skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that bailouts are not the answer.

The answer is to let these loans default. That's how the lending system should work. No bailouts, but simple defaults.

You as a lender are responsible for factoring in the probability of a default. If you haven't - sucks to be you. Same goes for government loans, e.g. you create an institutionalized Banking system (like the Federal Direct Student loans).

And if you survive the coming mass default (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-28/delinquencies-stude...) - without gov. bailouts - you'll have learned a valuable lesson on lending:
Don't give out ridiculous loans on ridiculous terms to people who can't afford them.
And rest assured that the education system will find a way to adapt - probably by making education a lot cheaper again.
Ask HN: [HELP] What is the best way to go SF for language school?
Hi,

I am Lütfi, lives in Istanbul, Turkey. I am "Ruby on Rails Developer". Me and my girlfriend want to go for language school for 2 months. I am preferring "San Francisco" to be with "Silicon Valley". But, our budget is really limited.

What is the best (cheapest) way to go language school in SF and "stay"? Staying place is the big (expensive) problem.

I'm sorry for my English.

-

Lütfi Demirci

lutfidemirci -at- gmail.com
I agree, maybe he dramatized it a little bit to make the story more interesting but I can't see the story as a whole being anything other that plausible.

I worked for Apple for about three years a while back and served maybe five or six deaf people over that time opting for TextEdit or a small paper pad for communication in all but one of those situations where the customer's daughter came along and translated his signing for me.
I would willingly take the risk of default on small purchases (< $100) in return for saving 3% on the cost of the transaction. This would pay off every 50 or so transactions -- and the failure rate is likely orders of magnitude lower than that.
I hope that's not right, just ordered a MBA a few days ago
10 Biggest Entrepreneurs Under 30 - Driven Forward
Yes, it's a compromise. It's not all about function, or all about form. If ST is 90% beautiful, and IDEA is 0% beautiful, then I will choose Sublime even if it's 5% less functional.

There are other factors at play such as speed; Sublime is lightning fast, IDEA is not. And afaik, IDEA does not support Sublime-style multiple carets.
This is absolutely brutal... given that many Americans I know have come out after 4 years (NB: it's standard 3 here in UK) with a degree in God–knows–what, with no idea what to do or where to go, and have ended up effectively retraining as soon as they start their first (often degree–unrelated) job.

This may not apply for e.g. doctors, lawyers, and such – but I'm convinced a University–grade education can be had for far less (though a large investment still required) outside of the for–profit institutions.

I'm just waiting for someone to come along and prove it... and for society to accept it (which would close the pay gap).
The fact that there is lateralization to cortical function is not just some curio.

A stroke on the nondominant side in the same distribution leads to contra lateral hemineglect of the world. Watch these people try to draw a clock: they'll put all 12 numbers on the right side. It is interesting, to me, that the pathways are such that there is this partitioning of deficits.

It's not "left logic right creativity", but neither is it one homogenous mix.

Anyway, I think it's relevant and not simply pedantic. If you disagree, well, I suppose we can disagree politely.
Hammer.js rewrite makes supporting touch devices easier
I used to doodle, which eventually made me think that I had some predilection for art. It was only partially true, and likely only in the sense that you refer to -- that anyone can do it. Drawing something that you see is a purely mechanical exercise.

The first real drawing lesson that I had was some years after I had started. The teacher placed an egg in front of each of us, and said "Draw exactly what you see." It was a revelation, an instant understanding that art was a way of looking at the world, not about collecting shapes on a piece of paper. The utter simplicity of the form and color force you to examine the play of light and shadow in exacting detail.

I am convinced that once you've learned to see gradations of light and color, you need no other lesson, only practice.
>Why does the US not focus on their own wrongs in history?

Because they won the war. That, plus they are the top dog internationally, or one of the top dogs. So they can continue to march around as morally superior despite what they have done (and continue doing). I mean, had the Germans won the war, they would have done the exact same thing.

From agent orange to nuking civillian towns, to having segregation until the sixties, to insisting on capital punishment, to shoving their black population in jail (through systemic racist imbalances and injustices to people their 2-3 generation ancestors they f* up as slaves), to toppling legitimate governments and supporting dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, to "world cop", to drone attacks, to "patenting" farming seeds and genetic material and enforcing it world-wide, to mass-surveillance and creepy related laws, and what have you.

And when all else fails, they can always blame it to the acts of their "bad government" (or to some "bad apples" in the government) all the while benefiting from those actions, supporting them, voting those people in office, and maintaining that they are a democracy (which implies citizen responsibility in state actions).
In case you're too young to remember, 12px was the standard for a very long time.

It's only in the last 2-3yrs that font-sizes have grown.

I'm sure that if the website was redesigned today, a larger font would be implemented.
>A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible, but truth be, any other country could have fallen victim to the same propaganda had their situation been similar.

If not "any other country", surely, "a lot of similarly thinking countries".

Belgium, France and Britain for example, also committed terrible atrocities and countless murders and deaths in their colonies at the same time (and even after world war 2).
It would be nice to have sound effects like that in Sublime Text.
If anyone is interested, I'd be glad to write a plugin together.
New Coderwall Networks
"The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation or safety to life and property."

First definition of "engineering" to pop up on a google search (Wikipedia).

The problem is that it is damn harder to be creative when your creations have to actually work, and you have to know some science to make that happen, than it is when the creations just need to be "beautiful, inspiring or thought-provoking".
Sony's PlayStation 4 is a thinly disguised PC
Equally weird is that watching PBS content online is blocked if you're not physically sitting in America. For those who don't know, PBS is a US non-profit TV network, partially funded by the federal government and to varying degrees the states. Yet their website actively blocks would-be viewers outside the US, including US citizens (who are required to pay US taxes wherever they live).

Oh, and when I took my Korean-made but US-bought TV to the UK, guess what? Its Netflix feature stopped working completely.

Whether buying a DVD or streaming video online, I'm tired of not getting what I pay for.
In Poland you can make a backup copy of a DVD circumventing "security" measures where necessary. More, you can share that copy with members of your family and people in your social circle. It's considered fair use.

Anyway, while this law seems completely and horribly broken, technology allowed us to escape it a bit. I don't even have optical drives in my computers any more.

Of course, this means that watching any movie or tv show on a computer requires downloading it from... a source because popular online players (some offer content for free, like TVN, a large private broadcaster; and not just a clip here and there — full episodes, even whole films) usually require Silverlight which doesn't really work on Ubuntu. Luckily, that — downloading copyrighted materials for personal use — is, again, legal†.

† some exceptions apply.
I just realized the other day that public projection of a DVD in an oil rig is illegal (yes, they appear explicitly in the banner). Funny: hospitals, schools, ..., oil rigs!

Unbelievable.
As both a libertarian and tech junkie, I have serious concerns about the use of drone surveillance and am excited to see the technology develop.

The best I can figure, what's needed is parity in drone use. That is, whatever is good for the government should automatically be good for the citizens to do. If the government wants to use hi-res cameras to surveil a city all day long, then anybody else should be able to do so too. If the government wants to arm drones, then I should be able to arm my own drones.

I don't think that's an answer, but I think it will work for a decade or two -- hopefully long enough for us to develop workable policies.
The "magic/more magic" switch is also this.
That sounds super nifty! I'll have to give it a try next time I need to trace the history of a file.
>Largely different people would have died, and Truman had to "play God" but I believe that millions of lives were saved. His options sucked.

Truman's options sucked? That's just official US propaganda. Actual history says that the Japanese were in dire condition, have had pretty much surrendered and only asked for some very inconsequential counter-demands in order to officiallly sign their surrender [1].

The US dropped the bomb anyway, and then another, because they were eager to test in on real conditions, and wanted to sent a message to the USSR as the war was coming to an end and the new era of "cold war" began.

[1] Not to mention that they were literally forced to attack the US (in Pearl Harbor) in the first place, by very careful manoeuvring of the US part, that wanted an excuse to enter the war.
There are very few legislation/regulation-based restrictions between the level of one's income and the repayment schedule/amount of one's student loans here in the US though it depends largely on how the education debt was financed. The vast majority of loans are made from a large commercial bank to a private citizen. The bank makes these high-risk loans because the US Federal Government "co-signs" on the loan for the student receiving the funds. In the event of an economic downturn or financial hardship, if the former student has limited income (underemployment) but can pay something, the student negotiates a payment amount with the bank. If the former-student is unemployed or has such severe economic hardship that they can pay nothing, the borrower's loan can go into what they call forbearance. Been a long time for me, but I believe you can have a total forbearance time of 36 months over the life of your loan. If, for a variety of reasons, you default on the loan, the lender can/will submit a claim to the Federal Department of Education and the lender will be compensated for the remaining amount of principle on the loan. At this point, your loan is now "owned" by the Department of Education who has substantially more latitude to get their money out of you than a commercial lender does (they can garnish your wages through your employer and keep annual income tax over-payments). But, getting back to your question, there are no established laws that dictate a lender can extract more from you than you can reasonably pay depending on your circumstances. Lender's are incentivized to work with you for 2 reasons, 1) the loan is guaranteed by the Federal Government so they will not lose a dime of principle 2) the longer you carry the debt, the more money the lender can make from interest.

Note: Congress did pass a law that stipulates that student loan debt cannot ever be included in a personal bankruptcy. The loan, theoretically, can and will follow you for as long as you live until you pay it off.
"U.S. student debt market cap reaches $966B, stakeholders mostly satisfied"
Former Miss Delaware Teen USA wanted in Maryland
Thats probably because of the booming inequality that means some people have a lot of money. It is unclear that art is becoming more democratic or widespread other than this.
It depends on the ‘level’ at which you employ this creativity. To me, neither coding nor writing requires much creativity at a very low level (think inside a function or a paragraph), but it does require creativity as much as the ability to analytically extract suitable abstractions at a higher level.

That is, once you created (using your creativity) some sort of flow-chart for either your programme or your story, you will be able to fill in the remaining bits using strictly analytical thought without much creativity: Once you created pseudocode for Dijkstra’s algorithm, you don’t need much creativity to implement it. Similarly, once you set up the story of your genius cheating the devil, you don’t need much creativity to fill in the gaps.

The quality of this gap-filling will still greatly depend on your skill as a coder/writer – making the best use of the language you have – but this is not a necessarily a creative process, unless your language is ill-suited to the task and you need to create it on-the-fly, c.f. Shakespeare or K&R. Neither Goethe nor Thomas Mann made up many words, but only used their tools at a very high level and are still considered among the best writers in the world. Similarly, Linus didn’t invent C, but he used it to build a very complex system (or randomly ended up at one by continuous evolution, though that’s another discussion).

The above obviously only applies to writing/coding, and I would assume that the same goes for composing – even more so, as you can choose a particular set of rules (harmonic, atonal, you-name-it) and each individual note follows from the previous with little choice. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is probably a good example for this.

On the other hand, at least to the uninitiated (read: me), painting and sculpting appears much more ‘creative’ and incomparable to coding/writing/composing.
I thought it had been pretty well established that a minority of people can learn to code.
From a statistical point of view, it seems kind of inappropriate to report something with a 100+ day standard deviation (iPhone release rate) down to the nearest day.
>It may not seem like it but this is

Trust me, we know. Most of us here have our own thing going on, and we know that terrible sinking feeling. The feeling that you've disappointed your friends, family, the whole world even. I also know how terrible of a place it is to be. And putting your name to it is much harder. I don't really have any advice because I don't think I'm qualified enough on this topic. But I will say this, stay strong. This is not the end of the world. Your family and friends will not stop talking to you, they will not estrange you, insult you, humiliate you or anything like that. What ever thoughts arise, they are all in your head. Make sure you have enough personal savings to tide you over, and please stay strong.
I too find this completely void of any useful information.

There are many things that are still broken in search; I talk about one specific experience here:

http://urgeous.com/p87t3aaa40g-for-some-queries-all-first-10...

("For some queries, all first 10 results on Google are spam").
Your English is better than my Turkish, so please don't apologize.

San Francisco can be very expensive. You can sometimes find good
deals on places to stay in San Francisco with AirBnB.

https://www.airbnb.com/locations/san-francisco

Good Luck!
"Instead of making a resolution to learn how to code in 2013, you might make a resolution to learn how to draw. " It is tragic that this is the world we live in.
Hitting meetups is a really good idea, but can I say that orangethirty said get out now, today, before lunch.

Hitting meetups - well it might be a good excuse to wait. You know, that meetup tonight is not so big, I will do Thursdays. Plus Thursdays, well the venue does its own catering and won't let me in till ....

Get outside the nearest two pre made sandwich places - and success is selling twenty lunch packs to people who otherwise would have bought a sandwich - this lunchtime.

Get out if the office and get out now.

Good luck :-).
What was so special?

1) It was deliberate extermination of ethnic groups. Not killings as part of fighting a war, but deliberate extermination.

2) It was enormous in scale and took place over just a few years. Sure there have been lots of atrocities throughout history, but not many rival the scale of the Holocaust.

3) It happened in Europe and was perpetrated by Europeans against Europeans.

4) It happened not that long ago, and people are still alive who remember.

5) The perpetrators lost so completely that there is no political risk in recognizing and condemning it. For example atrocities (like Katyn) were perpetrated by USSR but since they were allied, the other allied powers had to downplay it. Some countries (like Israel) does not recognize the Armenian Genocide because they would lose Turkey as an
important ally.

6) The allied won the war, so recognizing the holocaust underlines the heroism and just fight of the allied powers. Other genocides like the Rwandan does not in that way
reflect positively on western powers. To some extend the holocaust can also be used to downplay allied war crimes, since whatever the allied did of bad things, the Nazis were way, way worse.

7) Jews have big cultural influence in the western world through litteratur, movies and so on. Comparatively few Roma are in litterature and movie business for example, so their experience tends to be less visible in popular culture.
I'm confused from the announcement - is that Yahoo Groups as well?
Ask HN: What is your best online purchase?
60 of The Best Timeless Business Quotes Ever
Normal people do get massive bailouts.

Home owners got the largest bailout in world history. Trillions worth and counting.

And when it comes time in the near future, with the Sallie Mae system collapsing, the Fed will write a big fat check to keep it all solvent.

You can debate why they will of course (for the banks that have exposure, etc), but they absolutely will write that check.
Why is it illegal? Just because the DVD FUDscreen says so doesn't mean it is.
It's a more academic version of "So are you a dog person, or a cat person? Oh you're X? That means, you like to Y and and hate it when people Z!"

Another thing: generations. "Generation X does this-and-such while the Millennials are like so..." Go fuck yourself. I and most of the people I know from either "generation" are like neither of those things.
99% of all Webbased gaming is flash. Why? Because HTML5 is about at a point where flash was 5 years ago. Thats not just my opionion but facts (see all game portals, FB game etc.) and what the big guys say (http://www.wooga.com/press/releases/wooga-html5-project-goes...)
Archos launches 13.3 inch FamilyPad 2 with Android 4.1 Jellybean
No, I just wanted to point out that they do include the rigs in the banner. Like they were obsessed with rigs or something. Why not inlcude 'shareholders' meetings' or 'space stations' as well?
Nitpick: Four year degrees are actually the standard in Scotland.
I don't love in USA but I have an impression that laws like this are made just to put more money in pockets of RIAA and other similar ass.es.

Most of the copyright laws are standing on the line of sanity and one small change can make them appear like creation of a kindergarten kid.
The problem with your solution is that the majority of student loans are government insured Stafford loans and a "defaulted" loan is still paid back to the lender for full principle by the American taxpayer. Support for this solution would be miniscule.

In an aside, loans made to college kids to get a quality education is not a ridiculous loan on ridiculous terms to people who can't afford them.
The release doesn't mention Yahoo! Groups.
My brother is in construction and tells me similar stories about how they always leave something obviously wrong for the building inspector to find so he'll ignore the piddly things he'd otherwise complain about.
Congratulations Django team! Looking forward to the day when we can write full-on Django apps in py3 :)
Just because something doesn't make sense doesn't mean you can call it "absurdism".
Install XWLSD Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean Firmware on Samsung Galaxy S2 I9100
>One must wonder why they chose to expend significant R&D to make a complicated, power-sucking adapter for use on a mobile device that provides sub-par output and costs quite a bit more than a "dumb" cable.

And people have answered this convincingly. From comments on TFA:

= = = = =

The reason behind this stupid expensive solution: It seems that the lightning connector is similar to the thunderbolt connector idea.

With USB you have Power/USB/MHL output. Each method requires a specific combination of pins. Updating to a different protocol, support for other devices requires difficult pin sharing (thus hardware modification), support for currently unknown future connections is impossible. If in the future something new appears it won’t work with older USB devices.

With lightning you can connect anything. Similar to thunderbolt it does not use a specific protocol to handle a specific task. It uses a general method to communicate between adapter and iOS device. That way Apple can send anything through this lightning adapter. The adapter itself gets updated automatically because it loads its firmware from the used device. So Apple can send USB2.0, USB3.0, Analog audio, Digital Audio, HDMI and any new standard through it, in theory.

The idea is great: The lightning adapter will be Apples only port and it will remain future proof.

In reality however, the lightning connector also has a limited bandwidth thus they have to compress their data, the conversion to and from the Apple lightning protocol requires lots of processing power, on both sides, and reduces quality. And finally it’s expensive.

Apple should have tried to use thunderbolt instead of their own propietary technology, but then they would have used a common technology which other manufacturers could use and benefit from, too, that’s not the way Apple likes it, so they introduced their own thing, which is crap right now.

AND:

Just remember, this is v1 hardware for a tough future proofing problem. I genuinely appreciate the lengths Apple went through to create A) a reversible plug, so you can stop mashing and flipping. B) handled all the connector options.
The built in decoder module could take a compatible 1080p video stream and push that to the TV at full resolution, the screen mirroring is a separate protocol. Now I’m curious if the Lightning-SVGA adapter has the same rig!

So, v1 of the Lightning connector is probably (assuming) going at USB2 speeds. In v2 of the connector we could see USB3 (5Gbit/s) or thunderbolt (10Gbit/s) speeds, but all the accessories still work.

Assuming the faster speeds come, it’ll support 4K TV output video streams, same plug. Yay future.
The creativity comes in when you need to decide on the most efficient way to do something. And you are always creating something from scratch, otherwise you could just reuse the existing solution.