skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting.

I wonder what new forms/stages of funding will become available as micro-lending becomes a more widely accepted form of investment.

I wonder if you could build some sort of "micro-lending" pool. A fund for investors in the 20-200 dollar range. (pulling numbers out of thin air)

While slightly riskier than traditional micro-lending the individual financial burden is light. It's a numbers game of course, if such a company had a good enough selection process it could be a good investment.

I believe there is no limit of sellable ideas, only a limit to how many can be found and exploited, and only a very practical limit to how small a profitable venture can be.

It would be very nice to see a vast sea of startups and an economy driven by a higher volume of investors that thrives on change, new ideas and a thorough profit-motivated vetting process. I believe such an economy would be much more resilient.
High-speed trains are coming to America
That's a difference only of degree.
Would you have the citation for the studies that have shown damage done by ecstasy? There was a minor mistake in one study that used methamphetamine instead of MDMA: http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma_research2.shtml.
I'm with you. This seems like it would be better classified as 'Awesome' than 'Scary.

The more money and avenues available for owners to have available, the better. VC is not going to be eliminated by microlending, and anyone who thinks so is crazy. VC is 90% about the expertise/network, and 10% about the money. Microlending is 100% about the money. Both are valid in different situations.
Nah, I downmodded you because you used the "I'll probably get downmodded for this" line.

Also, this is a fine article -- it's well-written and makes some points that are novel (to me, at least). The fact that it's espousing one of the stances that redditors tend to blindly support is irrelevant.
Megapixels is like the only thing users compare cameras by. So they won't be going away, even though 99% of those users will never shoot above the typical 640x480 pic size.
Walls are irrelevant if you have the whole world inside them. Facebook doesn't need to cooperate with other elements because it is a behemoth. There will always be a minority which wants to see more outside access, and Facebook can appease them, but they don't need to go in that direction for growth. The way out for them is reorganizing and adding more features to tie people further to the service.
In Colombia the "war" on drugs _is_ often real horrible armed conflict.
Spoiler:
Legalize drugs.
No joke, I watched that movie (for the second time) tonight. It's a must-see. Easily the most "beautiful" crime movie I've ever seen. Every shot is just so aesthetically pleasing, yet you never lose touch with the danger and nastiness of the situations in the film.
I'm confused:

1) Most of the microlending is essentially aimed at being charitable, and is practiced in the third world. Most venture capital is 0-for-2. This is like comparing VC funding to consumption of chicken breasts.

2) Kiva et al get good press. They probably wouldn't if people knew the microscopic default rates were caused by local partners' automatically rolling over loans which go delinquent. This creative accounting just papers over the problems (and we will, inevitably, see a reckoning here.)

3) I don't see American entrepreneurs taking 100% APR debt anytime soon when many of them can do far, far better with consumer credit (which is itself a poor option for business financing, most of the time). (Oh, they didn't mention that in the microlending presentation? Must have slipped their minds.)

4) There are significant regulatory hurdles in front of microfinance in the US. Prosper, one American startup in the space, got essentially shut down by the SEC. They're also legally capped at about 30% a year for interest, which is unlikely to cover defaults if you aim at the sort of customer Prosper did.

5) I don't think loans in the $5k ~ $25k region would really help most startups that much. They're small enough that it is doable with familial resources for most people who are middle class. (The traditional first resort of startup funding.) They're also small enough to be covered by personal credit, which would take the average working professional about a day to arrange (quite possibly at painful rates, but not 30%).

And unlike selling equity they leave the entrepreneur holding the bag if things go south, which is the major reason we don't tell everybody and their dog "Put the business on your credit card!"
The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles. On Reddit, users need downvotes as a way of saying an article is lame. Downvoting is the only way you can get a (nonspam) submission off the frontpage. But on HN you can flag it and if it's bad the editors will kill it.

We can thus safely assume a nonlame set of articles, and we also (so far at least) assume nonlame voters. And if you only have nonlame voters voting on nonlame articles, upvotes should be enough to pick the winners.
I'm curious, who else do you want to shoot?
Fuel Tech Experts | Engine Cleaning | Fuel Additives | Octane Booster | Oil Additives
Fuel Tech Experts is a blog dedicated to the understanding of engines and the development of increased engine performance by manufacturers. Not just that but a place to discuss the fuel economy and alternative fuels, how to use improved driving styles with such technological advances as biofuels, biodiesels, hybrid engines and hydrogen boosters, and more digital technologies such as car chipping and tuning boxes.
The problem with these kinds of articles is that they make the assumption that governmental drug fighting efforts are sincere. They probably aren't that sincere to their original intent now.

I don't quite understand your usage of the word "sincere". As an ER nurse that's worked in the ghetto of Chicago, I have worked alongside many law enforcement officers. The thinking that hard drugs (cocaine, heroine, crack, meth) are bad and should be off the streets is a sincere and fairly universal belief. The majority of the efforts that I've seen first hand in getting these drugs off the streets are well intentioned and sincere albeit ineffective and futile.

The DEA will probably never go away, because it keeps people employed for one thing, and helps large pharmaceutical companies keep small pharm companies (makers of class II, III drugs with expired patents) from building a legitimate enough business that would help these smaller companies spend money on new drug research. Keeping drugs illegal is good business; it has less to do with discouraging illicit drug use.

Wow, that's a really cynical point of view, and sounds very conspiratorial.

Mind you, I would have little problems with legalization of many drugs that are strictly controlled now. I've administered cocaine and very strong morphine derivatives to patients for years. I've also lost track of how many people's lives I've helped save from heroine OD's. People make choices to kill themselves with alcohol. They can also choose to kill themselves with cocaine as far as I'm concerned. If cocaine were as cheap and abundant as alcohol, there wouldn't be as much crime as far as I'm concerned.

But the idea that Big Pharma is in collusion with the DEA to keep certain classes of drugs is silly as far as I'm concerned. A much simpler explanation is that a large percentage of the population thinks that these substances are evil or too dangerous to be freely available.

You find quite of bit of support for legalizing marijuana on the Coasts, but even among the drug legalization crowd, I haven't really heard too many people suggesting that morphine/heroine derivatives like Vicodin and Oxycontin, or stimulants like cocaine be sold freely like alcohol or nicotine. I don't believe that our society is ready to accept that.
Sketchpad, by Dr. Ivan Sutherland with comments by Alan Kay
At worst, we're talking about a stagnation, a flatlining in the exponential curve for a few years. I doubt that we'll get to that point. To see growth completely stop we'd need a nuclear war or something to that end.

Life was still better during the Great Depression than it was only a few decades earlier. Progress will continue even if the political and economic landscape is unfavorable.
This is so concerning on so many levels. The ineptitude and lack of accountability by the powers that be is borderline criminal.

In a separate vein I'm sure I'm not the only one to realize that people in the West, and in America in particular, have forgotten how to make things. Be it fogbank, tanks, textiles, semiconductors and soon to be cars. We keep farming out manufacturing to the lowest oversees bidders and soon enough all we know how to do is place orders.

What happens, god forbid, when our trading partners become our enemies and they withhold the materials which we need to fight them. How about the semiconductors used in critical systems are compromised by foreign actors? All we can do is hope people at the helm have already thought of this stuff and are doing things to mitigate the risk. I'm not too sure.
Getting Used to Not Being the Boss
One thing that I find confusing is the dotted line that separates the question from the tags. At first (and second) glance it seems that the tags belong to the question below. To be honest I never realized I was mismatching the items until I saw the last question on the page.
> The reason HN doesn't need downvotes is that HN, unlike Reddit, kills lame articles.

Honest question, and I do not mean this as a flame, because generally I quite enjoy Hacker News.

How, exactly, is the current top-rated story on HN, "How to Stop the Drug Wars" ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507509 ) related to.. news of hacking?
TinyArro.ws: 10 new unicode domains. Defaulting previews to ON.
Interesting that, on an anecdotal basis at least, the decline of detroit and manufacturing mirrors the rise of technology and information.

While computers were enjoying increasing market share in businesses and homes through the late 70s on, auto and other manufacturers struggled to compete with foreign imports and labor outsourcing.

Are the two connected? Is the rise of information technology at all related to the decline of America's manufacturing base?
You must understand why people have conspiratorial attitudes here: the CIA has on more than one occasion been involved with drug trafficking. Iran-Contra at the very least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking

The particular conspiracy of the grandparent post doesn't make much sense though -- DEA scheduling is not what makes it hard for smaller pharma companies. Jksmith, could you explain your logic a little more with that?
Sure, but I don't understand how you can belittle that. Partaking in the illegal drug trade is obviously not like jaywalking.
First, I should apologize for my misunderstanding. I do feel like a doofus for not realizing that downvotes are possible on HN. But I swear I have never seen a single downvoted post any time I’ve visited! I am a very occasional HN user, mostly a lurker, and my karma is not even 2 digits. :)

In my defense:

1) There's definitely an element of "if the user can’t find it, the feature doesn't exist" with downvoting here.

2) In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they almost don’t exist.

Anyway, I'm encouraged that downvotes exist on HN, but the threshold could be considered so absurdly high that they're nerfed into oblivion.
The comment implementation, however, does not appear to be substantially different from Reddit's aside from greater editor control. That means that lame downvoting is possible. If people start to downvote those they disagree with then we begin to see enforced groupthink.

(Funny sidenote: In forums with alleged [real or fake] groupthink tendencies, like Reddit, it appears that referring to and criticizing the groupthink is very often voted up by the community. This is why I believe that groupthink emerges naturally as a result of the availability of the downvote. No one notices what's going on and attempts to correct their own behavior.)

Killing articles and comments solves the problem of lame articles and comments. However, it does not solve the problem of lame voting hiding useful comments. I suspect that this problem will require a solution soon; I myself have noticed an increasing trend toward Redditism here.

Additionally, I believe that the comment system is probably even more important than the article system. In some sites sites, including Hacker News, I get more from the comments than I do from the articles. Thus, ensuring that comments are good and fairly balanced is just as important to me as ensuring that stories are good.
Hacker News isn't so much just about programming, but things that are interesting to programmers. It's entirely possible that the programmers that visit HN are interested in that topic.
Just upload it to Scribd with a new account.

Use a free webproxy if you're paranoid.
Hey guys-- thanks for all the feedback a couple of weeks ago.

We just released 10 new unicode character domains to give people some URL shrinking variety.

In addition, we thought it was a bit silly that all the URL shrinkers didn't default previews to "ON" for people and let them turn it off. Why should visitors have to track down some URL trick to show them if the URL is evil before they click on it?

Let us know what you think!
Most scientists really don't care about the copyright on their journal papers being violated. They would prefer them to be read as widely as possible. It's only the journal publishers that try and protect the content. Sometimes you can find papers under journal firewalls on the authors' academic websites.
Actually, I've noticed several downvoted posts in my short time here. Caveat: I think this is more a result of trollish posting in many of the cases, but of course that is another problem on its own.

See:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507278

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507604 (the downvoting on this does seem questionable, although it is an extreme position)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507301

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505452
You can downvote comments, but you can't downvote posts themselves. You can only flag them.
Regardless, I think it's a terrible story for a site about programming topics, and I would absolutely vote it down.

But I can't.
Prohibition causes most of the troubles though (especially cartel violence). And I think the social aspects of any increased addiction rates would be more than offset by not imprisoning hundreds of thousands annually on drug charges.

It's vastly cheaper to subsidize rehab for the relatively small number of actual addicts than it is to pay to arrest and process a million people a year. Not to mention the effect on GDP of the lost production from all the incarcerated people.
i second this. this is probably my favorite text book behind Mackay's "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms".

if you take the time to honestly follow the text you come away with a great understanding of convex optimization... both the theory and the methods.
It's a valid point, though. At what point is the line drawn? Political issues often result in uncivil discussion. There is also probably significant audience crossover with reddit that caused that post to rise up. Hackers may have an interest in libertarianism or economics, but does that mean that this site should become one about Ron Paul if people feel that way?

Editor control should be used to put a stop to that, IMO. Democracy is great, but it went too far with Reddit. HN would become much less useful to me if it went in that direction.
I'm not sure I understand why elections need defending...who is arguing that democracy is bad, and is anyone really taking them seriously?
Storage will not be a major factor in the megapixel race. We're already seeing 16GB SD cards, and with the introduction of SDXC and the prevalence of high-capacity iPhones and other media devices that size will only go up. Megapixel increases are slowing, so they'll likely be surpassed by storage increases, making storage limits a minor consideration in the future.
Flag it if you believe it to be off-topic.
The thing that irks me most about discussions on the internet like this regarding the illegal drug trade, is that this is just "intellectual" conversation to most. People are dying and families are being destroyed. Blame the system, argue that it's broken, or whatever, but don't even consider taking individual responsibility, which would start with saying no.
> Partaking in the illegal drug trade is obviously not like jaywalking.

You're right, they are not alike. Jaywalking is illegal for safety reasons (to both the offender and more importantly the driving public).

On a moral basis, I find neither offense objectionable unless you hurt someone in the process.
This isn't "a site about programming topics". Read the guidelines. Or even just the comment you were replying to.
This is a pretty neat project, and similar to something I saw done recently at Yahoo Hack Week at Georgia Tech (IIRC), but done as a webapp instead of a desktop app.
And how would your s3 bandwidth costs compare to running your clustered servers? Is the DIY storage triply redundant?

I'm not saying you made the wrong decision, or the right one, but is the comparison apples-to-apples?
This has been up so many times. It's not happening, live with it. Python "lambdas" can do most things you need anyway.Normally I don't really find the need for supercomplicated lambdas and you can do if-else in lambda s in Python with the ternary operator, see below:

#######
def throwaway_function(emp):
if emp.salary > developer.salary:
return fireEmployee(emp)
else:
return extendContract(emp)

employees.select(throwaway_function)
######

Python lambda:
filter(lambda emp: fireEmployee(emp) if emp.salary > developer.salary else extendContract(emp), employees)

Don't know what select does but it sounds like filter. So if that works as intended(is the ruby version both returning value and side-effecting?) or not I'm not sure but you probably could make it.
Legalization though probably not the ideal solution, makes sense. There are some decent examples out there today: ala. Amsterdam. Steven Levitt's book Freakonomics, does a great job of illustrating the elemental business like structures behind the crack-cocain outfits in Chicago; sprinkle in a bit of legitimate legal leeway and you have the potential of creating a regulated industry that pays taxes. The economy is in the gutter; every bit helps?
> On a moral basis, I find neither offense objectionable unless you hurt someone in the process.

How can you ignore the violence that is unarguably a by-product of the illegal drug trade?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4417261.stm

Seems to indicate that THC stops inflammation of blood vessels by suppressing the immune system's response. Also seems that oral delivery was used vs. smoking.
I believe the focus on megapixels did the digital camera world a disservice. When mobile phone cameras were introduced, phone makers were able to cram in the pixels and market the phones as comparable with purpose-built cameras.

Had camera makers focussed on other measurables (like lens quality, perception depth) camera phones would have remained a novelty, or at best a useful phone app. More cameras would have been sold, and these could have been higher-end sales as well.
One reason you see so few comments which get the nerfed-into-near-invisible-grey text treatment is that community norms discourage piling on. I mean that when I say it -- comments get down to -5 or so and then people will take time out of their day to post and say "I don't necessarily agree with that but it is a valid point of view" and then, this is the magic part, people mod them up to visible as a result of the social norming.

(Edit to add: I should mention I'm not talking about foul-mouthed racial slurs getting tolerated out of a total desire to let it all hang out. Its more that views which are quite possibly locally unpopular get tolerated, particularly when not obviously trolling. "Rails docs suxorz" would probably end up gray. "The quality of documentation in Rails is subpar, and has been for years. The platform changes so fast that significant features of the most recent releases are documented only on blog posts, if that. The wiki is an unusable mess, bordering on unreadable and filled with information which is out of date or merely wrong." would almost certainly not end up gray, despite the fact that Rails is very popular with the crowd who hangs out here.)

Another reason is that while the signal to noise ratio is not quite infinite the signal to "#$%!"# ratio is pretty close to it. I have omitted the word I wanted to use almost entirely out of my concern that it would be inappropriate for HN. That says something right there. To see it, click here:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

The following are taken directly from another popular news site, at random from the #1 story today.

[Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That was rich.]

[It'll be as big as that book of his, that totally revolutionized science! Oh, wait, nevermind.]

[The next Cuil!]

These three comments were heavily encouraged by the community on the other news site. They would not be encouraged here. This tends to prevent other people from seeing "Aha, sarcastic one-liners are what is valued, I should probably work on my sarcastic one-liners" and drowning most of the value-adding discussion.
You state: "But if you honestly believe that there is nothing morally wrong with intentionally and actively enabling people into addiction, I doubt that the gap between our views on morality can be bridged."

Do you believe that liquor stores, grocery stores, corner shops, restaurants, and bars are all immoral? Should their owners refuse service to any customers that they believe to be at risk of alcoholism? Should pharmacies do background checks on customers purchasing Tylenol to determine whether or not they are addicted to painkillers? I think this argument boils down to legality, not morality.

I think the point originally being made was that a significant portion of drug dealers are NOT intentionally enabling people into addiction. Certainly this varies by drug dealer, and there is a big difference between selling marijuana and selling heroin or crack. A lot of these dealers are simply supplying people with a product that they are purchasing for personal use because they think it makes their life better.

I think it's also important to recognize that morality is subjective, and that it's one of America's founding principles not to legislate morality. Your belief that something is immoral, or even the belief of the majority, is not significant justification for legislation.
Where's the UI to flag a story as off-topic? I don't see anything on the article page itself, and the FAQ ( http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html ) doesn't mention anything about flagging?
Concept is good. I'd prefer to see a swiss army knife approach with the design. Keep it simple/stupid. Just because your application has various features and services, you don't have to overwhelm a new user by carpet bombing them (humor me;) with them. I'm sure there is plenty of feed back in this thread that will also help with the next revision. Best of luck to the team.
its hard to find something like this convincing when the "index" that is the core of his argument is only taken back to 1998