skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure these loans are pretty bad, but if you need cash at a moments notice and have no other options it can be better than not having it

People who use these services frequently get dependent on them, and not out of necessity. That's a big part of why credit and loan industries have been growing so much for the past decade; people want fast cash once or twice and get stuck in the cycle.

Until recently a company in the debt collection industry I'm very familiar with was giving advances on paychecks to certain employees. The practice was recently stopped when the head of HR left and the result was basically analogous forcing people to get off a drug. It's not like they didn't have income, they just got locked into a cycle of dependency. The kicker: most of the employees in this company who were hooked on the paycheck advances are collectors themselves, dealing all day with other people dependent on debt.
So you'd rather see someone get fired, because they don't have the cash for some repairs to the car? Sure the price of the loan may be high, but in general these are risky loans and can be used when a person is in a tight spot.

That's not usually what it is. People use it once or twice and get addicted.

I'm not saying these services shouldn't exist (I'm personally heavily invested in the collections industry), but the parts of the credit/loan industry that target these markets are very analogous to drug dealing because they primarily profit off of people stuck in the cycle. Also importantly, the companies have all the power, they have the law on their side and can navigate the court system.
"In other words, the author's central point is a load of bollocks, ships do indeed now have a defence against ballistic missiles."

I may have read the article differently... I feel that the author has put the emphasis on aircraft carriers being obsolete, and his main point is that the US Navy has a flawed focus of fewer and larger units; instead of building a larger fleet consisting of smaller ships like AEGIS, stealth ships, or other smaller boats.

Cruisers != Aircraft Carriers
Very good points, although it's worth pointing out that the system can be rigged. Meaning -- just speculating -- a guy like Rupert Murdoch can use his influence with a judge to get a warrant. It's also worth mentioning that the author claims to have been in Phoenix while the raid was in Dallas, so he had no direct access to the warrant. And no one is forcing the FBI to obey the law these days -- read the news.
You Are Not Your Brain
Interesting. This is OT, but before your comment, my little joke was at like +5 or +6 within an hour or so. After your comment was posted, people immediately began downvoting me. I've seen this quite a bit...people seem to agree with a comment until someone else disagrees, then the community sentiment shifts the other way.
Selection bias. If your parents care enough to send you somewhere, they'll care enough to make you do your homework.
I'm always dubious of rants like this about hypothetical really horrible programmers. Even if they exist, I don't see what's the point of talking about them since they're so unproductive that they're certainly irrelevant and can be safely ignored. Once in a while you might have to maintain their unmaintainable code but such is life.

I always get the feeling the ranter is just an average programmer who want to remind everyone how they're so much better than the worst. I can't imagine a really great programmer wasting his time doing a rant like this about programmers who get everything wrong consistently.

The worst offender in this category is probably Jeff Atwood.
We think VCs are stupid. We think Google is smart. Both opinions are simplifications, but this explains the excitement.
I don't care about tracking and the length of the URL is the only thing that matters to me. That's why I prefer http://tinyarro.ws/ They use unicode characters to get domains shorter, and I use www. instead of http:// if I need to squeeze an extra character.
The $800-whatever prices quoted in the article are the prices for Verizon's FiOS service. The $20/home is to upgrade Japanese equipment to DOCSIS 3 over existing cable lines. It's different! The article then continues to state that it'd take at the most $100/home to upgrade to DOCSIS 3 in the United States. The section on competition refers to the slothfulness to roll this technology out in the United States at affordable prices.
Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan.

First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. It's going to cost less to deliver high-speed internet when people live closer together. Likewise, Japan is a smaller country. That 160Mbps is not the speed you're going to get traveling over underseas cables to North America. That's the speed you'll get for servers located within Japan.

Backbone connections are going to cost more to create in the United States simply because Americans are as likely to access a server across the continent as they are within 100 miles of them. Where you can essentially create a backbone in Japan with a under 1,000mi of fiber, in the US you'd need 20x that amount or more.

Those are stark differences. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard for an ISP to provide faster connectivity from Boston to Philly where populations are dense for sites hosted in that area, but that wouldn't be helpful to users - since most of the time I'm not connecting to servers hosted within eastern Mass, RI, CT, the NYC metro area or Jersey. In fact, I'd say that most of the time I'm connecting to Texas or California.

Can we stop comparing Apples and Oranges? The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. Maybe those things could offer marginal improvements (seeing our service go from 6Mbps to 10-15Mbps), but we simply won't have service like Japan will since we don't locate ourselves close to the servers we want to access or to each other.
How (Not) to Spend Your Way to Happiness
Ask HN: What virtual-team software do you use?
For a virtual team spread across the globe, what software do you use for collaboration and project management?
I pay to monitor my credit report.
"If I defriended you, you would get a message saying that you were worth less than one-tenth of a Whopper."

I agree it doesn't sound fair, because actually it meant you were worth exactly 1/10th of a Whopper, not less.
The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy.

I accept that geography is a factor, but do you mean to say that lack of competition isn't? It seems to me that it's simply not in the interest of US cable companies to improve bandwidth (which, as the article says, might lead people to stop paying for TV) or lower costs (which would lower their profits).
Very true. And don't forget that everyone is entitled to a public "education". --Including kids who are vegetables and have to have someone watching them all the time.

Editing to add more detail:

Based on my reading, they're spending more then $300 million on special education, around 25% of their budget.

$62 million goes to the university
$46 million goes to the public libraries
~$100 goes to early education and ESL initiatives.

Those are all expenses private schools never have to worry about.
He didn't really say anything new - it's all very obvious stuff.

The most obvious thing though is what he didn't say: no one cares. I mean, despite all these drawbacks and the so few advantages to link-shorteners, no one is doing a damn thing to stop them. And new ones keep coming up every day.
His analysis of starling reinforces an impression I got of Twitter devs from articles/discussions back when they were having lots of uptime/scaling issues. The impression was they weren't that experienced or all that good.

It makes me curious how many early startups aren't composed of rockstar devs. How much (if at all) timing, luck, marketing matter more than dev ability at the beginning.

I tending to think it's not nearly as important to have experienced rockstars from day 1. It's not until you get enough success to become famous and start attracting experienced rockstars that it becomes critical to recognize and hire them.
These rants are pointless. Divisive, corrosive. Making up names and stereotypes to apply to other people.

Yes, we're surrounded by a sea of bad code. Much of which comes from bad programmers, many of whom will never accept that they are bad. That's a banal observation.

What isn't banal? An example of a beautiful thing. There are lots of problems that are still awaiting their beautiful solution. If you want to promote beautiful code, publish some. Or, find some code you think is un-beautiful, improve it, and publish that. Teach people how to make such things. Show, don't tell.

It doesn't matter what the personalities of other programmers are like. What matters is the product. Critique the product.
Ah, perhaps I misunderstood. I thought political censorship pressure meant the government pressuring the URL-shortening service to change the target of short URLs that people try to use to point to politically disagreeable content.
Additional bandwidth will help, but Cuban's point is that there's too much uncertainty in the ability to deliver video over the web (let alone high def video).

HD is certainly possible over the web. (see my profile page if you want). It's just there's a stigma amongst people that produce HD for TVs that you to use TV bitrates and TV encoders for it to look decent.
Well, doesn't it depend on how harsh the environment is? For example, if there's not enough food for the population then only those most capable of acquiring food will survive. But today, where we have great plenty (in some parts of the world) and advanced medical care etc, what you said is certainly true.
"Warburg Pincus LLC has been taken off the list of the walking dead. The data did not reflect the $15 billion fund it closed last April."

Easy to overlook $15b.
Not 100% sure about gae but aws has multiple datacenters and is designed to distribute your S3 data across them so if one goes down your data is still available at others.

And you can always store a copy of your data/server images in US/Euro/Japan(some continent your regular data/servers are not) S3 as hot standby to launch when your local government raids datacenters.

AWS and probably GAE are in fact good defenses against this type of outage.

The real problem is not keeping your servers connected its avoiding being shot by the SWAT team assaulting your house.
"entitled"? That implies a choice. In the US, education is compulsory for certain age groups.
In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be connecting to with minimal investment. In the United States, you don't really have that option. Bandwidth is going to be expensive here. If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive.

Sure, lack of competition is a problem, but that's just an easy scapegoat. I mean, bandwidth at 10 cents per GB is really cheap bandwidth - cheaper than you'd get with most dedicated hosts. Part of what makes that expensive is that fiber has to go a long way to provide that bandwidth - if I'm downloading from NY to San Fran, that's a huge expanse to cover.

In Japan, it would be a lot easier for companies providing bandwidth to consumers to also run their own backbone.

Sure, competition is a problem in the US, but we're talking about having to do 20x as much cap-ex to cover the US. Anytime you have 20x greater costs, you need to expect that the product will reflect that. Saying that it's just competition is an easy way to be anti-corporate without addressing the issue - it costs a lot more to create and run the internet in the US; it doesn't cost a little bit more or 50% more, but orders of magnitude more because we're more spread out. We don't need to overcome a cost premium of 20%, but probably in excess of 1000% - and it's somewhat incredible that we aren't doing worse.
It's nearly impossible to discuss education, but ignore politics.

It's political policy that mandates compulsory education, forces taxation to pay for said education, and outlines what is taught in public schools. Politics play a role in acceptable curriculum for home and private schools, what age children are forced into these institutions, and what drugs & vaccines they must take to participate in the public system.

Politics can certainly play a role in vocalizing opposition to these policies.
The statement is an oversimplification that only makes sense when you throw a 25 year old hacker by a 25 year old businessman with novice levels of experience in their fields.
Military robots and the future of war [TED]
Since when is reductionism a bad thing?
Sugar-coated corporate speak
What would be interesting is looking at the performance of specific students who transitioned from public school to private schools or charter schools.
Skype, MediaWiki, Trac, code reviewer, Gmail, Google Docs.
That might be true, but that doesn't make them a bad idea. From a fiscal perspective, why spend 4x if the kid is going to get the same performance via voucher?
People usually don't explain their reasons. It does seem like there's a rash of senseless automatic downvoting these days that I don't remember happening a year ago.
Feynman actually voiced his frustration over school textbooks, because education was so politicized:

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

And what do you do? Reject those, and choose books that your parent-friends are using? Pay tutors?

(Hey, davetufts, I'm a Jumbo too.)
＞ I can't read the original link -- the site is down

Well， it is up. You might need some http proxy to read the article

> To actually get an official change into Rails takes months, minimum. In the case of Ruby that might stretch into a year or two.

Twitter can obviously fork Ruby code base and maintain their own branch if they like.
I read some Singer before doing pig vivesection as part of a surgery rotation in medical school. His general method seems to be to draw a bright intellectual line, and proceed to demonstrate just how bright it is. Like any bright line, one need only look around at the world for a moment to realize it is a convenient intellectual exercise. Great for publishing papers and books, not so useful in the trenches.
It's hard to make a decent living in film making, especially in a way where you're creative. So, if you're asking, my suggestion is keep your day job and stay a programmer -- at least for a while.

Filmmaking is a lot of fun and it's a hobby of mine as well. With digital cameras you're infinitely liberated. It's dirt cheap: you just need a good boom mic and your good-to-go, for the most part (especially if you go Dogma 95). So shoot. I mean it. Just go shoot. You'll most likely have to wear most of the hats: producer/screenwriter/director/editor/sound/etc. But that's great training. You'll see what you enjoy most.

And each time you shoot something, throw it up anywhere you can: YouTube, etc. If you're good, people will notice. Robert Rodriguez shot a short 16mm called 'Bedhead' for a local competition, and that took him to film school. After school he shot El Mariachi for $7,000, and went on from there. If you're talented, it will show. To get talented, watch great films with the sound off and shoot, shoot, shoot.
What is an accredited investor?
Redmine, Google Apps, Skype
[eBook] Reflections on Relativity
IRC, Trac, Email.
IRC, Email, Git :)
Present.ly, Google Apps, Skype, Unfuddle.
Dude, the geography and distrubition of population in the US isn't uniform.

Some cities are super-dense. Yet it doesn't mean that they will have really fast internet, since the cost of upgrading is a lot cheaper. What it cost to run line in a community is entirely different than what it cost to run in a city.
Skype, IM (usually Yahoo! since it supports offline messages), Basecamp (less than I used to), Google Docs, email, and Senduit for sending large files back and forth.
Beware the Lenny XFS issue:

"This AMI defaults to Amazon's 2.6.21fc8 kernel. There appears to be an incompatibility between this kernel and the Debian Lenny XFS kernel module and xfs.mkfs program. Because of this, the use of XFS with this AMI is not advised. The Debian Etch and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy AMIs do not appear to have the same issues."
Every acquisition between big Corporations generates layoffs in redundant sectors. Really nothing new.
Rails framework upgrades with git-bisect
Another new Microsoft ad for Windows. Which ignores Windows.
Numbers? What numbers would you like to see? I'm talking from first principles here, like Singer. He's saying it's unethical to not help the poor, I'm saying it is often counterproductive to do so in a naive manner. No numbers are necessary to debate this point.

And sure, a country with no food production capacity is addicted to foreign food aid exactly like Heroin.

Look, I'm trying to argue from first principles here, not get into a number-slinging exercise. I'm trying to counter Singer's broad strokes with some broad strokes of my own - kind of "concept V. concept". I can get nuanced if you like.

For example, you ask what percentage of the African continental GDP comes from foreign aid? Well, the answer is "not much". But take out the "rich" countries and it multiplies rapidly. Remove the oil revenue, mostly kept by the elite, and it goes up even further. I don't want to commit too much but I would estimate that in the real, nominal GDP of aid-receiving african areas (just the people, not the oil industry nearby) foreign aid is above 30%. That is a hugely distorting figure, and it is very conservative btw.

What percentage of Africa is fed by free food? That's the wrong question. The right question is about food dependency in a single area over time vs an area that didn't receive food aid, and I don't have any numbers for that.

I didn't say aid is the primary cause. It's an attempted solution, although it then goes on to cause a whole range of secondary failures. The primary cause would be governance, but that's not what Singer talks about.

That link does have some interesting discussion, and I'm also a fan of Overcoming Bias.
"The industry is worried that by offering 100 Mbps, they are opening Pandora’s box, he said. Everyone will be able to get video on the Internet"
- WTF? This really pisses me off!
I wonder where the other $5M went?
realXtend (http://www.realxtend.org) for virtual meetings and scrum, skype, google docs
Can any designers here comment on this?
Unless they use the state secret approach. They only have to convince a judge behind closed doors for a warrant.
Almost Perfect - The Rise and Fall of WordPerfect
Google’s User Data Empire
Yeah, but generally speaking carriers price things independent of cost. I'm guessing this is because it would be lethal to say, "you live in a less dense area, but we still serve you, just at twice the price."

Plus, if you had read, a large part of the issue is that some places might be dense, but you're not connecting to servers within that dense area. If you live in Manhattan, you might live in a dense area, but the backend cost of connecting you to servers in Texas and California and laying (or paying for) a lot of fiber to do that.

So, there's two costs. The cost of wiring a less dense population and the cost of backend wiring a larger geographic area where servers might be located. Even if you live in NYC, you still have the second cost.
If your parents care enough to send you somewhere, they'll care enough to make you do your homework

That statement may or may not be true. It's simply speculative. It also seems specious to me. Making a commitment for an hour or two that involves signing a couple of papers is nowhere near the level of making a commitment to follow and monitor schoolwork.
Facebook rolls out storage system to wrangle massive photo stores
Unreal's Tim Sweeney: Parallel Software Rendering is the Future
Look, no. I am not talking about "real world" bottlenecks like disks, databases, etc. I am talking about ideal mainstream applications written in community-accepted idiomatic code, no external bottlenecks. Smalltalk will still not be 70x faster, no way, no how.

If it was, it would be faster - much faster - than C, and if that was the case, games, graphics drivers, hell, operating systems - would be using Smalltalk. They are not. QED.

Smalltalk is great and its VMs are highly advanced. I accept that. I still use Ruby and eat the performance cost because I prefer its syntax and "world". But man, let's keep the performance comparisons grounded in reality. 70x faster is ludicrous.
It's the primary problem with group mentality and crowdsourcing. Sometimes it takes a second commenter to change somebody's opinion - not in this case, but if somebody sounds convincing, gets upvoted, then gets a powerful argument from somebody else, the votes start swaying.

That's probably a good thing, because it shows that people aren't just mindlessly upvoting. The follow-up comments are convincing people to think. The problem of course comes from the fact that because we can see the points a comment gets, we assume that we're being judged when really the points are effectively meaningless.

(If we're allowed to comment like fanboys, can we congratulate PG for breaking 40,000 karma?)
Reductionism is a bad thing when you reduct away useful or necessary information.
I wish they had covered more about the tracking. For example cli.gs has similar tracking capabilities to bit.ly but the cli.gs interface is way more annoying.

Cli.gs also has geo targeting which is unique to my knowledge.
Why is it that in Silicon Valley, the fastest consumer connection that I can get is 12Mpbs? And that costs me $60 a month.

Sharpen the pitchforks and light the torches.
This brings up an interesting point: why are the vote counts even shown on HN? Why not just use them for ranking and ordering, but don't display them, at least by default?
(decf (cool-factor ruby))
It's not so cut-and-dry as that, because the idea of complete freedom means you can have hate speech and hateful religions. George Carlin once proved this point emphatically by screaming the word "nigger" repeatedly, with the intent of having people less shocked at words. One thing he constantly would talk about in his routines is the idea that words lose power the more you use them, and that it's a bad thing to let a bad word have power over you.

Similarly, a person's religion is their choice. It should be wrong to discriminate based on religion, so long as you don't reverse discriminate as well. If a woman wants to wear a hijab, so long as it is her choice and nobody else's, she should be allowed. While you might argue that it's encouraging a phallocentric religion - and I'd agree - the solution isn't banning that religion, it's spreading reason far and wide so that more people make the choice to leave it.
I think by "consciousness" he may mean a different thing than I was expecting. My definition goes back to the classic Cartesian "I think, therefore I am", though I reject his subsequent dualism.

I think a brain-in-a-jar could also realize that he exists; he thinks, after all, if life support is there. Of course, the world may well be necessary for consciousness; maybe a brain-in-a-jar would never realize that he exists. But the world is not involved in the "being conscious", any more than the road is involved in my driving on it.
That's a vision of Europe I never thought of! Sort of like the states of the United States, but without the overarcing central government.

Do European countries have lots of varied laws? I know nothing about Europe because I'm an ignorant American, but I know it gets called socialist a lot. Are there more capitalist/libertarian countries in the mix? I'm aware this is a reprehensibly ignorant question, and I apologize if it's so ignorant as to be offensive.