skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I certainly hope it couldn't be legal.

The _only_ way this idea meets my standards is if the loan is invested in a corporate entity which enables the recipient to fail and walk away from the debt (and assets, of course).

Let me state this as clearly as possible for anyone that thinks this is a good idea: "excessive usury" is pure evil. Being able to walk away from failure and start again is the secret sauce that makes the American economy the envy of the world.
You sum up most of the stupid attitudes in this thread. The scientists in this study most likely are better at this field than you. Probably The Times misinterpreted the results. Still your denial is hilarious. Just because you're smart, doesn't make you right. That goes for all of you.
Sure, it's over-dramatic. But the point is it lowers the benefit of having money in the bank instead of a safe at home (or business.)
The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment
What happens if we extend life to, say, 150 and what we get is this long, 100-year decline into complete cognitive paralysis?

We go "That's interesting, I wonder which processes are involved and how we can keep their desirable effects while removing or reversing the decline?"

I'm late 20s and I do feel like I'm losing it. I feel overloaded by the infohose of 'news' I skim read every day yet mostly forget completely very quickly, lacking any rigorous understanding of significant subject(s), and facing paralysis of choice of all the things that might be worth spending 10 years studying.

More weight to my decisions? I think it's more inertia and more deeply worn ruts and grooves and more deeply implanted patterns of automatically triggered response that are 'me'.
Sorry that was a waste of time. The article goes on about everything from economics to evolution and never actually gets to explain what it may have started out with.
Three cheers for the Long Tail!

It's not an exclusive club though. It only takes a little time.
Sorry, my main point got lost in my comment: I can't see the argument in favor of debt financing for a startup.
Absolutely. We've been using the OAuth system with Ramamia for the past month or so. OAuth itself is going to have a big impact on things developed for twitter. It makes accessing an app for a user, as easy as a facebook app. It also will allow for a real directory of applications. Up until now, things have been ad-hoc and hacked together.

There's very few things I'd see Twitter competing against you with and doing themselves. They realize they are the telephone lines, not the telephone maker. It's why they haven't created an official Twitter client or really made huge improvements on their mobile interface (you can't even view protected tweets.)

You can also reach a lot more people with your twitter stream than Facebook. It's not uncommon for users to have 5k+ followers on Twitter. Up until recent that's been the MAX on Facebook. With the new redesign, we'll see.

So yeah, Twitter == LONG (mandatory that's what she said).
I didn't get the point you were trying to make when you mentioned that Portugal is a post-empire country. How relevant is that to the future of Brazil? Or South America in general?
I find it much more frustrating that the common concept is that once you finish your formal schooling, you're done learning.

As much as listening to lectures for 20 years can be tedious, schools are a compression (time) and expansion (breadth) of the discoveries we would make on our own, and are therefore simply a way to get people up to speed with the current world. The real learning starts after school is out.
Guys what do you think of Carbon Copy Pro
I'm 23. I'm going to reference this research when we pitch our company to raise money. Fund the young guys.
katz, I hear you. Perhaps some of your rational applies to people living in countries that do not have the same government infrastructure as we have in the U.S. Your perspective may be different for that reason. But for the U.S., secret banking only serves to do illegal things.

I'm not talking about privacy. I am talking about secrecy. Governments do have a right to tax. Secrecy from governments only allows the process to subverted.
Yup. Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhx8__Np_cM
Cool! I didn't see yours before posting mine... (I get a 403 Forbidden currently?)
That is the saddest thing I've seen the whole day
I didn't suggest debt financing for a start-up. I suggest debt for funding the entrepreneur's living expenses.

I agree that if the entrepreneur actually starts a start-up proper, he would do best by financing it using equity. But most entrepreneurish activity is not a start-up proper - Just little things you try and that sometimes evolve into big projects. It's hard to sell equity out of those.
What about happiness? I'd rather be dying and happy than eternally healthy and not.

(You could be including happiness in healthiness.)
Sort of. Twitter and Yammer are great for putting things out there quickly to get feedback or an answer to a question. Private conversations though will always be important.

That being said, I often appreciate a DM instead of an email because it forces people to be quick.
Yeah. You have to hit refresh to see the graph. It won't work if the referrer is an outside site. Had too many people lifting bandwidth and needed to stop it.
"TI calculator" option missing.
But I don't care about random-access speed when I'm just using it for media (music, photos, video).

I think within a few years most people will end up with a small (a few hundred GB) SSD for their OS and programs, and a very large traditional HD (a few TB) for archiving data that doesn't need random access.

That's the system I'm using now. Two 73GB 15K drives in Raid-1 for my OS, with 3 1TB drives in Raid-z for media.
> 89.5% of users

Who participate in online polls on Sunday evenings and happened to see this one.
I was thinking that as I read it.. I wonder if Jordan was influenced at all by this speech? (Eye of the world came out in 1990)

Jordan was definitely trying to play with gender politics through his work. From the only female magic users (at the start of the story at least), to the Queens of Andor and entire city of Far Madding - he liked to shift some of the gender-balance on its head. The constant Village Council / Womens Circle examples also bring this up.

That being said - the hero is still the young male with a sword. And the bad guys: Fain / Moridin / Shaidar Haran are all male as well. So while it does play some havok with traditional magic use (at least for the first few books) - most of the male-centric fantasy genre is still intact.
JaikuEngine, New MicroBlogging open source kid
c.f. the Fi-Times' "The Travails of Detroit" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2b815a94-0863-11de-8a33-0000779fd2... on the detroit reality gap.
It's not just Detroit. My parents grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, a couple hours north of Detroit. We went back for a funeral last year and drove around the city. My mom's house was ok, but my Dad's neighborhood was derelict.

Half the houses were literally gone, nothing but empty lots. Apparently there's a crack house epidemic going on where houses go vacant, drug dealers set them up as crack houses and rig them for quick incineration when they get raided, Lots of people die and the houses burn to the ground before anything can be done.

Most of the remaining houses in the neighborhood were vacant, with broken windows and empty driveways. My dad's old house was one of the few still occupied, although the front porch had partially caved in and two houses to the left had disappeared. We'd been planning on knocking on the door and doing the nostalgia thing but we were scared to get out of the car.
Tell HN: Successful Impromptu Chat on Drop.io w/ Customers
This may interest some people. About an hour ago I posted on our Twitter account (twitter.com/carbonmade) for people to come chat with us using drop.io’s new chat functionality. I just threw up a simple drop and invited people to come join. We got ~30-40 or so people throughout the session.

We invited people to share information about themselves, share their portfolio, asked them if they had any questions/comments/concerns, etc. We chatted it up with them for a good hour or so. Everyone loved it. It was really fun and people seemed to have a good time being able to get real-time responses from us.

Give it a shot and I think you’ll enjoy it!
"It should also be noted that even an entrepreneur who has failed to get rich by the end of the four year can resort to taking a job at a big company. One year of that will pay off most of the loan, and will allow him to take a separate loan from the bank to cover the rest."

So, if in one year your hypothetical recruit could pay off the majority of this $100000+ %20/year loan, why wouldn't they just work for one year at big co, save a bunch of money and then quit to do the startup?
The only part I agree with is investing in the entrepreneur. Check out http://www.entrepreneurcommons.org/

Your major flaw is that you assume 85% success. The truth is that for $100,000 loans, most entrepreneurs will spend it and then default on the loan.

Entrepreneurs will invest the money you give them: hire people, hire contractors, build stuff, etc. Once their venture fails, they come back to you and apologize, but the money is gone.

To use your words, your plan is great for the entrepreneurs, and very lousy for the investors.
Ask HN: Best place for promotional t-shirts, etc?
Looking to do an initial small order (2-8 shirts), and it would be nice to offer coffee mugs, etc. down the line.

CafePress, or somewhere else? FWIW, I found CafePress' interface confusing.
Maybe 1% of startups get VC or angel funding. Do you really believe that getting funding is easy? Especially in this climate, investors wouldn't put money in Bill Gates today if he begged.
Happy Cogs Redesign Mozilla
I'm 34 and I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up! The graph definitely shows I'm over the hill and fast sliding down the back side. Bummer.
He wants a 10K RPM HDD and a laptop that stays cool ... Those two seem mutually exclusive to me. It takes a lot of energy to spin platters that fast, and it all gets turned into heat in the end. MLC SSDs are pretty cheap these days - if you really do that much dev work on your laptop, invest a few hundred dollars in a good one.
As I wrote a comment above, I was trying to rack through my mind to come up with examples of strongly written females from Jordan. I decided to ignore the forsaken and royalty (as perhaps Graendal, Morgase and Tuon might count) - and I managed to come up with Aludra and Tylee Khirgan.

While the concept was good - in almost no place where the gender disparity was shown - does Jordan portray the women in a good light. (Perhaps only the Village Council / Womens Circle comparisons)
A year is a very long time to lose, in my opinion. That's why I wouldn't do it. But for a worst-case scenario, I find it acceptable.
It's really weird that you say "you are more apt to read a post when it's short paragraphs". I was actually annoyed by the short paragraphs as I was reading and ended up skipping to the end.
The adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland
I'm pretty sure that this is going to get flagged (it is in no way HN material,) but I found it an interesting read.
I was under the impression that you need to: use disk utility to create a dmg file from a folder; and burn the dmg file while leaving the CD "open" for future additions.

This is rather annoying. Moreover, when you insert the CD into the drive, it opens multiple disk images, one for each session written.

Under win 7, you can just drag and drop a file to a CD folder just like any other drive.
> Most code is in the first 80 characters, so having the abililty to see 300 characters across usually just leads to a bunch of excessive whitespace.

Why isn't there a horizontal line-wrap as well as vertical? A text editor that, when stretched horizontally beyond 80 columns, creates actual "text columns" ala newspapers, and flows line 103 to the top of column 2 after line 102 hits the bottom of column 1. Wouldn't be that hard, would it?
Better batteries are on their way
A module to send email simply in Python
There are cities across the nation like this, unfortunately. I'm from Cleveland and it has now ranked as the poorest big city in the nation the last 2/3 years (Detroit took the title the other year).

Cleveland is the city where Rockefeller's Standard Oil began, featured Millionaire's Row, was once the 5th largest city in the nation (now 40th), and featured some of the most beautiful architecture in the world.

That has all been lost to crime, poverty, and urban flight. While the factors listed in textbooks are the decline in the steel market and Rockefeller moving to NYC; the real cause is a lack of innovation. The city should have taken extra steps with the capital it had to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

I love my city so much, but I honestly don't know if it will ever rebound now that the hole is dug so deep. Detroit and other cities have fallen victim to the same syndrome and it's a shame.
University of the Island of Gont? FAIL. He is thinking of the school at Roke, not Gont. In Gont they herd goats, which is what Ged did as a kid. Boy, you sure can tell the old Pratchett beats the young Pratchett for domain knowledge.

Female wizard (not witch): Herald-Mage Savil. That book was 1989, though.
Ask HN: How should I monetize a SciFi story I put in the public domain?
I've written a roughly novel sized science fiction serial. To be consistent with my views on copyright, I released it into the public domain.

I would like to make money from my writing. Besides self-publishing/Amazon/Tshirts/tipjar, how can I get income without an exclusive publishing contract?
Remotely debug PHP using UDP sockets
Maybe I'm missing something, but window management has always irked me on the Mac.

I often have a bunch of files and projects open in textmate and I end up cycling through them with 'cmd + ~' or using expose to hunt for it. I want something like alt-tab, but for the currently open program, where I can see all the open windows for it (ordered by how recently they've been viewed) and access them easily.
Looks like AT&T has responded to the twitter outcry: http://gigaom.com/2009/03/15/tweeting-works-att-boosts-sxsw-...
I am not an historian, so I don't have any constructive critique to make on this essay. Nonetheless, this inflamatory comparisons seem somewhat exaggerated. The U.S. might be in a bad shape at the moment, but it's far from the catastrophe that Germany experienced after WW1.
I have a hobby of photographing abandoned places. These photos are amazing. A friend from Detroit has been bugging me to go there for the weekend, but it's hard with a family at home. Cleveland's actually a bit better -- most of the abandoned stuff is commercial rather than cultural and has little architectural value. Of course, a lot of the really beautiful stuff was torn down in the 60's and 70's, and a lot of once great buildings now have lesser purposes.

Once category of sad decay is places of worship. As white people left the city for the suburbs, they built new churches/temples. Their previous buildings were often purchased by urban congregations who couldn't afford to keep them up. Just this week, it was announced that fifty Catholic churches are to be closed within the next year.

Note: I'm an atheist, but I enjoy architecture. So, please don't take this as a religious opinion piece.
Amen.

Part of my motivation to get an investor was precisely to offload that financial risk to someone else. I'm already putting in at least 2 years of my life, including a lot of blood and sweat. If I fail then the last thing I'd want is to spend another X years getting rid of that debt...

Also I'm truly baffled at your statement of:

even an entrepreneur who has failed to get rich by the end of the four year can resort to taking a job at a big company. One year of that will pay off most of the loan, and will allow him to take a separate loan from the bank to cover the rest.

Excuse me?

After the 4th year I'd owe you roughly $120000.
Most of us mere mortals would probably need closer to 7-8 years to pay that back.
something that particularly jumped out at me was the mention of biases in relation to the jury trial. Since we know that people are prone to making these types of errors consistently lawyers can take advantage of it. Is there any reason to think that professional rationalists wouldn't make better jurors than "a jury of peers"?
I'm 18, and occasionally I feel like I've lost something I had before. But that's a common feeling, I'm sure: I'll always want to be wiser and simultaneously younger. I doubt that has anything at all to do with my actual age or level of knowledge.

The feeling of losing things may very well stem from the inertia that builds up in life, along with your own growing awareness of your abilities. When I was 5 I thought I was a superhero: I was powerful and could crush anything. When I was 16, I didn't think that, but I thought that I was a powerful, fascinating individual around whom the world revolved. Now I've begun working out and taking care of myself, and I'm probably stronger now than I've ever been, but I don't have the same blind, false confidence I had before.

Is that losing it? I'll suspect that a year from now if I continue to work out with any level of dedication, I'll be stronger than I've ever been - not just in my mind, but in reality. Similarly, every year I become more aware of my limitations, but simultaneously those limitations lessen and disappear. I'm brighter now than I've ever been, and it's my intent never to enter a life scenario where I'm not allowed to continue to grow.

Inertia is the larger problem: both with body and mind and personality, the longer you don't use something the more it fades away. By your late 20s, you've left school, you've entered a more stable type of living, and there's every chance that you're in a duller, more monotonous setting - and worse, you're faced with the prospect of things never abruptly changing. That's deadly, and I'd suspect it contributes a lot to this attitude of people burning out.

(I come from a slightly unique perspective - the world of writing, where if you publish a book before you're 35 you're considered precocious. In all of literature, the greatest changes have come from people older than 30. I think it's because literature, unlike other forms of music, is forced to be subtle in order to work: it requires command of only a few skills, and there's no pressure to hurry with writing, and so as a result the field is full of people who can dedicate a decade to a single piece. The works that are remembered are the ones so rich with experience that they stand above even this field of work. Unlike, say, music, where not knowing anything means you have an advantage in your ability to create new works, literature very often requires at least an understanding of what's been done before, because without it the chances of your making something worth people's time is virtually nil.)
Also, I'm Jason's business partner at Ramamia, and I developed the Twitter OAuth stuff for our app. I open-sourced the base code for OAuth/Twitter (written Ruby on Rails) we were using for it, and wrote a little app on top of it. Here's the github link: http://github.com/markbao/lightwitter/tree/master (w/ thanks also to kelliott who contributed fixes)
Cool. What are you using to draw the graph?
It's just a user friendly term for Semantic Web.
I think these designs fail pretty badly, for the first part, I think I can see around 1/2 elements on each design with my browser opened at slightly than larger size. which is more than enough for every other website I use.

I dont care for the open source propoganda, as far as I can tell from these designs is mozilla want to engage the community a bit more, but nothing pulls me in. I would guess I am in the target market for this and I am not in anyway more inclined to become part of mozillas community

and only 1 of the 3 even have a somewhat decent introduction to the suite!
I don't think the laptop manufacturers really understand how important that Home block is to developers. It effectively rules out all but two manufacturers from consideration. The only choice of development machine is a Thinkpad or a Dell (and only certain models from each line). All other brands have eliminated themselves by unrolling that key block.

The Widescreen point also hit home, but since there are only two laptop options anymore, and both of those offer models with a sanely proportioned 15.4" display, it's not really an issue anymore.
Fluxus ( http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/ ) is a scheme environment for live-coding graphics. Its a brilliant way to get started with games programming since you can modify code on the fly and see the results immediately. The underlying graphics engine is written in C++ so you don't lose much performance by choosing scheme.
Because it looks like one (compared to Gaussian it's skewed):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution
It is, to large degree, the tragic outcome of dysfunctional tax, educational, and regulatory policy. Newt Gingrich gave an interesting speech on the fall of Detroit last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNM6HHJTUMM
Didn't the Beatles keep their name when they changed from pop to cutting-edge experimental songwriting? Don't we all (er, mostly all) keep our own names as we grow up and change?

Being a singularly self-obsessed person, I've gone through several noticeable Facebook phases. At one point I unfriended all but 40 people, to limit noise, deleted profile information, to avoid being easily judged, and got rid of pretty much everything from my profile. Now that filters exist (as well as for a few other reasons), I've become much more open and expressive, friended a bunch of people I don't actually know (including people from HN), and changed things. I've gone through similar things with blog writing and web design.

People aren't scared about the future. Very few people censor themselves, even knowing people are watching them. Perhaps we've developed a conscious blindness to our numerous followers. Perhaps we just really could care less. Either way, people aren't going to worry about their pasts for long. Even when it's there, the attitude of people I know is, "Either they won't be damned to look far into the past, or it's entirely unreasonable for them to judge me for who I was three years ago - or for who I am outside of work."

That's a good attitude to have. You can determine some things by how a person acts when they aren't watching - but not everything. I have a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who like getting wasted, and a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who go to debate championships on the weekend. I've met introverts and extroverts that I liked. I'm friends with a few fairly racist people and a few fairly sexist people, and each one is a good person despite all the stuff they do, and some of them are people I'd really like in a working environment because despite all that, they're good workers. Overjudgmentalism is a character flaw, and it's one that there's going to be rising hostility towards if companies start getting anal about things like blogs and Facebook. Facebook won't be forgotten: those old manners of thinking will be.
No. I believe that good entrepreneurs are that rare.
>> ...we laugh and think, "Who the hell would buy that?"

I'd speculate that this arrogance is more a consequence of the content being sold than the format it's being sold in.

If someone wrote a "real scaling with memcached" (or whatever) ebook, with actual setup, use cases, performance numbers, patterns, etc, I suspect the users here would be intrigued.

Sure, much of the information could be gleaned from blog postings and READMEs, but how much would it be worth for all the topics to be aggregated and treated with a consistent depth?