skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can accept that, and yet agree with the earlier comment that Silver must have some sort of PR thing going on. I first learned of Silver in early 2008 when he was blogging at DailyKos.com under a pseudonym. I was curious to know who he was, and spent some time to find out that it was Nate Silver - friends who knew on the inside told me. So I went to Google his name, and found his amazing bio at Wikipedia. If you know anything about Wikipedia, you know you're asked to NOT create your own page, but create pages of others. It's not intended to be a site for self-promotion. But someone named "Mack2" had created Silver's page (I just went back to confirm it) and here's what I found curious.

One: the page had an inordinate amount of detail, including Silver's high school awards and favorite foods. His page read more like the resume of a recent college graduate - which he was - than a typical Wikipedia article.

Two: the information was incredibly detailed and included a comprehensive set of personal data, the sort of over-the-top detail you would expect from a statistician. And very promotional in tone - go find it and look for the "view history" link, see for yourself, it's still there.

Three: at the time, the only other pages edited by "Mack2" were pages about baseball statistics, Soviet history (Silver is reportedly Russian), and Silver's company and co-workers. Nothing else. Does that sounds like a disinterested journalist documenting an interesting topic? Hardly. I suspect it was Nate Silver himself, writing his own PR, using a fake name - just like he eventually acknowledged doing at DailyKos.com.

I had the sense that Silver was promoting himself there, and I thought he did a fantastic job at it. I'm guessing that once the NY Times picked him up, he may have hired a professional PR agent at that time, or the NY Times got him one - it's a win-win for them, after all. PR agents and journalists go hand-in-hand, any there are individuals who do both, or change jobs from PR to journalism and back - all the time. Not unusual at all. PR is a big aspect of newspaper work and journalism.
I agree that "generate less wealth" is a non-starter. Any political efforts down that road are wasting time, in my opinion. And if you think this is an important issue, why waste time on something that's not going to happen?

It does seem likely we can have a somewhat lighter footprint, or at least a more efficient one. The problem that lurks down that path is that if energy became more efficient it's possible people will just use more to do more, and the end result stays the same or even increases.

So I do think things like geoengineering and adapting to the changes have to be on the table. It's getting to a point where it seems irresponsible to not be exploring those options more fully.
not working in Europe. God damn!
Don't you realize how reprehensible it is to exploit fear after a natural disaster for political gain? The article alludes to Sandy in the first sentence even though nobody (except Bloomberg) is saying that global warming is to blame. What I see is disaster-chasing nonsense intended to manipulate energy policy.

There is nothing scientific (falsifiable) about this argument, and you seem plenty ignorant and dismissive to me.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but I would suspect that the IRS would only know that the debt was forgiven if the debt owner wrote the debt off as a loss on their taxes. If they simply hold it and do nothing, even if they deleted it from your credit record (which they can do), no taxable event would have occurred. I could be wrong in this crazy country of ours, but I believe there is no law requiring a debt owner to attempt to collect on it, or to write off a debt as noncollectable after a certain period of time.
LinkedIn vs. Facebook: Tale of the tape
Conspiracy to commit tax fraud.
Well, maybe yes. One strategy for predicting the outcomes would be to paint a quarter red on one side and blue on the other, and assigning the outcome of that state to the outcome of the coin flip. That probably wouldn't be a very effective strategy, but it's possible to still nail all 50 states (actually, 51 in this case). Silver's method is much much more accurate than the coin toss method.

Silver takes all the polls, even the crappy ones, and includes them in his calculation. If you're a bayesian you'd find this comforting because all of the evidence is included in the belief. There might be some handwringing about how important each poll really is. If you're not a bayesian, then you have some other weird strategy that might or might not work.

So really, the predictions are nice, but what we're after is a system that produces good predictions. It's not clear that Mr. Silver's is the best. Perhaps there is some horrible flaw an evil agent could exploit that just didn't get tickled this election. It's tough to say.
The term Moral Hazard is relevant here.
Yeah, medical bills just happen sometimes, for the un-insured or under-insured. And you can easily rack up 10k in debt for a weekend stay at the local hospital for something you could have never helped (accident, disease, or otherwise). Crazy part is, you would never even know what hit you till you got the bill 3 weeks later. It's not like they tell you upfront, "ok, each IV you get is gonna be $550, each blood lab $230, and each vital check is gonna run u $55." I don't think they are bailing out loans on BMWs or mc-mansions...
The answer is: a good coder knows when something should be quick and dirty, and when something should be thorough and clean.
Best medical journal (Lancet), proper sample-size (579), from first glance it looks OK!

From their discussion there are some caveats:

- mostly white people checked (so if you're Asian, this might not happen)

- MRI has a known bias towards participation of healthy people, as unhealthy people don't like to hear the "news" about their condition

- the study is "cross-sectional", i.e., the MRI is just from one point in time. Having several measurements from the same people over a period of time (in years) would be much, much better.

Here's the original paper in case anyone's got access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147444221...

P.S.: To lift your mood, the first comment in the news-article is hilarious: "now the government obama care will start to penalize people with high blood pressure? absurd, they just need more cash."
Beginner's Guide to Jeweler and authoring Gems - Zombie Process
From what I can find:

A bank will make a loan, after 120 (or 180) days of no payment the loan becomes "charged off", this means it's now tax-exempt

The purpose of making such a declaration is to give the
bank a tax exemption on the debt

Then a debt buyer will purchase the value of the debt for a percentage

A debt buyer is a company [..] that purchases delinquent
or charged-off debts from a creditor for a fraction of
the face value of the debt.

with the pricing generally being

Depending on the age and history of the debt, a buyer
typically pays between 3 and 16 percent of the face
value of the debt.

Does this mean that the debt buyer than becomes in possession of the value of the debt for tax purposes, even after it has been charged-off by the company that initially granted the debt? or do they become in possessions of the amount paid (eg: buying $1,000 debt for $100, do they now own $1,000 for tax or $100?). Wikipedia isn't clear.

quotes taken from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_buyer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge-off
Will that delete the history of that debt from the original creditor or only the creditor currently holding that debt?
BitTorrent Traffic Increases 40% in Half a Year
I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but... no. This was a common money laundering tactic in the '80s and '90s. At some point the IRS can declare the debt forgiven regardless of whatever the debt holder says, in the same way they can declare your money-losing business a "hobby" if they think you're not actually trying to make money.

The IRS has pretty wide latitude in these kinds of cases - I think the tax code is the only area of law where the government pretty much wins unless you prove your innocence.
Much appreciated!

Now I'm wondering what kind of business model Agency Y and Z operate on
Give me an example of how you would do it while still maintaing the tone with a person you've only met once and want something from.
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The Fall of Apple: Samsung Galaxy S3 Surpasses iPhone Sales
Show HN: Snapterms - a service for terms of service
oelewapperke: you seem to have become hellbanned (the first 2-3 pages of your comments look reasonable, too, so I think it happened in ancient times.)

I agree -- it's a big deal, but we have great natural experiments for some forms of geoengineering. Sulfur in the air is pretty well understood due to volcanos, with the main effects being cooling and some seriously awesome sunsets. It happens quickly, so if we wait a decade or two (with or without CO2 reductions), and see that climate change is causing clear problems, it is probably time to do the sulfur.

Our understanding is only getting better every year, so delaying action makes some sense. The most economically efficient thing is probably a moderate reduction in CO2, extreme reduction in point sources of pollution, and continuing to observe. Extreme cuts to CO2 would cause enough economic problems that they would be worse than the cure, and doing nothing at all seems like it has a higher expected cost, based on the evidence available today, than doing a moderate amount.

Some things we can do are not really restricted to reducing CO2 -- making cars more efficient in general saves money, reduces other much more direct and observable forms of pollution (local air pollution), etc. A few other specific fixes (cement production, agriculture, replacing coal with natural gas, ...) also seem prudent and overall cost savings, at least if done at the right time in capital equipment replacement lifecycle.
I think you were maybe drawing some parallels with the word "decriminalization" in your mind -- which makes sense, because the word is being used a lot (with news of marijuana regulation and such).
Cult TV show actress, indie video game developers and cult comic and adventure show host who are memes on Reddit. Reddit fancies these people, and the fact that they didn't pay to post makes it seem more legit. While they may be marketing something, the fact that it's not in your face makes it seem more innocent. Having something on there that specifically states "this is a sponsored AMA, someone is doing this to sell you something" immediately creates a negative reaction. Hiding the sponsorship would just cause paranoia.

Would sponsored AMAs be front paged immediately? Could they be downvoted to hell? Would comments that the sponsor found offensive be removed? Would a company want someone linking to r/SpaceDicks in their AMA? It's kind of a Pandora's box promoting on Reddit.
You're absolutely right - I agree that voter turnout "should" be highest at exactly "50% chance my guy wins" and diminish from there in either direction. I think I just got a bit too caught up in what I was arguing when I mentioned that a 10% Romney prediction should be the best one for Romney supporter turnout; a 90% prediction should probably be just as good as a 10% prediction in terms of making you likely to vote.

Under this theory, polls/predictions can't actually skew the result in either direction [1], they can only increase or decrease the total turnout (highest turnout when polls say 50%, lowest turnout when they say 0%/100%). In reality this probably isn't actually true, but we can't say for sure whether or not polls do affect election outcomes, and in which direction, unless there's empirical evidence. I don't even have a guess for which direction it would go (whether you want your supporters to be "concerned" or "optimistic") - I could see either being true.

[1] Edit: I should note that this assumes that each poll/prediction is listened to and taken seriously equally by both sides of the electorate, which almost certainly isn't true. Which actually brings up something kind of interesting - it could be that with all of its "Romney will win in a landslide" talk, Fox News actually hurt Romney's chances because most Fox News viewers are Romney supporters (but they could have done the same amount of damage to Romney's chances by saying "Obama will win in a landslide" - the best way for them to help Romney might be to say that the election is exactly tied). And I suppose it would also lead to a justification for the idea that Nate Silver has a liberal bias, using his relatively "wishy-washy" predictions to energize his mostly young and liberal audience to get out and vote. It seems that I've gone too far with this and started arguing against myself...
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>> The seven each received a punitive letter of reprimand and were docked half pay for two months...

I wonder how this dock in pay compares to the amount they were paid as consultants by EA.
Great follow up
>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.

That's why we have bankruptcy laws.

From what I heard at the time, the big hobby horse for the OWS people was student debt, which can't be forgiven in bankruptcy. And that kind of debt is entirely optional.
why would I pay money to for terms of service?
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This is awesome beyond words.
Also, the exciting thing about geoengineering is you don't really have to ask anyone's permission. If you had a random country flagged ship and a bunch of SO2, you could pretty much just do this thing without telling anyone. They would presumably see it from satellites after atmospheric sampling (and people with eyes in the evening) noticed, but I'm unclear what the legal process would be to stop it.
> End-of-lifing my mouse is not a way to get a repeat customer out of me

You may be in the minority. People buy products with huge ridiculousness factors -- DRM, region locking, DLC, retroactive feature removal (I'm looking at you, Sony), the mess that is the US cell phone carrier industry...The number of customers who simply don't care about such things is large enough to support a lot of companies.
You're also a zealot.

I care a lot about science - it distills reason by holding it accountable to observed reality. I dismiss your offensive reaction to alternative viewpoints. That should be obvious.
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A variation of "Buy debt at 25 cents on the dollar, collect 40 cents on the dollar in interest and fees, spend 8 cents on the dollar for high school graduates to man the phones and 5 cents on the dollar for overhead.", with numbers adjusted depending on how toxic their average pool of receivables is.
This was my experience (by proxy, my aunt went bankrupt and the day it was final, bought a new car and had tons of credit card offers). They do this because they know you can't go bankrupt again for quite a while, so you're on the hook the second time.
In US, most debt, you never have to pay off regardless of whether its forgiven or not. It's not a crime, and its not hard to avoid collectors.
Ah - after a bit of puzzling, it's a histogram! Time vs. #of sites requiring that much time to load. Without labels, it _is_ nonsense.

As for the long load times, whew, I thought it was just me.
"Clear algorithms. Full spreadsheets. 91% chance of winning." - N. Silver
Less than they paid in taxes (with allowances, etc., they make $3-8k/mo). The letter of reprimand is the bigger deal, if it prevents promotion or assignments in the future, and potentially makes it so they can't get to 20 years and retirement.
Buying a random stranger's debt with your own money, with no expectations of re-payment or even a personal thank you is entitlement?
>>You can't turn back time and undo abuse

Sure you can. The ancestors of those slaves are still suffering from that abuse. Your willful blindness is disgusting. The truth is that you are a racist. Only a racist would ignore all logic and pretend that the blacks of today are not a product of the slavery of yesterday. That the reason that they are poor and disadvantage compared to whites is because of the systematic oppression against them for hundreds of years. And the fact that many people agree with your comments shows that we are still infected with racism. Not as bad as before, but still going. You are proof of it.

And yes I'm angry, angry that racists people like you pretend that they are not racists.
More interestingly, how would the 1099-C work in such a case. Wouldn't it be like matter and anti-matter colliding wiping each other out since you would simultaneously incur a tax-deductable loss and a taxable gain of equal value?
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jwz's thesis, that uninformed people shouldn't vote, is overwhelmingly correct. I consider myself to be well-informed, politically speaking. Yet I voted in only 7 of 17 races on my ballot. I am not, for example, equipped to make informed choices for my jurisdiction's school board.

All ballots should come with a "No vote" option. What would the difference be from just leaving it blank? Nothing, except that it would give uninformed people a box to tick so that they don't have to stray towards the more important ones.

With that said, his stated corollary (to vote against propositions by default) is unhelpful and perhaps harmful. Many ballot proposals are stupid. Some aren't. As a voter, if you don't have an informed opinion, the right move is to leave it blank. Don't vote. Leave the job to those who have done their homework.
Yep. That's why I think people are slightly naive thinking that 'code in bigger companies' (vs MVP/startups) is generally good. I believe, from experience and anecdotal evidence, that it's generally not and that OP should just rather deliver than worry about 'bad programming'.
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6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/122zcw/we_are_the_edit...

Does this example work? Top comment, "Let's cut the shit: Buy our new book."
Your posts in this thread are blanket dismissals of any science or person supporting global warming. You offer no counter position and you resort to accusations and name calling - I'm a zealot for a simple mention of the volume of global warming evidence.
Panel Discussion: Skeuomorphism vs. Simplicity
This is his standard libertarian line.

I don't think you are fairly representing Thiel. I don't think he is making libertarian points at all, since he seems to advocate in favor of big government projects (at least in principle). Indeed, it's tough to argue this is a libertarian point, since he criticizes the private sector for the exact same thing.

I think his view is that this is just a cultural shift.

http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels...

There used to be all sorts of circulating ideas about large projects ...A 20th century example is Robert Moses, who in the 1920s simultaneously held twelve fairy high-level government posts...bulldoze neighborhoods, build roads and highways, and do a lot of planning and construction...From today’s perspective, this is crazy.
I get good sound isolation from hf5s: http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/hf5.html -- they are basically ear plugs with the ability to pump in audio. They work well enough to quiet (but not silence) a room/environment/train without audio hooked up.

The other extreme is to just use shooting range ear protection: http://www.earplugstore.com/hunting-and-shooting-ear-plugs.h... (or amazon'd: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Sports-Outdoors-Hunting-E...)
This may sound harsh, but medical attention isn't free, and crossing that street without medical insurance and getting hit by a car and accepting expensive treatment you can't pay for is still incurring debt which you are obligated to pay back. This is why insurance of all forms exists; to protect us from expensive, catastrophic events. So as far as fault goes, you are very much to blame if you take risks and choose not to pay for insurance, regardless how expensive it is.
I'm curious to why HN would be walking such a performance tightrope. I could speculate, but it would be uninformed rambling, so I'd love it if someone more knowledgeable than I could explain.
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Obama win may be good news for Pakistan flag-makers
"This completely flies in the face of the history of racism and racism systems in the US. The most raw and visceral forms of slavery and de-facto slavery in the US are most certainly based on power imbalance"

I didn't say racism can't exist with power imbalance, I said it doesn't require it. Obviously racism, combined with a power imbalance is worse than racism without the power imbalance. But choosing who you hang out with based solely on skin color is also racist - no power imbalance.

"policies such as affirmative action do not further racism..."

Yes they do, by encouraging people to think that making decisions based on race is acceptable and in fact encouraged by the government.

"This is a total derailment. Institutional oppressions are highly linked to racism, to ignore it is to dismiss the criticisms and voices of people of color point this power imbalance out."

I didn't say it should be ignored. I said it shouldn't be the focus. You can acknowledge that racism and oppression is a problem. You can punish those who make decisions based on race, and you can show that making race an issue in your decisions is wrong - by not continuing to do it.
A better question is why the original lender doesn't just try to give the original lender the chance to buy his own debt at pennies on the dollar more than what they are selling it for. i.e. "Hey we're about to sell your $10k in debt to company X for $500, but we'll sell it to you for $2000. Do you want to buy it or should we sell it off to Company X?"
See here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102
We were told back in the late 1980s and early 1990s that huge computer models were written, that ran on supercomputers, to model and predict climate change.

The fastest Cray in 1990 could do (I think) 60 GFlops when loaded with 32 processors, which is roughly the sustained GFlops as a high end i7.

So clearly it is not a case of "just need a faster supercomputer and we will have an accurate prediction".

Reality is, from what I can tell, is that we don't have an accurate mathematical model of all the pieces that go into global climate to run on a supercomputer, no matter how powerful.
What happened, from what I've read, is that initial contact put enough European disease into the population that the population and society collapsed; it was thus much easier for Europeans settling here to win.

The Amazon was, allegedly, basically a garden at one point -- the natives the Spanish eventually encountered were just broken remains of a much larger civilization which had been successful and then disappeared.

http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colum...
I believe he's talking about the job posts that don't allow comments.
Has Apple stopped innovating?
sigh No.

If you buy $10k of debt for $500, the debt buying business' basis in the debt is $500. If they cancel it, they can deduct $500.

If $10k of your debt is forgiven, you get 1099-C'ed for $10k in income.

Net-net, this would cause $9.5k in income if you went through with it.