skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In particular, the government was forcing lenders to accept more risk (viz sub-prime borrowers) than they would otherwise have done.

As I pointed out above, the number of loans made because the government said-so is not enough to account for the problems they encountered. Because of the mortgage-backed securities industry, there was incentive for banks to make sub-prime loans and offload the loans (and the risk) elsewhere. In other words, the government's requirements did not lead to the glut of sub-prime loans.

I also find your comment about lenders incorrectly modeling risk strange - it's a true statement, but I don't see how that means the market wasn't "free."
Indeed. The last high profile case didn't work out very well for the defender did it, but I guess that was largely due to the robber being shot in the back. [1]

I think the change is law is to help clarify this a little more. In reality, once the perps in this case dived out the window, they could have pulled weapons and started shooting themselves.

I'd sooner face jail than that possibility.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)
Prison sentences, fines, comunity service, etc are already a deterrent to crime. These deterrents (and punishments) are considered proportionate to the crime by the judge/jury. I see no reason to single out rioting to be different, apart from emotional ones.
Jersey Shore Season 4 Episode 3 "Twinning"
Jersey Shore Season 4 Episode 3 "Twinning" : to be aired on August 18, 2011 at 10:00 PM on MTV. So stay tune on MTV to watch it.

What about the next episode of "Twinning"? We will give a summary about this episode. In Jersey Shore Season 4 Episode 3 "Twinning" is told about the guys harass Deena for pulling a robbery on Them;
Can't be changed? Are you sure you aren't making up excuses for yourself? If you didn't believe people skills were innate and unlearnable, would you have to face the fact that you may be simply lazy in that regard, or that you're clinging to an unfriendly personality because you feel it makes you more of a techy hacker archetype?
Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning!
jbooth, if you're going to accuse others of ignorance and "turning off their brain", you should probably educate yourself about the issues you are talking about. The size of Fannie and Freddie's balance sheets were around $500 billion and taxpayers have so far lost about $300 billion on the bailouts of the GSEs. So, they were not insignificant contributors to the crisis, and reasonable economists disagree about the share of blame that the GSEs own. The mortgage interest tax deduction is about another $100 billion of subsidy to the mortgage market annually. Some people question the wisdom of these measures and the government's role in propping up the bubble.

Housing subsidies directed at minorities were increased over time in the Clinton and Bush administrations, but weren't large compared to the massive overall portfolio.
But they ask you to sign up first.
We use Skype too.. and it's fine. By fine I mean, it sucks.. but it's a chatroom so we have very few needs.

Wanted to correct something. Skype's chat is NOT persistent (if I'm wrong, lemme know.. I'd love to find out there's a feature I'm missing). That is to say, the chat persists.. but only on the distributed hosts that participate in it. So if I sign off at 10pm, and wake up before any of my team members are signed on at 7am.. I won't see anything that happened in between.. until one of them signs on.

This feature alone is probably worth the price of admission to Campfire, IMHO...
HBOGO, haha i love that website..
Sorry. By "patentable" I meant when embodied by a clearly-defined machine.

And anyway, why not patent algorithms in the abstract? There are an infinity of "fundamental mathematical truths", but only a few are spectacularly useful. If a given algorithm truly is obvious and trivial, then you can evade the patent by spending 30 seconds to find another obvious and trivial algorithm. (I note that most of the people complaining about the trivial obviousness of all software patents are not cranking out 50 algorithms a day like RSA or the fast Fourier transform. When they talk about software being obvious, they're talking about other people's software.)
I think it has to do with the number of tech jobs that are based in those cities. I'm from the midwest and am working out of an apartment in SF so I have no idea what I'm talking about it, but it seems like a lot of startups are based out of places that are "closer" to the tech scene.

Again, I'm still getting used to the whole scene, but the center of everything really seems to be further south.
In California there is. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/24/california-incandes...
In addition to your own future earnings, it is also partially a gamble on future inflation and interest rate changes.
Expect officers back in 30. ... device subject to 1st amendment privilege;
Cost of operating a startup in NY vs SF
And Microsoft has proven to its customers that the Cloud is a toy and not reliable enough for business-critical systems, so everything should return to the (Mcrosoft-dominated and less competitive) status quo.

Maybe it's just accidental downtime. But Microsoft is not exactly competitive in the cloud computing world (unless you need to run Windows apps) - I don't think it's in their interests for this movement to succeed in the business world.
It's really cool to see information like this laid out. I'm from Chicago, and even property downtown is not (as) expensive. I was always told that the bay was more expensive, but didn't believe it until I started living in San Francisco. We're planning on moving to San Jose, or somewhere a little further away to try and minimize that effect.

Chipotle is 50 cents more expensive across the board here. Damn.
Viewing this from Australia, where the 1 BR flat next door sold for $370K ($388K USD) this is very attractive. The bottom few ones are priced $50-$150K. It's plausible to buy outright - no mortgage.

However, unemployment ranges from 9% to 17%... I'm not sure how pleasant or safe that would make the neighbourhood.
I believe that what many are quick to refer to as social ineptitude is a keener sense of bullshit detection, combined with the inability to take it with a smile.

Imo, most socially-inept tech people are simply individuals that are more sensitive to the hypocrisy and nonsense one is exposed to when dealing with the public.

I don't know if being a tech person is a cause or an effect of that bullshit sensitivity, but as a programmer who used to be a bouncer in a bar a few years ago, I can tell you that some of my non-tech colleagues were by far very quick at losing their temper than I was.

Now, there's a difference between being bullshit intolerant and being malicious. I am of the firm opinion that the actions of that Tech support guy (deleting data out of pure spite) are certainly not characteristic of the tech-guy stereotype as we know it.
Could you point to a blog post or something that separates the ridiculous stuff from the solid advice, for those who perhaps lack the resources to tell the difference themselves?
wait, what? There is a difference between being socially inept and destroying data because you think someone is a jerk. This difference is similar, I think, to the difference between honking or flipping someone off in traffic and, say, ramming them.

I mean, one of those things is just being rude. The other is going out of your way to damage someone else.

Personally, I would put up with a lot of the first. Rude people, of course, shouldn't be in customer service, but on the back end, eh, if they are good enough, I think they are worth keeping around. Especially if they are the extremely direct, blunt and honest kind of rude, I think they can actually be better back end people, sometimes, than people who try to twist things to look better than they are.

But people who destroy things when they are angry or insulted? yeah, those people should not be let anywhere near a root prompt.
The 5 Coolest Coworking Spaces in New York City
War: less frequent, less brutal, and less large
I don't at all understand what you're getting at. A prospective employee having anger management issues is, like race, not relevant to decisions over whether to hire them?
Nobody likes a winner...

But, to be fair, if groupon can't turn a profit on 800 million dollars+ of revenue, they may have a problem.
Any chance you can install chrome frame? It no longer requires admin access: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/
When my wife got accepted to West Chester University in SE PA, we went looking for a place to rent in the nearby area. Coming from Harrisburg, where I could rent a house for $500/mo, I was blown away that a 2br apartment generally ran $1200/mo (Stop snickering, New Yorkers)

We decided to buy a 2br fixer-upper on the cheap and ended up with a mortgage of ~$600/mo. That was five years ago. We've since renovated the crap out of the house (it's now the nicest on the block), bought a second house in Philadelphia (wife's getting her PhD at Penn now, and I can now walk to work), and are about to put it out for rent. We'll be getting at least $1200/mo for it.

Renting's okay while you get your financial situation together. Maybe most people shouldn't live paycheck to paycheck. You don't have to be well off in order to make a budget. If you look at my social security statements, I was making jack squat while I lived in York PA, and still managed to squirrel money aside.

Some people's lifestyles are more conducive to renting. I quite like having a place I can mangle and customize as I see fit. Some people like not having to worry about maintaining their building and grounds. Maybe when I can't do things for myself, I'll go back to having a landlord, but especially given how low mortgage rates are right now, I feel fortunate to have bought a house or two.
Note: This attack requires a large amount of RAM. They may have saved a few operations, but they increased the total cost by many orders of magnitude over a brute-force search because they need a larger machine.

Also note: An attack taking 2^126.1 operations to break AES-128 is not 2^1.9 times faster than brute force; it's 2^0.9 times faster than brute force. A brute force search on a 128-bit key takes on average 2^127 operations.

In short, this is definitely in the "interesting new method to explore" column rather than the "interesting attack" column.
wrt "most people should rent"

If the alternative to renting is to buy a 5-bedroom, 4000-sqft McMansion, I totally agree. If instead they buy a condo/house whose monthly payment is within $200/$300 of their current rent, it's quite possible they come out ahead. OTOH a house reduces job mobility, so the decision should be taken lightly.

I think of a 30-yr mortgage as a 30-yr rent-to-own contract with a guarantee that the rent won't rise with inflation. That's a powerful reason to buy imho.

Historically, AFAIK, people in the US have bought houses whose monthly payment was approximately same as rent. Buying large/expensive houses as a means to leverage a small downpayment into large capital gains is a relatively recent phenomenon. Am I wrong?

What's your take?
The counter argument is that the rent you are putting down is not being invested into your home. I think that is a very cogent argument, but it relies on your ability to sell (or willingness to sell later on).

I concur with your analysis though, and don't plan to buy for a long time (ie, when I am ready to put down roots for 10-20 years).
"Don't hire people who are black" and "Don't hire people with anger management problems" are COMPLETELY different things.

Not hiring sociopaths and not hiring people with anger management problems are both great ideas, even if they don't have particularly much to do with each other.
Why was a URL shortened used to submit the link?
Bad people did bad things. Therefore brutally punish anyone who does anything bad, that'll keep everyone in line.

Perfectly logical, and perfectly medieval.
This is more about the S3 part than the jekyll one.

But yes, I guess there is some movement back in time. I'd say the two main reasons are a return to more minimal blogging (i.e. something like tumblr as opposed to blogrolls, widgets, plugins etc.), and the fact that you can do some dynamic stuff in the client now via JavaScript (e.g. comments with Disqus).
Skype is really terrible imho. If you're looking to move away from skype because it sucks, you can try an XMPP server + Candy, or an IRC server plus CGI:IRC or qwebirc.

Both solutions take about 15-20 minutes to set up and cost nothing, provided you have a VPS to host the server on.
New here, but could this solve your concern? Or was this is "manual" way you referred to?

https://github.com/jamis/rbenv-gemset
How to win at 'Rock, Paper, Scissors'
Sort of a meta-comment, but that is a very very nice graphic.
Good question. Flagged for that.
The case for declarative business logic in 3 minutes
I just moved from Melbourne, AU to Las Vegas, and its incredible. I have a running joke with friends back in Australia that you can go out for lunch in Vegas and buy a house with the change.

Having said that, I wouldn't trade my place in Melbourne for any number of houses here :)
I still can't help but think that at least a few of those unstable BOFHs could be convinced to behave using the right logic and wording. I'm reminded of the episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon refuses to do something until he's told it's a "non-optional social convention": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127907/quotes?qt=qt0419289
The problem is microsoft does this regularly; talk about cool shit and never deliver.
If we allow that large, computationally capable entities are likely to form in free markets, it is probable that individuals will be faced with a market in which the prices of major goods vary wildly from minute to minute, from person to person, and are predicated on both fantastically complicated loyalty programs and data collected about the individual and current market circumstances, processed in statistical models that no human has ever understood or evaluated. A market in which machines algorithmically game humans and each other by adjusting prices and the nature of the goods themselves to exploit cognitive or algorithmic flaws in other actors.[1]

The classical model of efficient, free markets ignores computational complexity and time bounds, as the article notes. These were reasonable approximations for a hundred or even twenty years ago, but I can forsee environments in which these factors lead to significant asymmetry. I question whether humans can really compete successfully in this environment, and whether the process of doing so is really best for us.

[1] Cases in point: Amazon, insurance companies, grocery stores, every major retailer, Google, high-frequency trading firms, airline ticket sales.
"Identifies Deep Relationships In Big Data" seems to imply there is some machine learning going on. A quick glance at their API makes it seem more like (perhaps over-engineered) graph traversals. Anybody have a good idea of what it is about?
Hiring the 'rockstar'? All star teams don't perform well
Do you mean that in a "he's clearly just promoting S3" or a "woah, the CTO of Amazon has time to code neat tools" kind of way?
Pretty much inevitable that it's going to get hit with spam initially.

This is still early days though, and given how effective google has been at dealing with spam in gmail, I suspect they have a good chance of having the smarts to be able to bring this under control.

Interesting to note though, that most of these would have been caught out already if google was consistently enforcing the "real names only" policy. I'm not sure if I know of any one with a first (or last) name of 'photoshop'
Social skills are not comparable to golf, they're comparable to being able to move around physically without tripping or falling into everybody within a 5 meter radius of you. It's not a sport, it is a critical skill that everyone who expects to participate in modern society needs to have.
Regardless of possible testing or analysis concerns, it's pretty clear that Safari 5 has a higher error rate than Safari 4 or 3. Safari is the only browser to go down in quality over time. This appears to be further evidence that Apple is putting less resources towards Mac software in favor of supporting ios devices. Fairly concerning for all of us Mac users.
Finally I got to hear about Office 365 being down. Was tired of hearing AWS down, gmail down....
Anonymous s not unanimous
Wasn't Office 365 released a few weeks ago? Not off to a good start. I feel bad for corporate users who are stuck with that junk as their toolkit. I wish this were enough to convince people that they don't need Word or Excel – they just think they do. (They definitely don't need PowerPoint.)
Sustainable means it doesn't hinder the business like a 50% off coupon and a 25% split on the revenue thereafter.

Most local businesses cant afford that and realize it too late.

The company I work for is thegolocalcard.com (won't plug it again on Hacker News...I promise).
Got the omnigraffle, still could not find the stencil you are using ? any custom stencil you are using ?
It is not actually the federal government's job to regulate every detail of every transaction that crosses state lines. The specifics of the lightbulbs are only tangentially related to the commercial transaction and even less connected to the fact that it crosses state lines, so I would hardly consider Congress negligent if it declined to make rules for cross-state light bulb shipping.
You and your PhD wife do not sound average, which serves my point that buying a house is a gamble on future earnings. You both are investing in yourselves, improving your assets and generating wealth. The average American watches 4 hours of television a day, he isn't prudent.

> Maybe most people shouldn't live paycheck to paycheck.

Strike "maybe most" and I agree with you.
Creater of Minecraft challenges Bethesda to Quake 3 Duel to settle a lawsuit
To hide the selflink, maybe.
Great comments under that article, too.
There's a lot more to employment than engineers. This really goes to show just how vanishingly small our field/industry is compared to the overall economy.

Things are red hot for software engineers in the Bay Area, they are way less peachy for just about every other field.
I don't think we are required to provide a better analysis in order to point out the problems with a flawed one.

Whatever the author is measuring here, it's most certainly not "node" vs "ruby". This should be obvious when you look at the test-apps that he's using (which involve mongodb and serialization).
Curious: which city in Canada?
This issue is related to a similar issue in copyright – is the "sweat of your brow" enough to render a protected work? The classic example is the white pages.
Looking at the source, it seems to be built with jquery isotope plugin. I couldn't see any similar examples at isotope site. Any one else know more details on the implementation?

Also, the job growth numbers for each city look suspicious. Was there such a jump in growth rate in Jan '11?
Ah thats the opposite :) I love beans and thats why its easy for me to apply. I like green beans, kidney beans, lentils so its the perfect diet. I really like exercise but i kept wondering why i would get defined all around the body but the stomach took so much effort (hundreds of situps just didnt do it) until i realised from reading his book that my whole diet was screwed. And yeh eating right just makes you feel so much better.

I read four hour work week as well. Some of the stuff in that book is quite difficult to apply as is because of work constraints but i think for IT people , we are in the best position to apply it cause for example, working from home isnt such a far stretch for guys supporting a unix environment, or doing some dev work, where else for people doing sales or face to face work its much harder.

I tried applying some of his techniques to lessen my "in office" work time and i managed to get 4 days a week (with just a tad less salary then if i was in the office 5 days) and 1 of those 4 days a week working from home. That was the best i could do, i couldnt get 4 days work from home or anything like that and even so it wasnt easy to apply them, the build up to ask for that kind of schedule from your boss takes time and planning. You have to somewhat let him know thats what you want and then prove that you can really work individually and are on hand to address issues anytime thats needed so gaining that trust takes some time...

But reading his book did kinda of highlight the idea that hey it is possible and if you dont ask you will not get so i tried and it worked (not 4 hrs but close enough :))
exists != filled with

this is link-bait.
Beyond the Java point I suspect the ease of releasing frequent small updates on android fits the way they do development better.
"Note: This attack requires a large amount of RAM. They may have saved a few operations, but they increased the total cost by many orders of magnitude over a brute-force search because they need a larger machine."

Is this terribly relevant though? Deep Crack was a quarter of a million dollars (90s dollars) as I recall.
The submitter is a betabeat shill, so I'm guessing the phrase, "maximum click juice," should provide enough sensemaking points.
It is 100% dependant on industry. Ask any retailer if a Groupon makes sense when they depend on the margins their products produce.

The only way it makes sense is if they are able to get large volume discounts on whatever they are trying to sell.

Just running some #s here.
Local clothing ship buys jewelry for $5/piece and marks it up to $15. Groupon takes 75% of the $15. Groupon takes $11.25 out of the $15 and you just lost $.25 on the entire deal (not including expenses to find that piece).

Sure that same retailer could mark the piece up to $20 but groupon takes $15 of that and you break even. A $5 piece probably couldnt be sold for anything higher than $20...

I will agree that it generates foot traffic but most smaller businesses I have talked to who have done a Groupon or thought about it have had negative experiences or choose not to do it because of a scenario similar to the one above I portrayed.

Just my .02
We also should arrest all the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya who rioted in their countries this year as well. Disorder must not be tolerated! Government power above all else! Bow before your gods, peasants!