skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a bank. I gave a mortgage to a responsible homeowner who has bought a house that is within his means. Now that I've given this loan, a lot of my money is stuck and I can't give loans to other people. However, I know it's a good loan with a very low risk of default. So I turn and say "Hey, I've given this loan, and here are the details which explain how much this loan is worth in non-real terms. You'll have to guess at the market interest rate to figure out the "real" (economic term) "value", but that's doable. Would you like to buy it from me?"

If someone agrees to take possession of the loan, they'll have to reimburse the bank. Hey look! The bank has capital to repeat the process until it can't find any buyers of these loans. It's a good, honest bank, so it doesn't do anything fishy to move more loans. Eventually, we hit an equilibrium between people buying these loans, the bank holding loans, and people getting mortgages.

Now you're telling me a derivative, the thing the bank sold, has no value? Sir, I'm going to have to disagree.
did you know that BIG NUMBERS are SCARY? Try these on for size:
17! 542! 24,986!
BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA
Twitter OAuth live on Tipjoy
The auto-scaling based on monitoring is the next logical place for our service to go, but the scaling service isn't complete yet.
i don't go that far, but i agree with the sentiment.

i've got everything slung up to the underside of the desk so it's not visibly apparent what a mess it all is unless you really go looking for it.
Man, I wish he would have written another epic work of fiction before he died. So sad. I loved Infinite Jest and Broom of the System.
We have used both at reddit. Performace-wise they are comparable for us, but nginx was a lot easier to configure, and lighttpd had a nasty bug that made us switch away (for the life of me though, I can't remember what the bug was).
Now that this information is public none of us
will give out our usernames to external websites,
thus ending the problem.

Correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm NOT a web guru, but I think there are three ways to get the user names, and it's enough if this only works in some cases:

(1) Brute force (look at who's currently active on the site)

(2) Look at browser history (HN users have to constantly look at their own profile to check for replies, and the URL contains their user name)

(3) Send whatever request the browser sends to HN normally, and gets the user name embedded in the page.

Again, I don't know enough about browsers/JS/HTTP/HN to know if any of the above would work. I'm just saying I'm not sure that explicitly giving out your user name is required for this.

Edit: typos
Well, yeah, but this is a site where what matters are the comments. Nobody's expecting superbig essays. They just like people who talk well and know what they're saying.
We just use an http load balancer (haproxy) and have the app servers talk http directly. No need for a web server, which makes things much more stable. We use nginx for static content though (haproxy points at nginx for the static content).
Its definitely the first iteration of the service with many more to come. This is one of the most basic needs for any production system, the diagnostics side (alerts) and the preventative maintenance side (load graphs). So stay tuned.
"I'm an American citizen working in India."

Why? (I'm American but my parents are immigrants from India.)
Speak for yourself! Ill take a handout!!! :D
Digg, An Infrastructure in Transition [video]
Where do I sign up?

Seriously, how do you get a SBA loan?
What exactly did Google expect to happen when they created the service and published the protocols?
I don't know whether you've been paying much attention to some of the threads lately but HN is trying to maintain a particular feel. It's huge publicity that begins to erode HN and turn it into something that many of us would rather avoid.
How exactly do you imagine oranges are assembled again?

No one is inserting shit into my oranges, hopefully. Honor system only I think for produce. Or buying bags of the shit, which most people arent used to.
Being an asshole is just that - being an asshole.

It doesn't really involve anyone else.
World's Best Programmer is... (w/ Focus)
It's the 80s and 90s where the US and the UK became distinctly more free-market oriented than the rest of Europe. During the 50s-70s there wasn't that much difference between the economic policies of say France and the US.

During the 80s and 90s unemployment fell in the US and UK with respect to Europe and growth rates increased.

US Unemployment:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/c/c3/2...

French Unemployment: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/9/9f/2...

Comparative growth rates of countries from 1988-2007
http://topforeignstocks.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/1-...

Take a look at the current unemployment and growth rates here: http://www.heritage.org/Index/Ranking.aspx
Presumably, the federal government doesn't make CDS speculators whole after their counterparties BK.
In which virtual robots are trained to swipe cheezburgers, then sit on one another.
Scroll down for animated GIFs of the evolved individuals, showing progression over time.
The difference between DFW and this article is that DFW writes really, really good sentences, that just happen to be incredibly huge. A parody most likely won't be as good unless the parodist is brilliant as well (see the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses).
SR-71 Disintegrates Around Pilot During Flight Test (in 1966)
Rush Limbaugh is not an influential individual. He is part of what is essentially an orchestrated system for conveying (conventional) right-wing ideology. Ever wonder why different news people during the day hit upon the same topic? I kid you not.
1. It most certainly was malicious, if not in outcome, in intent. xach wanted to say "Look, you say you're a coder - look at me I'll show you." There were a multitude of ways he could have presented his case in a manner that would have been - frankly - much more mature.

2. This is pg's personal pet hobby. I don't think holding him responsible for every possible vulnerability is really all that practical, especially when the code is wide open. He's putting it out there with an element of trust that a hacker to be would actually provide a fix instead of being malicious. If xach was such a great positive influence, why didn't he provide a patch?
I think you're being close-minded. There's an underlying thought process that leads to these conclusions that you're missing out on. You're applying your view of the world to his conclusions and thinking them ridiculous.

This essay is based on a top down view of economics. A top down view runs a game theory thought experiment based on the properties of money, trading, and investing, and ends up with the conclusion that bankers end up with all the wealth as time approaches infinity.

Watch money as debt for an introduction to this kind of thinking: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
I'd disagree with you there. It's not an orchestrated system. They all just follow the same blind ideology, and as a result their ideas stem from the same talking points.

Rush is extremely influential. But then, he's not controversial. A large part of the country wants exactly what he's peddling: black-and-white ideology.
You saw they're publishing The Pale King?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_...
> Asian cultures.

Oh my god dude. You mean all the people from Asia who came to the US for the explicit reason to bust their ass and get rich.

Go to Asia, if you've never been (I'm guessing not). You're going to find plenty of lazy people who aren't that smart.
This is _great_ took 5 minutes to setup and configure. I am very happy with this. Honestly, I'm not positive that I'd pay for this, with other freely available tools around, but it is very good. Great work.
I wouldn't normally say this, but your case is extreme.

Perhaps you should have an account longer than an hour before you lecture me about the effects of this issue on the community.
Everyone has the potential to be an idiot. Broken windows and all...
I remember Summize was rumored to have gone for $15m in cash and Twitter stock.
Here is a list of top banks that offer SBA loans...
http://www.tlmanage.com/sbabanks.html
Oof, I stand corrected.
Don't forget the jeans.
Official google.org Blog: Smart Epidemic Outbreak Detection Using Online Info
In re-reading this comment, I realize I should clarify something. I didn't mean all people who visit zoos are idiots, just the ones who don't know the difference between a monkey and an ape. Zoos are great places to learn, I just wish more people used them as a learning resource while they were there.
Why installing software on the Mac is really confusing even for advanced users.
Ideally, software installation should work the same way every time and require no thinking on the part of the user. This is generally true on Windows but not on the Mac.

On the Mac, you have several cases and the user needs to recognize and understand them then take appropriate action:

Case 1: you have an executable that you are expected to copy to a suitable directory (e.g., Applications)... not hard but requires the user to recognize this case and think about where to copy the file

Case 2: you have an installation program that you run... which could be just as easy as Windows except for the fact that such programs typically expect you to drag the app icon to the Applications directory from the install program (!) essentially giving us a roundabout case 1

Case 3: the software comes in the form of a dmg file. A user would probably have no idea what this is or what to do with it. It's not clear whether one should extract the contents of this file or use it as is. One might wonder about whether the app would even run correctly without extracting the contents of the file (e.g., it might attempt to write to a directory in the file). When double clicked, the file is mounted -- not an obvious notion for users to understand. The mounted file also clutters the desktop. Clicking on the mounted file icon will not start the app but it may start an install program OR show the contents of the image. Quitting the app will not unmount the file. The file can be unmounted manually (e.g., to reduce desktop clutter), but it's not clear what this does -- will it delete the app? Will it just stop the app from running? Can you unmount the file while the app is running? What happens if you attempt to run the app again after you have unmounted its image? Not only will the app start, but you will also see the contents of the mounted image OR have the install program run again.

The Mac version of Open Office is particularly bad when it comes to understanding its installation. It comes in the form of a dmg file, but it also requires you to drag the app executable to the Applications directory. Even more confusing is that it runs its install program to tell you to do this when you mount its dmg file.

Exactly what problem(s) does this dmg file address and why is it not needed in Windows?
Using Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages
http://www.sba.gov/services/financialassistance/loanapplicat...

Let me warn you in advance: they're set up to fund laundromats, McDonalds, and dental practices, NOT websites or software developers. The process of applying for the loan will consume an intense amount of resources which could be better spent getting stuff in front of customers.

For most people on HN I'd advise you to invest sweat equity, get ramen profitable, and just grow via reinvestment of revenues at that point.
Oh wow, thanks for the link!
Richard East on ROI.
Richard helps you in growing your business and success beyond your imagination.
It would be nice if you would overlay the help image over the input box instead of forcing me to go to a non-functional page to see it. I don't want to have to "go back" to use what I learned.
I think a large part in that teens already have strong texting networks.

One of the reason twitter works is because subscribe-and-publish communication has low transaction costs per message.

Teens engage in signaling behavior that has the high transaction costs of communication as an element of "conspicuous consumption".

I have totally no data to back this up, but research into this area is one of my interests, and am looking forward to performing some in the future and seeing if my conjectures hold up.
This is pretty much incoherent. The author is really comparing Clojure to Wordpress.

His concluding segment is literally called: A Brief Comparison: Clojure vs. Wordpress.

Clojure is a language (dialect) and Wordpress is an application. This is worse than the common mistake of comparing a language to a framework.
> If you haven't figured that out by now, perhaps this isn't the place for you.

God forbid anybody here should have a sense of irony.
It begins: The Dell Adamo spotted at SXSW, coming tomorrow, $1,999
Shurflo
Mosso Cloud Servers vs. Amazon EC2 (According to Mosso)
True. You'd still need to brute force USERNAME, but it's much faster to do that in JavaScript than issuing a million HTTP requests.
DFW's latest fiction in the New Yorker was really scary: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309f...
Stop hax0ring our megahurtz
Maybe double-click to edit an item for faster access?
Germany and Japan, once the war was over, were prevented from re-arming.

Think of the amount that the UK and US spend on expensive weapons systems, compounded over that period of time.

It's not really surprising, given those additional funds that Germany was able to do so well. I can't speak at all to Japan, since they have had their own problems.
One VCs take on clean tech / energy investing
Compare DFW with authors like Albert Camus and Simone Weil and it becomes pretty clear a particular style has little to do with an author's perceived brilliance -- it's about ideas.
... in 1966.

Perhaps there should be an HN rule about dating articles not from this year in their titles? That said, this is a great story.
Seems pretty cool - but I am a little worried about handing over my amazon keys - those things are literally the keys to the kingdom if you are running your apps with Ec2 and storing data with S3, etc.
It's worth taking a look at the results of the David Foster Wallace Parody Competitions:

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/parody.htm

Making lighthearted jokes about Wallace's syntax and verbosity are the common first steps I've watched people make when they begin reading his prose, but it usually doesn't take very more reading at all for these people to see that even attempting to parody Wallace on a humorous, surface level would require the kind of introspection and effort that takes a near-lifetime and of the sort that probably isn't the most satisfying or healthy way for a person to spend their time.
Maybe the grammar section of my brain is slow today, but I didn't understand the "absolute construction" at the end.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518776
At the end it could be read as just another lobby attempt.
Using the same statistics, we can say that the majority of H1B visa fraud is committed by Indians, and 100% of the arrested for that kind of fraud are Indians too... that proves anything?
That's a very good-looking computer. I'm curious to see how it feels. Dell traditionally pays not attention to things like key responsiveness and tension between the different parts of the computer. That's the design I'd like to see them learning.
patio11-

please source your data on why they are NOT set up to fund developers or websites.

That is not my experience... and at some point your business will require capital and an SBA loan is a nice alternative.
One of the things about nginx is the lack of an organised community - for e.g. there is not even an official repository for nginx (http://marc.info/?l=nginx&m=122153991029203&w=2). there are simply some mirrors of people who maintain a patch-based tree (http://mdounin.ru/hg/nginx-vendor-current).
There is no bug-tracker (!!), just a wiki page (http://wiki.nginx.org//NginxBugs) and as someone mentioned (http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Lighttpd_vs_nginx), very less activity on IRC.

It comes down to the original issue of Linus Torvalds, Ingo Molnar and Con Kolivar: do you have a clear roadmap of where the architecture is going, vs a very cool technology that had a lot of support and was no doubt popular.

I am in no way commenting on the technology behind nginx, but as an architect, making a deployment decision that is going to take hell to change later, I would be very concerned.
Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382 Percent
I would agree with you, twitter does not have that social feeling yet, maybe because they have followers and not friends in it.

I still prefer facebook ... have had it since 2004, hardly use twitter. I see twitter as more of a way to distribute information to everyone(friends and strangers)
Thanks for the useful feedback. We do offer a much simpler alternative to the AWS Console. No more worrying about key management and security groups, focus on the business. Also we offer graphs that neither the AWS console nor Ylastic offer that give you a better glimpse into your datacenter.

Regardless, we would love to integrate any ideas you have or any infrastructure services woes you've experienced or any general shortcomings of our/other services. Thanks again.
Seastead governments, having fewer barriers on exit for their citizens, will face better incentives to govern for the social good.

In more general terms: the interesting suggestions require rethinking how governments are organized, not just passing some suite of legislation in our current democracies.

Of course, it may turn out that technological progress generates new wealth faster than government can waste it, and we all turn out alright in the end, just not as well-off as we could have been.
Nokia Launches Three New XpressMusic Mobiles in India
Nokia announces the launch of its latest arrivals - three new XpressMusic mobile phones in India namely Nokia 5730 XpressMusic, Nokia 5330 XpressMusic & Nokia 5030. They are aptly referred to as Nokia Music Stores.
The SR-71 was an amazing piece of engineering.

The panels actually didn't line up - as they expanded when it got warm. So basically at take off the aerodynamics of the plane were shot - you had to fly for a bit for it to hit normal performance (it also meant it literally leaked until it got hot enough and sealed).
How did I know you'd pull that card instead of just letting it go? It's so easy to pull that card, isn't it? Long time reader, first time poster. Please don't judge a book by it's hour-old cover.
Obama is also making it easier to invest in small businesses and startups, according to the whitehouse blog:

"... a series of tax cuts for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage investments in small businesses. He noted further that in his budget, he proposes permanently reducing to zero the capital gains tax for investments in small or startup businesses"

Not sure how much investors care about taxes when they are investing in a startup, but it seems like this would make funding more available.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/03/16/Help-for-small-busin...
The idea of sorting web information the way iTunes sorts music has always struck me as a good idea. I've wondered why Apple doesn't spend time creating a similar design for Safari. It bugs me that they release such comparatively conservative updates, when in other fields they're innovating faster than anybody.

I use a lot of different web sites. I travel all over. It makes sense, then, to treat the opening of a web browser not as a single connection to a page, but as the initiation of a set of pages visited. Top Pages/Speed Dial solves some of that, but that's a page that appears only once. The real solution is figuring out how to make a single interface that handles everything, without the obnoxious clutter of Flock.
Of course, Mosso conveniently doesn't mention that

* Persistant disk is available via Amazon EBS, if you want it.

* For a given amount of RAM or disk space, Mosso is somewhere between "slightly more expensive" and "over double the price".

* Mosso's price for outgoing bandwidth is considerably higher than EC2's (although Mosso is slightly cheaper for incoming bandwidth).

All in all, I'd say that Mosso and EC2 each have strengths and weaknesses, and neither is clearly superior.
Our search company (Trovix) assigns meaning to words. Google does not. They use statistical analysis to derive contextual links.
Amazing story.

Read the story carefully. Note the incredible details of what that aircraft could do. Now read this line again:

By far, the most memorable flight occurred on Jan. 25, 1966.

This was more than four decades ago. Can you imagine what they're doing today? In some ways, it makes me angry, because I suspect that the military solved some engineering challenges decades ago that scientists are still wrestling with today.
such a sucka!!!
Economic epistemology is hard. Your data can never be controlled for all confounding variables. So you try to do the best you can.

With the difficulty of isolating variables in social data, I doubt the objectivity of large-scale empirical economics ever improves.

Other social sciences are probably worse. That's why they are stuck with the modifier "social".

So your criticism is right. The best large-scale empirical economics can offer is plausible-sounding models and examples that back them up.
Awesome h4x0ring, but it would've been better if you had done it without damaging the existing link. You should write up an explanation of how you pulled it off.

EDIT: Its source code is at http://source.notabank.appjet.com . Apparently news.yc is generating edit-profile closures even when viewing a profile other than your own.
Google does something similar to this:

http://www.google.com/accounts/tos/highlights/utos-us-en-h.h...
"Huge publicity"... but it's already publicly advertised in many places, many big names are blogging/twittering about it, did you really expect everyone to ignore it? If it's got such a good feel to it, why can't everyone else get in on that?
So far all I've seen is elitism, both in comments I'm reading and the replies to my own (first) comment.
Hackers aren't supposed to like elitism. We're supposed to promote the sharing of knowledge, information, freely and openly, you know... because that's how the world should be. Or so we say. But I haven't seen that here. I've seen the typical elitist social community, with the people who've been here "longer" running the show aside from the admin.

Decided to end my thought there, it was running a little long...
Whoa! This really works. Who made it?
Because they want you to have tangible assets that can be sold to recover some of the debt. If they give you money for a website and it fails they lose it all.
You can treat WordPress as a PHP based content management framework, and that is in fact what many people do. Also he is in fact using a Clojure web framework- Compojure. In anycase, contrary to what you are saying, his point is coherent.