skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interest rate limits for people (not corporations) are generally and histroically limited to about 8-12%.

[citation needed]

The evolution of the relationship between social and legal norms re: what are acceptable interest rates is a very interesting topic, with much cultural diversity and a broad range of case studies from canonical usury regulations in medieval Europe to the prohibition of pay day loans in much of the West in the 20th century, but blanket statements about 'loans being restricted from to 8-12%' lack any basis in reality and economic fundamentals. Just one counter example, I know of many people who took out mortgages (i.e., asset-backed securities!) right here in Belgium (a perfectly normal 'Western' country) less than 30 years ago with interest rates of 15 to 18%, and that was perfectly normal at the time, given inflation rates.
Luckily for them, they might benefit from having a "business" Internet link as opposed to a "home" one.

Before going to China, I decided to set up a server I could securely tunnel my browsing through. There are many commercial VPN solutions, but I didn't want to pay, and the free options are the first to be blocked. (Though it is an arms-race, and those services are still often usable.)

While in China, the SSH tunnel worked well to provide access to blocked sites such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and (for some unfathomable reason at that time) Python.org. However, I began to notice that while in my apartment, the connection would periodically close. I thought it was due to high latency or some automatic timeout, but it happened consistently enough to be noteworthy.

I took my laptop into work (a building with offices, a private school, and a bank) and tried the same SSH command, and to my surprise, I couldn't reproduce the problem. Later, back at home, I re-ran the same SSH command and browsing habits and I was disconnected within 10 minutes or so.

While China wants to control people's access to information, the government also understands the need for businesses to function well. This is why I suspect that residential connections are more heavily monitored and filtered - even if it's all automatic.

After all, why would a model citizen require a persistent encrypted connection to a server in the US?

[Reminder: this is only one out of a possible billion-or-so anecdotes, so it might not be best to draw conclusions about ALL of China from it.]
How Clenching Muscles Can Boost Immediate Willpower
It's a profile of the CEO of the company which successfully produces and sells the material for which people also claim that the similar is available online for free. Moreover, the material is actually lectures given by university professors.

It's certainly interesting for me.
Meh, quit gaming a while back but recently want to try it out again but more just to cool off as a "hobby."

I used to think games were evil and against productivity but no longer. I work a lot. I just want to chill out and relax some times and blow shit up. Maybe do a raid or two, so what?

It's no different then spending 3 hours watching a TV show on Netflix or something similar.

It just depends on how you want to spend your time. If it makes you happy, sure.

I think you need a real job before you can consider gaming a hobby though. Otherwise it can lead to a "full time life gig."

Girlfriend will also help make sure you're not wasting your time.

I'm lucky if I can squeeze out 8 hours a week on games. If that. There's weekends though that I have the whole day to myself and I prefer to play a game for a few hours than go to a club and get drunk.
I was so far unable to grasp the justification for the extremely high interest rates of micro loans. What is going on, and how can such high interest rates ever work?
The Dutch reclaimed a large proportion of their national territory from the sea, presumably because they needed more space and then proceeded to allow large scale immigration from Morocco.
I wouldn't like to live in Holland. They're packed like sardines there. Not cycling is probably not an option
Stripes and other patterns with CSS3 - no images
"A good trade, when it's a question of meeting basic needs. But once they are met -- and they are met; they are finite, tho liberals, from Mill to DeLong, deny it"

We should be thankful that our ancestors were not content to just live at a bare subsistence level.
Look up "Cross Fit"
Probably the same as not being a very smart person at all:
Really smart people try to seek out even smarter people...
and it's rather improbable they won't find any!
Flixya - Share Videos, Photos, Blogs, Make Money
I wish it was as easy as that. Real deadlines work because there is some external factor taking place. For example, you get fired by your boss if you don't put that important report on his desk by tomorrow. Or you'll be embarrassed if you don't keep the delivery deadline you've promised to a client.

When you're setting deadlines that only you know of, there is no possibility of getting "punished" so it's much easier to procrastinate.
If it works for you, cool, but I know it doesn't work for me and most likely it doesn't work for the majority of people.
Full type inference has not been done in python... however partial type inference on python has been done.

The article is talking about partial type inference, and most implementations of type inference I've seen do partial type inference.
Friend hot sister
My Sister's Hot Friend is the place for amateur sex. We have hot best friend sex in our amateur porn and amateur sex videos.
I only got through the first paragraph or so when I had to stop because the font is almost unreadable in Chrome on Windows 7.

The descenders on letters are being clipped and it's too decorative to read comfortably as a body font on screen.
Did you even read your own link? Here's the second (!) paragraph from it:

"But my car loan is higher than that"; "But I'm paying way more than that on my credit cards." That's right! Banks have separate rules. In fact, due to high inflation, in 1980, the federal government passed a special law which allowed national banks (the ones that have the word "national" or the term "N.A." in their name, and savings banks that are federally chartered) to ignore state usury limits and pegged the rate of interest at a certain number of points above the federal reserve discount rate. In addition, specially chartered organizations like small loan companies and installment plan sellers (like car financing companies) have their own rules.
Wearable see-through displays can also give this ambient sense. they're quite expensive(but getting cheaper) , starting at $2000.
The typical creative professional is not a minimalist.

Do you want to be a 'typical creative professional'?

...or http://www.everydayminimalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09...
thanks. Fixed!
Depends on what you define "helped" as.

I don't know anyone personally who has say, gotten a job or learned a new tangible life skill from playing.

I can say for myself at least that I have met a lot of people who I would call friends without hesitation, most of whom I would love to meet up with in real life someday. It has also made it easier for me to connect with RL friends as well. Half the reason I started playing was so I would have a way to play with some longtime RL friends while they were living at U of I in champaign and urbana.

Intangibly I feel like I have learned a lot about how to communicate with people, particularly from a leadership position. Since communication over text or in ventrilo doesn't have all the physical queues of face to face interaction, you learn to speak with more clarity and precision as time goes on. I feel like it would be pretty easy to be a successful manager of some non-technical sector of work like retail based solely on what I've learned from being an officer in WoW now as well as being an officer in Runescape back when I was like 13-14.

Edit: PS. I forgot a big intangible: I've had a lot of fun playing over the past couple years.
Ubuntu has the text based installer too. But still Gnome is simply not a good choice for a 256 MB computer -- the footprint of it is just too big. Luckily there are other offers.
It was a great service for learning a new language. Have tried it few times (if it had more languages maybe I would've used in on a daily basis) and I really liked how it makes you learn and remember words.

http://flashcards.dictionary.com seems interesting too, it's evident that some of the good stuff from Lingt is reimplemented there.
TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2010
VIM from novice to professional by: Derek Wyatt
GeoQpons Is To Mobile Shopping Whilst Groupon Is To Discounting
You're posting many claims of this nature in this thread, but like my gran used to say 'when you're in a hole, stop digging'. Much of the West does not have what you call 'humane bankruptcy laws', most debts in most of Western Europe is non-dischargeable. The US is quite the outlier in this respect.

Furthermore, bankruptcy is not a counterbalance for high interest rates! It's a purely pragmatic tool, not a designed part of the system! It's very delicate to fiddle with what is fundamentally a relationship of trust between lenders and people taking loans through statute, and while improvements are possible everywhere, just saying 'India should have liberal bankruptcy laws' (i.e., discharging loans should be easy) is nonsense because the shocks this would cause in the financial system (at the micro level) would be severe and there's no telling if the long-term benefits (if any) will outweigh the sure short-term catastrophe.
IIRC, that's when he just bought the mansion (which has long since been nearly destroyed from neglect [1]).

Here's a more recent picture of his home office - which looks relatively cluttered: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/life/2004-2006/08-dianawal...

[1]: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/29/inside_steve_j...
My own experience: http://inter-sections.net/2009/02/21/destroying-the-world-of...

Yes, if you have the right kind of mind, WoW is a soul-sucking, life-destroying monster. Don't let it into your life.
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This is an honest question: When did "liberal" come to mean "who think that human wellbeing consists in the consumption of goods and services"

I presume this is a new political meme that I'd not heard. Where did it come from?
J2ME Bluetooth Games | J2ME Bluetooth Programming
Bluetooth is available in all most all the modern handheld devices, providing a host of features such as wireless headset, transferring data or pictures to other mobiles and personal computers etc.
The problem for me with games like WoW, EQ and so on is that they aren't based enough on skills so to compensate you need to spend a lot of time in the game.

To contrast. In a game like Quake you are only as good as your Rail-gun aim it's pure skills. Or StarCraft for that matter again skills based.

The advantages from these kind of games in combatting addiction is that they are hard to become good at. you can't just get powerleveled up the latter.

The skills stays with you, the same is not true in WoW.

Having seen a couple of friends dropping out of university for a year because of games like EverQuest and WoW my advice is:

Don't play games where it's the avatar that gains power. Only play games that makes you a better player.
"Is playing a social game where you interact with other people any different than going out to a club or bar? Joining a bowling league? A cycling group? A health clubwhere you go to regular group exercise classes?"

The article makes the difference abundantly clear. This is what the writer learned by meeting the guild leader in real life:

"She was perfectly nice, and an excellent cook. But it was hard not to notice certain things - no matter how bad I felt for noticing them. It was hard not to notice she lived in a crappy apartment in a crappy neighborhood. It was hard not to notice she was fat. It was hard not to notice that despite her dreams of going back to school and becoming a paramedic, she just worked part-time at a local pizza joint."

It is that level of personal, real, gritty, disturbing, eye-opening raw detail that is often hidden behind an avatar.
Wikipedia Still $1M Short Of Fundraising Goal For 2010 (And Why I Donated)
Coincidentally, I'm moving to Buenos Aires in the middle of January. Do you have any tips to share?
Wikipedia's way of raising is nothing short of brilliant. No other organization could get this far without a one-time philanthropic donation. Which makes me wonder how hard Wikipedia tries to go after the big one-time donations.
They're open to lawsuits is any case -- such in the nature of selling products in the US. They likely have product liability insurance.
+1 for beanstalkd. Zero deployment and blazing fast!
Here's a sample video shot in the city where I live (Utrecht): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-AbPav5E5M

At times (e.g. 6PM workdays) certain routes can be even busier. If you're interested, here are a lot more videos on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/user/markenlei#p/u
The thesis - http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~osc22/docs/mphil_acs_osc22.pdf
The Smart Card Detective: a hand-held EMV interceptor
What exactly is the safety issue?
27C3: Adventures in analyzing Stuxnet (Bruce Dang from Microsoft)
Boonex Dolphin
Yes that was my point, Android and iPhone can share code, WP7 can't
Gaming like cigarette, do it once and you are smoker forever.
A ton of usability research in this area has been done by The Microsoft Health Common User Interface
http://www.mscui.net

It's a pity (and rather ironic being Microsoft) that none of the major healthcare IT suppliers seem to want to follow a common standard.
Most of the time, I use both as a tool to do visual diff, instead of code merge.

KDiff3 is not so good as winmerge as visual diff tool. And kdiff3 UI has small problem on Ubuntu, as it was not developed for gnome environment.
I assume you mean relative to other sentences/crimes you're aware of? It may be low compared to those, but in general, American sentences seem exceptionally high to me, and this is a good example.

I don't think a stronger sentence would have deterred him. I doubt he sat down and thought "If I get caught, I'll only get 3 1/2 years, which isn't too bad. Now, if I would get 10 years, that's another story..." I doubt he even knew the specific penalties for doing this. It seems to me he assumed he'd never get caught.

I think others reading this article will be deterred by the thought of losing 3 1/2 years of their life, and having their life after prison ruined in many ways. For example, try to explain a 3 1/2 year gap in your employment history during a job interview. And for the ones who aren't, I don't think a 10 year sentence would somehow deter them.

I don't think this guy is likely to commit another such crime after his release. I doubt he figures that 3 1/2 years in jail and putting his life back together isn't that big a deal and planting another logic bomb feels so good that it's worth it to do it again.

The only other motivation for punishing a crime is vengeance, an emotional feeling of hurting someone who tried to hurt us. That seems a poor motivation for taking away even more of someone's life.

He did something malicious that could have caused a lot of problems. He needs to be punished. But the punishment seems way out of proportion to what's needed to reduce crime.
simple and useful. recipe for success. congrats to the team.
Ask HN: What are the best Live chat Rooms For anyone associated  with Startups?
Please provide links. Thank so much.
That was a big vague. He said "causing the problem" but didn't go into specifics about what that problem might be. Seems a bit too much like PR speak to me. Let's get it on the table: are these chargers a fire hazard?
Yes, we're part of a mature culture. We do not incessantly need to be digitally liked by others who we don't really know.
Erasmus, Newton and Darwin all published writings which offended the powerful. Cambridge didn't censor that, and they seem to see that as a winning strategy.
Ah, of course. Silly me - thanks for bothering to enlighten me!
Everyone will eventually die anyway.

And your reasons can just as easily be turned around.

Why work hard to win at WoW? Cause you want to. Cause it is your dream. Cause you ever [sic] wanted to be lvl 80. etc.

If your 'argument' applies equally well to any position it is completely meaningless.
Tell HN: A Firefox plugin to force HTTPS in Facebook
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/269246/

I was looking for something like this, but could not find any (let me know if there are any good alternatives). Once you enable this addon, all requests to facebook will be forwarded to their https counterparts.

Please let me know if you run into any issues or if there are any glaring mistakes in the approach.
The fitbit tech is pretty primitive -- it looks like it only has a pedometer inside the device. It's probably why it isn't very accurate at tracking sleep. I've been using my fitbit for a few weeks, but it doesn't seem very accurate at all in general.
o_O
awesome dude
I knocked one up with some mates around HN, some people didn't take to it too well but here it is anyway

http://bleetbox.com/chat/123264/Hacker-News
Drugs: My anti-World of Warcraft.
Some really good tips for novices (and probably some pros that missed a few tips), but I hate the evangelizing.

"Do it the way it's meant to be done!" ... NO. Do it the way that works best. If you can get around easier with hjkl, go for it. If you find the arrow keys to be WAY faster, use them. All that matters is that you get the job done. If we always did it 'the way it was meant to be done' we'd never have progress.
Yes, but do you know people who can smoke crack a few times, and then forget it? Or take heroin a few times?

Yes, some personalities are more prone to addiction than others. But it's also true that some substances that give instant gratification are more addictive than others.
Skytap Raises $10 Million For Cloud Automation Solutions
Better yet, Bill Gates was a great hacker too, having written portions of Basic for several CPUs. I like how he shows up to comment on this pagetable post - I would like to believe it's really him, anyway, still with geeky interests...
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=43
#startups on irc freenode
That's dedication.
Poll: HackerNews vs Reddit
Which among the two throws up best content.
Seems like a pretty awful track record.
What you say sounds right.

I wonder what, if Heroin was as freely available as alcohol or tobacco, its addiction rate would be like. It's my suspicion that drug addicts tend to come from the addictive personality subsection of the population
That's a shitty justification for causing irreparable harm simply because you need to make a buck.
He posted that yesterday

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2051288

about his last app
Doesn't Mark Bao miss riding dirt bikes, chasing gals, playing baseball.
I'm baffled. Someone even upvoted this. I guess it's performance art!
Congratulations to Lingt. Dictionary.com, however, really needs to clean up and simplify their site - it contains a huge amount of potentially useful tools, which are hidden in the depths of the website. A while ago I stumbled upon a tool of theirs which allowed me to describe a word and it would show me a list of potential matches. Until I (again) accidentally re-found it via another website a while ago, I was unable to find it because their site is just so confusing (and Google was of no help).
Awesome.

One suggestion I have is to select either the first or third person and use the same voice for both the title and the article. I think its ok to write your own bio, but to show that you are writing and then appear to pretend that you are not is a bit annoying.

I don't mean to imply any actual pretense, of course, because there is nothing wrong with using the third person. I just don't think it works here as a literary device. Not that I am any expert.

And I'd consider the first person. You have achieved a lot and there's nothing wrong with saying so yourself.
Who says he doesn't do all of that? And also, where riding dirt bikes and playing basketball is your idea of fun, his may be programming, running startups and doing bizdev.
Why the fuck are you getting upvotes? Your hijacking of the points and arguments he makes doesn't even warrant a response.
If you make a poll like that on Reddit, guess who wins?
Can I ask you to explain what you mean?
Painless Issue Tracking and Help-Desk
Scientist: Tata dreams of cars running on water
Buying an SSD was a huge disappointment for me. Programs were not "almost instantaneous" but just 2-3 times faster to load if there was a difference at all. So OpenOffice took 3 seconds instead of 7, not worth the huge price difference for me. Compiling is CPU bound, I noticed no mentionable difference there. It might be worth it if you use a "bloaty" OS with virus scanners and indexers running or have specific use cases where very fast access is needed, but for a lightweight system the difference is neglible. The only real difference I actually noticed without looking at numbers was that after startx the XFCE desktop was ready before the monitor did its resolution switch. Lots of random reads in that process I guess. From a HDD it takes a couple of seconds (once per day...).

I returned it. And before some is implying I am dumb: Yes, I had a fast and quick SSD and my system was setup to use it well.
Scala - It's what Java should be.
So, You are confident that HN is going to win this one?
This is a real positive. My cell phone, my GPS and my in-car DAB radio all power from USB - I can charge and use them all with just one lead, instead of having a glovebox full of a Spaghetti Junction of different cables and connectors.

It also means that when one charger goes wrong, it's insanely cheap and easy to swap it out for a new one rather than having to look around for often expensive manufacturer-specific accessories.
Keep in mind transaction costs which usually can't come down very much.

A $100 transaction cost on a $10000 loan is comparatively insignificant to us.

A $100 transaction cost on a $1000 loan is pretty crappy.
I really woudn't like to critize but I would make the disctintion building startups or businesses and building apps. The former usually have customers, employees, payrolls, revenues etc.

But anyway it's great that you're building things.
How do you avoid this trap? How do you prevent [subject] from hooking you into a shadow of what you really want? The answer is simple: don't [do it] blindly. Consider what it is you get out of [subject] . Nearly everything the [subject] provides can be found better and more real elsewhere.

Fattening foods? Alcohol abuse? Sex Addiction? oh, WoW.

This is written with the assumption that the reader cannot think for themselves and is quite insulting to anyone that reads past half of these subjective assertions.

"at the same time there was something disquieting about the fact that all these people were still around"

Sorry your friends didn't die, change all of their habits entirely, or live up to your random expectations of what constitutes too much and too little involvement in a computer game.

Seriously though, its been out how many years, and using plenty of comics and quotations to express this point, its taken you 18 months to regurgitate this same tired public service announcement? This is just trolling literate people that have thought about playing games in the last decade!
i like both ;)
Thou art jesting, I am sure of it.