skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Investment return rate, rent/buy cost ratio, inflation and home appreciation (or depreciation) rates all matter. It's a lot to consider.

Luckily, the NYTimes put out a great calculator for just this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/2007_BUYRENT_GRAP...
vanguard emerging market stock index fund was doing that well for a while...
Even worse is the good ol "4 text boxes" solution.
not a big surprise, jRoR wins.
Google Is A Malware Site (Says Yahoo)
some Yahoo search results that point to Google with a malware warning are a sign that their new partnership with McAfee just needs a little tuning. The alternatives are either (1) Google is serving Malware, or (2) Yahoo or McAfee are playing a little joke.
One thing nobody seems to mention is that the owner has to pay for the maintenance of the home, while the renter doesn't. Over a 30 year period there will be quite a lot to do.
Three obvious ROI friction factors you missed:

1. Closing costs.

The mortgage is not a free transaction, for the buyer. There are a lot of services (inspection, title insurance) and misc charges. That's a couple thousand dollars. I don't know what the rule of thumb is; I know that it ended up being about $11k for a mortgage less than $300k, and that's without points or any other mortgage instrument issues.

2. Equity.

Almost all of your payments in year 1 go to interest with 10% as the downpayment, you'd probably owe about $266.7k -- play with an amortization calculator. If you sold the house for $312k, the difference would be about $45k. That's $45k back for your $55k... except

3. Selling fees.

The seller in a transaction is typically responsible for paying the real estate agent fees for some combination of seller and buyer. That's 3% each (if you both used something like redfin.com, it would still be 4% total). That's up to 6% of the $312k -- $18.7k.

So, with #1 you increase your investment requirements (call it $10k, so $65k for the year). With #2 you decrease your net ($45 on the $65k). With #3 you decrease your net even more ($26 on the $65k). On the plus side, you typically only make 11 payments in the first year, so you're only out $37k instead of $39k!

Summary:

Real Estate transactions are not efficient, low-friction or highly liquid investments. Duh. This has a positive and negative aspect - you have the potential for outsized appreciation because of the illiquidity, and because transaction costs keep the potential market (somewhat) more constrained. But you also have greater penalties on shorter ownership cycles.

Conclusion:

One year is an awful timespan for a house purchase unless you're completely confident in an extreme appreciation or you are investing additional sums or sweat equity which may guarantee the extreme appreciation (ie, a flip). It has to be extreme.
sudo apt-get remove firefox

Yes sometimes is necessary. The action of reinstalling it makes me rethink and postpone the decision for later.
Most up-to-date Markdown implementations support footnotes (specifically the Python one does for certain, but the syntax has been around for a while).

The syntax is pretty easy. [^1]

[^1]: And really adds some jazz to blog entries.
How to get funded with just a handshake
I guess with this strategy it helps to have a name that means absolutely nothing ;-)
It's a bit of a joke, but also a bit of a testament to how deep our societal conditioning is.

Here's an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZohpDS2aMc&feature=relat...
News can be too much like popcorn: unsatisfying one by one, bad for you en mass, and usually consumed while procrastinating.

If the articles instead brought difficult epiphanies, and challenging tasks, one might find it in them to attend to one's work first, and tackle some of the 'new articles' (say, a new fascicle from Knuth) later.
Avoiding >NCPU threads is basically doing your context switching explicitly in code, rather than letting your OS and/or VM handle it.

http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/02/kill-myth-please-nio-...

Seems it isn't necessarily more efficient in many cases.
I missed the whole memo on how MySpace is worse than Facebook.

They've dealt with their (larger than Facebook) scaling issues with what appears to be industry leading uptime, they're the biggest domestic social network by about a factor of two, and they've kept up feature for feature with Facebook if they weren't already years ahead (photos, the wall, applications, etc.).
I'd guess yes. Writing great code, and building a great product with a small team is a very different skillset than managing a medium to large company of dozens to hundreds of engineers.
Powerset has launched
Create a list of 4 tasks to get done for that day. If you get all 4 done, reward yourself by being able to view the sites you love. If you get them done really quickly then of course you would need a longer list. I find 4 to be my magic number. Oh and these tasks have to have the highest priority.
myspace is always at least 15% broken. Nobody publicly complains about it because everyone is ashamed to be using myspace...
Android? Does that even exist? I know I downloaded the SDK like months ago. "Vaporware" comes to mind.
I don't think a syntax with a whole bunch more sigils, punctuation and the like would be an improvement in language design. Of course, I've always been more of an oatmeal and toenail clippings guy than a line-noise guy.
Ask YC: Cybersquatting
Hello.

Could someone please tell me if it is considered cybersquatting if someone trys to sell a domain they registered e.g. XXXXYYYYZZZZ.com months before an existing US company was renamed to XXXXYYYYZZZZ from ABCDEDFG?

the company has aqcuired an EU company, then changed its name. With the acquisiton they own the corresponding domain in type X
XXXX-YYYY-ZZZZ.com.

Does anyone know?
Not this old chestnut again :/ Buy a house. Now. In a stable or up and coming area. Do it. I know things.
How to write great Javascript Unit Tests
how do programs in, say, japanese look? do they use japanese symbols as variables etc?
Surely arguing that renting is cheaper than owning implies that landlords make a loss - which I'm sure is very rare.
GrowlCode brings Growl to Xcode
Technology Strategy & Entrepreneurship - Case Report: Apple's Newton (Jan08; PDF)
I recently took on a new Java consulting job and I was very intent not to surf the internet while surfing. However, the work once again turned out so be so mind-numbing that I quickly gave up on that (for example waiting minutes for maven builds - what's a brain to do with itself??).

I need the news to have at least some interesting input to my mind occasionally. It is like coffee breaks for me (I'd like to wean off coffee, too, but I don't see how I could stand 8 hours at the office without it).
Like coffee, I suppose the effects of web surfing are not entirely negative.

The other day an interesting problem came up at work and I was able to concentrate on it without the surfing breaks. So it really depends on what you are doing (at least for me).
dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=187326
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Extreme programming offers a number of tools to manage your projects. Some important points: imply the customer by giving him access to the project state and to let him change priorities whenever he wants, focus on completing and testing the most important use-cases ("stories"), frequent "micro-releases", do regular demoes and acceptance tests to avoid bad surprises and integration issues at the end.
Why couldn't the headline be "lifescribe pen" or something like that? Editors?

More descriptive headlines would increase the value of news.yc greatly.
Review: Summize Twitter Search
.. and very good too the Part 1 and 2:

Part 1: Understanding the LAMP architecture

Part 2: Part 2: Optimizing Apache and PHP
SaaS - A symbiotic relationship
This just proves there are way too many frameworks.
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Ask YC: SMS Application, any help?
I am building an application that will need to send and receive text messages. i will like to know the best way to do that? i am thinking along the lines of an SMS server like Kannel.
Is hacker news being taken over by spammers?
Oh come on. This is POP we're talking about, not a full fledged SOAP client. Writing your own POP client is easier and takes less time than scavenging the internet for someone else's, looking through it to see if it doesn't have bugs and testing it.

In fact, I'd argue that if you've never written any sort of network client code, writing a POP client is perfect to get you started. It's just that simple.
I see you are having big aspirations. ;-) Regarding the style of writing, I personally like two styles: one is a temperate, sensible, normal writing (something like Robert Scoble or kottke), another style I like is the Gizmodo/Engadget type.
OK, this guy is a spammer. But it's a nice reminder that antiquated online shops like those do actually work.
This is an awesome, awesome pitch for the research of dynamic languages, both in real-world and academic settings. You can tell Steve Yegge's enthusiasm for the topic, 'cause it just gushes out, and it's pretty infectious. I don't even really like discussing programming languages, and I'm geeked right now about trace trees and type feedback compilation.
I noticed that as well... And yet, I remain more concerned about Natalie.
"I use Facebook, but only as a means to keep in contact with people whom I wouldn't keep in my phonebook. It serves as a nice mediator."

I think this is a sentiment of many people either actively or passively; most people have far more "friends" on Facebook than they would truly consider friends. It's more of a place for acquaintances than a place for true friends / people you keep in contact with on a regular basis.

It is for this very reason that I maintain that the "killer app" (if there is/can be one) for "web 2.0" is not going to be a social network like Facebook, but something that enhances e-mail to include these popular social network functions (or an app that uses who your correspond with via e-mail as an indication of who your actual friends are and keep you updated on _their_ affairs). My reasoning for this is the fact that, for most people, the relationships we really care about / keep up are still mostly maintained via e-mail more than anything. Sure, we can write on our friends' FB accounts or carry on twitter conversations or us IM, but how many friends do you have that you don't e-mail?

E-mail was the killer app for the web to begin with and I don't think its on the way out like many people seem to. Its still the most prolific and convenient communication method for the web.
No, the QWERTY keyboard is harming my wrists. :)
Brochureware is the new duct tape
He was at Accel at the same time as me... he is definitely both experienced and smart.
Twitter and the China earthquake
I typed in "why is there air?", and it linked to the Bill Cosby album of that name on Wikipedia, but they forgot to quote the ?. Not really that impressed so far.
It's common for one very simple reason: Programatically, it is much easier to demand user input in a single form than to code for different cases. In this specific case I don't understand it so much because it's exceedingly simple to write a regex replace that replaces every instance of "not a number" with nothing. The linked page describes a less-general use of this in Perl, but it's just as easy in any other modern language.

Here's a single line of python that removes any character that isn't a digit from the string "s":

re.sub(r'[^\d]', '', s)

Wow, that was almost too easy. Now the user can put spaces, dashes, periods, underscores... who cares! Oh, and if they put in the CSV code or something at the end...

re.sub(r'[^\d]', '', s)[0:16]

A single line should cover 99% of the problems the user can create. Compliment it by giving an example of how the number should be input and... done.
Shortcodes can be quite costly. Some people use http://www.textmarks.com/ instead, which is a tradeoff on usability for being free.
There are loads of services that bulk sell SMSs. You just fire off some XML to their servers and they'll send the message and then when you receive one, they just fire some XML back to you.
Thoughts on Data Portability
I personally don't find that particulary annoying, I just hit the tab key. You can always take the user to the next textbox automatically with JavaScript.
10 Steps to a Successful Design Project
Great talk! I only wish he touched on Microsoft's DLR, which seems germane.
We use a number of SMS providers. By far the easiest to integrate with is clickatell.

J-mango does SMS as well - both income and outgoing.
Check out the video at http://www.j-mango.com
I'd like the New Yorker of tech news. Not so much information, but articles that really open my eyes to new stuff.
I was watching a video by Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School on the topic the other day. The gist of it is (I think) basically that housing and healthcare are taking up most of the money of the middle class. In the 1970-ties a single earner could bring in enough money to support the whole family. Now in the middle class both parents have to work, which doubles the financial risk for the family if one of them (for example) looses a job.
If you are interested: the link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A
How Reddit (or Hacker News) Will (Maybe) Save Software Development
What a sad, sad article. A provocative title, with nothing to back it up.

The author comes up with two reasons for not learning a new language: 1) expanding your mind is worthless, otherwise we'd all be taking LSD, and 2) if you have a new toy to play with, you might neglect your primary tool.

The second point is a reasonable one; obviously, people shouldn't invest in learning a new language unless their fluency and competence in their primary language is such that they can easily sacrifice the time.

The first point is nonsense; the LSD metaphor is a poor one, and it would be more relevant (and useful) to compare learning a new programming language to learning a new spoken language.

In other words: not even a good troll. Sorry, thanks for playing!
I do the same. I have a script that will update my hosts file at the start and end of each day. All my bookmarked sites are blocked during the work day.
So very true. The best you can get in the UK is about 24 Mbps down, and 1.3 Mbps up - and that is with ADSL. When it comes to cable, there is only really one operator and that is Virgin Media. When it was NTL it was really good: fast, reliable, no throttling and no monitoring. But when Virgin bought it, then everything went tits-up: throttling, unreliable and part of the phorm debacle. If I had my choice I would go for the Scandinavian or Japanese system, i.e. fast and relentless.
Introductory Resources and Lectures on Lisp, Scheme
> So type inference. You can do type inference. Except that it's lame, because it doesn't handle weird dynamic features like upconverting integers to Doubles when they overflow.

Pretty weak argument against type inference. Yegge has used OCaml so i expected better arguments.

And JavaScript 2 is getting type annotations, so the trend is more likely in the other direction to improve performance.
You're absolutely right. I'm assuming the other hackers that are interviewing the manager will take care of that. Usually, technical skills are almost the only focus, so the post focuses only on the management skills.

I was part of a team interviewing manager candidates, and it seemed the only thing people focused on was technical ability. We passed by several very good candidates who were only so-so technically, and got someone who was really good technically but failed pretty much every question asked here. He proved so incompetent that we let him go after a few months.

It was actually kind of depressing, I could see the wrong decisions being made, but none of the other hackers knew much about this "management stuff," so I couldn't convince them.
I wonder if the Segway would have caught on if it were launched today. Or at least died a little more slowly.
Hammurabi's
Just a Flesh Wound
I find that intensely annoying. I type 4 digits; press the tab key; start typing the next 4 digits; realise that the page had automatically taken me to the next box, so I’m typing into the 3rd box instead of the 2nd; swear…
I asked it a question from news.yc, "What is the oldest code written and still running?"

http://www.powerset.com/explore/pset?q=what+is+the+oldest+co...

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=...

Advantage: Google.
In Finland, we actually have some shortage of skilled employees, especially in construction but also in tech. Even Microsoft and couple of other companies started a project to post educate 1000 applied science graduates and agreed to offer jobs for them.

In tech, entry level salaries are about $37-50k, senior positions from $55k>. Country average salary is about 37k. Of course that isn't the whole story. Cost of living is and taxation is very high. Just recently there was a article stating that apartment in Helsinki is more expensive than apartment from Manhattan.
Some cards have 19 digit numbers. (If all the cards you accept always have 16 digit numbers then you don’t have to worry about that, of course.)
It's certainly more tasteful IMHO, which should count for a lot. Spamming the CPU/OS with thousands of threads is just ugly. How can it not be? Networking should be event driven.
It's like having a thread for each pixel on the display or each button...
The Dollar: Shrinkable but (So Far) Unsinkable
The Bold and the Beautiful (New Blackberry Fund)
"Market research for the individual"
Just heard about this startup from crowdsourcing consultants at Delores Labs.

You upload a photo of yourself, and "within a couple hours, you will have detailed statistics about how people feel about the picture you provide."

It's powered by Amazon's Mechanical Turk
Your Chance to Finish a Movie Microsoft Started
Entrepreneurs around the world had six days to add value to a stack of Post-Its
Startup Promises Solar Energy As Cheap As Fossil Fuels
Feature Request: Google please unify your Gtalk gadget!
If true, he's probably just burned out. If I were the CTO for a company that required the coordination of software across 10,000 servers (and growing), I'd need an extended vacation, too.
Isn't is this a useful piece of information. :bmark
I would argue that my really close friends are people who I don't email much, but call instead. So your killer app would have to have access to my cell phone call history in addition to email history, and build the social network on a combination of calls and emails.
Are you actually short AAPL and long DELL?
you could say the same thing about Hacker News vs Reddit, for instance.

the guy/gal clearly just launched. i thought the philosophy of this group is to get something out there quickly even if it doesn't have all the features you'd like to implement on day one.

besides, there's always room for alternatives.
Who needs cash?
Common misconceptions about database security
A Face For Stephen Hawking (A strong vote for JRuby)
Apple's computer business may or may not thrive over the next decade, but beware the false dichotomy where the choice is between Apple thriving or Dell thriving. Dell is in the no-man's land where it actually isn't the cheapest supplier, as FSJ explains so sweetly, it has burned its customer loyalty, and it certainly doesn't have any cachet. And finally, they are at Microsoft's mercy, and the Vista debacle hurt them terribly. They needed an OS that would be a killer app: something that would drive customers to upgrade their hardware just to run Vista.

Without that, where are they going to find explosive growth? Music players? Anybody remember the Bic Lighter^H^H Dell DJ? Flat screen TVs? Selling American PCs to the growing Chinese market?

I can't tell you whether to go long AAPL. But I admire the balls of anyone going long on DELL.
"A four-acre farm in the [U.S.] nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre."
In a way this is what the CPAN kwalitee ( http://cpants.perl.org/kwalitee.html) aims at. It is currently rather primitive - but there is quite a bit of brainstorming in the Perl community on how to improve it.
IPhone 3.5G to support 1080p H.264 High-Profile Dual-Stream Decoding?
Ask YC: What Mobile programming tools do you use?
We do a lot of mobile and web programming. There is still quite some frustration involved with getting devices supported and working correctly. Not to mention shipping updates to the application.

What tools/toolkits/platforms do you use?

I am interested in knowing how other mobile developers have handled this problem. One of the startups - Tsumobi kind off covered this problem but I have not heard anything from them.

My reasons for asking is we have this http://www.j-mango.com/ (click on the video link). We don't know if it will be useful but everyone we show it to is impressed.

What do you think?
I like to use a timer particularly when I haven't gotten my day started yet. I set it for, say, 15 minutes, and that's my web time. Then I set it for 5 minutes, pick a small task, and try and get it done within that time without losing focus. Repeat that until I'm in the zone.
How Much To Say You Are Raising
Your chance to win a Nobel Prize
I actually turn off my internet connection. It is the only thing I found that really works for me.

Not disruption from IM/email/web/etc and then I just get on with it.

I guess I am lucky I can do this as most of my dev can be done offline.
This reminds me of me playing games.
When I was playing a game too much, I deleted it right away with all the save games so the hussle of reinstalling was too big and I lost interest.
Can people submitting posts please take the time to give a few words of description if the title doesn't explain. It would save lots of others reading posts they've no interest in. Some of us use RSS to follow the site and having to pick and choose based on "Why is this shameful practice so common?" doesn't help.
That's very short-sighted.

Broadband in a rural area means that the area is more appealing to business, leading to development of the area and economic improvement.

This can be seen happening in various European countries. Some of the farms outside of the city where I live have been able to convert some of their land into serviced offices, making them a pretty penny since broadband access was mandated.
At my university they had done something even more impressive. In order to change your password (which they made you do every six months) you had to type Eagle\foo.bar even though you've been typing foo.bar as your username the whole time and you have no idea what Eagle is. Luckily they put the helpful suggestion "type Eagle\ before your username" above the username text field.
Book Review: The Unofficial Guide to Managing Rental Property by Melissa Prandi