skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can anyone explain why we should look up to him?

I've never heard of this guy before today, but I'd venture to defend an honest loan agency.

Simply, loans are only profitable for lenders if they get back more money than they lend out. As a lender there are two ways you can recover the money you lend -- you get your money back in the negotiated payments or you can accept a security (the lien on a car or house) and repossess/foreclose on it if the terms for repayment are not made. Because there's some chance that the security would be insufficient to cover the debt (house is trashed or loses value, or car is neglected/destroyed), the difference is made up in interest, calculated by the probability of failure (represented by credit score) and the financial exposure if failure occurs (this fed into the feedback cycle where banks were basically giving money away, assuming houses were always going to appreciate). Any remaining delta is operational expense (salary for the lady behind the counter, rent for the buildings) or profit for the lender (presumably where the "exploitation" is).

Paycheck loans are not securitized, in that there's no asset the lender can recover if the paycheck draw doesn't clear -- this means it's down to interest. Paycheck loan shops (AFAIK) don't check your credit, and their very existence (withdraw repayment on payday) assumes that the customer has bad spending habits (otherwise the customer could get more favorable terms from credit cards) -- high probability of failure to pay * high exposure = high interest rate.

But how high is too high? I honestly don't understand the modern notion of usury. It looks like any other business exchange to me: if you need the service and nobody will provide it for less, the prevailing rate is that high, even if it feels like a screw. If it truly is a screw there are generally other businesses who want to get in on it and capture some of the profits. To the extent that this guy was profitable, it was down to either a lack of competition (this can be a bit of a tautology, but he did have competitors, including the one that eventually bought his business), reduced cost structure (yes -- online only), or better actuarial discipline (perhaps marketing to people likely to pay -- unsure in this case).

The article doesn't talk about how much money he made from the operation of the business itself, rather it was focused on the $70m proceeds from the sale of the business. They seem like two different sources of income to me: if the valuation was way off he exploited Cash America instead of his customers.

In summary, I feel that it's not exploitative: while paycheck loan houses have high interest rates and often a poor clientele, they serve an underserved market (as evidenced by the popularity and profitability), and are often a loan of last resort for certain people. They don't operate any other businesses that eventually coerce you into using their loan services. They're certainly a better choice than the criminal "loan shark" element that some people suggest they replace.
What doesn't work with annotations in Scala? The documentation looks like Scala supports them.
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/106
I have a client company who's receptionist has seen me as a courier, pc-repair main, client and programmer. Freelancing is fun :)
I'm Finnish myself, and have studied English, Swedish, German, Chinese, Japanese and now a bit of Korean, so I understand your point about differences between languages.

It seemed to me like the point of the article was that your communication is at its most efficient/natural in your native language, instead of English for example, if it's not.

I just thought it was obvious.

Well i think you're quite wrong to put all languages on the same level here.

Every language is someone's native language, so they're on the same level as far as that point is concerned.
He didn't force anyone to do anything - his customers voluntarily chose to deal with his business. He offered a service that was in demand and was paid a fee for it.
How Google earn money | Probably Biggest SEO community
It would seem that the market has a way of righting itself over time.

Yes, but it seems that many people are not going to wait that long.
Actually, the way it works they aren't dealing with a heterogeneous environment and a hadoop scheduler - it runs on an EC2 compute cluster just for you that they spawn on your behalf. Your job is the only job running on your compute cluster. One job per cluster. Sharing jobs would be better, and sharing a cluster with other users even better, but I don't see that it can do that yet.

I think that Amazon believes that making Hadoop easy to use and popular is the best way to sell more EC2 and S3 by giving people an easy way to burn cycles and fill gigabytes.

I think they're right.
You may want to check it out at another very good e-book library: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79e/part42.ht...

The U. Adelaide guy has been doing a great job for quite a few years. I confess I hadn't visited recently - they have redecorated (with blog instead of "what's new" page, etc.)
By default, the tweets you see on your home page are from sources of information
that you have curated over time - in other words, the accounts you chose to follow.

I thought this announcement was just 'hey guyz we've moved the search bar' until I read this part. Authority search! Interesting.
I am quite sure a guy named Rick Belluzzo was behind the wheel when most of the stupid decisions that killed the company were made.

Later he got a comfy job at MS. Go figure...
I don't agree. Though I think its great and technologically the next step forward this will never be a high margin business and will quickly turn into a race to the bottom as the switching costs are zero.
Moreover, Hadoop usage can be intense and it's sensible for Amazon to segregate it as a service to ensure quality and configure hypervisor's accordingly.
If you look at what they're doing, they've gone from offering raw storage and computers by the hour to offering DNA analysis as a service. They will keep building more sophisticated offerings. They're not racing to the bottom, they're racing to the top.
Running Cocoa what? Cocoa is a set of APIs, not an operating system.
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Virtual Leagues Fold, Forcing Gamers to Find Actual Jobs
Now if someone could do that for Operas... I'm sure it'd only cost a few million bucks in ticket prices...
I feel like Amazon doesn't get nearly the mind-share they deserve for doing really awesome stuff. They've been up on the front of so many technology curves it's silly.

We kind of take for granted what they do since, you know, it's a store. But they're in search, they're heavy into data analysis, they've innovated in interfaces, payment processing, they've had community generated content since before we called it that, they've pulled off one of the most effective infrastructure platforms, they're redefining publishing and content distribution. And they have a great reputation for customer service.

Another thing I like about Amazon is that I have a pretty good idea of what they're collecting all of my data for and it's something that I'm pretty comfortable with.

I feel like they kind of get left out a lot of times when people are thinking about serious online innovation.
Hint: Look at the name: "Lofa Polir".
Right. There are some EC2 specific issues though.

Most significant is the network speed. Small instances share a machine with other small instances so they can get more than their "fair share" of network capacity. So because of this the environment maybe effectively heterogeneous if some of the nodes are relatively starved for I/O because they are on a busy machine. Storing all the data on S3 makes this particularly relevant.

Since one of the defining features the the MapReduce model (as detailed by the 2004 Google paper: http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html) is that "moving computation is cheaper than moving data" the implementation of S3 becomes salient as well, where exactly is the data?

In a normal implementation of Hadoop one would run HDFS, which stores the data on the same machines that run the job. The scheduler attempts to minimize transfer AND transfer is still often the bottleneck when the data is shuffled for the reduce job. So interesting to see how this service compares.

EDIT: I haven't tried the new service though, but I will for sure after I get some sleep.
Right. He's not saying, "macros are bad", he's saying, "macros often lead to code that's very hard to maintain, and in the end many are more trouble than they're worth". You can still do very powerful things without them in most cases; as far as I recall, SICP has no macros.

Code conventions go a long way, though - with-* macros are easily understood, for example.
In have seen people, who leave at the critical time of project execution, then they back off with better deal.

This has made sick of those kind people, and the management. In the end others look foolish for being honest.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. They still are going to continue using Ruby on the front end of the site. It's just the backend message queuing, and data operational stuff that they're moving to Scala.

I probably would have just used JRuby for this stuff, but Scala seems fine to me. And if it works for them, thats great. But I hardly see this a "jilt" against Ruby.
My knowledge of philosophy has enabled me to write some brilliant SQL queries.
If someone walked up to me and said "Wouldn't you like $292 cash right now so you can buy your kids a Christmas present?", I'd say "No". A lot of other people would say "Yes", though.

I have some distant acquaintances that are horrible with money. In the last year they have been behind on their car and mortgage payments, the woman has been steadily employed but the man doesn't work any more than he absolutely has to. That said, on payday they buy PS2/PS3s and games, and are at the pawn shop on a monthly basis hocking them again (this cycle has happened 2-3x that I'm aware of, and I hear things third-hand). It's cultural for them to not trust banks, so they "keep" cash. These people place no value whatsoever on their credit score, and they seem totally unconcerned about using the tools at their disposal, despite the financial implications.

The husband went out of town a while back with a shady family member "to work". The shady family member had been in recent trouble (kept within the neighborhood -- they don't call the police) for home burglary and assault/robbery. There wasn't any hard evidence but there was the unstated concern that the "work" might not have been on the up-and-up.

Is it wrong to offer a paycheck loan service to people like this? There's certainly no way to draw causation here, but there's non-zero correlation. For people that choose to live this way how is it even ethically wrong? It's what they want and they're not concerned about the downside (living a little tighter next week), and they'd blow right past the boarded up paycheck loan shop to get to the neighborhood loan shark if that was the next best option.

Personally I'm of the mind that safe, legal, regulated access to loans for people who otherwise could not get them are a valuable service. Even if they're as unpleasant as needle programs for druggies.
I guess because everyone does it anyway so it does not make a difference.
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They still run HDFS, they just do it from S3. Presumably they are using EBS internally. This is exactly how you would do it if you set it up yourself... they're just doing it for you.

Small instances suck at Hadoop, you probably won't use them.
HTTP Pipelining: Security risk without real performance benefits
You have a very arrogant world view. You are assuming you know what's better for a borrower (call him B) than he does himself. You or the government don't have all the facts surronding B's situation, only B does.

B is the only one who is qualified to make decisions that only affect him. How can you possibly think that taking options away from B is a good idea? Options that you or I may think are stupid shouldn't be taken away from B, just because we don't see how they are useful to him.

I think that payday lending shouldn't be illegal - as long as an action doesn't involve any non-consenting parties (theft, violence, fraud, etc), it should be legal (in my view).
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To hazard a guess I'd say it's to do with voltage step up/down efficiency.
dna analysis is a niche, this is a service which by its nature is very easy to commoditize. To be useful it has to be invisible, and to be invisible it must have zero switch cost
That's an interesting view. Thanks for posting it.

I would agree with this, if it wasn't for the aforementioned shady tactics...

Taking your needle program analogy, it would be extremely unethical if the needle program was paid for by the dealers and they used that opportunity to sell you more drugs, chat with you to find out if you're thinking of quitting, and offer you some free heroin if you are.

Similarly, short-term loan shops often employ strong-arm tactics to ensure they do receive payment. I.e., if you don't pay back, they'll send a couple of burly men to stand in your doorway until you do (as far as I know there's no evidence of them actually using violence, but the message is fairly clear).

So, to me, it seems payday loan shops are closer to the mafia/drug dealer side of things than to the needle program side.
DNA analysis is a niche, and they chose it because it is a commonly executed algorithm with a Hadoop implementation lying around. The point is that by including it they are showing that they will be offering more and more such algorithms for execution as implementations become available. First it was just machines, now they're running specific software and specific jobs on that software for you. The stack just keeps getting taller and nobody else's stack comes close. The more advanced the service you run, the more they are charging.

Amazon is winning by building more and more sophisticated services on top of their infrastructure to sell more and more use of the basic services.

I hate to sound repetitive, but everything about it is a race to the top, not the bottom.
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Who Are The 5 Funniest People on Twitter?
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It's also easy to assume others aren't malicious when you're naive. Goes both ways.
The author doesn't understand HTTP pipelining, and is drawing completely incorrect conclusions as a result.

First, the fact that HTTP requests are pipelined in the network doesn't mean that HTTP requests have to be pipelined in the server. HTTP server support for pipelining can be as simple as "be aware that there may be more requests sitting in the receive buffer after the one we're currently reading", and in most situations (where the time it takes to service a request is far less than internet RTT) this alone provides a huge speedup.

In fact, I'm not aware of any HTTP servers actually processing pipelined requests in parallel.

HTTP Pipelining is not intended to do anything to mitigate server request-handling latency. It's all about cutting out network RTTs, and if you have to download hundreds of small files (e.g., small images on a web page) it does this very well.
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politicians will do everything to try to turn it into a perpetual money source because it is more politically popular than fiscal responsibility.
http://www.iousathemovie.com/

For an insightful look at the US national debt.
M0 or m1. gov uses m3 to make inflation look smaller i believe.
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The only reason I would consider building something for ASP.NET is an overwhelmingly huge legacy codebase I would have to rewrite for something more modern like Rails or Django.

Or something really cool like Seaside or Weblocks.
Summary: HTTP pipelining isn't relevant any longer because we're all on broadband. Because the server has to send out the responses in the order that the original requests were received, the server may need to buffer a response if it is ready before the previous responses have been sent. Thus a malicious client could request a page which takes a long time to generate (e.g. a complex database query) followed by 99 other requests (as there is a limit of 100 requests in a single pipeline) and force the server to buffer the final 99 responses until the first request has completed.

Basically, the author rants about pipelining being useless
(even though it's quite useful in practice, particularly when serving static content from a separate domain) and then tries to claim that a minor denial-of-service attack is a huge security risk and that this is justification for not using pipelining.
force the server to buffer the final 99 responses until the first request has completed.

Except that most or all servers won't generate the final 99 responses until the first request has completed... in fact, most or all servers won't even read the final 99 requests until the first request has completed.
I just wanted to note that Urban Dictionary actually does this.
Companies are jumping up the web2.0 wagon
How many companies do something totally amazing... twice?
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An API Readiness Checklist
Some of us have business models which do not require traffic the size of nation states and, accordingly, aren't exactly that intensive on the computational resources.

My side business runs off of a $20 a month VPS. My day job routinely charges millions for software that runs on one to three commodity boxes.

You'll forgive me if I don't consider "Has difficulty running Twitter" to be a knock against a language. I don't, after all, have to run Twitter.
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Not an error at all. Linux is free "in terms of liberty, not price". Just because you know how to get it, install it, and customize it to your settings for free doesn't mean everyone does. That $3 covers things like sending consultants to the manufacturer, writing specialized drivers, and removing certain parts of Linux to make it run faster.
The original announcement by Scott Guthrie:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mv...
I think it's time for an open source getsatisfaction.
Ask HN: Does the UK need a YC clone?
Barely a week seems to go by without another mini-incubator springing up somewhere in the US, taking the YC model and trying to make it a success in $CITY. However, so far this seems fairly geographically limited.

At a business event last night I was chatting with some UK-based investors who would love to see the UK get more businesses off the ground, particularly Scotland. Yet there are very few schemes that do what YC does - fill the gap between idea and launch.

(Seedcamp isn't YC. I'm talking earlier than that.)

Does the UK need a YC? Something to give people cash and help while they realise their idea? Or are the existing schemes such as Dragon's Den, Seedcamp, Prince's Trust, university entrepreneurship clubs and other, harder-to-find governmental initiatives enough to cater for the very-very-early-stagers?

(If so, are they publicised enough? I'm on a YC-like scheme, only it runs for a year, called EPIS. Nobody seems to have heard of it, though. We're trying to fix that.)
How did this get added again ?!
So THAT is what the bottom half of seth godin's face looks like...
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“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
—John Gall
ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC are actually completely different (even though they share the same name) - ASP.NET MVC is an MVC framework, just like Rails (and Django, mostly), whereas ASP.NET is component-oriented.

I would use ASP.NET MVC over ASP.NET for any web project I had to build using .Net.
In defense of telecommuting
Its Ok, coz the target market for the MVC Asp.Net is 2005 or ealier. Lots companies are still at dotnet 1.1 actually with the latest version 3.5
So it goes something like this then: Aunt Tilie wants to go outside so she goes to her desk and writes on a sheet of paper door open then presents it to the door which responds with a paper that says how do I know it is you aunt Tilie some one could have crawled in the window last night. To which she hands the door another sheet of paper with her password.

Riiight. She approaches the door pannel and visually identifies the door's current state and manipulates objects on that panel until it is in the appropriate state then she can open the door.
-- ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC are actually completely different (even though they share the same name) --

They use dirrent rending engines, but the business logic is more important and is usually > 50% of the codebase, so it can still be reused in MVC Asp.Net.
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If there's anything I've noticed over the years when building websites, it's that customers care a ton about speed. I'd argue that it's the most important feature, followed by design. The more responsive your interface, the better. Now, you shouldn't sacrifice key features to speed things up, and you shouldn't optimize your code from the get-go, but your product had better be fast.

Google won because of good search results, but I remember that the first thing about the search engine that impressed me when I first tried it in 2000 was its responsiveness.
Exactly Twitter like Follow and Remove buttons with jQuery and Ajax
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Then I set it up in a vertical layout. Something like this:

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but instead of spending $199 for a piece of plastic, I cut up a cardboard box and spend $1.99 on duct tape.