skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You said, "take issue with payday loans not him." Then you said "we don't know what his firm's policies were, if any measures were taken to prevent payday loan abuse, etc." This is exactly the opposite sentiment: that we should take issue with him if his specific practices were predatory, but not with payday loans in general.
Payday loans may have a high interest rate, but if the cost of a payday loan is less than the alternatives, then it seems ethical to me. For instance, say a payday loan for $200 costs $30. That's translates into a high interest rate, but it's worth it to you if it helps you avoid a $50 late fee on another bill that's due before your next payday. The trick to running a payday business ethically seems to be fee transparency and not charging excessive fees such that borrowers must borrow an ever-increasing amount. This article about a payday company in LA talks about these issues: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/magazine/09nix-t.html
Twitter: The Discovery Engine Is Coming
No, the JVMs use memory like crazy themselves, it's not just the frameworks. As I said, check out the Language Shootout. Java, in almost every test, is several times bigger than most other languages.

The rest of your comment, you change what I said so it's not worth addressing.
The photographer for an article like this might take 50 shots. The editors then pick one that looks the way they feel the subject ought to look.

If you look at pictures of US presidents in Japanese newspapers, they look slightly Japanese. The photos haven't been edited; the editors just select pictures that look right to them.
I don't understand: How can one battery per server be more efficient than a big, shared battery for all of them?
I would argue that a cost of a payday loan is always less than the alternative (as long as the borrower knows what it is upfront - and if they don't it's fraud).

If there were some lower cost alternative, the borrower wouldn't take the payday loan. They would use the alternative.

Hence, if you are providing a product (without lying), I think you are doing the world a service. And the magnitude of the goodness you are doing is measured by your profit.
Keeping Your Dog Out of the Litterbox
Exclusive Real Estate Leads
Real Estate Leads in Real Time - Our Real Estate Leads are delivered instantaneously to your email and/or mobile device. We deliver Exclusive Real Estate Leads Directly to your email box or text message service, or both!. Real Estate really is a numbers game, just like a lot of things and you need our Leads to success on this game.
Finding opportunity in pain
"Sometimes an economic boom can block opportunities, and a downturn can expose them."
Really? Have you got a link?
This is extraordinarily important work to see done. Whether or not anyone is bothering to keep track of successful predictions affects the whole quality of predictions that will be publicly made, which affects the sanity of the whole society. Mod parent up and link to this project on your blog.
I live in Cambridge so I can't really comment too much on the scene in London.

I think its smaller, but there are lots of great startups from big startups like Last.FM, to expanding ones like Songkick to newly formed ones working out other companies offices.
Bonuses are typically based on profit, and then use a small multiplier for performance.
I could do it in a second.
>> "have switched our javascript/web clients from polling to comet long-polling"

Congrats :) Very cool updates!
I once haggled off a lot of the price on a purse (gift for my mom) by accident: I told the merchant I was checking out the rest of the market first and would come back later.
He just kept going down until I felt no reason not to buy the item.
I really shouldn't even bother reading the news on April 1st. What a farce! There's funny, and then there's just trying way too hard...
See how the hard drives are mounted back-to-back? I'm guessing that is designed to cancel the mechanical noise by putting the drives 180deg out of phase from each other, extending the life of the drives.

I believe that is patented (by Avid?) and that might be why Google was cagey about releasing specs.
Data-intensive tasks that you do every day, or every hour, or every minute, require efficient execution above all else.

Prototyping tasks require efficient programing (as in, the act of putting the program together) above all else.

Ruby excels at the latter, but not (yet) at the former.
I applied too, and agree with reference to April Fools.
RIP PC, for at least you lasted longer than VHS.
I have been paid a bonus by a client even though I never asked for it.
Java scales just fine thanks. FWIW, Mibbit handles a good number more messages per day that twitter. On a single VPS with 1.4GB ram, running Java.
Well, then I guess I'll make your day with this Lao Tzu quote from the Tao Te King:

When the wise man hears the Tao, he practices it

When the normal man hears the Tao, he listens to it

When the fool hears the Tao, he laughs at it

But if if were not laughed at, it would not be the true Tao.
I'm not sure, but that sounds like the answer to a different question: what's the distance between a point and a line.
IIRC according to Feynman's memoirs the O-rings were the leading candidate already in his first meeting with NASA engineers, and in his first days in DC General Kutyna made the link to cold-weather brittleness. It did not take them months to have a plausible idea. They spent months looking into lots of things anyway.
I agree about the spirit of AFD. In old good days, AFD was always about making fool of somebody else.
Microsoft releases ASP.NET MVC under the (OSI-approved) MS-PL open source license
short dell, appl, hp?
And cparser+libfirm is another one: http://freshmeat.net/projects/firm_cparser/
Not really. Your average IT admin in a school isn't going to care that the students can't get to latestweb2gadget.com
Far from it. Daring Fireball—best writing abbout all things Apple you can find on the net. When I see DF post marked with a star in my RSS reader I know that high quality read waits for me, with some work, thought and insight put into it.
Or maybe I am just a DF fanboy…
Amazon announces Elastic MapReduce
This seems just like the general argument against extreme cleverness. Don't be cleverer than you must, or nobody else will understand it and you won't be able to debug it.

I think relatively simple macros are quite useful, but I agree with his argument for complex ones. Where the line is between handwavy categories like "relatively simple" and "complex", is beyond me at the moment.
I like to eat - I'll take whatever work comes my way.
How nice. There's two paragraphs of which the author says it's about programming, but in reality it's about how hard it is to fact check political statements. The rest of the article is politics pure and simple. If you don't believe me, you need only look at the comments here.

Flagged.
I doubt that actually happens with food. Over the course of a year, the person taking payday loans has less total money to spend on food, because he's paying interest. That's much more relevant than the extra food money he might have over the course of a week.
Is it just me or is there something fundamentally wrong with saying that something "makes no money" and in the same breath saying "they made $10M last year" when they have only a handful (if that!) of employees?

I think some people's definition of what constitutes a successful business are a tad inflated :-)
Most are actually sigmoidal. Exponential growth is unbounded, but most growth functions in nature have some upper bound set by the environment.

Debt's a curious one though. It grows exponentially, but it tends to "reset" at times through various currency crises, at which point the currency is replaced entirely.
As a redemption he should write that again and publish as an Open Source library - so that everyone could analyze what is going on.
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Keep all your software up to date with Software informer
I'd kinda like to see actual data either way. It's possible that he just rolls over the payday loans into larger loans, perpetually increasing the debt overhang. From the anecdotal news stories, this seems to be quite common.

I'm fairly certain this happens with credit cards: plenty of people max out one credit card to pay off another. And wasn't there another poster in this thread who suggested people were taking out payday loans to pay off late fees on bills? That's basically just letting your debt compound.

The additional debt load is effectively an increase in the money supply, which we know causes inflation. So yeah, I dunno if there's a direct connection, but it seems plausible.
Great, except that it's no good for small jobs. Looks like if you want to run a 10-minute job you are charged for a full hour for each instance.
Careful here: are you _really_ suggesting that Twitter would do a full rewrite without making sure that it would increase throughput first?

I don't get the sense that they are that inexperienced. If they think a switch to Scala will handle more volume, I'd be really shocked if they didn't have some solid evidence to back that up.
How does JRuby's implementation compare to Scala's, though? I've been pleased overall with Scala, but I've not had much JRuby experience, so I'm curious.
PyCon 2009 Videos Uploading
Here's a really interesting part of the offering: Cloudburst RMAP DNA searches. A supercomputer by the hour for every biologist that wants one: that is revolutionary.

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

The cloudblast project is here: http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/cloudburst-bio/index.p...

The paper on BlastReduce is here: http://www.cs.umd.edu/Grad/scholarlypapers/papers/MichaelSch...

Now someone needs to build better open visualization tools to handle the output of this system.
This dust-up over payday loans seems to me to be largely the same issue as low-wage garment work overseas.

You might think "Boy, I hope I never get into a financial situation where taking out a payday loan is my best option!" And I'd agree with you 100%.

When you extend that thinking to "Boy, if I were ever in such a dire situation, I wish that someone would take my best option [which we just agreed above was a payday loan] completely off the table such that I'd have to choose some even worse option than that!" is where you've departed from what I consider rational, logical thinking.

If a payday loan is the best option for some overall disadvantaged consumers, why would one want to outlaw their best option, leaving them even more disadvantaged?
Well, it does say "elastic"; perhaps you sometimes have huge batches to run, worthy of map/reducing, and sometimes have batches that could be run on a single machine instead, but since you're applying what's fundamentally the same transformation to both data sets, you only have one codebase, and so it would be nice if you could do it all with a single kind of infrastructure as well.
Wow. I understand that fits really nicely in your world model that unifies economics and morality, but that's not how the world works at all.

Borrowers are not always rational or informed. Most people go into debt because they spend beyond their means, not because they're leveraging short term capital. Payday lending is illegal in some states and a felony in Georgia. This guy made $70 million off poor people, pushing a large number of them further into debt, and you're calling that the measurement of his goodness?
Erlang style message passing in python
Candygram is python library which emulates erlang style message passing within multiple threads (equivalent erlang process)
This is why it has been essentially impossible to buy a house lately (well, up to 2008) if you have any intention of not being foreclosed upon.

It would seem that the market has a way of righting itself over time. The people who would take out loans and drive the prices up eventually run out of credit (it's a financial capacitor, not a perpetual money source), and then they not only have to compete on the higher priced market they created -- they have the burden of the additional interest, as well. They then can not even buy as much as before and are relatively disadvantaged in the market -- pushing prices back down, perhaps even below the origin. This is more or less playing out in the housing market right now -- home prices : income ratios are returning to their post-WW2 origin.

As far as the other points, I feel there are too many counfounding issues (particularly with the warring nations example) to really comment on.
Some graphs here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

Plotting as a percentage of GDP can also be misleading, eg US military spending is 4% of GDP but 30% of tax revenue according to wikipedia. They also discuss debt expenditures getting too high on that page.
I think this is a good idea. I've thought about creating a computer troubleshooting site where the solution is downloadable (as say a bat file on windows, shell script on linux) and will fix the problem for those not as experienced with computers.

Of course, this doesn't translate well to real life, but could be a source of revenue.

Just throwing the idea out there, haven't given it much thought.
and I'm sure keeps them cooler.
JRuby's a pretty solid implementation. It's generally faster than MRI 1.8.x, and has the benefit of quality threading. I think Scala is probably ahead, because Scala has the benefit of being-more Java-like than JRuby, and is therefore easier to implement.

For my serious apps, I typically write the front end in JRuby on Rails, and migrate code back into Java as it stabilizes and/or needs more performance. Works great for me!
This site looks, a bit shady, but it does give figures:

http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=6397

> Total U.S. credit card debt reached almost $800 billion in November 2007

In contrast, the US GDP is about $14 trillion, so credit cards probably have some inflationary effect (GDP isn't the right statistic, what's needed is some measure of the total money supply, but I'm not sure how that's done.)
This quote:

"The trouble, he insisted, is that the so-called Web 2.0 languages aren't always as efficient as they need to be, especially in an economic environment threatening to bring Web 2.0 to its knees."

Is particularly dire. Sure, so if we all switch to C or machine code we'll be able to skip through the recession, right? Seriously, less drama and more reporting please.
It seems a pretty good example of how important talent is vs. the shingle outside the door.

3dfx was founded by ex. SGI talent - Gary Tarolli, Ross Smith and Scott Sellers. (Garry Tarolli wrote dogfight)
On RSS (Or, Why Google Reader Sucks)
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome exercises that really work
Actually, you can. And if you have small data, run the same job on one compute instance. On once instance, getting charged pennies per job from leftover EC2 time is not a big deal. If you do that kind of thing a lot instead of bigger jobs, map/reduce is the wrong way to solve your problem. Its for big jobs, not small jobs.

Bottom line of what this means: it took me hours to get scripts going to launch a cloudburst hadoop compute cluster on demand on Monday. And I've written such scripts before.

I just launched the SAME JOB in 15 seconds.

You know what else? I got distracted and left my own custom compute cluster on overnight and it cost me $50. Elastic Reduce shuts it down for me. (edited for clarity)

I was looking into building this. Amazon did it first. Glad I didn't put too much time into it.
"The problem with Apple in the 90s was that they stopped doing this. The Mac had a great run from its debut in 1984 through the end of the ’80s, where both the hardware and software improved every year. Then that stopped."

Even that is somewhat misleading. The original Macintosh operating system was designed specifically for singletasking on the original Mac 128k hardware--a design choice that hamstrung Apple for years afterwards, and became the root cause of Apple's need to completely replace their operating system. It's not that Apple gave up on incremental development and started on quixotic missions to the next big thing. It's that the system architecture of the Mac OS was years past its prime and Apple couldn't fix it iteratively anymore.
That's a nice theory, but it's totally ignoring the reality of payday loan companies. There's a fair few of them in the UK too and they are all, with no exception that I'm aware of, basically usury shops. They pressure their customers into taking up new high-interest loans when their old ones run out, by sending out hapless representatives to talk them into it (note: the reps are themselves pressured into using every trick in the book to try and make a sale, with all the company bullying and brainwashing techniques you can imagine.. I consider them victims too). They'll send out those reps when holidays approach too... "Wouldn't you like £200 cash right now so you can buy your kids a Christmas present?"..

All in all, they're really the bottom of the barrel in terms of business ethics. Worse than crooks. I find it hard to believe that a payday loan company could be competitive without using all the shady tactics in the book, unless they did something radically different. There's no indication in the article that this one did something different, so it's fair to assume that this payday loan company was much like all the others.
There's no way to automatically kill the cluster after the job is done? There definitely should be.
Wikipedia's content policies are a fair deal more strict and paranoid about intellectual property law than the law itself is.
Ahh, this is a good point I hadn't considered.
I believe rjurney ment his hand-made cluster from before didn't automatically shut down (as opposed to this new Elastic MapReduce feature which presumably would).
Great point. Auto-shutoff makes up for the 15% pricing overhead. I've spent lots on forgetting to shutdown too. It should go in their marketing literature if they could figure out how to make it not sound like a negative for the normal service.
LG KC780 (Unlocked) 
The LG KC780 is a camera phone with the brains to outperform many other phones in the same price range. If what you’re looking for is a capable device that won’t lead you astray, then the KC780 is the way to go.
Yes well said, I reconsider my stance. Apple's store is full of crap, and Blackberry's won't be. Apple want to control their platform completely, but frankly, like you say, they don't seem to have a huge quality barrier, we've all seen the store fillng up with crap. And the store cannot scale to the number of apps in it already.

Your points and experience developing for BB were interesting to me thanks. We came from doing an iPhone app, doing an Android app and then dealing with the multitude that is BB dev, so the points hit home.
There are ways, I just didn't get there yet since I just got it up and running and expected to wait until it was done.

http://groups.google.com/group/ec2ubuntu/browse_thread/threa...
Netbook makers have turned to Linux, an open-source operating system that costs $3 instead of the $25 that Microsoft typically charges for Windows XP.

I think I owe somebody $3!

Seriously, what an odd statement/error. Maybe someone is charging somebody $3 for Linux, but you would think that the nytimes.com would know what Linux is...
I use function by M-x, not a hotkey. ;-) So it's definitely not a problem. Looks like this happens because I've switched to Cocoa version of Emacs.
It is intersting to watch Amazon's strategy as they improve existing cloud computing services and add new services. The way they are going, it looks like Amazon will totally dominate the market.

I expect this will have huge importance to the web, and computing more generally, in the next 5 years or so. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes as important, or even more important than their traditional business.
Corporations with cash will also continue acquiring those small companies, everyone wins.
Well what else did he expect?

I think you mean CS 193i. It's fairly well known that the CS 193x series are all "easy", non-intensive, non-academic courses designed to teach something useful (there's "high-performance websites", "internet technologies", "iphone programming", "client-side internet technologies", etc.) They have very few if no prereqs other than perhaps some programming experience.

And the point of that assignment wasn't to "build a browser". It's to introduce the students to sockets and HTTP. Just what you'd expect for CS 193i.
Right. The scripts mounted the data on EBS, configured a security group, etc. etc. but I didn't get around to automatic shutdown.

Elastic Reduce does that for you.

Although you can't do anything interesting like run Pig or Hive. 2.0 will be much better I'm sure.
Log File Scrolling with Color Syntax
MVC is so 2007
For a quick demonstration of why Amazon would do this, take a look at the old way: http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/AmazonEC2

Also presumably they have the cluster well tuned, which is not simple, here is a relevant research paper about the scheduling algorithm which also goes into some of the tradeoffs and particularities of Hadoop on EC2: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2008/EECS-2008-99...

This can be pretty useful for data analysis and science. I don't see Amazon making money from this, but they must think the market is larger than I do. I may have to adjust my opinion.
Doung Cutting should be hired by Amazon!