skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the linked website ("Why we strike debt"):

$1 trillion of student debt. 64% of all bankruptcies caused by medical debt. 5 million homes foreclosed already, another 5 million in default or foreclosure. Credit card debt is $800 billion, generating an average 16.24% interest on money banks borrow at 3.25%.

First, they seem to fail to understand that the reason credit card debt is marked up from bank debt is that there's a fairly significant risk it's not getting paid back. Later on the same page, they state that 10% is written off as irrecoverable.

Second, "Vast majority" might have been artistic license, and I meant to refer to distressed debt - plenty of people use credit for completely reasonable things and service those loans, or have them restructured in good faith. Student debt is also mostly in that category. In other words, those loans will never be available for OWS to purchase for cents on the dollar.

That said, I'm not at all sure bankruptcies are a meaningful proxy for what kinds of debts are outstanding. Certainly, loans bankrupted on aren't included in this project, as they will already have been "forgiven". I couldn't find a good source (indeed, any source), but I would be very surprised if various bits of consumer credit (credit cards, car loans, store credit etc) aren't a very major chunk of the debt available for OWS to buy.

If OWS singled out medical debt and perhaps even some student loans, or made some other effort to review them to make sure they fit a moral prerequisite for having been screwed by "the 1%", I'd be sympathetic to the project. Instead, they are paying off random strangers credit card bill, while honest people who pay off their credit cards, even when it hurts, are passed over.
Agreed.

People are sure piling on OP for mentioning taxes -- I think you are all interpreting his request as "Stripe, please add tax calculation" but he's only asking for an additional charges field so he can track his subscriptions + taxes instead of his subscriptions with taxes.
Not cool! Software update turns a v2 paid app to v3 trial with a paywall.
Agreed! Too many startups these days do a poor job describing the job they are doing and conveying the value created.
It's not data in this case. It's logistics. Volunteers on foot really do stir up the vote.
I presume this came up because it was auto-tweeted from swombat.com (this got retweeted today: http://swombat.com/2010/12/9/how-to-detect-a-toxic-customer ). If so, it's worth pointing to Joel Spolsky's response to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223

Definitely worth a read alongside this article.
No, but he was talking about the majority of jobs.

You're making the exact same logic error, but this time talking about majorities, so in addition to failing at logic you're failing at statistics.

Let me point you again at the law student example. All jobs as a lawyer require law school. About 70% of people who get law degrees will successfully pass the bar, and get a high paying job they otherwise couldn't and be able to pay their debts. About 30% will fail to pass a bar, and be put on that track, with the result that their best available jobs are much lower paying and they are hosed.

Did that 30% make a bad decision to go to law school? If so, then so did a lot of the other 70%, because it is not obvious going in who will and won't succeed. Most of the time, law school is a good choice. Some of the time it is a terrible choice.

Complicating the issue even farther, very few people going into law school are aware of how high the odds are of getting into serious debt problems. Until recently there was little public awareness of it, and marketing materials from law schools certainly make no mention of the issue.

(I'm pulling up this particular example because unsuccessful law graduates make up a high portion of seriously distressed student debt, and there have been lawsuits about false advertising around this issue.)
Thanks. I'll make a note to fix that.
> Meaning: I wasn't hired, I cannot be fired.

Oh I see the problem then. Dude please reconsider it. Do you ever tried to run that stupid LLVM-pipe stuff in a VM? it's impossible, and I have a nice machine. ARM? MIPS? Sparc? forget it.
heh cute. Enjoy it :)
Amazon Wedding Registry for Sandy Relief I Created Gaining More Steam
I don't see much on the documentation on indexes. Also this looks awesome, I would love to see a option to let it be eventually consistent and still keep the great querying ability.
Nope, OS X can only be virtualized on Apple hardware. ESXi (baremetal hypervisor) supports OS X on Apple hardware
Exactly, there's some epistomolgy at work here. There are no first-principle models of polling bias that fit the data. Silver took a history of poll-vs-election skew as a proxy, while Wang ignored the issue and looked only at sampling error (I think -- honestly I don't know for sure).

As it happens, in this election (and across hundreds of polls) there was no poll bias. The polls were right.

Now, is that because we're lucky or because polls have gotten better, or both? I don't know that this is answerable. My intuition (but that's all it is) agrees with you: I wouldn't have put down a bet for Obama given Wang's 100:1 odds, though I might have at Silver's 10:1. Arbitrage vs. Intrade's 2:1 looks a lot like a sure thing in hindsight...
Yep, you're right. I forgot about that.
San Francisco (SOMA: Full time) Triggit is looking for one really smart Data Scientist. The posting is not live yet, so if you are interested in working with real time data, email Joanne@triggit.com. Hadoop and HIVE experience is required.
API authentication for FTP users
Success is 80% Not Screwing Up
It's a bit of a dick move, but couldn't you just not install the update? If it bothers you there's a million other backup apps out there.
Take professional-looking sexy pictures? There is an app for that.
Yes, but quality is going down everywhere. Walk into any clothing store in any mall and take a look at the seams. Brands that used to be known for standard, quality pieces are jumping on the fast fashion train, but their prices aren't coming down.

I think the more interesting part of this article was this statement by Prof. Fraiman, "And what is the problem in America? They don’t fit in the clothes. So why do it? Having to make larger sizes makes production so much more complex.”

I've heard that SO many times from high end designers, but which fast fashion brand is making money hand over fist? Forever 21. And they're also the ones offering lots of options for plus-size women. Bigger women are begging for cute, trendy clothes and whoever delivers it will hit pay dirt.
It is true that this not a non-profit organization. It is a B corporation. According to Wikipedia: "A benefit corporation is a class of corporation required by law to create general benefit for society as well as for shareholders. Benefit corporations must create a material positive impact on society, and consider how their decisions affect their employees, community, and the environment. Moreover, they must publicly report on their social and environmental performances using established third-party standards."

How common are these B corps? Any other notable examples?
Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell
What Do the Election Results Mean for I.P.?
Hah that question is almost word for word in the faq: http://www.rethinkdb.com/docs/faq/
Thanks -- will do in the next few days.
Beijing Blocked Google
Ask HN: How to visit Sand Hill Road VCs?
I can't think of a better place to ask this question.

If one is visiting the bay area on startup business and has a few meetings with VCs on Sand Hill Road, how the heck do you get there and back?

I usually take Caltrain into the valley, but most of the VC offices are 3+ miles from the Palo Alto Station (~40 minute brisk walk each way). Is there a bus (or monorail) on the Stanford campus that simplifies this? Do you ask VCs for carpool suggestions? Does Uber work in the valley?

How do other founders handle transportation to VC offices?
Wow, thanks for responding!

I hope it didn't come across as negative, it was just something I noticed and wondered if other people saw the same thing, or if I was just being nitpicky.

I hope your project reaches funding, this looks like a really cool idea
Couldn't you build it into the minifier rather than polluting the original source?
> In the same way, girls can learn leadership and toughness from male protagonists and heroes.

As inspired as I am by men in web development, I don't get the same feeling of confidence as I do from other women in the industry. I would say that while these heroes are naturally going to have a positive effect on anyone, the females are inherently more relatable - and therefore more influential - to girls.
We currently support primary key indexing, but no secondary indexes. This is definitely planned -- it will take a few months to get this out.

EDIT: also, you can run queries with an out_of_date_ok flag, which will give you what you want. This only works for read queries though, the architecture is pretty much set up in a way where this would be very very difficult to do for write queries.
The managers field calls from China or Chile to learn what’s selling, then they meet with the designers and decide whether there’s a trend. In this way, Inditex takes the fashion pulse of the world.

So big data (and associated systems) is not always needed to detect patterns and trends.
* All of the bad developers I met at college are now working for the government or are contracted by the government. *

Interestingly, all of the government developers I know would run circles around almost any startup programmer. These guys design and implement systems that are designed to last decades without even minor bugs. Frequently, they manage to keep systems designed decades ago from collapsing under their own weight.

My guess as to why it happens this way is that they check your scores rather than your actual skills and anyone without a diploma is automatically disqualified. Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture.

Government hiring is credentials and experience based. Don't be bitter that you can't get a job because you lack the credentials or experience to make the cut.

Most hackers I know wouldn't go anywhere close to such a contract.

A certain level of professionalism is expected for a real job. Nobody cares what you wear, or where you work, or how you work when you're making yet another Instagram clone. When you are designing and implementing critical systems, being a professional matters. Most hackers simply don't have the self-discipline to get such a contract.
ConEmu is pretty good too, in terms of customization, etc.

http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

ConEmu starts a console program in a hidden console window, and provides an alternative customizable GUI window with various features:
Hi Brian, I'm the president of CFAR; we still have some scholarship money left so I'd encourage you to fill out the (short) application form today. If you're a great fit for the workshop, we can figure out a price that works.
San Francisco (SOMA: Full time) Triggit an early stage start-up is seeking C/C++ engineer who has experience working with high frequency data. This position would work with our CTO on our ad serving platform.

Job description: http://triggit.com/careers
Any questions, feel free to email Joanne@triggit.com
It's because there are only a few DMS (dealer management system) providers that most dealers sign up and stick with. They manage not only their web site, but a lot of back-end systems as well. These systems, like you pointed out, don't do a very good job with the web site, but that's only a small part of what they offer as a package.

Since most dealers aren't very technical, they just stick with what they get and leave it to the so-called "professionals" to handle the web site.

There's always room for disruption, but it's going to be more difficult than simply calling up dealers and telling them you can create a better web site.

BTW, since you're looking at buying a new car, check out my site: http://www.realcartips.com
what isn't that clear in the article, is the speed advantage over chinese-produced cheap fashion goods. the t-shirt might look the same, a sort-of copy of a Lagerfeld piece. but the Zara one is in stores practically immediately after the fashion show in say Milan is over, while the container ship from China is leaving port.

speed kills, and fashion is a speedy business. your customers see what fashion magazines show them, and they want it now. Zara has understood this. awesome, awesome application of clear thinking and strategy.

Zara is being taught over here in EU together with Red Bull as one of the key modern examples for smart business models.
I don't think your goal is to offend. But I think we'd all be better off if we tried to make our points here without needlessly causing tangential offense.

And you're right: it has everything to do with the reaction it gets. Many would disagree about your characterization of it as being "mild," or whether it's "lost any bite," and there's the rub: whether or not that's correct is up for debate, but I'd also submit that it's largely irrelevant whether or not that is, in fact, as inoffensive as you believe it to be.

While you may not think it offensive, many do, and would consider it a thoughtless treatment of something that's important to them. We can all argue about whether or not that's reasonable, but it's the reality, nonetheless.

It's one thing if you know your audience, but it's another thing to be commenting in a public place.

Consider this variation:

---

It has nothing to do with what I think, it has to do with the way the phrase is typically used, and the reaction it gets: In normal usage, it's mild.

This is true of many religious words used in this manner ... they've pretty much lost any bite they once had. E.g. "[racial epithet/gay slur/nationalistic slur/etc.]! <complain complain>" is similar: 75 years ago maybe you'd have had people up in arms over that, but these days nobody will even notice.

---

I'm sure inside those brackets there are plenty of things I could say that wouldn't feel offensive to me, or even many of the people I'm around in the real world, but if I care about making my point without it instantly becoming about how I made my point, then I'm probably not going to start my comment off with something completely irrelevant to my point that runs a non-trivial chance of offending someone who reads it.
I have ADD and a prescription for one of these, and have tried several. Such medications will give you a boost, but if you're not used to them the boost is likely to be offset by unwanted side-effects such a grinding your teeth, stomach cramps etc. Additionally, taking them for a boost rather than ramping up the dose slowly over a few weeks is likely to inflict a rather unpleasant crash when it wears off.

Not to be moralistic about it or anything, but if you are looking for 'superhuman powers' then be prepared for the possibility of feeling like a human punchbag instead.
Plus lots of HTML 5 video players out there. Things are looking good.

http://praegnanz.de/html5video/
I don't define "progressive" as right or left. I pretty much define it as "solution-driven" rather than "status-quo" driven.

The GOP has been "status-quo" since Reagan. Say what you like about Paul Ryan, he's at least looking toward the future. The rest of the GOP establishment is still livings the past. Problem is the country isn't.
He's a graphic designer by trade.
"Google is great, that's why we use Facebook" says anon Google Employee
Africa Is Rising Fast
I dug up the book to check, and in the 20th anniversary preface page 16 and 17, a few lines before the previous quote there is :

"Mr Tortoise, meet Madame Tortue
A few years later, a wholly unexpected chance came along to make amends, at least in part, for my sexist sin."

And here comes the French translators part:"[...] they rather gingerly asked me if I would ever consider letting them switch the Tortoise's sex to female."

So I don't see what's the contradiction you're trying to point out.
From the homepage it already looks more usable than mongo, liking the query syntax. Looking forward in trying the performances. Well done.
Ray Kurzweil Talks About Robot Jeopardy Champ Watson
My resistance to change has paid off! Now, can someone tell me how to build my layout table with javascript? Also, what is the best way to factor in my Flash navbar effects?
3D-Printed Rockets Help Propel NASA's Space Launch System
Sounds like they're misusing the word "suspicious". Either that, or they're setting themselves for PayPal-esque issues at scale.

If your business model is "one suspicion means your account is frozen", once you are at a scale large enough to have false positives, you are destined for scandal. I guarantee that if you hope to have a million users and you retain this model, "Gittip froze my account and I can't get my money" is going to be on the front page of HN at some point.

As with other commenters, I applaud the desire to be responsible with others' money and I completely understand the need to be conservative if you want others to trust you with their funds. But scale does funny things to good intentions. You will wind up with insufficient funds to staff an adequate support desk. You will wind up with bogus users trying to do shady things with your service, and they will be very convincing and make you want to help them. And you will wind up with legitimate users who love your service and want to use it the way you've designed it but end up tripping your heuristic. And those users will not love you and will feel hurt and betrayed by you, and if you do that to the wrong user it will quantitatively affect your business and the public perception of your organization.
They weren't even tabs when Opera invented them. It just had a toolbar at the bottom, see here:

http://i.imgur.com/bURNJ.gif

This is the ad-supported version 5, you had to enter a key to remove them. Prior versions were shareware.

StarOffice had a similar idea but they made an effort to show where they were drawing inspiration from: http://i.imgur.com/fiQ5c.jpg

(For those who are wondering, yes LibreOffice is its legacy.)
> What we are more after is better drivers

Gnome 2 didn't need any driver to work, it was perfectly fine with a frame-buffer.

You know what else do not need any driver to work? Windows.

Llvmpipe DO NOT WORK except in latest-generation, very expensive hardware. You are alienating a huge portion of your users, it's specially painful because they are the poor-ones.
Philip Roth Is Retiring; Amazon Glitch Disables Buy Buttons
Cut it in half and hollow it out.
Ah that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
Interesting. The links were not clickable. Was that because they were in brackets?

http://HiddenNinjas.com

http://goo.gl/jhvJf]
I'm confused by your reply. The grandparent comment was saying "You should never flip a coin", the person you replied to said (roughly) "It's impossible to avoid all situations where you can't measure the winner, you have to either flip a coin or just take the person who happened to come out ahead in the vote count".

Your link to a place where they used a coin flip isn't disagreeing with him (nor really the grandparent, who wasn't claiming that you can't use a coinflip, but rather that you shouldn't use a coinflip).
I learned about this: R2D3:

> Since it doesn’t get bogged down with supporting legacy browsers without SVG support, we switched over to R2D3 for versions of Internet Explorer less than IE9.
https://github.com/mhemesath/r2d3/

It's that easy to provide IE support for D3?
According to Politico (I don't know if this is the best data, but it was high on the list in Google) Obama won Florida by about 60,000 votes (out of almost 10 million cast).

Now, that Romney volunteer says:

the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc

Now, if those volunteers had been engaged, could that have tipped the state to Romney? I don't know how many of those volunteers were in Florida, and how many votes each dedicated volunteer can turn out, but it's entirely plausible.

(Of course, even if Romney had won Florida, Obama still would have won.
How do you think this compares to Perl::Mason? How are you avoiding the same pitfalls that Mason has? complicated failure modes, pretty much impossible to improve timing and create on demand resource prefetching without increasing complexity greatly?
Hmm.. Tricky.
MapDB: Java collections backed by fast database engine.
Occupy Wall Street is not a bank. They are purchasing the loan from the bank. The bank may be able to take a loss on the sale of the loan to OWS, but that is irrelevant to what OWS does with the loan once it is their property.

If this doesn't happen then the government loses revenue and it also opens up the possibility of people using loan forgiveness to dodge taxes.

Well, yes. And the IRS will certainly pursue cases where it is clear that loan forgiveness is used to dodge taxes. But that is not what is happening here. OWS is purchasing loans to help people get out from crushing insolvency. The alternative is the debtor's declaring bankruptcy, in which case no one--not the government, nor the private creditors--gets anything. Note also that OWS is a non-profit entity, so issues of tax revenue loss are generally irrelevant.
I'm just getting start with Python and was using the Requests library this morning. I didn't like that my tests were coupled to both the library and an Internet connection existing.

This just hits the frontpage today and it is exactly what I'm looking for. Thank you!
Has anyone used Gliffy?
Has anyone used the free version of Gliffy for making diagrams and flowcharts? I am looking for a free online to create mind maps.
I ignored the other comment, but since people are trying to quote stuff, I feel it's important to put it right. Football is the official name in the United Kingdom and especially England. We don't have the Association Football Association but rather the Football Association. It doesn't not have a prefix when it's referred to in any form of media at all. 'Beach Soccer' has no relevance here.
I'm hoping this'll be a viable replacement for MongoDB. (Sparse/Schema-free is incredibly useful for me, as is JSON-centric modeling)

jedberg already asked for a compare/contrast, but let me provide some specifics I care about that you might be able to answer.

1. Is it fair to say that thanks to MVCC, running an aggregation or map-reduce job isn't going to lock the whole damn thing up like it does on MongoDB?

2. You've got a distributed system that is seemingly CP, do the availability/consistency semantics compare with HBase? Master-slave? Replication? Sharding?

3. Latency is a big one for us and is a large part of why we use ElasticSearch. How does the read-latency on RethinkDB compare with Mongo/MySQL/Redis/et al ?
Worked for me in April on Netflix from Spain.
And I'll pay someone $4 to save 5 minutes of my time.
An American-Made iPhone Won't Happen Now, Or Ever
Very useful. Thank-you.
Is iPhone’s Supremacy Coming to an End?
Depends upon your language. Java treats a null Boolean pretty sanely.
I have boycotted Sony products ever since the root kit fiasco on their music CD's. It was tough at the time but more and more their offerings have become irrelevant. They always favored proprietary storage and accessory technologies in which the charged significantly for. Personally I think the time for anti-consumer companies to reap what they have sewn is long over due and I think Sony is the first of many that once the magic stops, people are no longer willing to tolerate their lack of consumer advocacy.
Google maps can give you public transit directions including local bus services (Shuttle to Stanford, SLAC bus goes near SHR). This makes for a long, long journey compared to driving, but you can work/think instead of operating a vehicle.