skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No sorry your wrong, I didn't(and a huge number like me) take on a mortgage I couldn't afford, and we shouldn't be asked to pay for others mistakes (I'm not anyway, emigrated last year).

It did not bail out ordinary people who had borrowed a little too much, these people are getting doubly screwed over. Paying extra taxes (which the governemt is raising, a large part of which is going to the banks) and they still have to pay back the loans on homes that are now in negative equity, on which rates have risen.

If nature were allowed to take it's course, the people who lent the money(other EU countries as it turns out) would have to take a hit(accept that they won't be getting all their "investment" back.

You can't just call in a loan, you know, contracts and all that, and why would the lender even want to do that? Who wants an unsellable thing like a house in Ireland(you can't sell them nowdays, no ones buying) instead of SOME of their money back.

So the current state of things in Ireland is homeowners that are in negative equity(everyone who borrowed since 2000 essentially) are prisoners. They can't sell, can't leave, they just have to take it(and both the government and the banks know this). And I'm sure the voters don't like that.
The Perfect Server - Mandriva 2010.1 (Spring) Free (x86_64) [ISPConfig 2]
This is a popular argument in support of mind-enhancing drugs in the "real world," and it's completely wrong. You could make almost exactly the same argument in favor of nootropics in schools: "anything that allows the sum-total of human learning to increase at a faster rate is good."

That's just not true in either case. If the widespread use of a substance accelerates human work (or learning) by 10% (whatever that means) but halves life expectancy, it almost certainly isn't good. That's obviously pathological but my intention here is only to show that your argument is bad, not your conclusion.

Moreover, you seem to believe that, outside of schoool, people would only take nootropics if the net benefit to humanity outweighs the net detriment; the real world, after all, isn't a competition. The problem is that it often feels a lot like one. If I'm competing with a coworker of roughly equal skill for a promotion and a nootropic is available to both of us that will increase job performance by 5% but noticeably decrease quality of life -- again, this is pathological -- we're put in a prisoner's dilemma: both of us would much prefer that neither of us take the drug if the alternative is that we both take the drug, but both of us have a strong incentive to take the drug no matter what the other one does.

There's no getting around the fact that allowing nootropics in the real world at least has the potential to instigate exactly the same sort of prisoner's-dilemma-esque mental arms race that allowing nootropics in schools generates. Some of the side effects of that arms race might be good, sure, but some of them might be very bad. This issue isn't anywhere near as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.
Missouri court finds using thumbnail pictures a violation of fair use
They should be praised. Fear mistakes, fear disincentives, avoid any consequences, and you fear life!

By definition of what a mistake is, you certainly don't want to make mistakes as soon as you've learned how to do (what you want to do) without making them. By merely making mistakes, any mistakes, you won't grow.

But you know that you're growing in life when you gain new problems to replace the old problems. And when you're working on something new, you'll always be making mistakes. New mistakes. It's those you don't want to fear, disincentivize, or avoid.

If you don't make mistakes, you're either too shy to not challenge yourself on anything you might not know well enough already, or you're the perfection itself and you know everything already.
I accept that not everyone else has the same outlook as me, but I plan to do the sustainable thing.

What old people who can't do anything anymore have done for millenia before social security and "retirement". Have my children take care of me.

Well that's plan B, plan A is to become very wealthy from the things I create and live off that.

And who said someone has to hire me? There are plenty of people here who work for themselves (or at least their customers). With webapps they don't even know what you look like, you could be a 90 year old dressed as Gandalf and it wouldn't matter as long as the sites good.
Probably architecting and choosing between options, though it's not all wasted. Most of the stuff I do can probably be best done by doing an ugly first implementation, throwing it away and replacing it with a better one, and then abstracting out some nice modules and interfaces, and iterating from there. But my instinct is to analyze the problem up front, decide what the right interfaces are, which the right third-party libraries (or even languages) are, and before you know it, I've spent a whole day reading about Clojure's concurrency primitives, or pros and cons of different OO patterns, or comparisons of Library X and similar-sounding Library Y. The worst is when the available information isn't that good, so all I've gotten out of my hours of reading is, "huh, libraries X and Y sound pretty similar, and I still don't really know which is better for my purposes; I'll just have to pick one and see".

It does occasionally lead to an epiphany of the "aha, my problem is exactly [this]!" variety, so sometimes it works.
> There's going to be more automation which will mean that people can work for longer, and I suspect that the whole notion of what it means to "work" will change.

why doesn't automation eliminate the need for work?
I'm open minded about the future. I think the problem for people my age (30-ish) is that the entire time we've been working real wages are flat or negative. We've never had a chance to get ahead of the game. I make more money than most of my friends, lots of them have student loans to deal with too, and it's hard to project a way to save even $200k-$300k over the next 30 years. Of course I could cut my expenses, move into a cheaper place, eat lots of ramen, but that's just choosing to live poor now instead of later. So for now I'm making the choice to be poor later.
i don't understand what you're saying.
Ask HN: Review my Project: SpellingThing
Hi All,
I'm looking for some feedback on my web app, SpellingThing, a tool to help people improve their spelling. It's targeted at teens and adults (it seems like most spelling programs are targeted at kids). It's populated with EN-US words only (for now).

I'd love to hear what you think. What's confusing? What doesn't work for you? What's missing?

If people start using it and getting value out of it, I'd like to switch to a freemium model, so I'd appreciate any feedback in that direction too.

http://www.spellingthing.com/
It reads like a justification for arrogant cowboy programming, eg: Developers that have to spend a long time cleaning up after you are just the mediocre ones that can't keep up.
That was along the lines of my first thought: That it sounds like a large bureaucracy. Of course, the article specifically stated it wasn't a large bureaucracy. So my second thought was that perhaps (or hopefully!) such companies change their ways or die fairly quickly.

(I didn't post this earlier mostly because I am not a programmer, so just speaking off the cuff.)
I told the financial adviser that administers my 401K at my current job that "it's clear that putting money in a 401K makes Wall Street rich, it's not clear that it's making me rich."

There's a serious breakdown of trust between Main Street and Wall Street, and it's got (at least) three angles: (i) I'm not confident that money I invest in retirement plans is going to grow, or even keep it's value, (ii) I'm not sure that the "system" currently knows how to distribute capital to places where it will promote prosperous business (if it did, investment funds would be making money...) and (iii) I'm worried that giving money to Wall Street is like giving it to an enemy that's going to actively make my life worse: it's going to go into lobbying to keep Washington D.C. corrupt an ineffective and it's going to be used as a club to force businesses to eliminate jobs in the U.S. and ship them out elsewhere.

Given that business, government and such doesn't have a vision that makes sense five years down the road, never mind 25 or so when I retire, it's hard to avoid a "carpe diem" attitude and to simply try to minimize your use of financial services: spend what you make, don't borrow or save.

I've noticed some people here are enthusiastic about index funds; now, "seldom is heard a disparaging word" about index funds, but personally I think they're a lot more harmful than hedge funds could ever be.

I mean, index funds just spray money indiscriminantly at companies that are lucky enough to be on some list. It gives the big shareholders a great opportunity to collect rents, but it means that investors aren't doing there job -- why does an investor deserve to get a return on capital? Because they do some thinking about where they can put their capital to get a good return. If you don't do that thinking, you don't deserve any return... Just as if if you've got some job and you don't do your job... You don't deserve a paycheck.

"Bubblenomics" made index funds look brilliant from 1980-1999, but in the long term, I think mass investement in index funds is one of the major reasons why Wall Street doesn't work...
Toyota bringing electric Rav4 back
"He" as gender-neutral singular pronoun is not even vernacular -- it is standard English.
Really, the biggest flaw with a monarchy is the difficulty of succession? Not that the whole concept is based on subjugation of the populace and nepotism?
A benevolent dictatorship seems a great idea if you're the dictator I would have thought that most people here would have realised that you won't be, and even if you were you shouldn't be.
Yes it is a hard problem to solve but the first step is to abolish or disempower the monarch not to try and plan a more effective succession strategy.
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Architecture
The future of Solaris looks the same as its past: proprietary and very expensive (but they'll throw it in free if you buy a Sun server running Oracle).
How did this make it onto a science blog?

"It only makes sense..." is the start to many failures in our understanding. Wtf?
A table of homicide rates per country hardly counts as a "citation" for the statement, "blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America", let alone, "The answer has everything to do with race."

No doubt political correctness is a distorting factor in the discourse; so is garden-variety racism. Therefore it's important for honest inquirers to be careful about how they put things. As you said, "it's really hard to be very exact about this sort of thing".
Is this wrapping around because of the first "act", when washes up on shore? I still don't quite understand how that fits in, if someone cares to elucidate.
> Of course, I also hold a disdain for "proper quoting".

What do you mean here? When talking about "proper quoting", I much prefer what I just did to what you're supposed to do (in American English) for "proper quoting."

I feel like when you quote things they become a unit together with the quotes, and the punctuation should then treat the whole composition as a single object. You wouldn't stick punctuation in the middle of the word at the end of a claus,e so why would you do that with quote?s
It's not so much that I trust the government a lot, it's just the best option when looking on a large scale.

Governments, and other people in general, can always screw you over. By "trusting" the government, you are just cutting out the middle men who give you a false sense of security and imperviousness to other people's actions and take a commission.
Various websites exist to connect project creators and programmers. You'll pick up work if you dig around.

www.elance.com (better fixed jobs)
www.vworker.com (better by the hour)
www.ifreelance.com (don't know it well)
www.scriptlance.com (smaller?)
I think the US needs to seriously start rethinking its system. What's the use of being so rich if you need to contemplate retiring to another country or dying early after you stop working?

Please look at Europe and Canada. They have their problems, sure, but they take care of their old and sick. And they do it with less money!
> But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere

I don't understand why this rules out cultural reasons. In most of the places where black people live today outside africa their immigration was mainly based on slavery and subjugation, and this comes with a really heavy cultural baggage both for the black people themselves and for the rest of the local society. And racial slavery took a few centuries to fade away, which helped build a lot of other sociological prejudices and rituals around it. At least here in brazil this is pretty obvious. That's very different from jewish immigration worldwide (based on commerce and a looser form of persecution), mexican immigration in the united states (also marginalized, but far less), asian immigration, etc. You can't discount these factors.

I've never been to africa, so I can't say why (and if) this phenomenon happens there, but I think european imperialism and colonialsm might be a good place to start looking for a reason. Before you think I'm a liberal nut, if the structure of a society was built for a long time around foreign domination, most people living in it will adapt to it. Inferiority complexes are hard to overcome, even discounting factors such as ghetto areas, bad infrastructure, and the "social inertia" that makes it easier to raise traumatized kids if you've been traumatized yourself.
http://djangogigs.com/ has worked out well for me
if(depth > 3) return false;
else {

try {
// ... do what the OP wrote
} catch (DeathException D) {
enterLimboState() ...
}
}
clickable: http://www.spellingthing.com/
Meeting people.
Relevant bits:

The Court applies these factors and considers the circumstances of this case in the context of the broader aim of copyright law. Use of a work may be fair use where its purpose is transformative or supercedes the function of the original work. GOI’s images are not transformative, as they do not alter the original work “with new expression, meaning, or message.” Campbell , 510 U.S. at 579. Unlike the scenario where a general internet search engine “transforms the [thumbnail] image into a pointer directing a user to a source of information,” GOI’s use of the images is limited to an informative and promotional function on the Gallery’s website- to show customers the Teter works available at the Gallery. See Perfect 10 , 508 F.3d at 1165. The images advertise Teter’s works, which is a basic commercial purpose and suggests against a finding of fair use.
While it may not be the best of ideas, you have to balance it with freedom and the value of self-reliance. Social Security as it is only helps further the growth of the nanny state while also limiting our freedom to do with our own money as we see fit.

As a side note, Government should never be in the business of "Public Good" projects. Time and time again, government has shown that it cannot be trusted.
You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.

It's very plausible, and indeed pretty much undeniable, that male behaviour is different to female behaviour (eg higher aggression) for biological reasons. Males and females have been under vastly different selection pressures for millions of years, so it makes sense that the survival/reproduction strategy for males should be different to that for females.

However, it's only been <100,000 years since the various ancestral lineages of modern humans split off from one another, and only in the last few thousand years that life in Europe or China has been significantly different to life in Africa (apart from the climate). Huge differences in behaviour between the different lineages are very unlikely.
You've hit upon the most important and possibly most overlooked point in macroeconomics. At the level of the whole economy, modulo things like inventory, there's no way for aggregate savings to be anything other than aggregate consumption + investment. Every good or service is produced by someone and consumed by someone else. If you don't have both parties, there's no transaction.

When you "save" money, it's essentially a claim check against someone else's income. It's a way of recording that you contributed more than your fair share to the economy this time, so at some time in the future, you have the right to consume more than your fair share.

If everybody contributes more than their fair share, who's using up the excess? And then if they all go to cash in their claim checks at the same time - say, when the baby boomers retire - who'll produce the goods and services needed to satisfy those claim checks?
At the risk of coming across as "my favorite language/platform is better than your favorite language/platform", the fact that you have to jump through these hoops to get Razor working in your ASP.NET MVC app strikes me as anything but easy (and certainly not intuitive).

Compare this to using haml in RoR:

1. gem install haml
2. vi newfile.html.haml

Why again doesn't .NET have a plugin management system analogous to gems? Or is there one that I just don't know about?
Hardware is irrelevant. The analysis is mathematical and abstract. The model that people typically work in when doing this analysis is the comparison model: one < comparison costs 1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_sort). There are other models that more closely resemble computers. For example, in the cell probe model (http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/cellProbeModel....) you have a word size (e.g. 32 bits, but the exact number is irrelevant) and you can construct radix sort in that model.

If all values in your set of numbers to sort are unique, then quicksort is indeed O(n lg n) worst case if you pivot about the median. If there are duplicate values, can you think of a way to still guarantee worst case O(n lg n)?
That depends on your opinion of his work.

Did the bottom 10% of his papers (under the influence) move the field of mathematics forwards? Perhaps.

Did the bottom 90% of his papers move math forwards? I'd argue yes.
You can use some of the crawl packages at 80legs to do this. We regularly do crawls of company directory listings like yellowpage sites and provide an ongoing feed for you to collect. http://www.80legs.com/use-crawl-package.html
This math is grossly oversimplified...you're assuming zero interest. I'm on a train and can't do the math right now, but compounding interest + other variables like employer 401k contributions, tax shelters, etc make a huge difference when doing this calculation.
The author mentions manufacturing processes in the article.
Clickbank is exactly what you want in this situation. You are selling an eBook
I don't think that was their intention. They might be open to github.

By default, when you create a new file, XCode adds a standard preamble header:

Copyright __MyCompanyName__ __Year__ . All rights reserved.
That's my understanding too, for the Roth IRA.
I like the concept overall. The animations you get when you misspell a word are pleasant and informative. I didn't register, so this feature might be there, but it would be nice to always be able to see "percentage right" after completing a set of words, or some hard numbers you can compare over time. Also, is there any evidence that this will make you a better speller overall? Or will this simply help you spell words that you have spelled incorrectly on this site previously?
Can someone explain why the zero g scenes didn't cascade down through each dream level? They were feeling forces in the first dream in the van and those would go to the hotel but those sleeping there would not feel the same forces (eg lack of gravity) the next level down.

I did really love the idea behind the totem though, very clever.
maybe. or the presence of bigass pain rays and unmanned flying killing machines could make us look like the kind of oppressors that you wouldnt mind blowing yourself up to overthrow
How funny! I've been re-writing the site for Hackety Hack in Sinatra with MongoMapper! It's been a real joy. And so performant!
I'm an ADHD OG myself, and take adderall to this day, but my experience is a bit different. Without adderall (and usually coffee) I can organize, email, hustle and promote like nobody's business... but I cannot program, finish anything or do much but bounce between 2-5 minute tasks in 30 second intervals. You can't implement metaclustering or write a cohesive paper in 30 second intervals. It's not that I'm not creative on tasks requiring more focus, it's that they are not even accessible to me without the drug, and that these 30 second bouts of activity feel like they are rewarding even if they don't amount to anything. With adderall I'm creative on a longer attention window, and can work for rewards without very fast payoff.
So your data are limited to the few places on Earth that there's a significant population of Africans; being the US, the Carribbean, Europe and (of course) Africa.

Now, it's also true that in all of these places, people of African descent are poor, and it's also well-observed that poverty is correlated with crime, so I'm not really convinced that your "black people commit more crimes because of a biological tendency to do so" hypothesis is any better than the more conventional "black people are poor for historical and cultural reasons, and poor people commit more crimes" hypothesis.
It's still possible, PyPy for example post-processes the assembly in the generated binary in order to identify registers that can contain GC pointers (ones into the heap).
Do you hold disdain for properly citing references in technical journals? The rational for proper quoting is the same.
You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties.

What are you talking about? It's not race. That is, genetics means shit here. It's all socioeconomic. The incidence rate of poverty is also a lot higher in blacks than whites.

The blank slate is dead. Science killed it.
If you want to have a nature vs. nurture debate you need to actually post some science. Until then you've simply violated a fundamental law of statistics: correlation is not causation.
I think hangovers lower inhibitions just like being drunk does.
Standard English is a construct of a society predominantly run by, and for, men. It is, in no small way, the English of Those Who Rule, which is to say, at least for a very long time, men.