skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Americans are choosing to pay off their debt. They have paid off $90B so far. You are correct that $118B of the $208B drop is caused by lenders writing off bad debt. Of course, the elephant in the room is that total debt went up by $1.6 trillion - corporate debt increased 5.4%, govt debt increased 20%.

By the way, did anyone notice how crazy the financials of some of the people being interviewed are? The saleswoman had debt payments of $6500/month. Assuming she previously spent 50% of her take home pay on debt service, she was taking home about $13k/month. Yet somehow, she accumulated $500k in debt, and blew through her entire retirement savings in about 1.5 years.

I have no idea how it is even possible to be that irresponsible.
Further the cache is 1MB vs 640kb. And the GPU way faster. This is a system on a chip, not a desktop CPU. So your statement is pretty inaccurate. In various real world benchmarks non-graphics stuff has seen a 1.5-2x improvement and graphics oriented stuff has seen over 7x improvement. I think that justifies the 2x statement enough.
I said rich in reference to the gulf states in general (including Qatar, Bahrain, etc). They're rich because they have oil.
I'm going to miss the Engadget Podcast. After Paul Miller left, I thought it might still have a chance, but now all three are gone!
Generalizations but reasonably accurate ones in my experience. I find it far easier to socialize and interact with strangers in the US than in the UK. There's a certain "shock" and disbelief that can appear in the eyes of a Briton if you randomly talk to them in public. I can't blame them though, I act exactly the same way until I leave its borders! Perhaps this is why so many Brits travel and move overseas ;-)

An ancillary point that I've noticed over the years is the relative unpopularity of open social/discussion sites in the UK compared to the US. The UK is Facebook mad, of course, but doesn't really have a locally popular equivalent of Reddit, Hacker News, Digg, MetaFilter, etc. I wonder if the reduced desire to converse with random people has an effect in this scope too.
Yeah, there are definitely reasons to check out the competition. I don't know why this has to be a competition between owners. I enjoy the device I own but I acknowledge it has limitations.
I agree that the marketing thing is in horrible bad taste, and the non-apology lame, but I've always disliked it when people have an opinion about where, or how much money others should donate.

Trying to put aside the circus they've created around it, what's it to you if they donate $0, or $100000, or $10000000? How much of a companies revenue should a company donate for this? How much should an individual? Who should decide? Who's business is it?

Given that you find the amount the most offensive thing, I take it you are also offended by the billion of companies and individuals who have donated nothing? How much have you donated? How much should I?
How Game Mechanics Will Solve Global Warming
I would say that lots of software developers of PC games died because of piracy.

PC gaming was in life-support for about three years because of that.

And it has recovered thanks to Steam.
Story about Twitter and the Japan Earthquake
Changing my diet helps a bit. (It keeps my weight more or less constant if I’m really strict about it. At the moment I still want to lose weight, though.) But since I do actually love eating pasta changing my diet in such a way also requires a lot of constant willpower. I don’t see a lot of difference to plain old calorie counting. I try to do both, though – eat healthier and different things (with the occasional pasta day to keep me happy) and count calories.

Counting calories and constant monitoring (for rewards) are the two cornerstones of my current weight loss (and it works) but I very much try to sneak a better diet in and I also really should start doing more sports.
I've always found the tags on Engadget to be completely useless, and I was wondering why they even waste their time with them. SEO makes a lot of sense.
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This seems like a sincere apology. Given the text of the controversial tweet (which I believe isn't the slightest bit insensitive or inappropriate), a "real" apology would likely have been insincere.

Anyway, as soon as you challenge the "realness" or validity of a specific apology, it brings up the issue of what the purpose of an apology really is, especially an impersonal apology from a major corporation. To me, an apology is not necessarily an admission of guilt. An apology is an expression of regret.

What would you propose to be a "real apology" in this case? Do you want Bing to tweet out that they purposefully did this to slight the victims of the tragic earthquake and get retweets? Do you think that would be honest?

edit: typo
Ask YC:  How can I help in Japan?
I know I can help in the 'normal ways with donations'. But I actually have time to travel out there and give time, effort, and sweat. Whether its technical/hacker stuff, or organization/project management stuff, or just plain old get hands dirty and help with cleanup stuff, I'm willing. Does anyone know of some good channels to find out how I can help?
Nuclear meltdown: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_meltdown
Ask HN: What's your advice on attending SXSW?
For new startups (just launched, but still working on lots of stuff), is it worth attending events like SXSW? Or is it better to just spend time working on your product?

If going to such conferences, what's the goal? Publicity? Getting funders? Getting customers?
calling them "Douchebags" for donating 100k

Disingenuous. I was clearly referring to the non-apology. And for that you get a nozzle.
I find your implication that this was a marketing stunt much more insensitive than the original controversial tweet. First off, this is a tweet, so presumably only people who follow Bing would originally see it, and it would be up to them to retweet it.

Is any public corporate humanitarian donation a marketing stunt by your definition? Should corporations keep these things secret? That seems like nonsense to me.
Is this like the time you threw the paralyzed kid into the ocean and then blamed her drowning on her parents for not teaching her better car dodging skills?
It is all about perception. You may not think it looks like marketing, but it does to me and I am sure it does to many others.

"For every dollar donated by twitter users, Bing will match it up to $100k" would have been appropriate, and gotten them a lot of retweets.

Instead they took the same approach that SEOs and "social marketing experts" use. "If this retweets \d+ times, we will give you a chance to (win|donate) (ipods|ipads|cash)".
I spent 3 hours on a plane on Thursday sitting next to a guy who grew up in Dubai and was arriving (from Dubai) in the States to study. I asked him about the real-estate crisis and how the emirate is doing. He said not much has changed, Dubai has plenty of money and foreign media are blowing the story out of proportion.
I don't see anything particularly wrong with people choosing to exit a mortgage in a way that's legal under their mortgage contract. If it's a no-recourse mortgage, then a debtor is perfectly within their rights to walk away from the property and consider the debt settled by the return of the property to the lender. That might cause the lender losses, but the lender is supposed to be pricing the possibility of such losses into the contract in the first place.
I read this article on the ketogenic diet and epilepsy a while back:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/magazine/21Epilepsy-t.html

If I understand correctly, nobody completely understands why these dietary changes effect such significant benefits. But the results are interesting, to say the least.

About six years ago, I was forced to change my own diet quite radically. It has been a huge adjustment, but the process has made me acutely aware of just how much certain foods can effect me physically and mentally. And, too, how the physical reaction to certain foods effects me, mentally. So my bias here is obvious -- it's good to see investigation into possible causes. Especially when the medications for ADHD are a bit scary.
Root login shouldn't be your normal entrance. For maintenance stuff use sudo-capable regular user account with public key authentication. If there's some software that requires root login and you cannot do anything about it, enable root login and allow it only from the specific IPs.
Oh they are really rich. Sadly, not much else
The reason that the other lenders are willing to lend them money for another house is because they know that they can pass off the mortgage to the taxpayer / dollar holder if the house buyer doesn't pay.
They are pretty terrible with spam profiles (getting better), spam groups, etc. The slow decline of MySpace is relevant (though, not nearly as intense or quick).
An apology is an expression of regret.

And any old regret will do? How about regret for the action? They might as well express regret that there wasn't enough mayonnaise on the sandwich they had for lunch.
Now that they're all gone, I'm hoping that maybe they'll continue podcasting together, even if they no longer use the Engadget name.
This is such an annoying new trend to claim one's company is in "startup mode" when it is all just superficial or even straight out bullshit; it has become quite the trend in NYC now.

One place I declined to work at claimed to be in startup mode yet their offices looked like those of a financial company (which they were not), everyone seriously dressed up, and the code base and infrastructure was pretty big and inherited from the parent organization.

A place I used to work at is also going through the motions of "becoming a startup" -- a company that has not been an internet startup for over 10 years. Apparently being a startup means rewriting the whole codebase in Java, offering free snacks and drinks, tearing down the walls from the cubicles (say goodbye to ever getting "in the zone" when coding), and calling daily standups and using JIRA "being AGILE". Sticking feathers in ones butt does not make one a chicken...
Not only is this article rubbish because there is little to no content and it is taken directly from the NowJS site, but the part about dnode is completely false.

> DNode is another RPC system for Node.js. "NowJS is a higher-level interface than DNode," our own Pete Warden explains. "It offers an abstraction layer to make calling remote functions very simple without worrying about ports or sockets."

Pete Warden has no idea what he is talking about, both NowJS and dnode are built on top of socket.io which abstracts the sockets/ports part and makes it very much plug and play. Not only that they interface at the same level, the major difference is in how the functions are set and called on either end. NowJS focuses on explicit return statements where as dnode uses callbacks.

Why is this on the front page?

For more information about NowJS and dnode from their creators comments on another submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2316079
Read the study, it's not dismissive at all. According to the authors, roughly 1 in 3 kids don't respond to changes in diet.

As someone who recently abandoned methylphenidate for my new BFF bupropion, I understand the sensitivity to common claims that ADD/ADHD is primarily a lack of will power or a lack of parental/teacher discipline. But I still believe in science. Part of my early treatment involved vitamin supplements for serum deficiencies in iron, B12, and D. Bringing those levels up did not alleviate the symptoms for me, but I'm open to scientific investigation of reports that such supplements were a crucial difference for other people.
No doubt Vietnam would be further along in its development if the West had just left it alone to develop at its own pace, but I think it's clear where the blame lies for that.

With the French?
> why base it off of retweets?

Because the link in the tweet is to Microsoft's Disaster Response page, and retweets will help spread this link. Google also uses their site to spread information about the disaster.
And AOL loses another editor. He says he'll be sticking around as editor-at-large, and co-hosting the podcast, so... maybe this is a way for him to keep writing without being under AOL's posting mandates?
That didn't answer my question ;-)

Maybe seeing what he's done for other ppl for 2k eur a day would be a good indication.
I agree there is a trend but I think it has more to do with the idea that you will be making something new not that you will need to work a million hours to do it. I've never needed to work a lot of hours to get my projects done and I always avoid companies where people seem to work too many hours.
This is slightly off-topic but I hope they release decent Radeon drivers for Linux.
.
My experience with their proprietary drivers wasn't very good. I ended up switching to the open source driver, which (unfortunately) doesn't support 3D very well.
Show HN: Review GabHere.com
I've been working on this "weekend project" in free moments for the past week or so. It's basically a chat room that uses GeoLocation so match you up with people around you. It isn't anywhere near done, but I thought people might want to try it out. What do you all think?

http://www.GabHere.com/
Are you sure that banks don't somehow have a hand in these funds. I don't know -- just guessing that easy money has something to do with all of the cash getting tossed around right now.
No, because they ask people to retweet it. Hence, they (probably?) want to achieve that people that do not follow @bing will see it in their timeline.

Not every public corporate humanitarian donation is a marketing stunt. I guess it would have been perceived very different, had they just announced that they donated a $100k instead of making the amount that they are going to donate a function of retweets. Just imagine them tweeting "Bing just donated $100k to help the people in Japan. Join us at http://blabla to find out what else we can do."?
Ask HN: Which programming languages are the most verbose?
In my own limited experience, I have found Java and Objective-C to be rather verbose when compared to, say, C. What languages do you find to be verbose?

And yeah, I understand that Obj-C isn't verbose per se, it's more of an issue with the names in the Cocoa framework.
I really don't want to get in flame war with you here, so I'll just say that as an employee, the thirty some odd students I talk to every quarter seem happy once the class is over.

Also, I was there when we were initially approached and took 149 back when students had to write a long paper in all of the classes.

If you have more complaints or would like some of your facts verified, feel free to email me at nat@ifixit.com
(that everyone scrambled to say doesn't apply to them leaving approximately nobody it does apply to)

Actually, Paul Miller made no bones about the fact that AOL was the reason he left Engadget. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238175
Simple real time apps w/ the same code on client/server using dnode & Node.js
But Google's information contains no blatant advertising of how much Google is doing to provide aid. It just provides information about how to help.

I don't think their tweet was all that bad, but it is absolutely an advertising attempt. Intentional or no, they're clearly attempting to use people to spread how much they're helping, and their name. And information. But all that is useful is the information (and it's not even mentioned aside from an obfuscated link) - why is the rest there?

In any case, the twitter world is already ablaze with help links: http://twitter.com/#!/search/help%20japan How many of the results there mention how much the tweeter has donated, much less corporate twitter accounts?
Yey, different countries/cultures have different traditions. Film at 11. If you want to be useful, set up a site/wiki that can describe the different traditions in different countries. That would be useful.
Had I been aware of this in my youth, I would have cultivated a French accent and kissed every female within range, little girls, grandmothers, even pretty girls. I am sure I would have been happier.
Haha, yes, Hacker News does target those same people. I suppose I was wondering if any other forum or Q&A style sites were targeting the same market segment.
I've had to teach myself to touch everyone I meet (on the bottom of the elbow, or top of the shoulder), and start conversations with strangers in any situation. I've met a good number of friends this way, and if the touching is done properly and subtly enough, it can instantly create a warmth that is hard to achieve any other way.
Maybe debians philosophy and approach is not the only valid one for security. Or people want to choose other trade-offs than the debian maintainers.
I'm not really a fan of using Google/Facebook/Twitter for logins. I don't imagine your site really revolves around ensuring people use a real identity.

How about you just let people enter a username and start using the app?
Xcode 4's single window interface is a huge improvement, IMO, even though I haven't been able to get my old project to package up yet... "schemes" and "run destinations", oh my.

But I know once I figure it out, it will be better.
I would be up for this, and I can drive as well.
The U.S. has two main political parties: the left-wing one in perpetual power, and an incompetent left-wing one that still thinks they can get the outcomes they want through elections (they can't; progressive civil servants run the show).

Some introductory reading: "Politics: Comtemporary" in http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/2009/03/collected-writings-o...
I agree with the parent poster and would like to add that I think it's great that bing donated a $100k today and it does not seem stingy at all to me. Moreover, I doubt that this is the only thing Microsoft does with regard to crisis response. The link from the original tweet illustrates this.
Can some one explain what Bing is actually apologizing for.

I've read this 4 times and all I can make out is that Microsoft is donating money if people retweet a message that they are donating to Japan.

The link embedded in the tweet even links to their disaster relief page.

Everything about this seems like it's a good idea.

What's the controversy about?
Check for Java, standups, JIRA, snacks, etc.

But only free espresso -- I should forward your comment to my boss, so we get more drink options. :-)

(A Python guy just started and makes predictable noises about rewriting thousands of pages of working code from a scripting language with very similar capabilities... That will probably happen simultaneously with free Coca Cola being introduced.)
And yet, when you say it on the internet, it just sounds creepy.
It's fair to regret a certain consequence of an action, but not the action itself. When you say something that people decide (irrationally, in this case) is insensitive or offensive, there's nothing you can do subsequently that will appease them. The people who have chosen to be offended by the original tweet will likely remain steadfast in their choice. Even a "real apology" according to their bizarre concept of "apology" wouldn't appease them.

Remember, people choose for themselves what they find offensive. If you do something with good intentions, and someone chooses to be offended, it's reasonable to regret their response to your action, but there's no reason to regret the action itself.
Previously discussed on HN here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=550719

and here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968439
They're apologizing that some people chose to be offended by the tweet. I agree, that is perfectly reasonable. I too regret that people would choose to be offended by a helpful, charitable action.
That video was hilarious (and informative)!

Austerity measures are painful but necessary. I think that ten years from now you will be better of than the Americans, simply because the austerity measures are stopping all the malinvestment and over-consumption as quickly as possible. I'm Swedish and we went through the same process twenty years ago when our real estate market crashed. Luckily we didn't do like Japan, which still hasn't recovered from their crash from the early 90's (they did what the FED is doing now).

Bankruptcy is never fun but it's the main thing that makes a market driven economy more efficient than a planned economy. You have to stop malinvestments and reallocate resources to something more efficient. This reallocation can be painful but is necessary in the long run. The recession is not the problem, the boom was the problem.
I definitely love this method. I learned this in a workshop and was amazed at how people reacted as opposed to the tapping on the back. Works well for groups as well. Always approach from the side or the front.
Dan Benjamin recorded a 40-minute interview with Josh three months ago. He talked about his experience becoming Engadget's editor-in-chief, coming from a background as a music producer:

http://5by5.tv/pipeline/33
What is the difference between owning some physical paper and some pyhsical bits on a memory card? In both cases I own something physical that I can use to extract a books content.
You probably can't.

When disasters occur in impoverished countries with poor social infrastructure, there is a great need for people to set up communications networks, provide medical care, hand out vaccines, et cetera; but Japan isn't an impoverished infrastructure-lacking country. They have a functioning government and lots of technically skilled personnel; in the rare cases they do need something, they will know and ask for it -- unlike places like post-quake (and arguably, even pre-quake) Haiti, where the minimally-functioning government had no idea what resources the relief workers on the ground needed.
If they were as hostile to all tobacco/nicotine products as they deserved, then for whatever value of illegal heroin is, tobacco/nicotine should be about equally illegal.

Cigarettes, cigars and pipes got grandfathered in. Gum and patches are medical. But I suspect their reflexive "no drugs for fun" attitude is applying to anything else.
When I look at Dubai I think of Potosí, the silver mountain in Bolivia. It was an equally hallucinated commodity adventure, where the streets would sometimes be paved in silver. Four million dead natives later, after all the kinds of luxuries of the world were imported continually, it's a shithole. All that's left is, ironically, 60% of the silver and the architecture.
I find it varies with region of the US, too. Generally people in the South, Midwest or Southwest are more willing to engage in conversations with strangers, and people in New England are less so. I've had people in Massachusetts stare at me and not say anything when I've talked to them (not saying anything unusual, I swear!).
I suppose this is because touching people (and social interaction in general) comes naturally to most people, but not necessarily to people who spend time commenting on discussion forums on the internet :-)
We just got a nice little Mac Mini so we will be testing/fixing the bugs on OSX.
I don't know about most, but a lot of people seem to be making poor dietary decisions to begin with (lots and lots of soft drinks, for example). Are they really all aware how bad it is what they are doing?