skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a middle class American who paid for my home for 24 years month after month, who did not speculate, nor took any risk, this guy pisses me off. They stole my equity. Period. Plain and simple.

It was their fancy methods of making money that stole the money for my retirement, my children's education, and home improvements. I wish they would take their 2 trillion dollars and fly to the moon.

These people are scum. Harvard is just a fancy school for thieves. You can dress up a pig, and its still a pig.

When these folks wanted to make money they changed the bankruptcy laws, freed up credit, and started charging 30-40 percent interest on credit card loans.

They freed up credit in the home loan markets and allowed speculators to drive up the price of homes 3-4 times their value. And then when the bust comes, they cry their eyes out because they are afraid to invest.

They are fear based because the days of thievery are at an end. It sickens me to see someone post this stuff as if they are our only answer to the future.

The real answer has several components:

1. Tie our money to a real standard. Gold.

2. Loan money to middle America from Banks ran by our country and limit interest earnings to 1 percent. This means housing, student loans, car loans with a cap of 1% payback for fiat money borrowed to pay for it.

3. Get rid of income tax. Sales tax only.

4. Eliminate sales of stocks which do not provide a minimum dividend payment monthly. You can't pay your dividends, you go bankrupt. Period.

5. No more funny money games with derivatives, credit swaps, bundling, blah bu blah. To hell with free wheeling economics. It does not work and it only helps the greedy bastards that continue to screw us middle Americans that only seek stability in our futures.

6. Money = Greed. Control how much any one entity is allowed to own based on productivity. Cap it based on ability to produce goods, services, or IP. No CEO should be paid more than 50 times the lowest level employee in the company. Think we would be talking about minimum wage if this were the law?

7. Force people to save by taking 1% of all sales tax paid every year and allocating it to a privatized social security account.

8. Eliminate Unemployment. If you can print money the way we do, then spend it on creating government jobs meant to help people. If money is not tied to a gold standard, then its really just perception anyway. Print it and give it directly to folks that will use it to live better than poverty levels.

9. Free Health Care for everyone. Pay doctors the same level you pay a money manager and the doctor shortage is gone in 6 years. HMO's? Private medicine? How do you justify this in the worlds richest country with 42 million men, women, and children, not able to afford it?

It is only a matter of time before we eliminate money entirely. 500 years? A thousand? One day nano tech and robotics are going to completely eliminate labor required to fulfill our basic necessities. Star Trek Communism will replace this greed driven economy.

Live long and prosper...
and one way around this is http://keepitlocked.net/archive/2008/11/07/preventing-clickj...
Our business model couldn't be much simpler: build machines that save people and utilities energy and money, sell them at a profit. But it's still tough raising money.
<moody> "a[:] feels a bit too much like Perl" - doesn't feel like Perl at all!
working on the engine is no different really. Remove part a, b, c, d to get to part e. And then replace that with the new part and put everything back together.

Most things can be pretty much taken apart with a socket wrench.
... and then some conscientious time traveler goes back in time and tightens up the truck's brakes a little ...
Expanding on the issue of finding bugs, everyone should check out git's "bisect" feature for when regressions crop up: http://lwn.net/Articles/317154/
Giz Explains: Why There Isn't a Perfect Ebook Reader
Happiness is...
It isn't total vapor when the OLPC already was a compelling proof of concept.
Alexa Web Ranking Update | TechJaws
Or failed to save their dieing business.
Also, it's "Mercurial." "Mercury" is the former name of a pretty awful commercial bug tracker now known as HP Quality Center.
What's interesting to me here is the different response of Kent Beck and Bob Martin. Beck went ballistic, attacking Spolsky with little support for his positions. [Martin's response][1] was clever and humorous.

Kudos to Martin.

[1]: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/02/06/on-open-let...
Minds, Machines, and Intelligence: A Conversation with Eric Horvitz
Time /did/ tell, this article is 2 years old, and the forgotten blog + traffic stats both show that the business is dead.
Is this appropriate for HN?
HTTPU is not HTTP. That's why it has a different name...
Project Management + Mechanical Turk
That was pretty awesome, thanks for sharing.
The "interface engineers" are the developers, and the "designers" forget that Photoshop is static and web apps are not?

The problem is that they hired the wrong people.

Perhaps they'd prefer to hire "interface designers" instead. I hear they understand that Photoshop is not static, and do not use bizarre print advertising terms like "lockups."

Netflix has never had a good UI. They have a great business, but the UI is fair to middling at best.

If there's any doubt about this, just remember the system for reordering your queue, which involved entering arbitrary numbers into text fields.
By putting it on Object (this is my ruby side speaking) you avoid the same thing.
Ask HN: Is there a RSS feed for new links?
The RSS link at the bottom of the Hacker News site lists out the sites that get enough votes. But what about the new sites? Is there a RSS feed for those?
M&Ms.

They were working for "peanuts".
What Do We Mean By a "Disease of Aging" Anyway?
At any rate, for a country in the Middle East, they are a lot more open to Western values than anybody else on the peninsula.
90% of journalism is crap. But then, 90% of everything is crap.

h/t Ted Sturgeon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Dubai is a constitutional monarchy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy

But this doesn't excuse the fact that "debtor's prison" is a horrible, horrible, horrible concept in place in Dubai.
In Lassez Faire economy anyone who creates a systemic risk discounts said risk by how big they are in relation to how big the system is.
Follow up: How to write a Linux virus
Indie iPhone Game Design: Triphids - a Developer's hindsight
This is a decent way to estimate the average score. But sometimes you're not really trying to estimate the average score. You're really trying to estimate the score that the user who's currently viewing the page would give it, especially for someone like Amazon (ie, People Like You Rated this Product as 1-star).

His estimator might be a decent one at picking the average score, but in Amazon's case, it's not a great estimator of the rating I would give the product I am viewing. If you have such an extensive record of my past-purchases, use it to predict how I would like certain products! Surely the 5-star ratings of SICP are more applicable to me than the 1-star ratings.
Not just time available but also units sold; if you are looking for a niche item, you don't expect a lot of ratings.
Wow.. that sounds seriously impressive.

Single-page print version: http://www.networkworld.com/community/print/38366
Heroku gave us an example of how to do it right:
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/1/12/whats_up_at_heroku...

In short: keep both versions.
Hitler was also at the front in WWI. Lots of opportunities to get yourself (nearly) killed there.
Ruby 1.9.1 & Friends
Well, with the caveat that the surest way to kill humor is to explain it, I thought it was funny because option 1 was a super-simple equation, option 2 was a super-simple equation, and the "right" answer was Quantum Rocket Surgery.

(I suppose it's funnier if you've done research. Roughly 88.69% of all research literature is some dude trying to "improve" a simple model with pages of mathematics. Not that this guy was wrong -- it was just evocative.)
Give me one example where you would ever want a copy of a tuple rather than another reference to it.
We've had troubles raising money, too. Our core business is making real things, we have technology no one else has, it fits a under-served and well-defined market niche, and there's tons of customer interest. The deals that were available before just aren't there.
Agreed. The deep copy is much much better. Consider this code:

>>> a = [1, [2, 3]]
>>> b = list(a) # or a[:], they are identical
>>> a[1].append(4)
>>> a.append(5)
>>> a
[1, [2, 3, 4], 5]
>>> b
[1, [2, 3, 4]]

If you had used copy.deepcopy, b would now be [1, [2, 3]] as intended.
I also had to modify the portaudio Makefile to remove the -arch flags, and it worked then.
ah yes, I see :)

here I was thinking this was news.ycombinator.com, I should check those submissions better I guess!

The site does seem to be functional though, I just signed up for a trial account and that seems to have worked just fine.

Any zoto.com users here ? Apparently the CEO is
called 'Kord Campbell', http://www.blogger.com/profile/2622955
How Not To Sort By Average Rating

Or, "How to Make Your Host Very Happy Because You Suddenly Have to Move Up To a Server With Double the Processing Cycles"
I have no problem with Hacker News' focus. It's useful because it's narrower than "all startups."
Answering the question: “Was this a successful project?”
I hope it's not just me, but there should be an equation based on objective measures about the desired product and the teams quality and experience that could determine the best development methodology.

Obviously this would require a lot more fundamental research, but I don't see it as an impossible task. I am continually surprised at the lack of this type of research in computer science.
Thanks for posting that! Saw it a while ago, but had forgotten about it.
I'm kinda in the Cory Doctorow school of thought. Whenever I see it reported that this or that e-book reader will soon be the thing, I can't help but think of: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/03/cory-doctorow-you-d...

Those waiting for the e-book to "arrive" may have already missed the fact that it's here.
"I think the biggest potential issue with the H1-B program is that employees are bound to a particular company once hired, but it looks like at least the major companies pay their foreign employees on par with American workers. That means they're not hiring to keep wages down, but instead to get the best people."

Uh, if the second statement were true, then the first condition would not be necessary
Why bother trying to predict the future?
A few years ago I wrote a little script for what you're describing or similar (but very simple, no indexing) using a Perl module for fuzzy/approximate matching; I think it was this one: http://search.cpan.org/~jhi/String-Approx-3.26/Approx.pm
Github is YCombinator (I think, right?)

Not AFAIK: "We had a talk and agreed right away: no outside funding. We wanted to keep the whole company."

http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/how-github-used....
for python loving folks, who don't want to miss out on the fun...

you can do this easily with pygame.org too... Or with pyaudio(a good wrapper of portaudio).

Also the latest pygame pre-releases include a wrapper for portmidi... so you can do midi sounds easily.
And Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", if I remember correctly.
I am for more immigration. My father was immigrant to the US. The H1b program is slanted against both immigrants and the native programmers. Against the first by making them depend on a particular company and against the second by making them compete against the first. Let programmers immigrate to the US based only on their skills and then let them both compete for jobs and let the companies compete for their skills.
Greenspan Says He Was Mystified by Subprime Market
Abolish legal tender laws and see whose money people trust.
Wonder how much traffic they had at the time. There don't seem to be any public stats out there that go so far back.
They can be. But if they are shallow, dogmatic assertions, they often (and should) go negative and stay negative.

I've seen lots of good, fair comments with strong opinions (whether I agree with them or not) go initially negative -- early downvotes from the anonymous censorious underemployed peanut gallery -- then creep back up to small positive values after a full day's cycle. Those are much better comments than any pandering +20 one-liner.
Grants for housing
If you have children and a hard time paying the rent, here is are a few free grant secrets to help you.
The problem with that E-Ink is expensive, slow (you can't
have moving cursors or any kind of video) and boring.

The price will decrease once the technology behind its production improves (and people stop there willingness to actually spend that much), it will also speed up over time (its just how things work. To address the last point: WTF?

Secondly, from the Pixel Qi site:

Our screens use 1/2 to 1/4 the power of a regular LCD
screen, and when integrated carefully with the device can
increase battery life between charges by 5-fold.

and from Giz:

Jepsen says it's even possible to get a week of battery
life from LCD tech, of course depending on the device the
screens are embedded in.

I really don't see how those two can statements can coexist. Currently we get around 8 hours from labtops, improve that by her 1/4 estimate and we now get 32 hours which fall short of our weeklong estimate.

Lastly:

Infrastructurally and perhaps historically speaking, the
odds are in LCD's favor.

I'm going to need this one spelled out for me...
That wasn't my point. My point was that [:] conserves the type of sequence.

Also [:] returns a reference to the existing tuple instead of a copy:

>>> a = (1, 2, 3)

>>> id(a)
3081276268L

>>> id(a[:])
3081276268L
Journalist, news network or blogger -- it all comes down to brand. "Do you trust the source?", for millions, Fox news is a "trusted source" in spite of published memos from the business side telling editorial staff to change stories. I haven't seen a trust system implemented on the web I'd have confidence in to resolve to automatically suggest a trust weight either.
Why do boys and girls prefer different toys?
Darwin on a Godless Creation: "It's like confessing to a murder"
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 74 - All Mashed Into One
Why does she keep saying stuff like that it's a "a hybrid approach that incorporates investment/incubation theory" when it doesn't invest at all?
OK, I came to this late, but there are other solutions.

On Dawdle, we spent a ton of time thinking about this. For their Marketplace sellers, eBay does number one; Amazon does number two. What we do is not three, but something that I think is better: we just rank our users.

Look, you can't ask buyers on the site to rank any particular transaction against all others; that's crazy talk, especially as you get into large numbers and people forget about all their experiences ever on a site. But we guide all our buyers to leave feedback of 3 - not 5 or a positive. The hope is that you'll have a semi-normal distribution of all feedback. Then, and only then, do we do all sorts of stuff to that. We have bonus points for good behaviors, some of which we talk about (shipping quickly, using Delivery Confirmation, linking your Dawdle account to Facebook, MySpace, XBL, PSN, etc) and some we don't. Then we just throw the ranks on a five point scale.

We call this our Seller Rating, not a feedback rating. Feedback is just the beginning of the process. KFC starts with the chicken - necessary but not sufficient - then adds their 13 herbs and spices. That's what we do, and it's why we don't even allow users to see the individual feedbacks. They're designed to be useless individually, and I don't want some new eBay expat bitching about not having 100% feedback.

Does this mean that some people are going to end up with 1s on a 5 point scale? You betcha. And we don't want them anyway - they're more hassle than they're worth. They can go to eBay or Amazon.
The 7 Stages of Design Grief
Appreciating evolution on Darwin's 200th birthday
go outside and run. works wonders.
The simple formula is to assume a Dirichlet prior. This gives you

score = positives / (negatives + x)

and you can fiddle with x to get something that looks reasonable.
Again, interesting analogy. Big lumbering dinosaurs were the peak of their evolutionary line, too, but the small rodents are who survived and thrived after the asteroid hit.
I think the important part was when integrated carefully with the device. Laptops spend energy on other things than just the LCD. However, reducing energy in other places has diminishing returns when the LCD is draining a lot of juice. Take the 17 inch mackbook's battery and use it to power a dell mini 9 with this type of LCD and you might get a weeks worth of use (7 * 8hours + standby) out of the thing.
Turning skin cells into stem cells
But regular expressions are not neat tricks, they're basic features of Perl, and are immediately understandable once you've learned about them.
YouTube Hopes To Boost Revenue With Video Downloads
I've given it a spin, and must say that I like it a lot. Thanks a lot meese_!
Because the vast majority of users out there can barely click a mouse, much less write code to define sorting functions.
Will We Live On Mars? (Predictions From 2000)
The big question I have is this: how did they insure that cashers returned the money to the core group?

If you walked out with a fistful of cash, what would motivate you to give most (some?) of it back? The promise of more money in the future?
I'm not sure if they meant con in the premeditated, organised sense. But there are probably all sorts of shady dealings going on.

Economies like Dubai's (& Hong Kong & other gateways) tend to attract money launderers, scams & other such 'cons.' There were probably builders that knew it couldn't last but built anyway.
Not to mention a planet, an element on the periodic table, and a badass Roman god (perhaps in exactly the reverse order, in terms of which came first).
The Real Risks of Obama's BlackBerry
Cloud Idea using GridGain – Get VC Funded in 90 Days
Shut Up and Go Create Something
I'm sure the day will come when RMDBs will be a distant memory, but sometimes it so comforting to open a database and see all the data in pretty columns and rows.
Search Engines: Specify your canonical URL
It seems lax transactional guarantees bit banks in the rear. I am not sure how difficult it would be to avoid parallel use of cards at different ATMs (especially given the inter-bank nature of ATMs), but it was not done, and this weakness was taken advantage of.
Are you suggesting that a cryptic regex is as easy to read as [:] or [::-1]? If you know python, that syntax is clear at a glance, dense regular expressions are not comparable.

Basic language features don't need comments, difficult to read lines do.
Rocky Lothka about Oslo
Oslo == Access Reloaded?
The promise of not getting shot in retaliation in the future?
How the Crash Will Reshape America
Social Media: Bull Market on Users, Bear Market on Revenue
numpy arrays do not copy on `[:]` therefore an explicit `.copy()` is required.

`copy.copy()` makes a shallow copy of both a ordinary list and numpy arrays.
The Big PHP IDE Test
shameless plug

Create one with Feedity - http://feedity.com
Moonlight Gives Linux Users Silverlight Compatability
Why does it need to be a Firebug plugin? If it were just JavaScript it could work in any browser.
hey im bored!i lifted weights dont listen too me you sack of losers
Google Latitude keeps tabs on friends' locations
The article does not state that there was any sort of profit sharing involved.

People involved in online fraud rarely collaborate with each other. You never know who's on the other end and your anonymity is your biggest strength. It's more of a marketplace where you buy cards, skimmers, or accounts from vendors and then go out and use them on your own.

Some guy probably sold these cards (or just the data to encode them) at a hefty price with the disclaimer that they had to be used on a certain date and time at any ATM.
There may be a good point in here somewhere, but it's not clear what it is. Relational databases don't scale, so... try CouchDB! or Drizzle! ...which also don't scale. What?

For a more complete list of RDBMS-killing science projects, try http://www.metabrew.com/article/anti-rdbms-a-list-of-distrib... (discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=440687 )
CPM for a job site must be something really nice, at least $5. Perhaps they have around 50M pageviews per month, so that would make $250,000 / month. Maybe valuation should be about $15M? Indeed got $5M in funding, so that seems fine. Simplyhired got $17M, that does seem on the high side.
It doesn't have to be totally custom. Just solicit a few representative types and allow all those. This also solves the problem of not everyone knowing how to write such a function, and dealing with user code running on the server.
And to think the fears of the day were the Soviet Union was going to beat us to Mars.
Considering I have one of her displays (an XO), it's hardly vaporware. In eBook mode it is very much like an eInk display, super crisp and great in sunlight.
Economies are complex. It's simplistic to think of Dubai as simply smoke & mirrors.

I would have said Singapore or Hong Kong. IE, Dubai is (was) a comfortable outpost for the (extremely profitable in good years) companies doing business in the region. If you need a base from which to conduct your dealings with Saudi or Iran, Riyadh or Tehran aren't as attractive as Dubai. Beijing wasn't either 25 years ago.

Then you have the second level of the economy. The financial services & the like servicing the companies that chase their customers out there. Then you have a large number of cashed up expats with less family, more income & fewer vestige expenses. You have the industries catering to them (real estate, entertainment). Then you have the industries that are comfortable extensions of this local luxury entertainment market. Tourists, tax refuge, criminals (eg money laundering).

There is n doubt that this was an obvious bubble. Especially in real estate. But directly selling commodities is not the only way to make a buck. That's compounded by the fact that no-one is sentimental about Dubai. If luxury apartment population starts to drop, that's it.
Why is it that boron, nitrogen, and carbon have a lock on the really hard materials list?

Many really hard materials are xxx nitride or xxx carbide.
It's mostly about sending additional headers with the response which your Firebug-plugin plugin interprets and displays in its console. There are similar plugins for other languages, see e.g. http://www.firephp.org/ (that has does a few things that I believe FP does not, like let you emit pretty tables)

I don't believe you can get access to headers in Javascript so if you wanted to smuggle your log messages out that way you'd have to set some giant cookies or the addon would have to intrude on the rendered page and modify it -- these plugins do not.

This has also the advantage of embedding those log messages in non-HTML content, e.g. a JSON AJAX respnose or a generated image.