skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bankruptcy was 'reformed' while no one was paying attention and now some debt follows a person after a BK.

Some people still have land line phones and don't know how to fire bill collectors.

A BK also costs several hundreds of dollars now.
--- I typed this up just before getting a call, so apologies for the first-draftiness. I refreshed the page to see if anyone was saying anything similar but I didn't see anything, so I might as well post it. ---

I really think they should just skip over the whole maj/minority struggle and work on a more suitable approach. What makes Reddit so special? Each subreddit and its dedicated and often unique community. When reddit was relatively new I avoided it, because on the surface all I saw were fellow tech-hungry teenagers looking for the next big place to gather. Only a few years ago did I stumble on some of the smaller, more interesting subreddits and realize that I could spend my entire time among just a few without ever caring about the rest of 'Reddit' because within those little communities, there was something really cool and fun. Expat living in Japan? There's an r/ for that. Love cartography? There's an r/ for that. Linguist/mathematician/physicist? Plenty of r/s for you, of varying quality and concentration but interesting nonetheless.

Sometimes when I'm motivated to learn more about a subject, one of the first things I'll do is check if there is a decent subreddit that's relevant. Lo and behold, r/spicy and r/bonsai now come to my frontpage to shower me with pruning advice, sauce exchanges, and more. Of course, anyone can create a new subreddit if the existing ones aren't interesting enough, moderated poorly, or the subject just doesn't have a home yet. My list of micro-wikis and webpages to set up now has marks for items that would work just as well being a subreddit. But we're talking about revenue here, so let me get to the point.

Don't just think about Reddit as one big thing, but rather as a world full of lively other things– some some tiny, others huge. They can make money without looking heavy-handed or causing too much controversy, as long as they see the users (all of them) as collaborators in that effort. Subreddits already enjoy a certain amount of freedom (of moderation, styling), why not gamify it somehow? For example, most people wouldn't mind if r/pics had real ads, and r/pics is probably one of the most trafficked subreddits around. Those who still don't want the ads can get Reddit Gold. However say r/crypto thought the ads were silly, and wanted them removed. Then they could, for example, buy their way out directly (garnering a few extra features for the local mods) or encourage their own subscribers to get gold, with some percentage reducing the number/location of ads until reaching zero.
>Not when the majority of jobs that create a vibrant middle class in the post-industrial United States require at least a college degree.

That's a self-refuting argument. If your degree was really the ticket to a "vibrant middle class" job you'd be able to pay off your student debt.

The reality is not all degrees are created equal, and people should think a little bit before they go $200k into debt for a degree that's going lead to a $40k job. Granted, 18 year olds aren't very good at this kind of reasoning, but that's what parents are for.

On top of that, for a lot of fields a degree from a public university is just as good as one from an Ivy. Nobody is entitled to a pricy private college education. Either you go on family money or you think very carefully about how those loans are going to get repaid.
Xfce is sticking with gtk2, in order to avoid the some of the v3 issues discussed here.

Individual applications may still switch to gtk3, in which case those applications will experience the breakages. But that can't be helped-- it's up to the individual application developer. In the same way, you can fire up a KDE application in Xfce and stumble across various KDE bugs.

I have no idea what will happen in the long term with regard to Xfce and gtk. Last I checked, there were no developers working on any version of gtk full-time anywhere. So maybe it would be practical for Xfce to fork gtk 2.x. Or maybe gtk 3 will settle down and they'll switch. We'll see.

P.S. I use Xfce myself. I think it's the best desktop out there today for Linux.
But gifts are capped at $12,000 per year, which puts something of a damper on the whole point of this, unless they've figured out a legal way to farm out who gets credit. So either they've promised not to go after these cases, or ... something else?
Oh, I think that's also a problem. I can't believe that, as a company, they put up with that for so long - I would have banned Jailbait from the start, especially once it started showing up on Google's front page results.

That being said, I'm sure there's a compromise. If Obama is prepared to associate himself with the website (and I would have said that was a fairly poor decision on the campaign's part, but it didn't end up being a problem), then I'm sure there are advertisers. A bigger problem I suspect, is that it draws an audience who simply do not click on ads.
Actually the most accurate 2012 election pundit was Drew Linzer (http://votamatic.org/). Provided Florida goes Obama's way, he correctly predicted the electoral college - Obama 332, Romney 206.
I think this makes sense from a high-level point of view. It seems like it would be bad for the economy, if more wealth flows from consumers to bank profits.

This is maybe simplistic, but I'm thinking progress is better served if more people can buy iGadgets, than if bank execs can spend more on luxury goods.

There are huge, positive, side effects when people buy more technology, because technology gets cheaper, which then advances economic growth.
Merely being born American made us winners in that lottery, if you get down to it.

Is anyone really against the idea that all 49 million need help?
The robots.txt file for HN suggests a Crawl-Delay value of 30 seconds.
Beehive Cooperative
Actually: "For one thing, Razer now plans to make Synapse 1.0 drivers and other legacy drivers available shortly on its support site"
I detect the possibility of a closed debt-like loop. There must be a way in this system to buy my own $14,000 debt for $500 and forgive myself. Its just a matter of path-finding.

So theoretically, I can travel backwards in debt... Profit!
I don't doubt that there is a lot of racism, misogyny, etc, prevalent on Reddit. That doesn't mean that Reddit doesn't have any good qualities. It's like judging America based on the worst qualities of the country and saying, "This is America, why would anyone want to live there."
For me the big question is whose debt do you forgive first?

You are making a political statement here - great.

You are making an even bigger one if you choose to forgive
the debt of White folks before black, black before White, republicans and democrats, short v tall and fat v thin

even a lottery seems to send the wrong message

And doing it blind by just buying anonymous tranches will reveal the biases of the original moggage sellers.

A mess I would not like to sort through

ps
at 30:1 anyone have an idea total needed to be raised to forgive everyones debt? Even ignoring Market reproving to take this into account?
First, if the delinquent party has $2000 lying around for an expense like this, the debt agency is probably better off trying to recover the full sum. It's not like they can just loan it to them.

Second, if you're years behind on your debt, you're probably not in the habit of reading letters from debt collection agencies.

Third: the moral hazard: get deep in debt, set aside 20% in a high interest savings account, wait for offer.
Am I missing something or are there no units? Sub and unsub rate per... mailing, week, month..?

My newsletters consistently run an unsub rate of about 0.15% per issue (so about 0.6% per month). And probably a growth rate of about 3.5% per month.
Death from afar
I thought that too. But... the about page of gittip.com actually says "gittips, short for 'gift tips'". So in this case, the web site actually says that...
Not only is it bad, a BK on your file means you will have to use 'special' finance to get a car loan and it will be impossible to find a bank to underwrite a sub-prime loan for a house (for seven years). You would also have to pay a higher rent security deposit on an apartment.
NASA drives Lego robot from space to test new networking protocol
Better yet: Stop voters telling me to obey whatever they voted on.
I've seen a few HTML5 games for sometimes now but have only been impressed by two - first Subbania and now this one. And I must say Buildy tops them all. Good Job. The thing that I like most about it is that people don't use the canvas element as creatively as it can be but you did it. Such games must be developed more to popularize HTML5.
Sorry I have to ask - "we called them up and told them" rarely works with my insurance company so ...

whom did you talk to at the IRS - what's their seniority and pay grade and did they reply in writing?
Donald trump has -- TWICE!
Angel Investing Mistakes
There are more sophisticated arguments than this one for not voting. Among them, even if you believe in a particular cause, you can probably accomplish more for that cause in the hours it takes to vote by doing something other than voting: http://www.artoftheory.com/the-ethics-of-voting/

Another reason: Those who are not merely voting among party lines are childish, superficial, and even reptilian, when it comes to picking candidates: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S19/28/30C37/
Currently, this is only offered by one mobile phone operator, and it's in the Philippines:

https://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Two Ray Bradbury works, an essay and a Christmas story, to be published
Collective can not have rights different from the rights of people, since collective is nothing but people - it just word saying "many people". So you're saying "I'm not willing to put rights of individual over the rights of other individuals". OK, that sounds fine, but nobody is asking you to.

>> There is a point where promoting individual rights is not useful where the species is concerned.

Useful to whom? Species is just another word saying "a lot of people". I'm sure to some of these people suppressing right of some other people would be very beneficial. So what?

>>> The concepts of "fairness" and "equality", are both fundamental to good societies.

People understand very different things when they say "fairness" and "equality". Some people think it's "fair" that somebody can not work a day in his life and still get money, shelter, services, education and many other goods paid by somebody else who works 14 hours a day. Some think it's not. Some think it's not "fair" that some people have millions and live in luxury and some have trouble with paying for their basic needs - and others think it's completely "fair".
Same with equality - equality of what? The only way people can be truly equal if they are identical clones living identical lives in identical circumstances. This can not happen. So equality needs to be qualified - what we want to be equal?
The society can do nothing with these definition - these things mean different things for different people, and always will. Politicians use this to lure people into voting for them, but in their speeches they just mean "vote for me please".

>>> When individuals are not beneficial to the society they are in, they are not good.

Sorry, this is baloney. Individual has absolutely no obligation to be "beneficial" to other people. Treating people only as resources or sources of benefits for oneself is immoral and such treatment - if you're talking about sociopaths - is usually a sure sign of some pathology in emotional/moral sphere. It is not a fundamental measure of moral, it is a fundamental measure of immorality. This is what leads to societies where millions of people get murdered, because they were declared "not useful for society".
Some thoughts about multicast. This works great on a single subnet, but it's likely to just be treated as broadcast (in the absence of IGMP snooping on the switches). Making multicast work outside a single subnet (even off of the same router) requires multicast routing to be enabled (and it's usually not, because doing it without breaking things is complicated).

Now for some comments that apply more generally to multicast (and not for this low volume chat application). Setting TTL=1 for multicast traffic is often bad, because it causes the first hop router to have to generate an ICMP time exceeded message. Having to do this lots and lots and lots of times per second can crush some legacy router platforms. Speaking as someone who builds networks just for multicast, we instruct our application developers to always use a large TTL and tell them we will ensure it doesn't go further than it should. It's just a practical course of action.

But good job!
"Corrolary: You should vote "NO" on every Proposition unless you actually know what the fuck you're talking about. The California Proposition system is asinine, and the way to do least harm is to reject by default."

This is half correct, and that half is very much my policy. If the proposition is for something the legislature can and should be doing, I vote no; we are paying people to give these issues more time and attention than I can afford to.

There are three places this differs from the above, though.

1) If the proposition deals with something that hugely favors incumbents to the point that the legislatures won't touch it for fear of job security.

2) If the proposition is for something the legislature can't do (Constitutional amendment that really needs to be a Constitutional amendment).

3) Most significantly, there are places (raising taxes, mostly) where we have tied the hands of our legislature with previous propositions, and require a proposition.

For 3), my default position is yes; vote for decent legislators and let them do their jobs.

For the first two, I try to make a point of learning enough about propositions of that nature that I can make an intelligent decision. If I can't, however, my default is to not vote on those measures.

On propositions for things that the legislature can and should do, I agree whole-heartedly - vote no.
What are they talking about when they say, "As you can see from our test run, the return on investment approaches 30:1. That’s a crazy bargain!"

Is that a joke or are they actually making a return on the investment?
The debt can be accounted for at least two ways:

Full value and take an income loss on not collecting all of it.

Income of what amount you DO collect.

So in a sense occupy will have a tax shelter on their hands :-)
Anyone can explain me where they get all the deal ?
Yeah I can get behind that people should have known.

But in the case of the Mortgage Market prior to the crash I can't - simply because it wasn't an equal/level playing field.

In brief

1) CDOs => Mortgage Origniators no longer held back by their risk levels. CDOs can just offset it.

2) MOs incentives are now drastically different - Incentive now entirely to generate as many mortgages as possible, whatever the risk profile.

3) With no incentive to care who was signing, as long as they signed - MOs sold to people they knew were incapable of understanding the terms, nor ever meet the conditions, creating things like NINJA mortgages/loans.

The MOs held the information advantage, and then abused it (look at the marketing material of the time) while now including people that they KNEW were out of their depth.

It was like stealing candy from a baby.

Edit: Formatting, point placement and flow
My solution is to use a firewall with per-application rules and just turn off network access for chrome before I launch it. On my laptop I just unplug the wired/wireless network for during the launch. This was mainly because of HN but also has the added benefit of taking less system resources since a blank page typically is less resource hungry than a real page.

Firefox has a better solution for this but then again, I don't use firefox.
In my experience the banning is too strict.

It is triggered very quickly and it seems to last forever (maybe 15min would be better?).

I ask pg to kindly consider making it a bit more lenient.

I doubt HN goes under deliberate/malicious attacks, etc...

I'm making a HN extension that preloads some data such as the comments
and the links on the next page (it's still with reasonable delays).

But at the moment it's impossible for it to function without risking the user getting banned.
Firefox Turns 8
Looks like on October 30th Google made a massive expansion to the Google Art Project - which launched earlier this year - and it went under the radar for the most part. Here's Google's official blog post about it:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/more-art-project-onli...
I realize Halloween was only a week ago, but I seriously never see people handing out candy as often as they do credit cards.
"Intentionally destroying the resale value of your product wouldn't be a smart move"

Yes, because companies only make smart moves.
I've got to say, from the headline I was expecting the exact opposite of what this product turned out to be.
"Because when that time comes up, Razer may find they're losing users to Logitech."

You assume long-term planning. It does not appear to be in play here.
Last Tuesday.
ah! I'm guessing you're on Sprint/Virgin/Boost.

Sorry... there's literally nothing I can do to fix that. Sprint simply just doesn't support non-GSM characters. You can send from AT&T to Sprint and see for yourself :(

If you're not on Sprint, send me a message at chad át Twilio.com and give me some more details.
Internet cafes don't let you install your own software and drivers, so no. This is not being marketed to that demographic.
There's a name for what's going on here: bullying.

And it's happening to users, who are being told their concerns about GNOME3 are irrelevant, and also to developers, who are being told that "you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app." (direct quote, btw.)
Abusing Incorrect Algorithms and Cheating at Poker
the debt was already downgraded from say 14k to 500$ so the loss was already taken; in relative terms an extra 500$ loss is meaningless.
Behind the Mirror
When someone threatens to take that away, people are rather vocal about protecting it.

I expect people would be just as vocal, if not more, if the right to vote was threatened. The right to vote comes with the right to elect to not vote, and people like it that way.
That's a good start, but I don't really use either Twitter or FB. It's possible that I'm coming from a very minority position, but I've seen a bunch of HN posts about how e-mail lists drive more engagement than any other form of electronic contact.
Didn't Nate Silver say that was the most likely split? There was a post about it on HN for like the past 2 days.

Edit: The confusion is probably that Silver was reporting the average electoral split as his prediction, when the mode is more important in what you're talking about. His average was almost never a number that was actually possible, since he was quoting them to the nearest 1/10th of a vote, so its kind of unfair to punish him for not getting it exactly right.
Ah sorry - I thought you were using market value as in terms of the original value of the loan. Not its impaired value.

edit: I recall that debt forgiveness to consumers was considered a better form of stimulus - economically speaking.
The Channel API doesn't currently use WebSockets. Instead it uses Comet techniques like forever frame and long polling.

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=25...
Got this via SMS from Globe Telecom (PH): "Make sure that there are no running applications connecting to the internet when using the service to avoid incurring data charges"

Tried it in the Philippines and it works well. One possible problem here is that for smartphones, users may be charged unexpectedly because background apps that access the net. There should be a separate APN for Free Zone use so users are sure they are not charged for normal data rates. I don't think users will use this if they are uncertain that it is totally free.
How to design a shit website . com
Agreed, it's a terribly ambiguous name. Rather than "Google Free-Zone" (which is read as "Google-Free Zone"), it should be a "Free Google Zone."
https://www.4chan.org/news?all#109

https://www.4chan.org/news?all#110

It's worth mentioning that moot has managed to keep 4chan running since 2005 without accepting any donations, while paying for what I imagine is a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and being shunned by most advertisers. Up until the addition of 4chan passes, he was paying a fairly large portion of the monthly server bills out of his own pocket. Moot hasn't said how many people have purchased passes, but I'm guessing it's an amount closer to "allows me to break even without dipping into my own pocket" and not "I can support 4chan entirely through user contributions!"

I think Reddit would have a much easier time supporting itself entirely through non-intrusive advertisement, which makes me much less sympathetic towards their desire to have users directly support the site.
I have been voting in all the elections I have been allowed to vote in. If I am ever forced to vote I won't. If the fine Is æarge enough, I will show up, get the ballot and rip it in pieces right then and there.

Voting should be a privelege for the few who are very well informed, not the many who are not.