skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is microfinance a smart way to park your savings?
Here's the post that prompted me:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/12/is-micro-credit.html

In the context of PG's essay "Be Good" (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html),
this makes a lot of sense. Not in terms of fleecing the world's poor, but as a
smart investment that happens to be nearly indistiguishable from charity.

At the moment I'm still a little averse to the stock market, but I do have some
savings and I'd like to put some portion of it to better use (no major financial commitments on
the horizon). These organizations piqued my interest:

Kiva -- http://www.kiva.org/

United Prosperity -- http://unitedprosperity.org/

Silicon Valley Microfinance Network -- http://svmn.net/

Anyone here have some experience with these groups, or other microfinance
ventures?
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind [pdf]
Product Reviews:The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian(Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:46:30 GMT)
Feynman for the win
Can anyone imagine an efficient way to search a laptop for even one type of illegal data?

You would have to do pattern matching over the entire hard drive, and then, do it again for every possible way to encrypt the data. It seems completely hopeless to finish even one search before the end of the universe.
Sports is artificial competution under arbitrary rules. There is no benefit to people violating the rules. Using steroids in sports is like riding a bike in the marathon.

In contrast, regular "productive" work is not trying to be entertaining, it has other goals (e.g. moving packages from one place to another). If I ride my bicycle while delivering packages, more packages get delivered.
@m_eiman. InstaPaper.com does offer similar service, but not good enough.

Besides the small headaches, the text-version does not provide images. What's even worse is the lack of support other encodings. Try this one in your instapaper and you'll understand what do I mean: http://news.sina.com.cn/w/2008-12-08/170516806326.shtml

That being said, you do raise a good point: how much shall we charge for the consumer version? Maybe it should be free while the API should cost some money.
Can I ask approximately what your client's failure rate is with Auth.net? This is a problem we're struggling with - out of 10 different payment attempts, we get maybe 1 successful payment (yes, some of the attempts are bogus, but that still seems pretty bad). It might be worth switching to Auth.net or something else, but the only reason would be the failure rates, and that information isn't very easy to find.
Jcrop: the jQuery Image Cropping Plugin
damn.. it sure as hell sounds like it.. IP doesn't really apply to the data you're hosting on their hardware does it now?
something like: oh man, we had such a great time at that place. remember when he did that thing.
In my question I meant either it would allow scripting (for example Greasemonkey scripts), or it would be so interesting that scripting wouldn't be necessary.
well, it depends on what you're trying to do.

microfinance charity-type organizations have little risk, but no matter what, you're not really making any money on your investments. you'd make more from an online savings account.

if you want to do some good, those are good options. if you want to grow your savings, they're not that good.
So if I'm getting you right, you think that it is of tremendous importance that a user not be asked, in their 5 question run, whether to choose Good or Evil twice.

And you're willing to take a MASSIVE performance hit to guarantee that, for all users.

OK, let me take a wild stab in the dark: you've got over 1,000 unique pairs in the database. You ask the overwhelming majority of users 5 questions. The chance of a user getting 5 unique questions, if you just pull them randomly out of the DB, is about 99%. And that would be Pretty Darn Fast to calculate.

Or, here's a cheap trick for you -- partition your table of questions into 5 groups. A really simple way is to take primary key mod 5, but if you want to do it better you just hash the input and then take mod 5, then store that in a group column. For the first question, choose randomly from group 1. For the second question, choose randomly from group two. etc. By construction, it is now impossible to ask the same user the same question twice.

Which means you don't have to store a user's prior votes at all. Just store counts.

There, enjoy your million-fold performance increase.
How would you write it out? HSV-1 is the virus typically responsible for cold sores. The other herpes viruses were not under investigation, and writing out "herpes simplex virus 1" is longer and more confusing to the layman than "cold sore virus".
Art and Innovation
Blackbird: the browser for African Americans
I used this recently in an application I wrote and it's quite extendible and easy to use.
Works in IE6 too, if you care about 'the gorilla' ;)
Such "hiding" is only effective against those ignorant about such viruses. This is likely the same sub-population who would react negatively.
I think Google knows more about us than Twitter does.
I don't trust anyone who spells perusal "parusel".
Failure of what? legit transactions? Are you saying that there are times when someone enters data that you know is correct and it still fails you?

That should never happen.

If you have full AVS checking, you might hit against the incapability of most users (quite understandably) to type in their address exactly the same way as on their credit card bill. For this reason, we (at my previous start-up) disregarded the address part of the verification (but still required post code and CCV2). Address failures aren't a good indication of fraud, since most legit users will mistype their address.
Observations from the article:

- Test-taking levels declined to below 2007 levels, but are still above 2006 levels

- GMAT levels are still rising.

- China's test-taking is still rising; India's fell to between 2006 and 2007 levels.

- GRE test-taking has been sharply rising since 2004, when the credit bubble was in full swing.

So, was there also somewhat of a bubble for student loans, which is now deflating? Are GMAT-takers more ambitious in the face of an economic downturn, or just more likely to have already lost their jobs in 2008? Is immigration policy affecting China and India the same way, or is India's economy more vulnerable than China's?
Most technically savvy Windows users use Firefox. IE6/7 have terrible stigmas for being insecure and also are demonstrably and noticeably slower.

As time goes on, IE market share continues to slip. This process is vastly accelerated in technical discussion and news sites.
IPhones apparently on their way to Wal-Mart. Either for $99 or not for $99
Now that is just a cool hack.

Sadly I don't think there is too much commercial value in extraordinarily CPU-intensive lossy image compression but it sure beats the heck out of 99.5% of what I saw in undergraduate AI/algorithms-type courses as a demo.

Incidentally, I think from a marketing perspective that is a great test case to use for it. If you had picked, I don't know, some portrait by an unknown artist it would have been no less technically impressive but it wouldn't spread NEARLY as far. (This is one reason why I managed to work the KJV Bible and the US Constitution into my test corpora for almost every natural language processing project I've ever done.)
WikiScanner2 beta
isn't this a boolean version of the old Usenet Oracle?
Right.

What you have to understand is that ID isn't really what most of the vigorous ID proponents are really arguing for. What they're really arguing for is a literal interpretation of the english transliteration of the Bible, including a <10k yr old earth, genetic stasis, and biblical creation.

That's why it's not enough to get the "whys" for an unverifiable non-scientific explanation like ID. The "Whats" are also equally important to these people. Evolution cannot be accepted because Evolution requires time on a scale that rejects a biblically literal timescale.
Opera shouldn't be hyped. It is not for the hoi-polloi, it is for the select few, the connoisseurs, the epicures of software nourishment.
Are you saying there was a proportional increase caused by population growth?

What do you think about increases due to stability in the West, better quality food, better quality healthcare, and taller giants upon whose shoulders we can stand?

(About the last one, I mean that as a collective whole, we have much more specific scientific knowledge than our predecessors)
FAILCamp Continued: Word List Fail
More often than not I think we worry to much about profitability and social-acceptability while building applications for the web. As of Web2.0 we're suddenly deluded with social apps that only harness user's in terms of output, meaning applications that allow users to socialize with one another via the apps API; IMHO, this just creates more noise. We need web apps that harness users/user input for creating better output. This sort of thing can be built directly into existing APIs or built from scratch where the user is directly passing vast amounts of data as input. Current web-apps are weak in this regard, since the input we ever pass into the system are either shouts or bookmarks.
Microsoft will support CPAN authors with free access to Windows machines
i'll disagree with #2 as well. i setup a merchant account with braintree and they handled the establishment of amex, discover, visa, and mastercard accounts all for me.

the only thing i would add is that once you have your american express merchant account, login to their website and immediately switch to electronic statements. otherwise they charge you a $5 fee every month for paper statements.
So much for cross browser accessibility. At the end of the day its his site and he can choose which browsers he wants to ignore, but I think even ignoring that 4% who use IE is a big mistake.

And its not like 'daring fireball' would be all that difficult to make IE render correctly anyways.
Nanotechnology 'culture war' possible, study says
The most efficient way invented so far:

1) claim to be searching laptop for illegal data

2) watch the face of owner for suspicious reactions
The question here is rather incoherent. But the idea of interactive ads aren't old (shoot the duck, etc). Not sure how CAPTCHAs fit in this...
Einstein's creative/innovative genius is what he's known for - If you're going by IQ alone, people like Bobby Fischer and Ted Kazinsky(sp?) would end up as the most amazing brains in recent history. They probably had more raw processing power than Einstein, though they couldn't function in society. John Nash is another.

What is genius?
jamis has the right to support whatever he wants, it's his project that he designed for his purposes. if windows developers need to tweak for windows, they should fork capistrano. i guess jamis is saying, fork you! (ha)
Linked In is down (can't sign in anywhere).
What is unclear about this idea?
PC premiered 40 years ago to awed crowd
I'd take a serious look at Braintree for credit card processing http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/. I'm not affiliated, we're a customer that uses them for processing. Reading stories like this, I'm glad we do.

When we signed up they gave us a heads-up on almost every one of these facts (i.e. warning us up front to authorize a minimum of a dollar or many banks would reject it). They called AMEX on our behalf to get the service hooked up so we didn't have to. They've also given us tons of technical advice, like how to improve accuracy on AVS checks and details on what some of the esoteric failure codes really mean.
I bet they'd LOVE to try, though.
Funny you mention waiting for the sky to fall cause I was about to mention Skynet.
You will need to be very careful about which sites you allow users to extract content from as many larger sites have TOS which prevent this type of activity. You could be opening yourself up to some nasty DMCA take down notices depending on how you plan on displaying/redistributing the scraped content.
A) It works for me.

B) Are these "site is down" (false) alarms really of any value here?
Somehow, I don't think so. They'd just say, "Oh, we need to make this EVEN MORE STRINGENT AND DIFFICULT.", rather than abandon it.
If only the future was as obvious now as it used to be in the old days...
At the rate we're going though I think the depths of what we should worry about is whether or not a hard-drive has failed and if backups have been made. We gotta ways to go before we see the rise of the machines.
The fact 'join' being a method of a string that accepts an array as an argument. I guess it isn't that bad, I just think I've been conditioned to expect it the other way around.
Krugman's Nobel Talk slides
Wow... This one is quite pretty. Really. A very nice side effect of the "everything is an object" concept.
3) If the face of the owner reacts by being darker than yours, confiscate the laptop.
http://be-a-magpie.com/ are already using the information in my tweets to post ads based on my content.

There is a community wide negativity towards serving ads to your followers. With Twitter still unable to come up with a definitive financial model (pay per tweet / tweet advertising / monthly subscription etc) then companies like this will continue to pop up until they lay down a marker.
I don't understand why people on windows just install Wubi. It dual-boots into Ubuntu (a MUCH better OS anyways) and the whole database is stored as a file so you don't have to fiddle around with hard drive partitioning. Or you can just pop VMWare on your computer and have linux running in no time flat.

If you're using Windows to develop for RoR, you're just lazy and you don't deserve to be supported.
As an aside, personally I use the Sphinx full-text search engine. While it's not entirely perfect (I would LOVE to have delta merging to not cost as much IO), there's practically no cost to searching. One of my biggest pet peeves for message board software was the search timer because all the search algorithms sucked. It was either something like this or just plain used MySQLs FULLTEXT feature which is horrible for 1GB+ pure text data. So when I wrote my own forum software, I used Sphinx for zero-cost searching.

http://forum.fangamer.com/forum/search/
Obama: "It is unacceptable that the U.S. ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption"
ObjC: You don't have to declare ivars for your @properties if you target 64bit. The 64bit runtime Does Magic. Also, @property cannot imply @synthesize because you might want to use @dynamic instead.
LG HB620T (UNLOCKED)
LG HB620T is a standard sized flip-phone offering new technology in mobile TV capabilities for the European/Asian market. Users will find that the phone includes many typical features, but stands out for its innovation with DVB-T technology.
I suspect this is because a table may be used for an object (or some other abstract data type) which has a different data type. Adding another metatable hook for __empty might be another solution, though. (I agree it's a bit annoying.)

> Ok so all is good. But now what happens when the table contains a nil?

One of the invariants for the way Lua tables are implemented is that they won't contain nil as a value, IIRC. Using a multifaceted table type for both arrays and dicts is a mixed blessing. It is really convenient much of the time, but it does lead to some quirks.

NB: The i in "ipairs" means "integer (keyed) pairs".
I downmodded you because what you said was asinine. That I hate IE a lot and have an actual reason why you're wrong is mere coincidence.

It's probable that the decision to stop caring about IE was made in light of similar stats. Note that he said he no longer concerns himself with IE, and that his stylesheet still contains IE-specific hacks. He's done nothing to intentionally dissuade any hypothetical IE users that might come along, and if IE's rendering gets worse over time, that only further justifies his decision to stop caring. On the other hand, if IE's rendering gets better over time, then not caring about IE won't be a problem because IE will render more like modern browsers.

It's also important to be clear that the site does look right. If simply not catering to one particular browser causes your site to be completely unusable in that browser, that's a strong indication that the browser vendor is incompetent.
Maybe invest $100-200 in microloans but Kiva at least doesn't pay you any interest on the loans. I don't know about the other two organizations. These are different from charities in that they aren't tax deductible so if that's important for you then look elsewhere.

I heard some advice on the radio the other day: invest your age in bonds. So a 40 year old would put 40% of their invesments into bonds. Bonds are slow but reliable sources of income and are basically the same as a loan to a large corporation. Try that if you're looking to back loans and earn interest.
It's this sorta paranoia that prevents me from signing up for a Facebook account.
Good God. You actually used the word "epicures" to describe "people who like a lightweight, multi-featured browser." That's taking things a little too far.

You forget that the software world is not one of connoisseurs. There's a free class and there's a professional class. There's no more than that. You couldn't have a luxury class, it couldn't sustain itself. And we could have a whole discussion on why - the Internet relies on the power of networks, so closing a network off damages the potential of the system - but really, the point is more that you can't defend a web browser through elitism, not when it's a free product that's trying to get as many downloads as possible.
There are sooo many downsides to anabolic steroids. Especially if you take them when you're young.

And cortisol is technically a steroid, but not the body-enhancing type that everyone refers to.

And steroids do allow you to train harder and recover quicker, but you still have to cycle off after 6-8 weeks... and then you go back to your original strength.
Last time I looked they have a minimum bar of $250,000 of business a month, or they're not interested in you. Thus not an option for people starting out.
See also: (http://lua-users.org/wiki/CountingFromOne)

There are arguments for doing it either way, but making indexing incompatible with the language in which it is expected to embed in is just rude.
I don't know about that. If the end user actually got to the end of the rainbow, they would have a pot of gold. I think most end users would love to have a pot of gold.

If the end user actually got to the end of the semantic web... they'd have some extra invisible markup. I do not think I would be able to convince most end users "Hey, I was going to give you a pot of gold but instead have some extra invisible markup. You should be happy, you're getting a much better deal now."
Though I don't know of any names, I think Einstein's explanation of photo-electric effect is not completely out of this world or without precedents. Quantization was known though it was not applied to light earlier; Light's particle nature was considered earlier, though the double slit experiment convinced everyone that it's a wave. If I remember correctly Newton was of the opinion that light is particle in nature. Though it might have been hard to make the jump, I would assume that some smart guy would have been able to put these together and explain photo-electric effect, if Einstein hadn't. In a sense this achievement is more or less on the expected lines of progress for science.

However Relativity is a huge leap in my opinion.
I don't get what the noise is about here. Millions of lines of objc code have been written without mass confusion of how to init objects. It might look good on paper, but in practice telling people "this is the designated initializer" seems to be more than sufficient to sort things out. And being able to initialize an object with anything (or, remember, to have anything initialize an object) only adds to the flexibility and dynamic character of the language.
Facebook already possesses and uses this sort of personal information for ads and they still don't have a great monetization rate per user. Twitter certainly has less overhead per user though.
no, I would just do what I do now, and install ad-block plus
Lifehacker is such a bunk site. I used to love it, when I didn't realize that a good 90% of their articles are garbage. It's a shame.

VLC is incredibly overhyped: everybody that doesn't use iTunes or WinAmp seems to use it. Ubiquity doesn't do much yet, but people are talking about it a lot because it's Aza Raskin. Songbird deserves no talk whatsoever until it has a featureset that makes it noticably better than iTunes on OS X, WinAmp on Windows, or Amarok on Linux, but it gets talk because it's Mozilla and Mozilla products are always worth talking about unless it's Sunbird. Picasa's Google and gets advertised all over the place. OpenOffice is hyped too much considering Bean and Abiword trounce its word processor.

Is Dropbox underhyped? Everybody seems to love it, and I'd guess it's growing pretty fast.
Cloud Computing's Final Frontier: The Network
I've given 10 loans so far at Kiva, and 3 have been totally repaid (others are in various stages of repayment). I don't think you should look at microfinance as investment options. That said, there are a few micro finance organizations that give out a small percent of interest. Microplace is one example. But as noodle says, an online savings account would fetch you more.
I think Google knows more about Twitter than Twitter does.
However, Gnome takes a large part of its interface layout directly from Windows. The taskbar and the window layout always seemed to be direct copies of that system. Instead of crating something new and more functional, Gnome and KDE (though I haven't tried 4) seem to just lift Windows' ideas wholesale at times, and merge them with the Linux ideas of app and system management.
The C code for Fixnum#to_f is quite literally

fix_to_f(VALUE num) {
double val;
val = (double)FIX2LONG(num); //RSHIFTs sign
return DBL2NUM(val); //Ruby float constructor of C double value
}

It does the same thing. Ruby, by design, flows left to right instead of nested params. This way you don't have float(user.timestamp) but instead user.timestamp.to_f.
Sun moved from Perl to JavaScript/C in a high profile project
His talk will go live here: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/...

I went to his speech when he came to Northwestern. He was extremely pessimistic at that time about our current economic conditions.
I think that if you made something that made Mac OS X look like one or the other, very few people would bite.

OS X has the most beautiful aesthetic of any computer I know. But it's not just the looks that matter. It's the functionality. You don't have a taskbar and an in-window menu bar. You have a dock and a top menu. And that's the best system I've ever worked with. You can't copy that over to Windows or Linux effectively, either.

If a Linux distro was smart, it would emulate OS X rather than Windows, because fundamentally, the design is more efficient and more usable. As long as they copy Windows they're at a disadvantage.
What did you add? linkage?
Daring Fireball does render almost correctly. And why should Gruber care? He makes a living off of his web site alone as it is. Worrying about 4 percent when you're writing for your own site and it's self-sufficient, when worrying about that slim percentage means a lot of pain, isn't exactly a waste of time, but: why bother?