary number, when you reach it, what's to stop you from writing this same post asking how you can make $500k?
The ever-lowering base interest rate made real estate acquisition (and refinancing) way more lucrative than traditional instruments like savings account. This outstanding stream of revenue turned the whole of financial industry with its powerful lobbying machine to twist as much out of it as it can, encouraging the stampede.
Ouch.

How many times do I need to tell people not to use wordpress? :P
Jobs that don't create long term value AND don't serve a basic human need. We need X farmers, but we have X + Y actual farmers the Y is are optional jobs that have limited long term economic value.
Yeh, that referred to the crude bit - I was typing a bit fast.
When I was doing a freelance, I hated projects started by owhner in with Wordpress. Yeah, to create basic functionality - anyone a but computer savvy can do this, but later - you will hate to develop for wordpress.. I always asked, why people run stores, community sites, etc on wordpress??

I also head about "content types" in WP 3.x, but hey, it's not code, it's community who put code really matter. And WP community will need tons of time to get nice coding standards implemented in their heads! I am talking about "modules" right now mainly, 'cos this is what really matter.

WP for non-blog site? No way =) I even do not use it for blog sites, because I always hope that one time this blog will become something more then just blog =) And I will hate to be limited by what WP can provide. (and usually, you can't just upgrade =( )
Peer review is usually by scientist peers, and not professional peers. I doubt that most academic researchers in medicine were prescribing anything, really.
We emailed this guy and are waiting back to hear his side of the story. I can't imagine how he'll defend himself, but we'll give him 24 more hours before we pull his jobs off the site.
The communications-psychologist in me found this observation about FaceTime interesting (the author seemed to warm to FT as he spent time with it, even to the point of productive "meetings"):

>You almost feel as if you need to talk about something substantial when you're looking at the person.
Really Great Isn’t Much Better than Bad
I understand what it is. My question was if it's sustainable, e.g. how hard would it be to come up with fresh ideas every goddamn month :)
The game costs $9.99 so I wouldn't epect it to sell in the thousands. If he'd have had it at $0.99 or $2.99 when it hit the front page he'd be talking about "how I made 10k sales in a week".
Profreesoftware
Maybe you should tell them to secure their wordpress install instead:

1. Put an IP lock on the login page via .htaccess so that it can't be accessed from anywhere else but your IP - this one change alone can stop a significant percentage of intruders.

2. Add this line to the .htaccess file at the top level of your WordPress install -
<FilesMatch ^wp-config.php$>deny from all</FilesMatch> - it'll make it harder for your database username and password to fall into the wrong hands in the event of a server problem

3. Create an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file. Otherwise, you leak information on the plugins you're running. One of the easiest ways to break into a wordpress site is to hack through outdated/unsecure plugins. So don't let anyone see what plugins you're running to begin with.

4. In the header.php file for your theme, look for -
<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” />
- this line reveals the version of your install. Again, hackers look for wordpress sites that haven't updated to the latest version, so delete this line and don't reveal your site's version.

5. Remove 'Really Simple Discovery' and 'Windows Live Writer' - http://falcon1986.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/remove-unwanted-w...

6. Block injection of malicious code with these 2 steps - http://wpcult.com/wordpress-security-hacks/

7. Whenever wordPress patches a security hole or releases a new version, apply it/upgrade to it immediately

The above steps should stop everyone but the most dedicated intruder. This is a lot more efficient than boycotting wordpress altogether.
I've known poor families that are the absolute masters at resources management. Your argument is invalid because we have the "hoarders" holding most of the money and doing jack shit economically except putting it in savings. And we have the poor who aren't even paid enough to buy the things they need much less have the ability to save.

You want to see an extreme case of hoarding look no further than Japan. Where the people were so good at saving they never bought a thing which only caused the economy to stall further, ie., "the lost decade".

The accumulation of wealth is never a good thing and we have a long history of booms and busts to prove it.
His approach to this - the goal of beating the market - has been totally wrong. It sounds as if he's been at this completely solo - he mentions in the comments that he worked alone as he didn't want to share his algorithms.

He would have benefitted enormously from working in an institution that specialises in this kind of work (hedge funds etc). Being largely self-taught and having worked alone since he was 17 pretty much guarantees he doesn't know anything institutional trading firms won't know or have studied - employing as they do advanced mathematicians, physicists etc to work at the cutting edge of algo research and trading.

Not only has he missed out academically, he's missed out operationally. "Playing-the-game" is as big a part - if not bigger part - of trading than pricing/valuation. With the resources of a large institution you can learn to play the market in a way you can't possibly by yourself. This is in fact largely how they make money - consistently, year on year.

Thirdly - even if he did discover a pricing inconsistency or whatever, it's doubtful he'd be able to leverage it in as profitable a way that he would be able to as a firm.
Lots of games can be analysed quite deeply, if you care enough about it. And I agree that the analysis for chess has been done to quite deep levels.

Even humble Poker has provoked some sharp minds.
Currently I have more ideas that I am able to do ;) I am wondering about hiring someone to build some websites... but still in plans :)
"When teaching someone a programming language, your first goal should always be to get them to the point where they've made something real in a domain they understand"

There are steps before that! The user's first concern is how to run the damn thing. If they can't get past this stage, they will give up and never return. The user should be able to download, install, and copy/paste/run "Hello, World!" with no bullshit. No IDEs, no configurations, no REPL. You have time later to sell all of that. A programmer who can't run from a file is tethered to your tutorial, even if they want to write more permanent code. Give them that freedom immediately, and give them a win immediately.

After they can actually run a program, then give an interesting example or two, and provide live links to up-to-date tutorials. It's irritating to see "official" links that are three versions out-of-date, and I see it too often. Examples should include a little bit of magic from the language, so the curious programmer thinks "Hm, that's not familiar. I wonder how that works!"
It seems inconceivable that, with random combinations of biochemistry and no "layers of abstraction", that anyone survives. Spaghetti code generated at random always fails, period.

I imagine "layers of abstraction" may not exist, but common nodes of behavior, clusters of biochemical solutions bound by genetics, MUST exist or we would all be still born.
I finished my undergrad 6 years ago and want to get into a PhD program in a year or two. I expect my research will pertain to DSP and involve FFT/DFT on a regular basis. To brush up on my math (PreCalc, Calculus, Linear Algebra etc), I've been watching Khan's videos nightly. I must say his videos are a great way to recollect what you've already understood once but forgotten now.

I wish there was a way to speed them up though. I've thought about downloading the mp4s from YouTube and playing them locally at high-speed with VLC.
I agree with you. The most important area to save money: we have military bases and/or installations in about 3/4 of the countries on this planet. We need to stop that. We also need to allow state and local governments to go through bankruptcy to renegotiate pensions, etc. Harsh, but necessary.

The easy copout is printing money.
Depends on where he lives. I live in Montevideo, Uruguay, and I had to look at profiles from people in other countries to get something resembling a match (only 3 active female users in my country).

He seems to live in Toronto, so that doesn't apply though.

Edit: I actually found my current girlfriend through another dating website :) and do recommend them for introverts.
These are a fantastic resource (I've actually up-voted the submission), and everyone should know about them, but do we have to see them here so often?

http://searchyc.com/submissions/Khan+academy?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1459869

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1415147

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1351584

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1177230

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995830

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993632

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898167

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892222

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=733383
WWII is a counterexample. This does not mean that more stimulus must necessarily make the economy better

Heard of the broken window fallacy?

In any case, the shift to war productions cause the population some misery. You got rationing of essential foodstuff and the like. You can't buy anything you like. There was almost certainly no R&D money spent on consumer research.

Never mind the fact that all the men went to wars! That's going to cause less employment. When a lot of men die, that make your employment statistics awfully good, doesn't it?

Spending money on education is all well and good, but what about the dead GIs that we can't bring back to life? How many Einsteins, Teslas, and Neumanns die in that war anyway? We probably lost some of them in that war.

Wars are just another case of digging holes and then filling it in again, except you're digging graves for dead soldiers, airmen, and sailors, and a whole perfectly good workforce too.
"He[Dan Zanger] holds the unofficial record in trading stocks by turning $11,000 into more than $18 million in 18 months in 1999-2000. He grew that to an incredible $42 million in less than two years and has the tax receipts to prove it."
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/04/082504.asp

"Williams won the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading from the Robbins Trading Company were he turned $10,000 to over $1,100,000 (11,376%) in a 12 month competition with real money. Ten Years later his daughter Michelle won the same contest"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_R._Williams

Somebody has some sort of algorithm.
Because I see it everyday. Hell I've got a sister that couldn't save a dime if she made a billion dollars a day.

I know it's a circular argument - but because if they (or their parents) could manage resources better they wouldn't be poor - don't look at what signle person does - look at their bloodline.

My parents (mother mostly) managed to save enough money to buy her first property by age 18 (she started working age 15). She managed to save incredible amounts of money - while mostly working minimum wage type jobs - for her entire life and we always had cash when necessary.

It did take a lot of sacrifices. I mostly wore second hand clothing until I could afford to buy my own. I was never to McDonalds until age 15. We never went to theatres. We spent most of our vacations working, She did a lot of stuff that is nowadays considered ecological/organic/fancy - but 30 years ago made you look like a lunatic in eyes of general community (recycling/reusing everything - like taking zippers off clothing and using it on other clothing). I was raised entirely on organic food - thinking that I'm deprived because of it. But I was always encouraged to study - hell I was probably second kid in class to get access to a computer and certainly first kid in class to have their OWN computer.

Hell I might go and write a "How to survive on 100 dollars a month." guides only on stuff I learned from her.

I was certain that we are piss poor until I realized that we are actually pretty wealthy - just poor on liquid assets.

Bootstrapping yourself from poverty is certainly possible - but most people are just too ignorant (yes it might be cruel but thats the way I see it) to pull it off.

Have you ever noticed how many poor people smoke/drink - have you ever considered what a % of their income goes towards these habbits?
BUt how do we know this is "a cure", and not just the favorite project of bitter researcher who's funding was cut off?

The stringing along of desperate people is WHY the FDA exists.
Soccer and the law of large numbers
Lovechild (White) Adult Boots 
Super selection of all types of costumes and clothes for adults and children and a reduced rate of freight, while a super day. Enjoy shopping risk-free area and the number of exclusive costume!
IEEE Spectrum: Free the Radio Spectrum
A good number of blogs that get linked to on HN are down minutes later. If you didn't know about caching before, I hope you learned about it. :)
How Can I Watch Satellite TV Online
In the late '70's people were just beginning to hear of a new way to receive television channels. You purchase a satellite dish similar to the television station and through a converter, watch unlimited programming from...and more in my site
Facebook Now Has 60,000 Servers
"That's not really called for"

Didn't mean it in a nasty way. And yes, actual physical attacks are unlikely as a response. Unfriendliness is rather likely, though. But if you have a hardened "shell", no problem. Or if you have become very adept at chatting.

Also, if those single girls at grocery stores are so desperate, why don't they make a move themselves?
I love rap music, and have been looking for meaningful and deep rap lyrics on the web more than once in the last couple of years (haven't found a webapp for that yet).
I'd love to have a place on the web, where others (or your webapp) could recommend such rap lyrics to me as a user, based on my listening history for example. Also, you could also let people discuss lyrics.

I might be biased, because I'm a rap listener myself, but you could add any other genre to your repertoire, that has a lyrics-aware fan base.
> I'm glad to finally find someone who knows exactly what caused the housing bubble and subsequent crash. Could you explain it to me? I find the whole matter very confusing myself, although I've read a lot about it.

Yeah, it is a complicated topic. What did you want to know specifically, what were your questions?

> So: low interest rates caused the housing bubble. Could you explain how that happened exactly?

Low interest rates were a big part of the problem - the price of money got below the cost of inflation. That means borrowing as much as you can is profitable. Let's say your interest rate is 4%, but the rate of inflation is 5%. That means that all things being equal, your rents on a commercial property are increasing faster than you're paying in interest! That doesn't seem like a big difference to a layman, but the gap between 4% and 5% is huge. That's 20% on your money.

In that kind of environment, it means if you borrow as much as you can, you turn bigger and bigger profits. This drives housing prices up. It also drives the stock market up. But the assets are artificially high because the money lending rates are artificially low, ie, set by the Federal Reserve. An arbitrage like this would be much less likely to happen over such a long period without the rates being set artificially low for political reasons, to make things look good when they weren't.

And then you know the rest of the story after that.

For the most straightforward, plain English explanations, I'd recommend Peter Schiff - he was correctly predicting the housing crash almost to the letter and getting mocked on news analysis programs for it. Here's a link to some of his clips from 2006 and 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

He's got some free videos and wrote some books, check the clips above out - he's consistent with that message - and then check more of him out if you want to understand more.

If you have any specific questions, I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.
Why is economy stalling considered so bad?

Would it be so much better if they just spent everything?

Why is more production, consumption and pollution considered good?

Can't you see that taking wealth of Warren Buffet and distributing it amongst the poorest would cause mostly problems. These people wouldn't use the resources to empower themseves or improve their position - they would mostly blow it for hedonistic pleasures.
As technomancy said, there's no way to tell what the issue was without more info, but was the Mac behind a proxy, by any chance? That was the issue I ran into when I first tried to use ELPA. Solved by setting url-proxy-services in Emacs:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1595418/emacs-behind-http...
Career day in kindergarten: how to demonstrate programming in 20 minutes?
How to teach the kids and their teachers about programming in a fun way
I'm not convinced that reasonable comparisons can be made to the circumstances surrounding WWII. WWII was a far-from-equilibrium economic situation, and decisions around debt are very different from more "normal" economic situations.
Thanks for correcting me, I've never used google apps so I'd never noticed you could register domains there. Personally I'd still register my own domains elsewhere as I've had bad experiences with combined registration and hosting, and even the almighty Google has been known to partake in shenanigans.

In any case I'm pretty sure you don't even have to be a registrar to get lists of newly registered domains, not that it matters because the rest of my post addresses why registration has nothing to do with this.
> Unfriendliness is rather likely, though.

I'd say that is highly unlikely also. At worst you'll just get ignored :) but generally anyone will talk to you if you look and speak normal/friendly.

> Also, if those single girls at grocery stores are so desperate, why don't they make a move themselves?

Social convention. Also; this is the beginnings of a strawman because it's not like that at all :) the GP is just suggesting we talk to people more - which is always a good thing!
An iPhone wish list looks more like an Android feature list
As the others have noted, no lyrics have been coming up for me.

But on the flip side, it does pick up my 'currently listening' song from last.fm very fast. I use Spotify, it must publish currently listening pretty quickly. I think its only about 10-15 seconds.

Just a couple of 'ideas':

- Fix the lyrics api issue

- Show the last X songs played so you can go back and search the lyrics for them.

- Enunciate what the site does better than the text box on the side. From the text on the site it looks like it is just a lyrics search engine... display what sets you apart.

Great idea!
EBay apps make it No. 1 mobile retailer in U.S.
After venting my spleen, above, I tried to figure out why I don't have the same reaction to POSIX that I have to Java.

Part of it is that Unix has a rather different philosophy. Part of it is that Unix seems to be better designed.

But I think the deeper answer is: I'm ready and waiting to develop an allergy to POSIX, if and when a pragmatic
alternative appears. There is plenty of fuel for its funeral pyre: Where do you think I honed my own platform-griping skills? By reading The Unix Haters Handbook, which is really old by now.

But the difference between Java and Unix is that there are alternatives to Java. I'm sufficiently pragmatic that, if compelled to solve a problem with nothing but a roll of barbed wire, I'll learn all about barbed wire. And if I didn't have alternative means to solve my
problems I'd probably try to love Java as well.
Not installing Wordpress in the first place is more efficient, but your checklist illustrates there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
yeah I get the we don't have lyrics for every song. Haven't got lyrics for any song to make a insightful comment on that.

You should update the lyrics database. I am not sure what you are using but I wrote a script for myself sometime ago that shows me the lyrics for songs I am playing by using the url http://lyrics.wikia.com/api.php?action=lyrics&fmt=json&#... and appending artist and track to it.
Less is More. Say NO to bloated software.
Talk about an article with potential for vandalism... people will believe anything you label a historical misconception. I would know, I do this to my friends all the time.
Anatomy of a Linux system – Poster
Patience is a SEO Virtue
I'm not saying that paying 250 euros into a social security system each month makes it impossible to start a startup. I am the last person to discourage anyone from starting a startup. I've never been employed in my entire life.

What I'm saying is that paying 20 is more attractive than paying 250. And indeed, I cannot bear to give up 25% of my time just because some socialist government has decided to force me to save for retirement. I do not intend to retire. Ever.
Learning How to Freelance without Clients
I created a similar app a couple of months ago :D
http://nowlyrics.appspot.com
It was also featured on last.fm, http://build.last.fm/item/481
Thank you all.
nice app, what's the revenue model?, or is it a 'just for fun' app? .. unfortunate that it doesn't have more lyrics, but it's in beta and rome wasn't built in a day ... best of luck with it!
Facebook Application Development Requirements
Ever since Facebook opened up their platform to allow 3rd party developers to access the core engine and build new applications on top of their existing site Facebook has experienced incredible growth as a vast array of companies rushed to build apps that can tap in to the Facebook market.<p>Without a doubt some of the most popular apps are the simple ones like personality tests, quizzes, comparison tests and games – all of which can be created and start getting users within a month. Take Zynga for example, they created a number of social games using Flash and are now one of the most successful companies to have exploited the Facebook audience, even introducing a revenue stream thanks to their micro-payments which allows users to buy digital items for just a few dollars – the tens of millions of people that play their games means that only a fraction need to get their credit card out in order to make the company profitable.
Your response would be relevant if it addressed the point I made about using WWII as an example and if it lacked the sarcasm. WWII was a massive spending program by the government. It is credited amongst Austrian economists and Keynesians as the reason we got out of the depression. Therefore it is an example of how government spending can get a country out of a depression. It is incorrect to believe that government expenditures can never get us out of a depression. Is is also incorrect to believe that government expenditures can always get us out of a depression.