skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm that white guy from the ghetto with a single mom. I'm an executive now, and I'm sure it was easier for me than a black kid from my old neighborhood.

Let me change the subject slightly, people who are tall and good looking have more opportunity and success than those that aren't. No one, even you, are making purely rational decisions based on merit. All of us make decisions that are influenced by things we aren't aware of.
Well in the first place framing this discussion mostly around jews is precisely the problem. Don't you understand why it is offensive?

The same way it's offensive when my jewish relatives claim the Nazi genocide was the worst catastrophe in all history, conveniently forgetting the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Armenian Genocide etc etc

So I don't like the use of the word "anti-semitism" in the first place. But what really annoys me is that it is a euphemism, and a hyped one at that. To a first approximation, anti-semite means Nazi. Prejudice against jews is correctly called judeophobia instead.

shmerl managed both to commit this abuse of language
and complain about the use of stupid euphemisms at the same time.

And what he was complaining about - affirmative action to mean discrimination - is a far smaller abuse of language.
Er, no he's not saying that. He's saying users should be able to decide what they like, rather than being coerced by their government into choosing what the government likes best...
Interesting fact learnt from the Phonegap creator at Web Directions: calls to the battery API actually decrease battery life.
>that says to me that you either aren't familiar with the data about this.

Pretty much this. Thank you for being helpful :)
TBH that's the problem of the companies handing out the credit cards. Companies that do that are making a business decision. You and I need not worry about their business model because they have their own spreadsheets with assumptions of how many people will not pay.
Pinterest's Secret Boards Let You Pin in Private
But I guess this is only for government and legally mandated wage garnishment. Otherwise if they already have the black mark on their credit, will paying back anything matter or change that? Is that true?
Debt isn't some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street.

No, but distressed debt can be.
It would be more accurate to say: High blood pressure may damage the brain, or, the factors that cause high blood pressure also damage the brain.

Correlation does not imply causation.
For the benefit of folks who might not understand how debt collection works, which may include OWS: if you buy $10,000 of an individual's debt for $500 and then forgive the debt, they have just incurred income of $10,000 and are obligated to pay taxes on it exactly as if you had handed them $10,000 in cash for services rendered. If you don't inform the IRS that you forgave the debt, via a 1099-C, you're going to get wrist-slapped mightily if they think it is an honest mistake or, if you're, say, doing it as a political statement, you will be afforded the opportunity to make your political statement in front of a judge hearing your case for criminal tax evasion.

This is not accounting advice, by the way. There's some wrinkles if the debt was caused by your principal residence, due to some of the recovery measures passed two years ago. If its, say, CC or medical debt, though...
I like to open videos of talks an play them while I do other browsing and work. I still am listening just not watching. If the video stops when I move away, now I can't have my background sound be interesting info about $TOPIC.
There's a little markup at the wholesaler, but if a wholesaler like Costco buys in bulk they get the same deal as a manufacturer buying in bulk.

The price each individual pays approaches that of the manufacturer, enough to make this a viable alternative. This is nothing new.
So this is kind of odd... Nothing loaded when I first opened the page. I opened developer tools and had a javascript error "Failed to load resource http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js . Well, I keep all facebook widgets blocked with Ghostery and disabling it allowed the website to load.

Seems kind of strange. I mean if FB goes down or moves the location of that js file or something, the whole jamwithchrome site won't work?
I don't want music, just quiet.
Careful; debt forgiveness can be treated as taxable income. The lucky winners may end up with a nasty unforgivable tax bill.
Won't a result of this be an increase in the "cost" of debt, and hence interest rates on variable loans would raise for everyone else while other's are being paid off? Seems bad..
"Debt isn't some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street."

Except debt can be exactly due to some random accident like getting hit by a car while crossing the street and you don't have the insurance to pay for the medical bills.

I'm not saying that this is true for all of the OWS debts: probably not even the majority. I'm just saying that it's not as easy as "it's your fault you're in debt".
I was thinking the same thing... To make this a better program they should buy someones debt, in the example they bought a $14,000 debt for $500. The person that had the debt removed should pay $1,000 back to OWS. Then OWS can buy 2 more... and so on. Unfortunately, the person that had the debt removed will probably just create more debt for themselves
Awesome, this reminds me of GoonTower and GoonBase (spiritually inspired by them I take it?[1]). Interesting tech stack too, I'd love to make a game like this sometime in the future. I tried googling for buildy somethingawful but got no hits - did you guys rename it, or are you launching it on IRC/in a private group?

I agree with the comments that you guys should consider putting avatars in. It would increase immersion and expand your future possibilities dramatically. But I'm sure you guys have already thought about this.

Kudos, once again.

[1] There's a tradition of "collaborative building" projects on the SomethingAwful Forums. Some examples:

Goon Tower: http://www.goontower.com/

Goon City: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=292...

Goon Base (the grandaddy): http://pictures.deadlycomputer.com/d/16192-1/goonbase.jpg
You can't erase the statement that the debt was 180+ days late and sent to collections.

The original debt holder could erase that statement, but they have absolutely no incentive to, since they took a 97% loss on your debt.

A single late payment like that will probably drop your FICO score 150-200 points.
Question:

If OWS does this often enough to the point it becomes expected by debtors (i.e. "I won't pay because maybe I'll win in the OWS debt lottery"), wouldn't that in effect reduce the number of people that would actually pay back the $14k? And assuming it does have a global effect that should depress the market value of distressed debts further, right?

How can OWS depress the probability that creditors will get their money back enough so that the cost of buying debt becomes cheaper?
If your server is compromised you tend to have bigger problems than session forgery. Why would an attacker bother to fabricate http-sessions after he already gained access to your database and, in most cases, source-code?

Replay-attacks work the exact same whether you use this scheme or store a magic number server-side. There's no difference whatsoever.

For a password-change you update the last_logout timestamp and hand the user a new cookie (since his current one was just invalidated).
sounds good. would be happy to give it a crack
There's the cynical take on this, the non-cynical take, and the reality, which is somewhere in between.

The cynical take is that "passionate" means "exploitable".

The non-cynical take is that it's somebody for whom programming is not just a job but a vocation. The average programmer reads one or fewer books about programming a year. That's why they're an _average_ programmer. A passionate programmer is the opposite of that, somebody who is constantly learning and growing as a programmer, whether it's through books, experimentation, learning new languages, talking with fellow programmers, etc.

The classic definition (from the early days) is the person who is still occasionally boggled by the fact that people will PAY him (or her, these days) to do something you'd do for fun anyway. To paraphrase Steven Levy, you had the engineering priesthood, then you had the other guys - the guys to whom these devices were fascinating toys to be taken apart and put back together, simply for the sheer fun of it.
You clearly haven't tried crossfit for very long, or went to a shitty box.
I never said we are not progressing anymore - just not as fast as before, and we were quite fast (log scale!).

The fact that authors did believe we would have colonies on the Moon or Mars, or flying cars etc should tell you something too - we are not dreaming big anymore, even worse : we discard past dreams.

Look at a GDP per capita curve and see the deep cut. Nothing that big ever before - expect the great depression, where no billion dollar stimulus was applied. Many other factors play of course, but a generally accepted key element for long term grow per capita is technological progress.

Maybe I'm stuck in my niche but I seem to notice something - and share the opinion of other people who seems to spot something too.
The Obama Campaign’s Technology Is a Force Multiplier
True, nothing wrong with this, but a repercussion would be increasing interest rates, which would undoubtedly drive some debtors to default on their loans.
You know, when you come by, write a controversial one-line dismissal of an article, mock anyone who might disagree or even just wonder why you feel that way, and offer NO explanation or reasoning.... that is called trolling. The name-calling and accusations elsewhere are just further evidence.
Don't forget that if they were to run their own hardware, they'd probably need a couple of sysadmins to manage it. The question is if running their own hardware would be cheaper by more than the salary of a couple employees.
Yup. Exactly. 12 hours+ a week seems like a lot when working on your startup, until you realize the benefit of feeling better all the time, relieving stress, and not having high blood pressure when you're 30.
Unfortunately the nexus 4 is also large, heavy, and made of plastic.

[And what's with the stupid chrome ('d plastic) strip, given that they were apparently at least aiming at a quality feel?! Why on earth do manufacturers feel the need to add tacky chrome "accents" to otherwise reasonable designs??? Guys: it doesn't make your phone look classy, it makes it look cheap.]

The iphone 5 really nails the physical phone; it's simply beautiful. Unfortunately it also features apple's wackymaps™... :(
Speaking of buying up debt, does anybody else remember how, early in 2009, the Obama administration set up exchanges for private investors to buy toxic assets from financial institutions with government support? I remember Geithner announcing this with much fanfare as the program to return large banks to solvency. There was a brief controversy, and then the whole thing seemed to just disppear. My impression is that it turned out the banks didn't want to sell at a price anyone wanted to pay. But I've always been curious: what really happened? Is it public knowledge?

(Sorry for going off-topic... my excuse is that some of the same debt is probably involved, albeit through many layers of indirection and far downstream in the collection process.)
Oh! No wonder you're trolling me. After a glance at your comments, I accidentally nailed you spot on for both global warming and Nate Silver without even realizing your last page of comments is denial of both!

I don't know why you're calling me names. I made a single comment that had to do with the actual issue of global warming and now that's grounds for me being a climate change zealot? I'll ask you again, do you realize that dismissing science as zealotry with no actual evidence or argument makes your position look less legitimate?
At a very basic level, convince the credit card company (or hospital, bank, etc), that they will never collect even a penny from you and incur the hit to your credit rating that such activity entails. To actually purchase the debt, you'll likely need to be licensed according to your local jurisdiction.
Microsoft's JavaScript Move
Indeed. I know that if I can buy a dollar of debt that I owe for a nickel, I want in on that. It'd make things a lot easier on my pocketbook.
Couldn't OWS just hold it forever and not do anything with it? i.e. "Look I bought your debt, you don't have to pay me a penny for it ever, but I can't officially forgive you since to do so would subject you an income tax obligation. Just don't worry about it ever again and get on with your life."
Buying someone's debt and hoping to make more than you paid is what any collection agency does.
I'm always cautious of the models as you get to the more extreme cases. To me it seems likely that as you get further and further from the current state that there are unknown factors lurking somewhere.

Those factors may represent positive feedback, they may be negative feedback, or they may not exist at all.

But to me the further into the unknown we go, the further into the unknown we are, if that makes sense.

To be absolutely clear, I think the models probably work well enough for the near range. It's the far ranges I wonder about.
It would be cool if someone created something like prosper, where I could see bad debt from people, and they could make pitches for why I should extinguish theirs. For $x, I could purchase and extinguish N x $x in debt, where N is some function of type, time to maturity, etc.

I personally would be more likely to buy deserving-seeming medical, failed business, etc. debt than car notes or whatever, but maybe others would have their own preferences.
That isn't entirely true...if the owner of the debt (whether or not it is the original owner) decides to delete it from the credit record, then they can. In fact, many debt buyers act this way - they buy the debt for pennies on the dollar, and then offer to delete it if the person pays, for example, 25% of the amount owed. As mentioned elsewhere, this is know as PFD or "Pay for Delete".

Most of the major credit bureaus require that you own the debt of 5,000 or more people before they will accept payment history records and/or delete requests from the debt owner. That's the only restriction.
I am young in the Industry and I already see examples of such people. They go through a recursive cycle of "visible productivity" in terms of fancy features which break three months later. Then, they are on a "fire fight" trying to fix this "broken feature". The worst thing you could do is try to look at their code and attempt to reuse components for anything you want. I however don't completely blame such people, I think it is the nature of the startup world we are living in where the idea is to ship as fast as possible and technical debt be damned.
You can read their whole explanation, it's an interesting read: http://strikedebt.org/debt/

Short answer: various methods of systematic trickery and financial booby-trapping perpetrated by, you guessed it, the 1%.
You dodged a bullet. It is soul-crushing work.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: you buy $10,000 of, say, phone bill receivables, with the average in the $250 range, for $500 from the debt collection company which previously worked them for a year and got nothing. You use a commercial database and are able to identify phone numbers for half of the debtor. The "fun" now begins. You begin getting told that the debtor is deceased, told that the debtor ran out on her three years ago, told that the debtor owes $300,000 due to uninsured medical expenses, told that the debtor did not authorize the debt and that was in fact his ex-wife's cell phone, told that the debtor has to choose between paying for Christmas and paying this bill, etc etc etc. This is of the 10% of debtors who will speak to you and not just curse loudly into the telephone.

Some of those debtors are actually telling the truth, by the way.
If person A is in debt from Agency X, am I right in thinking that OWS would have to buy the debt from Agency X? They can't really buy debt from person A since A is in the hole...

Or OWS would buy from person A and, by some weird tax provision, doesn't have to pay agency A the entire amount?

Or...how does this actually work?

Yeah, I know nothing about money.
How large is "large"?
It not weird - I'm a libertarian too and I'm worried about the situation in the west.

It's bad when you notice that even with big government contracts the growth was much better.

Something is happening - we just don't know what.

We each have your pet ideas, based on our ideologies; IMHO the welfare state demotivation is suspect #1, but I'm ready to consider other hypothesis - even those that include government spending.
I know Splice was being tested for linux support a few weeks back last time I was in their office. (Specifically for inclusion in the humble bundle.) so if it's not there yet, hopefully it is soon?!
But if theyre making payments on the debt, the debt collector won't sell it because theyre actually getting their money. The only debts OWS is going to be able to buy are the ones not making payments and the ones that havent made payments in a very long time. So, as cool as not having to pay 50/100 a month sounds, that wont happen to anybody because the ones paying are not the kind of people that would be getting relieved of their debt.

Also, the people who havent paid their debt in years hardly benefit from this too (this might even make it worse in a way) because not only have they had an unpaid debt sitting there, they now have a new mark on their credit saying somebody gave up on collecting on them and that they sold their debt to somebody else. This is even worse, from my understanding of credit, for your credit score then it is to just let the debt sit there. The person in debt obviously isnt making any payments if it's up for sale, so it's not like it saves them any money. All this does is modify their credit score.

This all sounded awesome skin deep, but as you look into it more... it doesnt really do much for anybody affected by Sandy or anybody in financial crisis in general. They're saving just a few people a few hundred bucks that wouldn't be coming out of their bank account for years to come... if at all, ever.

They would be more productive just giving money to people affected by sandy then paying off debt that people have ignored for years anyway. People need food, shelter, clothes, toiletries, warmth... not a 'hey we paid off a debt you havent cared about for years and you dont get to see any of the money we just spent on you, but sorry your cold and good luck'.
Thanks for your understanding.

I don't want to push any ideology or debate on this - I just see a weird trend that other people seems to notice too, and I'd like to understand what is happening, regardless of whose ideology is used to explain that.
Good point, patio11. If debtors don't pay back their debt after after a certain time period, they are supposed to report it as income, but I doubt very many do. Setting up an organization like this puts the onus on the organization to file the 1099-C's
That's great marketing for Medal of Honor: Warfighter right there. I wonder if EA gave that to the NY Times.
Apple conceals court-ordered Samsung statement with clever Javascript
When did HN become reddit /r/politics?
And your settings are still there even if the vendor goes out of business or Oracle buys them and changes the license.
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&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y&Y
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This is what I get.
Ray Kurzweil on Using Exponential Thinking to Predict the Future
I'm interested in knowing if there is a business model in an "eBay or SecondMarket for personal debt" where anyone could buy and sell the debt of other people.

I get the feeling that there is disruption possible in this industry but I don't know enough about it to speculate how it could be disrupted.
I don't think you can have it both ways. Either we can predict the effect of things on the environment (co2, and other things we could use for geoengineering), or we cannot.

If you believe we cannot predict and prevent cascading problems or adapt to them then you're the same thing as a climate change denier, since who's to say that we got the cascading effect of co2 increase right ?

If you believe we can predict those consequences, then geoengineering will allow the human race to take control of the climate. So the problem of climate change becomes the problem of finding the set of consequences we like best. Climate change becomes a problem similar to animals digging holes in a dam : an inconvenience to be monitored, but nothing more.

This ignores political problems of course. Geoengineering would make one hell of a weapon of war, for example. China, given it's coastline, might choose to raise the sea level by 5 meters with little consequence for them, but major US population centers would become unliveable (New York, San Francisco), as would many European cities. Geoengineering, used like that, can do far more damage than 5000 nukes could.
I really appreciate your words! I'll do my best. They ask me to use hangout for the interview.

So I'll let you know...
Person A bounces a credit card payment to MegaBank, MegaBank asserts their credit card is in default and demands full payment immediately, A does nothing, MegaBank attempts to collect fruitlessly for ~4 months, A does nothing, MegaBank sells debt (principal + interest) to Agency X, Agency X attempts to collect fruitlessly for 18 months, A does nothing, Agency X sells it to Agency Y, A does nothing, Agency Y attempts to collect fruitlessly for 12 months, A does nothing, Agency Y sells the debt to Agency Z, A does ntohing, Agency Z attempts to collect fruitlessly for 12 months, A does nothing, Agency Z sells the debt to OWS for 5 cents on the dollar.

Each time I say "fruitlessly" read "They autodialed them between 2 and 5 times per week plus sent biweekly dunning letters."

For your added edification, while MegaBank, Agency X, and Agency Y all have no interest in the debt after it is sold to Z, many of them have very terrible recordkeeping practices, so it is entirely possible that e.g. Agency X will attempt to collect on the debt even after selling it, and potentially even after it is cancelled by OWS. Person A may not notice that this has happened, because Person A is likely a) delinquent on more than a dozen similar debts and b) Person A very likely has a very different level of personal responsibility as compared to many people in your reference set.