skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know, but most jurisdictions have a view on that and most ethicists would to. I can tell you it's less than 400%.

I think "these people" are not a homogeneous group, so defining them as truly poor is tricky. I would argue though that it is still a social negative to lend to anyone who has an iPhone but doesn't have the money to go on a night out before pay-day. I can't think of a better example of socially-useless lending. I think that is bad for the state to allow that, but I can see not everyone would agree. There are however definitely much worse off people using such services, and they should be prevented from doing so [1].

The other issue thing I want to mention is that the state schooling system is woefully inadequate in the area of personal finance. Maybe it's the parent's job, but budgeting and managing your finances is too important a skill to be left to them, and schools waste plenty of time teaching "personal, social and health education" — it'd be easy to shove money management in there.

[1] With the possible proviso of a proper social emergency loan or payment system for people living below the poverty line with unexpected non-discretionary spending [2], e.g. car breakdown which prevents them getting to work.

[2] Don't even get me started on medical bills here. Pay-day loans are a third-level kludge on a totally broken system there.
"The inclusion from all of this...", I think you meant "The conclusion to be drawn from this...".

And while I do think the proposed law is shockingly broad and overreaching; I find your grasp of american jurisprudence to be lacking in several important respects.
It's right there in the FAQ.

"Why can't I view more pages from a specific book?

We help our customers discover and sample books to ensure that they'll be satisfied with their purchases. Our agreements with publishers and copyright holders currently limit how much of the book is available for preview. We continue to work with publishers to expand these limits."
> If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times.

Umm... this does not follow. Their argument surely must be more convincing than this nonsense.
don't worry. I own it. I just call it by the author's names.
Data passed between TOR nodes is encrypted. It should be painfully obvious that this encryption is essential for TOR to function properly.
My guess is that this has a lot to do with when they started. In 2006, the cloud platforms we take for granted today didn't exist. Running a service meant buying servers, hiring an ops team, etc. Starting today, you could probably bring a sync service up on App Engine in a few weeks and operate it for a couple hundred bucks a month.

I started my last company in 2005, and I've often thought that if we had started a couple of years later when the cloud platforms were available, we could have been a lot more successful. Instead we built a product and an organization around an obsolete technology stack with a high cost structure, and there was no going back.
Wow, a big waste of money. Common Wealth Games weren't enough that they have to do this :(. This really makes me sick.
Ask HN: About exit strategies and paydays.
HN has been a mentor for me.(Sometimes I see it as a giant organism with a power of a thousand brain connected with no concurrency and poor integration algorithms.) I taught me many things, shaped me as I had my years of transformation from a naive boy to an ambitious confident but still a little naive boy. I never try to point out fallacies in the HN community, the chief reasons being that most of the times if will not get fixed. But something has been bothering me for quite a while.

I want to go into education sector (my ultimate goal being having my own university where I can fix things as I see fit). Thus whenever I think of a business, I think of something which will last at least a decade (after that it may lose relevance). But the start ups I see on HN are increasingly about making something to sell. Not just sell the product to the customers, but selling the company itself to some other bigger company. They are more concerned with having a big payday rather than making businesses that last.

So I ask HN, is having an exit strategy before even starting to make revenue.
Can we count users without uniquely identifying them?
Some of the major payment processing companies provide ACH services which would simply require the users' routing and checking account number.

A few years ago I used Cybersource and they provided ACH transfer, I think it was like $.10 per transaction which was much cheaper than CC charges.

http://www.cybersource.com/products_and_services/global_paym...

Good luck!
Totally Awesome!
Wow, major talent leakage. Whoever running a startup right now, if there's a need for low-level programming talents, better snatch these guys.
> And how much debt did we run up during this period?

About what we're going to run up in the next couple of years. The difference being that the deficit was going down and now it's roughly stable (Obama's predictions) at roughly twice as high.

> And since when does Congress write the federal budget?

They pass it.

Bush wasn't all that good on spending as the prescription drug monstrosity proved. However, he was better than Obama.

> As for your comparison of boom-period deficits with emergency post-recession deficits, surely you can't expect me to take this seriously.

Sure I can - the recession ended a year ago. More to the point, the spending isn't going down post-recession. That's why the projected deficits are staying high.

> Share of the tax burden is irrelevant

You're claiming that the rich aren't paying enough. I'm pointing out that they're paying more than they did before.

> Marginal rates are the only thing that counts on the individual level.

The rate that actually matters is not the worst case marginal rate, but the rate seen by an individual. The high rates in the past were accompanied by a lot of loopholes and the like that disappeared with Reagan.
I'd support an encryption backdoors if they implement it similar to the backdoors in the existing telephony system. They must get a warrant to tap your telephone line and by law, the telecom company must comply. That's why all telephony switch have these "features" that can "copy/record" telephony packets for law enforcement purposes. If people don't have a problem with the existing system, I don't see why they would have a problem with data encryption backdoors.
Yes, and who wants to use a game console that sounds like a man's genitals or a tablet computer that sounds like a menstruation guard. Names do not matter when you already have a product people want and need.
Looking at http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/#spanning-columns it seems to me column-span is implemented exactly like the site in question, i.e. wrong from the point of view of existing behaviour (that behaviour being all the printed magazines and newspapers since we worked out how to mix text and images.)
[1] There was some debate whether to keep this analogy, lest it seem a pretentious comparison, but I kept it after Harj, who went to college there, insisted the atmos was in fact very similar.
It's not even a paper, it's just a manuscript on the arXiv, yet to pass peer review, if indeed it ever will.

I had a quick skim of the manuscript, and remain skeptical... a bunch of it doesn't even seem to make sense:

If it does occur in Nature, eternal inflation has profound implications. Any type of event that has nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times, usually in widely separated regions that remain forever outside of causal contact. This undermines the basis for probabilistic predictions of local experiments. If infinitely many observers throughout the universe win the lottery, on what grounds can one still claim that winning the lottery is unlikely? To be sure, there are also infinitely many observers who do not win, but in what sense are there more of them? In local experiments such as playing the lottery, we have clear rules for making predictions and testing theories. But if the universe is eternally inflating, we no longer know why these rules work.
Cassandra Documentation Now Available Online
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
Charges dismissed against man who taped traffic stop
the set of all possible events has a much, much higher cardinality than an infinite axis of time.

Are you sure of that? How would you prove it?

It seems intuitively right, but intuition has a habit of being wrong, when it comes to infinities.
Does this include whatever communications systems the government uses? Wikileaks' job could get even easier.
It should. I was referring to Google Analytics in particular, which was the source of this data, and GA's calculation doesn't use blur tracking as far as I can tell.
I cannot help to notice the "Likes" at the bottom of the post and the immediate loss of credibility.
Burning Horizon - Play Racing Online Games
> That might include coming over to get it by force.

How? They don't have a blue water Navy.
Cryptographers won this argument in 1996 with the Clipper chip. They are the first "winners". The agencies that want the backdoors were the "losers", but the premise is that the agencies will just keep trying until they succeed. It's asymmetric because the agencies' eventual win cannot be undone, but the cryptographer's win will be.
http://www.gobolinux.org/index.php?page=at_a_glance

The key point is that a package is stored entirely under /Programs/packagename - bash is stored under /Programs/Bash/3.0, and /bin/bash is just a symlink to /Programs/Bash/3.0/bin/bash.

When you want to uninstall bash, just use rm -rf /Programs/Bash/3.0.

They also have some tools which allow you to cleanly install programs from source in this manner, i.e. programs that are not included in the Gobolinux distribution. So regardless of whether Gobo packaged it, all programs are under package management (unlike yum/apt-get/etc).
> I fail to see how it's a marketing failure.

Because it's awkward to pronounce and then you have try to explain it. Ideally a name would be easy to read and pronounce, and self-describing, and LibreOffice fails on both counts.
So the theory is that the mafia guys they're trying to take down for extortion and murder will meekly submit to government mandated encryption? Sounds plausible to me!
I've skimmed the paper and it's quite readable. The problem arises because probability doesn't make sense in an infinite universe. To make sense of it the authors consider a small patch of finite size and then let that finite size go arbitrarily large. In this picture probability is well defined but our space and time will always have an edge. However this is just a model, not an expected version of reality. The same thing happens in quantum field theory where the theory doesn't make sense at arbitrarily high energy so we just impose a cut off and ignore energies above a certain scale. This doesn't mean we think physics just stops there. Instead, it's just a way to parameterise our ignorance about what comes beyond.
Switch Statement in C/C++
You don't need to "Go to web browser, look up book, buy book, and send back to Kindle". You can buy the book directly from the sample with two clicks (menu -> buy this book)
I will leave the validation arguments to the people who know something more than the highschool physics I know. But "End of Time" wtf can that mean?

Take a shot sci-fi fans.
Site Speed for eBay Search Results
i am currently going through the process with redfin. it has been hands-down the best customer service i've experienced, doing anything, ever. the hand-holding is there if you want it--in fact, i warned the "field agent" that hand-holding would be required when we started looking at properties. she took it in stride and was incredibly helpful.
So here's the obvious way for someone to beat Facebook.
> And then they would just forget about it and let bygones be bygones, I suppose.

Not at all. They'd remember and never loan us money again. Given our spending habits, that would be a good thing.

Or maybe they would loan money in the future if they decided that was in their best interests.

Remember, other countries have defaulted and gotten loans later, some more than once. Why would this be any different?
What kind of security is offered by a service with a backdoor?
Less arXiv on HN, please.
4,100 Students Prove ‘Small Is Better’ Rule Wrong
The difference is "Father knows".
> This is similar to saying that, since the set of integers is infinite, it must contain Pi.

Not exactly. Pi has no chance of occurring in an infinite set of integers.
Weird graphic design point: the way each blue paragraph is separated by a strip of white makes each paragraph look like an entirely separate point, and destroys the flow of the writing. Usually Matt Ridley is one of my favourite writers, but this was painful to read.
The lack of variation in the estimates among groups was the main surprise to me. I would've expected people on the left to overestimate the concentration of wealth, and those on the right to underestimate it, but it seems they both significantly underestimate it.
Bad idea. CALEA mandates this with normal telephony. This, in part, led to Israel getting the power to wiretap US calls as they sold America intercept gear:

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ketcham.php
Search works well. Yes, the auto-categorization needs some tweaking, but I don't see that as the key benefit. Automatic indexing of destination content - that's what's really useful about Zukmo. The comment on highlighting this benefit is quite relevant in this context!
I wonder what implications this could have for PKI systems. Forcing OS vendors to include trusted FBI CA certificate to enable forging SSL certificates on the fly would seem like a logical thing to do... if it's not being done already.
If you haven't done this already I would take as much time and care mocking up drawings and explaining how your system will work in lay terms. This will be good for 2 reasons, 1) you'll continually refine your concept and 2) it will provide a basis for explaining the system to someone else.

In my experience dealing with clients who come in with an idea, often times that idea isn't fully formulated and we end up making huge architectural changes downstream which are extremely costly. I consider myself at least somewhat business savvy so I can spot potential problems and generally bring them up and get them corrected ahead of time, but if you're dealing with someone who is going to build off spec you probably won't have this safety net.

Like RiderOfGiraffes says, if you don't provide a developer enough vision of the product you'll likely end up with the wrong modules. For instance let's say you're setting out to build a formula 1 car and you send a spec out for a steering wheel without mention of it's purpose. You're probably not going to get what you wanted.
Well, there IS an integer that contains all the digits of Pi

3141592...
I think the theory is that mafia guys will download stuff off the web, which presumably has backdoors they don't know about or understand, instead of hiring coders to write custom chat and email applications...

Not that this will ever pass as a law.
How Tucker Max Got Rejected by Publishing and Still Hit #1 New York Times
Yes! I would love to pay more taxes for law enforcement to do their jobs instead of spending even more coming up with an overblown and inherently insecure backdoor scheme.
(Oops. Misread your comment, and missed the edit window. Nevermind.)
Less of the whole arXiv, or just the subset of the arXiv which is crazy?
> don't start planning your End of Time Party

Rats, there goes my idea for building a Restaurant at the End of the Universe!
Fair enough re: #2. Given that, it's not at all surprising that the ruby and python folk have done rvm and pip (which, in a faux-spectrum, is a big shift towards what maven et al. provide in the java world).

Of course, it's the debian maintainers' prerogative to structure things such that others generally pick up their toys and go play in their own sandboxes. I just get irritated when I hear people griping about it when it happens, as if system-level package managers have some kind of inherent priority.
The headline interest rate is misleading remember. Let's say it costs s fixed amount to do the paperwork to set up any loan. Obviously that is going to be a greater or lesser part of the overall interest charge if the loan is for 1 week or 100 weeks.

How would you ensure your "social emergency loans" were ever repaid?
I don't like guessing. "Yeah, I think it has high precedence" doesn't cut it any more than "Yeah, I think that is supposed to non-null" does. I try not to make assumptions.

Does this mean I write code so that it can be read by someone with little experience? Yes, generally. Does this mean I am constantly having to verify my assumptions, as if I don't know anything? Yes, it does. There are some things that I'll take a pass on verifying, but if elevates a problem and everything else checks out, I'm going to seart looking at the parts that I "know" are fine.
Steven Hill: The China Superpower Hoax
I suppose if they make using non-backdoored encryption a felony, they can convict them of that, even if they don't know the contents of their communications.

Of course, if there is a back door in all encryption between, say, businesses or minority political groups or anyone else who has legitimate reason to encrypt stuff, 1) there's the chance (very likely) that others will discover the back door, and 2) the government (or some of their employees) will probably abuse it at some point.

See, the whole point of encryption is to make your communications SAFE and eliminate these sorts of unknowns. It's a legitimate need, and just because it can be misused doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
JSConf.eu Megaroundup
I absolutely disagree. Besides, having the sun shine into your window or having bright lights in the background gives the same problem.
No, that "integer" would need to have an infinite number of digits, and no integer has an infinite number of digits.
Mr. Bill Iphone Review
Is this code for "Less Science Topics" or is there something wrong with arxiv.org?
Their statement makes sense: If you have a non zero probability of something happening, say P, and N times that it could happen, then you would expect it to happen about P * N times. Lets let E = P * N. Now as N goes to infinity the number of times you expect it to happen does as well. Both go to a countable infinity (Aleph 0 as you linked) which is a problem when it comes back to defining P. Normally we would say P = E / N but this doesn't make sense when E and N are both the same 'size' of infinity.
CSS3 PIE: Add important CSS3 features to IE6-8
I'm not sure what the -dbg packages in Debian/Ubuntu are strictly for, but wouldn't this be a case for it? If one could post-run the tests by saying "apttest Foo" or something along those things, integration into utilities to automatically install test packages and run them shouldn't be a huge hurdle.
No offense taken. I am not familiar with the term "polynomially" but I assume it means it grows at a rate that is a more complex calculation than a simple exponential curve.

(useless to me: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/polynomial )
Evolutionary psychology can sometimes provide useful insights, but "women like shoe shopping because it is similar to foraging" and "men like golf because it is similar to hunting" is weaker and hand-wavier than usual.
That's a fascinating wikipedia page, I bet wolframalpha could be used to make a nice graph of it too.
When I saw the headline, I has hoping for something more like the Firefox/Mozilla or Drizzle/MySQL forks (only pull over the good parts, leave most of the bloat behind). That would have been something to get excited about.
What an odd grab-bag of half-baked ideas. As far as I can tell, it seems to boil down to "don't listen to anybody else, don't compromise your dreams," which is fine-enough advice, I guess. Here's the trouble, though: other people, even people you can't stand at first, can help enormously in making dreams into reality. I personally dislike a couple of my high school teachers, but they were excellent, demanding instructors who shaped would I would become. I've had exacting, difficult clients who pushed me to make great products.

I'm worried that the OP's message ends up being, "you're a special little flower who doesn't need to listen to anybody." That's an easy brand of advice to sell, but doesn't generally result in fulfillment.
of course not, it's just something to whine about on the internet forums, that's all.
Correct me if I am wrong but I think all communication between the TOR nodes is encrypted. So if you run a node locally (as you should) nothing is revealed. However if you just configure your browser's proxy settings to use outside node all bets are off. Everything should be encrypted from entry node to exit node.
That you don't get your money when somebody pays with a stolen card or does a chargeback.
I came here for this, thank you.
Disclaimer: Debian Maintainer here.

If you need plain old Postfix, you just aptitude install postfix.

If you need LDAP support in your Postfix instance, you just aptitude install postfix-ldap.

Is it really that hard?

And regarding OpenSSL, the problem is not in Debian.
Just check http://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html

OpenSSL always had a problematic license.
This is based upon a false assumption. Not every possible thing need happen given infinite time. There's an infinite number of things that can happen, and each thing that happens takes a finite amount of time to happen. Infinite time is not enough for infinite things to happen.
> It's asymmetric because the agencies' eventual win cannot be undone, but the cryptographer's win will be.

How can the agencies prevent crypto without backdoors being implemented on top of their crypto with backdoors?
And linked from that, Lubos Motl's even less charitable take:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/09/bousso-et-al-catastrophe-i...

Much like most other doomsday prophets and other kinds of crackpots, the authors are completely unable to understand the point and the arguments that they're assuming something fundamentally wrong in their very first axioms - and that's why everything they write down has to end up being a complete nonsense.

Instead, they obviously expect a long sequence of follow-up papers that will discuss whether the Universe will cease to exist in 5.31 or 5.32 billion years and worship the amazing prophets, Bousso et al., who have predicted this amazing doomsday. This is also clear from a staged dialogue included in the paper where a semi-dumb person asks various questions about the doomsday that the authors would clearly like to be discussed in other people's papers.
I was thinking about that and i would like to know the answer as well...
Well apt has tools that help you install it through dpkg and manage it through apt, just not many use it.

What I am wondering is how they solve the dependency problem, like say something depends on bash and you remove bash with rm do you get any warnings or help or just a broken system? (This is more for when it is part of gobo and not installed from source).
agreed.

I currently have detailed wireframes, a UI design mockup, and a complete overview description. So those should help.
"Lawful intercept" backdoors like the one you described have been abused in countless cases (google it, you'll see - the example that comes to mind is the Greek olympics scandal). People are fighting this because the existing system is rife with potential for abuse, and anything else that opens up more potential for abuse/intimidation/corruption is a bad idea.
One of the difficulties that I see comes in that it's hard to overestimate such a huge skew. If we're guessing jellybeans, your guess of 100 is countered by my guess of 900, in a jar of 500 beans. But with wealth distribution at the 85% mark, it's hard to 'overestimate' that number: it's unlikely anyone will say the top 1% controls 99% of the wealth.