skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'm in the process of closing on a place, myself.

i did all homework beforehand, researched the area, used zillow and craigslist and the local MLS. i didn't trust any of the data provided on any of the sites. i used past sales of comparable homes, price per sqft, etc..

once i got done with that, i contacted the person who appeared to be in control of the most properties that i was interested in. sometimes, to make a sale, a realtor won't double dip if they're both selling and buying agent, so it'll be a discount to you.

after all that was said and done, i got lucky. a lot of this is about timing, being able to wait around for a good deal or speed ahead full tilt to slide in on one in time. i found an estate sale that absolutely wanted to close by the end of the year, and as a result, i'm buying at 25% under the appraisal value, and the appraised value is very conservative because of the market. after things level out, it'll likely appraise another 20% higher.

my tips would be to simply become an expert on what the trends are in the area you want to buy in so that you'll know exactly what a good deal is. unless you absolutely need to move in by a certain date, take your time. the more flexible you are, the better deal you'll land. and once you become an expert in your area, find a realtor who is also an expert there.
Fantastic! Congratulations Elon!

A big win for the private space industry, and a big win for taxpayers.
A lot of economists have been saying for a long time that overinvestment in real estate is a structural problem of the United States economy. It's sure not clear to me how buying a McMansion in a sprawling exurb increases productivity.
I believe that is what they say in England, judging from movies.
I see downmods on above comment without explanation. On a whim, this prompted me to say a little more:

The more OSX crosses into mainstream consumer territory, the better. I only run Linux myself, but having been a long time developer and troubleshooter for Windows, I am seriously psyched about seeing the OSX market grow and grow. Getting over the stigmas of "coolness" and elitism is a good step in a positive direction. Whether you like it or not, these stigmas are out there (I doubt people frequenting this website were lured into Macs for this particular aspect of them).
There was a hypothesis in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct that children's ability to learn languages is not an innate, magical part of being a child. Rather, it's because learning languages is hard, and so people will avoid doing so whenever they have a choice. Everyone learns a first language because otherwise they can't communicate. People who have to speak one language at home and one at school (or a language with one parent and a different language with another parent) end up speaking two languages. But the reason people don't learn languages late in life isn't that they can't: it's that they don't need to, and their attention can be better spent on other things.

My dad spoke and sang to me a little bit in Chinese when I was a toddler, but it never stuck. I suspect this is because I could always revert to English and he'd talk back to me in English, so there was no reason for me to learn Chinese. Some of my cousins - the ones whose parents were more strict about speaking Chinese at home - did end up picking it up.

Similarly, this also explains why immersion works, why immigrant ghettoes prevent language acquisition, and why people retain accents. If you're dropped in a foreign culture and have to learn the language to survive, you'll manage it whether you're 10 or 60. If you have other people who speak your language that you can depend on, there's much less reason to learn a foreign language. And if you can speak well enough to be understand (as most people with accents can), there's no reason to improve that last 10% (which, in true 90-10 form, takes 90% of the effort) to make yourself sound like a native speaker.
Since we have this day off because it is a Christian high holy day, and since Christianity was the primary religion of our civilization for the last 1,700 years or so, I don't have any problems celebrating Christmas as an unbeliever. I even went to a Christmas service and listened to some solid carol performances and a nice little speech by a priest. It makes me feel connected with my history.

For somewhere around 1,500 years (since the Christians co-opted Christmas), people have been doing almost exactly the same thing on December 25th. That's kind of cool to think about and participate in.

On the down side, it makes me realize just how radical the coming post-religious world is. This is going to be a century that is more eventful than we would probably like.
There are a lot of smart people on reddit, dons, cgibbard, sigpfe and slava_pestov to name a few.
He's not asking, he's wishing.
put it into a high yield FDIC online savings account (i use HSBC direct). your money won't disappear if the bank is FDIC insured (unless you have more than $100k in a single account, in which case, spread it out across banks until its less than $100k)

save until you have 4-6 months of living expenses tucked away. you don't want to be caught with your pants down in this economic environment.

after that, you can worry about investing money. i'd suggest starting a retirement account, either 401k or roth (probably roth from the sounds of your situation).

regularly and unwaiveringly put money into it every month (even if its just a little -- the important part is that you're doing it and growing it). invest your retirement savings into a solid, diverse handful of index funds.

index funds are key, because the cost is minimal. invest and forget it. retirement is long-term. even after this bad downturn, the market will go back up. i haven't touched anything in my retirement account. you don't want to be the idiot who sold on the bottom and later has to buy again when the price is back up.

after that is all taken care of, then you can buy some gold, or stock up on roombas and iphones if you have cash to spare. the important thing is to take care of what needs to be taken care of. save for an emergency, and prepare at least a bit for retirement.

edit: just noticed you're from germany, not the US. my bad. i'm not sure how FDIC would apply to you or if there are any similar institutions in european banks. might want to check into that.
I recommend this book:

William Bernstein, The Four Pillars of Investing.

(I also read Andrew Tobias' book, which is decent enough, although he's more of a light read.)

The super-short version: Index funds.

The Impatient Person's version: First, pay off all consumer debt (credit cards and car loans) and amass a pile of emergency cash equal to three to six months' living expenses. Anything extra after that goes: one third in a whole-market domestic stock index fund, from Vanguard or Fidelity if you're in the USA (an S&P500 fund is a bearable approximation), one third in an international stock index fund with low fees; one third in bonds. If you can figure out how to buy bonds denominated in another currency, that might be nice, but watch out for the fees.

Better, however, to just read the book, which discusses the principle of diversification and drills you on basic skills (distrust most financial industry pros; don't pretend that you or anybody else can reliably pick individual stocks; don't panic in every bear market because the darned things happen on a regular basis; etc.)

Don't put undue faith in gold. And don't feel that you have to go crazy buying consumer goods before the prices go up: At the moment, we're as likely to have a period of severe price deflation as anything else. Just look at what the sag in the economy has done to the price of gas, and everything connected to it.
Students who captured crows for tagging the first time were continually harrassed by the birds afterwards.

Now when students capture birds for tagging they wear masks and hats.
Article is from Summer 2007.
Are you in Germany or the U.S? I don't know much about Germany's legal protections or the stability of their currency. I'd imagine that given their past experience with hyperinflation, they're pretty careful.

In the U.S, I think cash is about the safest thing you can hold, in an FDIC insured account under the insured limit (currently $250k). Don't believe any of the stuff you read on Reddit about hyperinflation; Redditors are largely idiots and don't know a damn about economics.

If hyperinflation does hit, you will have bigger problems than the security of your savings, notably how to get food and how to avoid being killed in a riot. Your best bet here is the same as if there is no crisis: friends, skills, and a reputation for being a decent human being.

The depression-era advice of "neither a borrower nor lender to be" is also appropriate. In a crisis, the fewer financial ties you have to other organizations, the fewer potential credit risks. Pay off your credit cards, pay off your car loans, pay off your mortgage if you can, and avoid holding bonds or other debt on risky organizations.
Unfortunately I have to agree with some ideas in this article. Long time ago I've had artificial intelligence forum, and kept it alive for two or three years, but decided to give up on it - because most of posts where exactly philofophing on theme "AI", not really useful. You cannot make a program based on those posts. Also one of comments here also suggests that "Software is applied philosophy." - I have to agree on that one as well. I've seen software source code, which were "overabstract", or over philosophical - if you could say so. Finally I've concluded that native language walks hand by hand with programming languages, and they should become one language eventually. Now I'm looking deeper into programming languages, especially C and C++, and how they are constructed, and trying to find resemblance to native language. Unfortunately trying to extract the essence/core of languages is non-trivial thing. I have hit basically the same wall as psilophy - operating on I-don't-know-what by using I-don't-know-which-terms using I-don't-know-which-logic. Also on some wiki page language definition page I have found a mention that languages in which you can express easily one thing, it's more difficult to express another thing. This basically means that exact atomic terms or definitions does not exist, and it's up to language to define them, and fluent communication is a result of language construction. So basically any language can be defined, using any terms, side effect is "how easily language can be used". Philosophy walks on shaky ground, since they try to define their own terms, concepts and logic, (or in other words their own language) after a while that newly defined language becomes completely detached from reality of this world. Or it might be even not completely detached, but not understandible by most of people, after that it still can be considered as detached.

I'm afraid of such detached situations, and so I'm trying to get highest possible abstraction of source code taking into account current programming environment / developers mental world. Each small abtraction step, which I'm achieving is one step forward - I can identify of what was done correctly and what was done wrong and take into consideration on making the next step. Unfortunately the further I go - more resistance I feel is hitting me back.

For example programming language compilers are made by whole teams, and architecture and design - even if they exists require enormous effort to develop similar compiler.

I however still think there is a way to simplify things, but it's very hard to find a better way / solution, as it is probably with philosophy. I'm inspired by language like Toki Pona, and that what drives me forward.
I feel the same way. Being an outsider, who cares about the bickering between coding groups. It's still a nice programming language to code in and improve on.
Yes, I think that could be it. Thank you!
But man, this is expensive material. Crazy expensive.
Did you read the article at all?

Take the case of the breast cancer charity which, from the article, was pulling in $71mm from charity walks using his services. They stopped using his services and continued the walks and are taking in $11mm now.

You might argue that several other variables might have also changed, but a 6.5x factor is hard to ignore.
We've been through several anti-religious periods in history, so I doubt we're anywhere near "post-religious". The arguments today are basically the same as two hundred years ago.

I'm with you that it is interesting and pleasurable to participate in historical traditions and ceremonies revolving around religion/philosophy -- as long as no coercion is involved. And it isn't.

Most of western thought came out of either Athens or Jerusalem (or a combination of the two). It's neat to see what parts of modern thought are still in various religious traditions and vice-versa.

Cool stuff.
Yeah, that sounds about right, and command log mode locks like a good
base to build from. The real trick will probably be in coming up with
tasks that are both interesting and useful.

I've set up a Github thingy at
https://github.com/almost/emacspractice/

Let me know your Git hub username and I'll add you as a collaborator.

We could maybe use the wiki to put some ideas together, that or just
use some org-mode files in the repository itself.
I truly hope that Zed has some "just fucking do it" left in him after the slaps in the face he's taken from some of the Ruby/Rails community. If he makes good on his plans, stops talking about himself, and lets his actions and intelligence speak for themselves, I'll gain a world of respect for him.

Oh, and Zed: "Any more" is written "any more" when referring to additional items. "I will not write rants anymore" would be grammatically correct, however. Just a bit of constructive criticism. :)
I have seen some Bangladeshi immigrants in Japan speaking Japanese fluently. They got to Japan well in their twenties. Necessity, mother & invention come to mind.
To me philosophy is a way to make life easier. Philosophy is also a way to make technology solutions easier.

I see no conflict between using the same tool for both types of work. However I would not go so far as to say both types of work are identical. As a deep pragmatist, I pick and choose philosophies of living and idea development concentrating on what works and ditching what doesn't. It doesn't matter to me that on different projects, or on different days, different philosophies which might be mutually contradictory are required. Philosophy is always a work in progress. I have a small enough moral sense that stealing what works isn't a problem and a small enough ego that I don't worry with trying to come up with the ultimate philosophy of everything.
Zed is dead. Long live Zed!
Using JPA and Hibernate with Maven
How to set up Maven (pom.xml) to use JPA with Hibernate as persistence provider.
One of the puzzlers in language acquisition is the Joseph Conrad phenomenon: that some aspects of language learning (vocabulary acquisition, for example) can be picked up at much later ages than others (in Conrad's example, a spoken accent that sounds like a native speaker's accent, which Conrad did not have in his acquired English). I'll have to check the Pinker book reference; thanks for bringing that up.
is this a web frontend to bitlbee? looks very similar in functionlity.
This is the best article I’ve read on how Arrington developed TechCrunch into what it is today
well if you are in emacs you could just start up erc...
So as long as the charity compartmentalizes their income into different groups (depending on source) and pay the Porches from one group you're OK with it?

Your line between OK/!OK seems really arbitrary to me.
not surprising that python is competitive...afaik haskell also crushes erlang in lightweight threading benchmarks (supposedly the core strength of erlang).
One similarity certainly has to be zombie companies that the government props up, to the hindrance of creative destruction.

I think the industries that are affected aren't the most innovative in the US. No zombie web companies are getting bailed out, right?
Nice article. Anybody want to try this with the new CPython multiprocess module?
my favourite posts are when HN startups post back saying how fantastically they're doing - well done, its a real achievement, ESPECIALLY in this climate.
Crows "finding" money is problematic, as it might not be "lost"... intelligence (evolution, flow of water, etc) has a way of finding the shortest path. It seems tricky to specify the goal clearly, so the crows are trained to find only "lost" money. Perhaps only reward them for coins that were on the ground? As opposed to in someone's pocket, purse, on a shop counter, in a cash register, in a bank... hmm, this experiment could end badly.

Crows more intelligent than monkeys, he claims in the following (1 min) video. Could that be true? http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/03/taking_over_the_...

We try to kill off adaptive pests like roaches, rats and crows, but we're breeding them to be parasites ... a better goal ... is to seek an interspecies harmony.

Lovely idea! Reminds me of how parasites became symbiotes, then integrated, as has been argued for some cellular machinery (eg mitochondria and chloroplasts) by Lynn Margulis: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3IIWSOA7G9YKL . It also reminds me of "The Evolution of Cooperation" Axelrod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
If you like this stuff check this out:

http://chrishecker.com/Advanced_Prototyping

Edit: OK, this time I succumbed to karma whoring and posted it as a news item; make any comments in that page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409861
Advanced prototyping
It's focused in games, but I think most lessons apply to all software prototyping.

Be sure not to miss the .mp3 to listen to while you browse through the slides.
Christmas Tree in Your Unix Shell
2009: Year of the Hacker, YC poster quoted in nytimes
I think 2009 is going to be the year of the hustler, which isn't mutually exclusive with the term hacker.
Imagine a society with 30 million waitresses and 5 farmers. Those extra waitresses are useless, and such a society cannot work. The other way round - 30 million farmers and 5 waitresses - people will serve themselves and there will be a lot of excess food to be exported.

Service industries that function as an add-on for a manufacturing industry needs to be specifically calibrated to the volume of the industry, otherwise the excess is wastage. The other way round does not hold.

You have to understand what fundamental value in a world economy is. A waitress is no value, a programmer is a lot of value, and a guy working in the financial industry is basically the same as a waitress. He's an add-on for other industries, and the volume has to be calibrated also.

If a country produces a car out of some metal in a mine, it created real value, irrelevant of if this car was exported or not. If a country produces a waitress who can be trained in 2 days and simply moves food from one place to another, the value it created is really minimal.

I'm not saying that the service industry in the U.S is too small or too large, I don't know enough about it to say. I'm just saying that the backbone of any stable and real economy lies in constantly creating real value.
Important qualifier: for iPod Touch, mic only works for 2nd-generation units.
While you're correct, I think the commenting and voting tendencies of the overall site population tend to drown them out. Intelligent discussions on Reddit seem to have a higher chance of being derailed by e.g. people posting 4chan cliches for cheap laughs.

Of course, he's flattering us, and he got voted way up...
First you said:

Real value is created only in manufacturing, industry and agriculture. Service, finance and so on are add-ons to those fields.

Then you said:

I did not say that all service industries do not create value.

Actually, you did, in the comment I just quoted, less than a day earlier. What is wrong with your brain, child?

Value is created by scarcity.

Not only is that a stupid theory of value, it also fails to justify the conclusions you're trying to justify with it: waitresses (and the services they provide) are quite a bit scarcer than, say, corn.

Maybe you should test your theory of value by trying to give up something abundant for a few days. Try oxygen. Then you can tell me if oxygen has any value.
Allocating money properly is not creating any value at all. It's just a regulatory service that works according to some rules - it's a bürocratic step in economic system, and though it is possible to create some valuable people by then developing skills or experience, but they don't create value. They move value around.
When I say "service" I mean things like waitressing or so on. Programming belongs to me in 'industry', so when the comment following mine categorized programming into service, I tried to explain what I meant.
It's not even so much about the money. I just find it pathetic that there is a market for a utility which produces fart sounds. Hell, it could be free and I'd still find it sad.

I mean, okay, maybe farting was funny when I was five. But if you're old enough to own an iPhone, you should be old enough to have a slightly more refined sense of humor.

Granted, "refined" is extremely subjective and arbitrary, but you asked so there you go ;)
Stop giving this guy popularity! Merely breathing hot air and having a fiesty online "persona" should not make you newsworthy (although, sadly, it clearly does).

He had some good points a year ago. Now, not so much.
I think you should probably look at them once a week. Don't get too obsessed with pure traffic stats as they can be misleading!
You have completely failed to articulate a meaningful distinction between autoworkers and waitresses, or between "real value" and whatever its opposite is (illusory value?).

Imagine a society with 30 million waitresses and 5 farmers. Those extra waitresses are useless, and such a society cannot work. ... A waitress is no value, a programmer is a lot of value,...

Unless you have robots to plow and harvest (which is harder than it sounds) being constructed by other robots, a society with 30 million programmers and 5 farmers can't work either; neither can you have a society with 30 million iron-ore miners or 30 million autoworkers and 5 farmers.
I don't think Stackless is nearly as well-known as it should be. It has a solid value proposition and is blazing fast in my experience as well.
One recent HN thread on the current state of this research:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404248

The conclusion was, I think, that psychologists no longer believe that children learn languages more easily than adults.