skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mr. Kahr, for one, makes no apologies. "If someone is riskier, he should be paying a higher rate,'' he said. "It's more economically sound. It's fairer for riskier people to pay a higher interest rate, higher fees, whatever it is, than less risky people.

Interesting. What he is really saying is 'what's fair got to do with it? Free markets dissolve the concept.

"If there was a demand for a credit card product that never changed its terms and rates and stuck with the customer no matter what, I'd be running around telling people 'Let's market this wonderful fairness card,'" he said.

"You know -- 'transparency card,' 'rock solid card' -- whatever it may be. I don't believe that that would succeed."
Wouldn't you agree though that if enough people screw themselves, people who haven't screwed themselves start getting screwed, too?
This should be "Five Deliberately Goofy Programming Languages". Strange programming languages are J and Prolog (and APL, as already mentioned).
Hulu now longer claims to be "sold out" of online ad inventory
Credit cards are exploiting holes in our rationality: classical, well known rational choice failures like irrationally valuing x dollars now more than 2x dollars some time in the future

How do you assess that except on a case-by-case basis?
Let's be honest: 75-90% of programmers use terrible languages to write terrible software -- internal applications in vendor-supplied crap languages. They're not special, they understand little more than a few complex if/then/else blocks, and they're the vast majority of programmers. </quote>

Hear, hear
Chalk poisoning. ;)
It's true. That's an important distinction.

But apart from 'information' requirements like those imposed on tobacco in many places (advertising bans, warning labels, mass propoganda campaigns) I don't think any more information would help. If you go that path, you may as well regulate.

What would happen if all regulations beyond basic information availability requirements were lifted? If you could sell people whatever they would buy? We know what happens in lower risk, higher value credit.

The effect of large scale defaults is a flavour of everyone else is screwed.
Um, that's not what the paper does at all. There's exactly one invocation of gcc in the whole paper, and its only point is to enable the (human) developer to see what the calling convention for a function should look like. A couple of sentences after the one you quote we get: "Let's compile it using gcc [...] Generating this file from Scheme is straightforward." and then comes the very first compiler in the incrementally-improving series, which accepts a small integer and outputs assembler code for a function that returns that integer as its value.
That looks like a good resource, thanks!
I agree with the comment on the site pointing out the glaring absence of unlambda.
Infomillionaire
Great Infomillionaire review and great infomillionaire bonus, on this frank kern product called infomillionaire
Definitely one. If your bank account is full of zeroes, then you're not rich, but with a lot of ones, you are (as long as none of them is a sign bit....)
What other product can you purchase, and have the price change after you purchase the product?

What other form of loans/credit can you purchase and then have the interest rate changed without your knowledge and without informing you because of a missed or late payment on a different loan?

What other form of loan can increase your interest rate (cost) based on an increase in the balances on accounts with completely different companies?

I've meet well educated Md's and people with Master's degrees who've gotten screwed by credit card companies. It's not a matter of education, IMHO. It's a matter of deceptive business practices that people don't really get wise to until they've gotten burned badly. Have you ever tried to read through a credit card agreement? I'm a well educated man, and I can't make heads or tails of those agreements.

I'm sorry, but even an industry needed regulation, its the credit card industry.
Showdown: VMware Fusion 2.0 vs. Parallels Desktop 4.0
IBM labs promises five innovations
Stay well away from Zen.
Google, Microsoft insist that they still support net neutrality
Gammelfleisch - Leute Ab Dreisig
Yahoo integrating its mail app with third-party sites a 'game changer'
Free broadband access is a right, not a privilege
Ripping HD Video from Blu-Ray
I'd imagine you'd have to love animals as much as this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Durrell - fascinating life.
Right. He uses grabbing assembly output from gcc to demystify the process. (I guess I worded that poorly.)
Take a look at japanese erotica, esp. alternative media. Hentai manga (erotic comics) is at least half about context - story, characters etc.

But recently I stumbled on something completely different, and a lot like what you're describing: Fate/Stay Night, a visual-novel. Technically an ero-game, in reality it's a book, with image backgrounds and music. One scenario (out of 3 possible) took me about two weeks to read, and it had exactly 2 (two) scenes of sex. But they were worth every line/image, exactly because they were so embedded in the story.

One problem with doing the same in movies is that you can't be as free as in manga. Under-aged characters or incest are "like saying hello" in manga, but I doubt they'd be well received in movies.

Another problem is the quality of actors. To make what you're describing you'd have to start from the other end: have a good show, with good actors/story and put a real sex-scene in it. Otherwise you have with people who are willing to have sex on tape, but you lack everything else.
It's like using "software" as a count noun.
Content-free. Boring. Waste of time.
You mean keep tinkering with the study until it "works"?

If you're not careful, you could get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias on a massive new scale...

It would be interesting to try to find scientifically optimal ways of doing study iteration, or approaches to interpreting the complete (experiment_rev, results)-list from another researcher...
I'm so tired of users who routinely submit links to every single article they write- whether on topic or not- in order to generate ad revenue. Yesterday this user posted a link to some lame article about a cop punching a guy in the face. How about submitting a couple of your favorites that actually might be relevant here? If we like your stuff maybe we'll subscribe to your RSS feed or something. We don't need this site junked up with submissions of every single article from whatever sites a hundred different users are trying to plug.
"Free markets dissolve the concept [of fairness]."

Some would say that free markets implement the concept of fairness. Of course, there are no free markets in the world today, to a first approximation, since all the prices and outcomes are distorted by external agencies, so whether free markets are fair is a bit academic.
The point is that those are metrics which the computer uses to classify the music. You can then find similar music which may not be obvious at first. (Just look at the video to see examples.)
This man makes some very good points.

To which I'll add: expecting to do a huge launch means you will have to be "perfect" in order to catch this theoretical wave of attention: cuz you will just have that one chance! Which leads to much longer cycles, and a hesitancy to ship, because what if things aren't perfect?

That's essentially "Big Upfront Marketing," or BUM. You see where I'm going with this.
I was talking with some friends last night about Facebook, or "Shitebook" as one called it. We all agreed that Facebook was annoying, but not as annoying as MySpace.

The first social networking site that does it right will make a fortune.
This really isn't a useful generalization. Nor factual. If people are genuinely interested in peaking, read "Overachievement" and "Talent Isn't Everything".
Injectable artificial bone developed
David Allen: What Kind of Self-Manager Are You?
Of the 350,000 portfolios on kaChing, 1,500 have actually generated positive returns over the past seven months, which is no mean feat.

The broader market is down almost 40% in that time. But the standard deviation of returns is way up. And it looks like they let you short, too.

I am actually surprised, in this case, that there are so few positive returns. I would expect at least 1% of investors to be betting on financial apocalypse.
Rumor: New Mac Mini Coming to Macworld 2009
Take a tour of Yahoo Mail’s new smarter inbox
Godel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth
Decent article overall (fairly short and not particularly controversial though).

One item I would argue with is the second half of this:
> You need to decide what critical means for you (most often it means losing money).

Just because you're losing money doesn't make it critical, at least not for any site that operates at scale. If you log as critical everytime you knew you're losing small amounts of money, you'll also have log files full of tiny taxes you've paid. "Can't reach US credit card payment provider" probably sounds critical, but isn't all that critical if you can place that order into a stored state and retry it with the provider later. Sure, that loses money because some of those payments will fail, and some users won't retry after an email prompt, but that doesn't make it critical.

In my experience (on the dev side for years and now on the operations side), developers log errors at one level more severe than is actually warranted. ("Divide by zero" is almost never a fatal error from the perspective of the site operations team. :) )
If you log everything you will probably get too many log entries to have a meaningful reaction to exceptions in your log.

In theory, this makes perfect sense. In reality, you will almost always wish you had logged more. Having good detailed data will enable you to discover patterns when you can't recreate problems.

Disk space is cheap. Log it and archive or dispose it later. You can't see what you don't save.
BizSpark Startup of the Day—GameWager
I still get it, but they just pile up on my desk. Not as fun to read now that the editorial page is an AEI loudspeaker. Much better content from my reader/tweetdeck.
http://community.schemewiki.org/?90min-scheme2c In 90 minutes you can write a scheme to c compiler.
The Pomodoro Technique - stop procastinating and make deadlines your friend
The price is not changing after the fact - you agreed to all the rates and changes before you start.

If they want to change those in any other way then they have to contact you and you have the option to stop using the card and pay off the balance at the old rate.

The agreements are not that complicated - people simply don't read. I see it happen all the time with website UI's - the instructions are right there and people never read them.

You don't need to read the full agreement - everything you need to know about the rates is on the back of the application - in a format set by congress. How much more regulation do you need?

Edit: apparently there is more regulation coming: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d70973f2-ca0f-11dd-93e5-000077b076...
Data Visualization:  Modern Approaches
A robot navigation problem [pdf]
What happens when sleepwalkers go online?
> and this feature alone makes me inclined to try out GitHub.

Yes, do it. GitHub is -perfect- for small projects that might otherwise die on your hard-drive. Because it's so easy to fork and there's no "ownership", you can stop maintaining it and if someone finds it useful, they can add their changes it and keep it going. This is one of the best use cases for git/github.
Student loans, personal loans other than credit cards, business loans, preferred stock, corporate, municipal and government bonds (from the issuer's perspective) all change price/rate in response to missed or late payments on other obligations. (In the latter case, often dramatically so.)

Why shouldn't a lender be a able to offer a contract that allows them to increase their fees when the borrower shows themselves to be a less than ideal credit risk at some point in the future? The borrower signed the terms; if they didn't like them, they could have not signed them, or they can pay off and close the account now. Those are the two (non-bankruptcy) avenues for them to get out of the contract that they now don't like having signed.
If you bring up terminator when talking about today's robots, you don't know anything about robotics.

Cluster bombs, landmines, nukes, etc. are all much better kill-bots.

The ethics are also trivial: killing civilians is bad. Torture is bad. Killing armed combatants is ok.

Robots are going to be _more_ ethical, because operators won't react instinctively but logically. No one wants to kill civilians. A robot entering a house in Fallujah will be less trigger happy.

I find myself writing this comment every few weeks. People don't know anything about robotics.
Ask HN: If you could hand-pick an Advisory Board for your startup...
...who would be on it?

Specifically people who will help you on the product, NOT business, side of the startup: who've built great tech / proved to be exciting marketeers / done something new with social apps/community / will be awesome help in building something people want.
4 tech predictions for 2009
In the long run, I do not. In the short run, I think you are confusing the end of the artificially high good times substantially fueled by these people "screwing themselves" with an absolute reduction in relative purchasing power (or other measure of "goodness") for people who didn't participate.

Honestly, even though I bought a house in summer 2007 (which is now worth somewhat less than I paid), I've been made vastly better off by the free and easy credit that others took part in and that I for the most part did not. Sure, the economic turmoil/headwinds now are less pleasant than 2004-2006/early 2007, but that's far from saying "I got screwed by this obviously unsustainable great ride ending."
...which reminds me of a line from R.J. Gatling:

"It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling
Brian's point seems to be key to me - you need both network value, and what he calls "personal value" for that first user.
"What he is really saying is 'what's fair got to do with it?"

Huh? People who are "riskier" paying higher rates and fees IS fair. Would you lend your (presumably hypothetical) deadbeat, drug-addled uncle your entire $100,000 retirement nest egg at the same rate and terms that you'd lend the US government?

Why the hell not?! He's family, and these big mean credit card companies are profit-seeking arms-length lenders, and you would expect them to act morally better (by your standard, not mine) than you would to family? (I would neither expect, nor as an investor, wish for them to do that.)
What other product can you purchase, and have the price change after you purchase the product?

Money is not purchased when it is loaned. It is rented, and lots of rented goods have rate changes.
The Secret Knowledge of Developers that Network Administrators Want
Until this latest hiccup, my simple IRA was making 10-11% a year without me even thinking about it. Also with 5 mil, or 22 mil the types of investments available to you are not 'regular' or something you average hacker has access to.
“So do you seriously think that all these smart people, writing (and collaborating on) all these projects have somehow missed the magic technique that’s going to make Ruby run 60x faster?”

http://fukamachi.org/wp/2008/06/02/maglev-and-the-naiivety-o...
While we're at it, PHP is pretty bad for desktop GUIs and artificial intelligence...
BTW that NYTimes article you cite is boom-town trash. Published in 2007, just before things started going in the shitter. The mentality of the past 5 years was "more, more more" and it's almost sickening to read this account of how greedy these millionaires are/were.

They all chose to live in Silicon Valley and continued to aspire to be hundred-millionares instead of enjoying what they have. Some people don't deserve their wealth.
Everything is gravy except for the part of focus on the input. I cannot express how many times that has annoyed the hell outta me whenever I use a web app that employs that technique.
If network neutrality laws in the US don't pass what do you think will happen?
I was wondering if possibly the internet might be split in two. One network for the people who pay for the filtered internet and another "underground" internet free of restrictions.
Related (and with more information): http://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page
Find the hardest problem that intrigued me personally and start working to solve it. Hire some top-drawer help to have some great minds to bounce ideas around. Keep it simple and focus on bang-for-buck.

Heck. I guess I'd do the same thing as now, except I'd have more resources to do it with.
Have a look at "Information Dashboard Design" by Stephen Few, I also found "The Non-designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams very good but it's more concerned with general design principle then the specific stuff you're interested in.
Depending on the amount of $ I have, I agree with this. If I was only filthy rich, family education would come first. If I was stupidly/insanely/infinitely rich, everyone would benefit from free education.
Diaphragm spasms.
At the moment I'm using a pre-launch signup page with most traffic driven by adwords. Only time will tell how well it works though, Mint famously managed to get 20,000+ signups this way but most sites will have less of a "wow I need this" factor than Mint.

My current conversion rate (i.e. user signing up) is around 25% - I'm not sure if this is good/bad or even reflective of common conversion rates.
A rush of blood to the head would have a cooling effect in addition to providing the needed oxygen. I think that the two go hand-in-hand.
true. but it has a lot more spam, too. why don't they fix it?
Well, he was right. Imagine the invasion of Iraq with swords and men on horses. You would need millions and the deaths would have been in hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Guns end wars quicker.
If you where harmed you can still sue. IMO someone will and anyone on the board who voted for this should probably be sent to jail. However, most of the time these things are kept quiet.
Here is the most general thoughts I have on the subject:

If your site NEEDS users to get users, you need a soft launch where you do whatever you can to get users in and keep them, then you have a bigger launch where you can say "Look what we've done with only x users! This is going to be great!"

If your site doesn't need users, then grow organically, 5 or 10 at a time, and work towards an exponential curve.
Much appreciated - thanks!
Would you rather buy something that isn't too good but is marketed well? Or something that's awesome but poorly marketed?
They all chose to live in Silicon Valley and continued to aspire to be hundred-millionares instead of enjoying what they have. Some people don't deserve their wealth.

So you're saying it's bad if rich people continue to build things instead of switching to being mere consumers?
Malbolge: hello world
North Carolina power company may rent roofs for solar panels
Social Media Getting Out of Hand | TechJaws
I can't find the page where I saw the numbers, but a staggering proportion of American adults don't know basic math well enough to figure out which grocery store has the lowest prices. I assume an even more staggering proportion doesn't really understand how compound interest works.
I think it'll really suck
These and other exploits are well known to most programmers trying to build secure browser applications in the medical and secure document fields. I've heard of a security company that has built their own special one-use browser to try and get IE users to access their services with anything other than IE.
Bond's don't change rate when the company get's into trouble the cost of new bonds goes up.

Student loans are normally fixed interest rate loans and they only charge penalty's when your late in paying them.

The problem with increasing rates when people get into trouble is it tends to force more people over the cliff. Let's say you owe 20k at 10% and make 50k/year. You get hospitalized for 5k and your old and new rate becomes 33%. You have gone from a 2k /year to 5k/year when you need to borrow 5k more. If the company lending you 5k wants to charge you 33% interest that's fine you can focus on paying them back first and get free of debt but when everyone starts raising your rates while your in trouble it's almost impossible to get out of the hole.

PS: Not to mention demonstrating a lack of good credit is an ill defined concept. Loss of a job reduces credit worthiness even if you make all your payments.
This is more of a popular myth than reality. It's more common in math than in other fields, and mathematicians peak earlier than, say, writers (35, as opposed to 55, would be my guesses) but it's not actually the norm for a mathematician to do his best work in his 20s. Those stories are cases of the exception proving the rule.
The Discipline of Content Strategy
More importantly, I disagree that building great companies is not enjoying what they have.
Many of us would love some digital money/payments/savings/loan fair system. There has to be some way for a startup to turn bigger than Google just with that.
I suppose because it is still risky to depend on another company for one's own business model.
This suggests an opportunity for a credit card startup that:

* Charges no fees of any kind

* Charges a rate that is determined by a publicized equation where the only variables are the amount borrowed, time (in, say, days), and the rate.
Downturn Spurs "Survival Panic" for Some in the U.S.
In fairness LOLCODE is very readable and understandable.
The big difference at this point in time, as best I can tell, is Twine's ability to auto-discover relevant content tags for you when you submit links -- tags I might not have entered or certainly that I wouldn't have taken the time to enter since I never enter more than four or five tags but it is not uncommon for twine to discover a dozen or more. Given that richer set of tags, it is more likely that it can do a better job finding related content and interesting linkages between content.

I think Twine, as it exists now, is really an app to feed their internal engine with interesting data that they'll one day use to reveal their real application and it's not to difficult to imagine that such an application might involve a switch from passive data collection to active data discovery with intelligent summarization, but that's just my best guess.
I spent ~1.5 years working on an app that would do just that. I've since put the project on hold: the problem is just so huge that it's very hard to whittle it down to "just" an app that can be made within a reasonable amount of time, and have it be useful.
I just think they are too many social something sites out there at this time. The trend should slow down a bit to allow users to awake from the ongoing drunk fest of social tools.
Ask HN: Proof of concept for my web site
I recently had an idea and put this together: http://www.me-vc.com

Since financing is a well-explored area and micro-financing is such a hot topic, I'm sure I'm missing something.

What do you think about it? You can leave comments on the site or here. I will update the site with some of your comments as this process goes forward. I'm available at: david@me-vc.com

Thanks for your help!