skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Financial institutions lent money to borrowers who could not afford the loan they were given.

I don't think they were doing their jobs well. The same goes for insurers.

One reason the insurance industry is so poorly run is that tax incentives are given to businesses to offer generic health-insurance to their employees. Discrimination according to individual cases is needed, and that is not what has been happening. And when they do individually discriminate (both lenders and insurers), they (being conservative, incompetent, scientifically-illiterate, etc.) ignore well-established important factors such as IQ and the various personality factors -- factors that are known to be determinative of social outcome, and more predictive than past-performance (credit-ratings, etc.).

If they are unable to do their jobs any better than that, then the market should be allowed to have its way with them, just as it did the dozens of second-rate silicon-valley VC firms -- and their, in-turn, poorly-discriminating limited-partners -- that created the internet bubble. Why? Because it makes way for the more-competent.

[Edit: Anamax just pointed out that there was government "encoruagement" in these lending decisions, and that other institutions then took on these poor-risk loans. I think the general principals apply: 1. where the government distorts the market, it causes problems; 2. wherever there is freedom in market decisions, whomever finds himself holding the bag has no-one but himself to blame.]
I don't think you addressed the argument.

You can set up whatever legal arrangements you want. But marriage is a sensible default for the majority of people, thus specifically written into specific laws to make our society function more smoothly. If you want a custom arrangement that is less in demand, that is going to have some higher costs and less convenience for you. But that is true of many things, heavily customized products are often more costly and inconvenient than just buying the show room floor model.

I think this is what the post you responded to is arguing for, not some prohibition on non-standard living arrangements.
Ask HN: business model for a new image format?
I am currently working on an image compression algorithm. In lossless mode, it is already 30% better than .png for average photos, and I hope I can make it even better.
What do you think: is it possible to make a new image format widely adopted, and still somehow make money from it?
(Sorry for my English.)
The version of FreeBSD I installed to try ZFS loses all data on the volume after every reboot. It's like having a 146g RAID 1 SCSI RAM disk. :/

Granted I know I picked a random version (7.0 RC1), but the differences in maturity between the platforms is astonishing. This isn't a big deal when it's something that might at worst take rebooting to recover from (say, a SMP related crash), but with filesystems it's a little more crucial that they come through.
Tougher standards, dumber students. [video]
That's not the complete story. Financial institutions were "encouraged" by the US govt to make those loans.

The other organizations expected to make money buying these loan packages knowing what was in them, so it's hard to see why bankers are to blame.
Hence: "I'm Rich, Bitches".
Forgive my ignorance, but I haven't done the pricing for both. How do they work out?
What will happen to all my web accounts/blogs after I die ?
facebook, orkut, hotmail, gmail,yahoo,linkedin,slashdot,reddit,yc,infoq.. are well some of the accounts I have..

Will someone inherit them ? What about my blogs ?
"It would be very good if those rights/responsibilities could be unbundled from marriage."

The opposite of this is why many people are advocating allowing same sex couples to participate in marriage. It is difficult to assemble exactly the parts of the marriage rights/responsibilities that you want in a legally binding way. Just getting the whole package with the label "marriage" is a big benefit.
Cloud computing is a trap, says Stallman
While not really "news", it's interesting to see how Microsoft actually puts time and effort into non-mainstream projects like this.

As for the linked article, it raises one question which had me thinking:

I also pondered why another .NET language (from Microsoft) is necessary. Are C#, VB.NET, and the available third-party languages not enough?

I'm not complaining about getting more options, but with .NET compiler implementations for a dozen languages, functional languages like Python included, this seems like a valid question.
Since we're not going after the politicans who "encouraged" the no-money-down loans and took campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie, it's unclear why you're upset that the financial execs aren't taking a hit.

If you're renting because you couldn't afford to buy or you bought what you could afford, should you pay to keep people in houses that they can't afford?
Sprint's WiMax: Comcast Who? We'll Choke BitTorrent If We Want To
The Decline of Print Journalism?
"You can get F# to do what you want, but it seems to be more relevant for number crunching activities like financial/data analysis, modeling, and academic work — at least, this is what Microsoft is saying."

I don't understand this -- .NET-oriented podcasts and other people discussing the language have described F# this way as well. It would be a mistake to think F# is some kind of niche language like APL or Prolog just because it supports functional programming. They also bring up Lisp (which they all seem to spell as LISP), which shows that they have a hard time separating functional programing support from Lisp which is multi-paradigm.

My limited experience with it tells me F# would be a good general-purpose replacement for C#.
The Admissions Office Finds Facebook
See, this is one of those cases where an anecdote does not render fact.

If women actually did cause more accidents; hence they are worse drivers, they wouldn't be paying less for insurance than us males now would they?
I can't tell you how many times a large truck accelerated up behind me with the horn blaring and guys yeehawing in a not so pleasant manner interrupting a nice, quite bike ride in the countryside. Sometimes they throw can's or cigarettes.

Never had this happen with a truck full of females.
My understanding of the post is that one single mistake might be enough to ruin your business or career. To grow and succeed, you have to get everything right. Or at least the majority of things. And this gets more and more complex.

I totally agree with you, failures can be very valuable, as long as you learn from them.
Videos from DjangoCon 2008
Performance techniques used in the Hotspot JVM
Guess who's not coming to dinner; Roger Ebert with a terrific analysis of John McCain
> Still, it is puzzling why the United States are keeping the people who led them into this mess in position.

Which people do you have in mind? Surely you're not suggesting that the Dem party leadership take a fall.... (They're the ones who protected Fannie/Freddie and pushed the "no-money needed"loans. The vast majority of Wall Street campaign contributions went to Dems for a reason.)
I think there's some ambiguity in saying "The exhibit tried to explain why fusion is a good thing." One can take the view that fusion is a good thing and the exhibit is trying to explain that fact, or take the view that the ehibit is trying to explain that fusion is a good thing, without saying anything about whether it is or isn't.

I took the article as a whole as suggesting that research into fusion on this scale is not a good thing, and it specifically quoted a critic as saying that fusion was desirable, but nobody knows how to contain it. Which suggests to me that the article is in accord with you on that subject.

So overall, I don't think the article is suggesting that fusion is good, or clean, but rather the article makes the point that fusion's supporters hope that in forty years or so we might have something that is good or clean.
Sure. I am not saying we shouldn't have a secondary market.

I am saying: "Hey if professional traders did not exist, the markets may be a bit slower but it'll still work."

So yes, they provide liquidity but...at least in today's markets the CDO traders are not doing their job on the liquidity front! :)
Getting official Microsoft support with an official IDE is a big deal and this seems to be the first functional language Microsoft is taking seriously. IronRuby/IronPython and third party languages may exist, but they're nowhere near as big as the official languages (C#, VB.NET, managed C++, and heck, even J#).
Background tasks on appengine
Superior Lamp Inc
Superior Lamp was recently awarded the prestigious Torch Seal, awarded by the Better Business Bureau and given in recognition of excellence for outstanding product design, innovation, and uncompromising standards
I disagree. Biology had built complex abstractions, it is just that (outside of specific bioinformatic domains) mathematics has consistently proven not to be the appropriate language for describing complex, messy biological systems.

I like the DNA-as-code analogy. Getting the 'source code' is not the stumbling block - this is becoming far easier with high throughput sequencing methodologies. The real difficulty is writing the code. I have spent the last 3 months constructing 15kb of DNA by classical molecular biology techniques - and this was largely acheived by cut and pasting from existing DNA sequences. The cost of synthesizing large DNA fragments is currently >1 dollar / base. When this falls to trivial levels I think we will really start to see DNA programming taking off.
In theory yes, they manage risk which promotes economic growth etc. However, they are not the ones that put up the cash to start the lending cycle. So, if GM withdraws 1billion in assets their bank would have problems.

The result of this is there is no incentive to avoid failing big if you where going to fail anyway. Bank's can insure a trillion in assets and their only risk is the bank's assets. Each banker is only risking their job it's not their money (unless they have personally invested in the bank). Over time the banking system acts like a game of chicken where they each banker might as well take ever increasing risks, because they make more money in the short term by taking more risks and the downside is limited.
I agree that the US government is not blameless, but I disagree that bankers should not be blamed for their role. If a banker's value is "managing risk in lending, reducing overall risk," then the banks still failed to supply this value add.

It may also be a fair statement that the institutions did not know the value of what they were buying because of the way they were packaged. I thought that was one of the obstacles facing the bailout--how to value some/most/all of the troubled financial instruments involved. This lack of clarity seems to add to the risk.
Teaching robots
What does the number of articles in the NYT have to do with anything? Shouldn't we be trying to measure something that's directly proportional to revenues, or to profits, or at least to some hazy metric of "influence and importance"?

Show me a plot of ad space vs time and maybe there'd be something useful to learn. Every ad represents some definite revenue. All an article represents to the NYT's business is a cost, and perhaps not even a significant cost.

To say nothing of the fact that "print journalism" != "The New York Times".
DropSend sold - but how easy is it to flip a web app these days?
I know that the plural of anecdote isn't data, but our experiences with Solaris at work seem to not be unusual.

Over the past ten years Sun has NOT had their story straight on the availability of Solaris x86 ISOs and support patches (formerly packaged as X_Recommended bundles). While I could download x86 and install it when I was considering trying it out for an important but non-funded project (replacing authoritative DNS servers for our domain), AFAIK the only way to install updates was to download individual patches from a FTP server and apply them one by one -- and there was no way to tell which applied or why.

I think CentOS is saving RHEL's market penetration... if CentOS (or equivalent) wasn't available to cover all of those little cases that nobody would ever fund in a business, all of the Linux expertise would move on to other distros. I think Sun might have figured that out now (OpenSolaris), but if not they have an even harder road ahead as they continue to lose more market share.
Around '95, I was a college student with a brand new Pentium-90. I had read about this Solaris thingy that could run Windows apps and thought, "Hey, I'd love to try that out..I have 64 megs of RAM!" So, I called Sun to ask about getting a student copy. $600! I was a sophomore in college. When I asked the Sun salesperson why I couldn't have a copy for $50, she explained that they'd be losing money that way since they had to recoup their R&D costs! My argument that I wouldn't be purchasing a copy for $600 anyway fell on deaf (dumb?) ears? Right after that, a friend helped me install Linux -- no small feat as a kernel hack was required for network connectivity in the 0.9 kernel!

To this day, I have never owned a computer that ran Solaris. However, I work on a project with over 500 Linux production servers. Serves Sun right for not being nice to me when I was nineteen.
"But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU ..."

Huh ?
"creator of the computer operating system GNU"

Can somebody explain what that means ?
Surely you're not suggesting that the only alternative to allowing firebombing is govt regulation?
Permalink (Article Link goes to Homepage): http://xkcd.com/482/

Direct image link: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/height.png
Show info at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d23yx, preview clips at http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/visualisations... and a bittorrent copy is apparently available from MVGroup for those who don't have access to BBC iPlayer
Using Rails to serve different content to humans and robots
GNU is a UNIX-like operating system that RMS wrote most of. (Since he wrote it, a lot of other people have worked on it too.)

Most Linux distros use the GNU userland, but they don't have to ... they could use the BSD userland if they really wanted to.
GNU is Not Unix

:)
GNU is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU ).

It is a common misconception to call Linux-based systems “Linux”. Linux is the kernel, the piece that manages devices, processes, and memory. GNU is a collection of tools (GNU ls, GNU Bash, GNU C Compiler, etc.).

What the user sees is the set of GNU and non-GNU tools running on top of the Linux kernel. This is the reason why rms insists on people calling their system “GNU/Linux” and not only “Linux”.

RMS started GNU in 83-84: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU#History
Well, it's written in PHP, so I guess it also has the potential to become an awful, writhing mass of horrible, painful code.
http://store.xkcd.com/#HeightPoster

If the # doesn't work, scroll down about 3/4 of the way, it's the first poster. Personally, I'd rather have the online communities poster.
Males drive more miles than females.

...Yet another reason to charge insurance by the mile and/or minute.

.

By the way, this is interesting (though I don't know how accurate it is):

http://christianparty.net/womendrivers.htm

Women Drivers: Hidden Health Risk To Men

Women drive only 30% of miles driven but are in 37% of the fatal accidents ...

NHTSA data suggests that ... if only women drove:

There would be 23,879 more traffic fatalities each year.

There would be 7,674 more women killed each year.
Mention them in your will (don't forget to include passwords).
This is true.

What would be interesting however, would be a nice comparison of a supported Linux with a supported Solaris.

Then again, when you've paid for Linux support, do what is price difference between it and Solaris then? Whit is the price difference between a supported Solaris install and a supported Red-Hat install? Is Red-Hat significantly cheaper? Does it's less restrictive licensing bring about an advantage? Does it have features that compare with Solaris?

In addition to Red-Hat, Novell and supported Ubuntu are also worth talking about. Ubuntu may be free, but support licenses sure aren't.

You could also then compare supported Linux distros to unsupported Linux distros, but that's a whole other box of worms.
It's one part of an ambitious OS project. I discard a lot of assumptions about software and programming languages.

It's actually not hard in principle. There is a very easy algorithm for deciding whether you should use a list or an array: You try it out.

If I fail, I'll write about it some day...
Thats because most of their accidents are less severe. A guy's accident usually happens when they go beyond their limit and they end up totalling their cars. For women most of their accidents are due to carelessness and usually happen at a much lower speed. All of the accidents I had, were done at less than 10 mph.

+ I think the whole insurance industry is lagging, it'll probably be another decade before they adjust women's rates.

I mean right now the whole thing is unfair as hell when it comes to insurance. When I was in college, a girl I knew had 8 at fault accidents. She totaled 3 cars and the rest were fender benders. Her insurance paid out close to $150,000. And her insurance was STILL lower for full coverage for a new 330ci than what I paid for liability on my old Civic. And I had a clean record, no at fault accidents or points on my license. Not exactly fair.
He's generalizing. Cloud computing must involve locking away files in the cloud? Depends entirely on the company/organization you're doing business with. There's no reason a cloud app can't provide export features as well as a local Gears-like presence. There could even be an open source app operating in the cloud (like a free App Engine app) with full data dumps to your local computer.
good! good! everyone under forty should be cheering this on. if you finally want to be able to afford a house, you need people who currently own houses to go through some degree of hell. the "bailout" is about making sure those who had money yesterday have it tomorrow. i say let the power change hands. LET IT SHATTER. i will buy the pieces on sale.
They form a field under multiplication and addition.
There's always the Saudis, or another rich foreign group...
That seems like an excellent point. It looks like electric motors are pretty efficient, particularly big, powerful ones. Electric cars, with 100hp or more should achieve about 95% efficiency, according to this:

http://www.psnh.com/Business/SmallBusiness/Motor.asp

I don't know about converters, or what 'etc' is... (I'd guess you are more qualified than me to factor that in-- any estimate?)
> My limited experience with it tells me F# would be a good general-purpose replacement for C#.

Yes, in the same way that a hairdresser would be a good general-purpose replacement for a pizza.
I've been thinking about this lately - about giving all of your data to a third party and hoping they don't go out of business or erase your account (for whatever reason).

Issues of software freedom aside, I think the key to making people trust the cloud is to make the data contained in the services more transitive. Essentially, creating a standard Import/Export for the web. i.e. - If I decide to switch to vimeo for my web video needs, I'd like to be able to import all of my videos from youtube without much fuss (or make a local backup). That's not a great example, but it's the general idea.

Hmmm...after I think about it, this pretty much boils down to: "let me get at my data in a format that I can read."
Well there goes my bank. Oh well, at least it didn't fail or anything and my account is always insured by the FDIC, although I'm not sure how one would go about collecting that insurance.
> So if google came out against slavery or child molestation that would be a bad thing?

I didn't make the previous statement but I don't think that is what was meant. The point is that shareholder laws state that the purpose of the company is to make money for all shareholders, not to push a social agenda. A company can take a stand on issues but when profit and social issues collide the company is bound to follow profit.
There’s a reason why Window’s object code is everywhere, but the source code is top secret.

Might be a bad example. You couldn't use the source even if it wasn't secret. That probably protects windows' copyrights more than the other.
You can see the trap he's talking about as one possible future on the horizon--I don't think we're there yet, and it will take continuing to be vocal about our concerns to keep the benefits from turning sour.

The 2 main potential problems with your data being in the cloud versus on your own computer seem to be 1) privacy and 2) portability. Privacy long-term seems to be a tough nut to crack, and seems to depend mostly on choosing companies we feel we can trust. Data portability will only win out against walled gardens when users scream for it loud enough rather than go along using whatever service (such as Facebook) despite your data being locked in.

But the benefits we get from using the cloud for storage and computation are going to be difficult to ignore, despite the above concerns, and big brother is going to be constantly creeping in as long as the people continue to be scared into letting him.

I can see this being a problem for consumers long-term. But it doesn't do any good to hear that Larry Ellison has come out strongly in favor of keeping your data in-house.
What is Richard Stallman's stance on the electric utilities?
GoDaddy Charges Customer $6,579 in Fees; Points Finger at Drupal
Even worse than software patents
http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=1256083
Open Source Software a Booster Shot for Health Care?
They don't have to use the Linux kernel in the first place ... they could use the Hurd, NetBSD or FreeBSD instead ;)

http://www.debian.org/ports/#nonlinux

Linux distros are more GNU than Linux, the problem is in the name -- 'GNU' sounds and looks nerdy and unfriendly.
Thomson Reuters Takes Virginia to Court over Zotero
The Linux kernel is not the entire environment.
The set of GNU licensed tools and applications is not the entire environment.
Gnu + Linux is not the entire environment.

Those who care are aware of the distinction between "Linux" the kernel and "Linux" the environment built upon a Linux kernel. Those who don't are unlikely to be aware of the derivation or importance of either term. Of those who care few are willing to use his terminology.

This is not what I would consider a "misconception."

In my opinion Stallman does his cause damage by tilting at this particular windmill.
5th Update: Citigroup buys Wachovia
I remember something like this from one of my security classes..

Its a shellcode which works on 2 platforms... its designed so that the executable code on 1 platform is interpereted as NOPs or other harmless commands on the other platform and vice versa
Not quite: The structure is called a "ring" when you don't have division.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_%28mathematics%29
Yes, thats what it said, "the next wordpress" =P

Wordpress might have a nice admin UI and a large community, but the code and even they way you interact with the code is ugly and in large part PHP3-style... (at least it was when I was looking at it extending it sometime after v2 came out...)
Top 30 Skaters - Nov 08 : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community