skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blog Naked Capitalism--hardly a friend of big finance--points out that this is a scam here: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/08/beware-of-private-equ...

Some key points:

* The profits are being split among Richmond and a private investment firm named "Mortgage Resolution Partners, LLC".

* Seizing a mortgage for less than its fair market value is blatantly unconstitutional. The argument that the value of an underwater mortgage in repayment is worth less than the house is so obviously wrong, I have a hard time believing Richmond officials honestly buy it. A mortgage that is on track to be repaid is undoubtedly worth close to the future value of repayment, even if the house is worth $0.

* Big banks do not actually own most mortgages in general. So this is not a scheme to rob big banks, although Mortgage Resolution Partners, LLC certainly wants to spin it that way.

* Almost all housing mortgages are merely serviced by banks but owned predominantly by entites such as "state and local governments, hospitals, Fannie, Freddie, and to a lesser degree, foundations and endowments". The banks have a legal obligation to protect these mortgages, of course.

* Many of these loans are current--they're not distressed mortgages at all! They also plan to steer clear of houses with liens. Naked Capitalism comments that the plan only works financially if they go after the mortgages of those that need help the least.

In short, this is a transfer of wealth from a diverse array of investors to the city of Richmond and a bunch of investment banker types--theft under the cover of populist outrage. It would also severely damage the market for future homeowners in Richmond, anyone who wants to sell their home, anyone who wants to refinance... Oh, it's also a threat to fundemental notions of private property, rule of law, and market capitalism, but distressingly few people still care about that. The bit I want to emphasize is that it's Prince John pretending to be Robin Hood.
I assumed this was going to be another case of eminent domain abuse until I found out that the bank's argument seems to be "Writing down our loans to market value would disrupt our entire industry". I don't think "this would interfere with my accounting fraud" is a legally sound reason to block an eminent domain taking.
Let's see where Microsoft is vs where Apple is in 3 years. Apple has 0 innovation going on. OS X and IOS are stale as anything. They are riding on earlier success and eventually will fizzle out.
Latex also does the layout for you. Thats the entire point :).

Also, it is surprisingly fast.
I think the article does a pretty good job of elucidating why the traditional view that a manager's job is to generate the maximum profit for shareholders (narrow view or the Milton Friedman mantra) no longer works - yet the contemporary holy grail as taught in management schools that advancing a broad range of stakeholder interests and also pursuing corporate social responsibility agenda (broad view) does seem to work.
I get it, it's hilarious because some trash cans are cylindrical too. Well done! That's far funnier than noting that it's cylindrical for practical reasons.
You're assuming the Supremes will buy off on such a radical extension of eminent domain. Sure, its possible, but I don't at the moment think that's likely.
This benchmark [1], which was just on HN a couple days ago, puts nimrod at 96% the performance of C++.

1: http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-tw...
The claims in that patent are in terms of main games and auxiliary games. If your main site content is not a game, but you just use a very simple arcade game while loading, I am not sure this would apply.

Also, the claims seem to be for the situation where the progress made in the auxiliary game is then reflected in the main game, if the loading game is merely a reflection of the loading process itself and is not related to the main content, then it would seem to be fine even if the main content is a game.
I would agree. Even though I feel that I will probably be happier in the long run with a partner, I find myself quite happy to be alone much, of not most of the time.

I could see myself living in the woods and traveling to a nearby town or city ever few weeks or so to 'dip my toes' in social activity, or to have friends visit me as a form of 'retreat'.

The main thing that I miss, I've noticed, is (intellectual) input. And being online can satisfy much of that need (though not all).

What I don't miss, is social interaction for the sake of it.

I'd miss sex though, if I were to do this without a partner.
you can still use a t-test for non-normal data...
The Chromecast would be a pretty great device with a few hundred third-party apps, including streaming radio, a photo viewer, and other stuff that could be easily implemented on top of the existing SDK. And I was planning on writing a specialty app at some point. I have a whitelisted device and I've been fooling around with the SDK. It's a nice platform.

But there's several comments in the Koushik Dutta thread from people who "spoke to Googlers" suggesting that Google intends to keep very tight control over the platform and only allow major media companies to ship apps. If this is the case, the Chromecast is a pretty worthless competitor to the average, proprietary smart TV, which already does Netflix, Hulu, etc., and doesn't require the customer to use multiple devices to turn on the TV and play content.

As somebody who once spent a couple months of evenings hacking on Google Wave bots, I'm ready to drop my Chromecast plans like a hot potato. If there isn't a robust market for third-party apps, this thing's going to be another stinker.
No, but I would pay you to create a RoR tutorial
The tutorial would be viewed by thousands and would support open source
Contact me Ric at RubyRails dot com
Edit: This is part of my OpenDomain project - we have been supporting open source for 14 years
Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges
Website Visitors are People Too
From a business perspective it doesn't make sense to block a very useful feature like this. My vote goes with them simply moving around the private API for technical reasons.
This is some liberal utopian garbage sprinkled with a misunderstanding of human behavior and capped with a statement contradicting the premise.
A progress bar, no matter how bad, can tell me there is progress being made.

Except it can't, really, because browsers don't expose any kind of "percentage complete" information to javascript code. Partly that's because the browser doesn't always know; if the response uses chunked encoding (common for anything that's not a static file), the initial headers don't indicate the length of the response, so the browser doesn't know what percentage of the response it's got until it's got the whole thing.

Basically, from the HTTP protocol up the stack is designed in a way that makes it really hard to know how much longer it's going to be before a request is complete. It's designed that way for good reasons, but the unfortunate side effect is that progress bars that have any degree of meaning are generally not possible for non-static content.

That's why we have spinners. They provide the user with feedback that says "yes, I saw that you clicked that, and I'm doing something about it", which is crucial, but they don't depend on knowing how long it'll take to do whatever is being done. Most of the time that's fine if the request completes within 10 seconds. Any longer than that and additional feedback is probably necessary, maybe using setTimeout().
The original HN title, before it was "corrected" was "It's not about the star, stupid", which was less clickbaity.
Even with all scripts enabled, Spacebar (and Vimperator's Ctrl+D) are broken. Home/End and Vimperator's gg/G turn out to not work as well.
Flipload.js: Flipping elements and show a loading indicator easily.
Apple of course prints money, far more of it than Microsoft, so I don't really see where this author is coming from. Amazon is more interesting; Amazon famously posts loss after loss, preferring to reinvest it all in R&D an infrastructure. It's on open question as to why their stock retains such a high valuation (see e.g. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/12/amazon_s_zero...). I think the answer for most people (including myself) is that a) I don't want my Prime going anywhere and b) Jeff Bezos is a genius.
Another option is WeasyPrint — although it is rather slow.
I agree. Windows 8 feels much better than Windows 7. You have to keep in mind I am a Ubuntu user who loves Unity. Many people resist changes like this. The same kind of resistance is to be expected from users who actually like Windows 7.

I must add, however, I switched back to Ubuntu on the first opportunity.
Ellison is the original NSA whore.
The constitution explicitly permits eminent domain, provided it's for the benefit of the public. It's also clear that Wells Fargo will argue against it, because it's obviously not in their interest.

Not too far from where I live is a house that Deutsche Bank took possession of a year and a half back. They haven't made any moves to sell since. The lot is overgrown, the roof will start leaking soon, it's an eyesore that's getting worse every month.

A few years back I had the misfortune to rent from an absentee landlady from one of the poorest ZIP codes in Brooklyn who had bought that property at the height of the boom. The high point of the tenancy was the heating failing in early October. When the code inspector showed up I could show him the garbage that hadn't been collected for three weeks and send him down to the basement where the lady, her husband and her useless cousin had torn the boiler apart, attempting to fix it, and couldn't put it back together again. She had arranged for the plumber to come, cancelled it a day later, and then went out from Brooklyn to do this cock-up of a cowboy job.

The backstory was that her bank had asserted rights the day the plumber was cancelled. The garbage was there because the garbage hauler had gone unpaid for that month. I moved out soon after, and the move was a pain.

That was in 2008. The state of the house is uncertain. Lis pendens was filed in 2008, as I said, and there has been no court date until now.

What I'm saying here is that unmaintained housing stock and housing stock without a clean title has real effects on the people that live in them and nearby, the public that is. You can make a good case that eminent domain is justified here. No one has done it yet, this is uncharted territory as far as the law is concerned, but it's heartening to see Richmond take a shot at it.
Heh, very recognizable.

I do think you will acclimatize to being alone over time, and it gets easier and perhaps almost back to 'before'. But I also agree that once you've had a taste of good partnership, it changes your perspective permanently, and you don't want to settle for 'before'.
That is precisely my point, in noting his control over how he executes on his wealth. Thank you for re-iterating.
They did it before, why not again?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Which is, from the users perspective, pretty irrelevant. The user bought it and is the legal owner of the device. Everything else is a calculation of the seller and his problem (tm).
The controller is the best part!

I wonder what his display is like?
Is it timing the things that take time to happen?
> Richmond. What they're doing is flatly unconstitutional, as the article mentions.

I didn't see that mentioned in the article. Are you sure you are not thinking of that article someone linked to in a comment here on HN rather than the submitted article?
you're claiming that if if it was meant to be a critique it's ineffective yet you found yourself realizing "how much [you were] thinking about this silly little thing"

interesting!
Exactly. The benefits of having npm as a package manager really cannot be overstated.

In my experience, requirejs has been nothing but one over-complicated under-documented and inflexible mess
I don't live in SF or need that sort of instruction, but that strikes me as a bargain rate - even for group instruction.
I was thinking the same thing. Why would anyone want this?
I find that the biggest effect of being alone for long periods of time is that my mind starts obsessing over weird things if I don't direct it to specific 'problems' to solve. It's like I need to exert more control when there are no friends around to 'center' my thought processes.
You should at least do some basic searches on these before asserting them. After said "storm", the Translate API was not shut down as originally announced. It became a paid API[1]

[1] https://developers.google.com/translate/
Yes - it would be reckless to store users' login attempts (correct or incorrect) in the clear, no matter the purpose. And I've never heard of anyone doing that - it's pretty self-evident.
This is a great way of holding the banks accountable and asserting fairness in the citizen's fight against the corprotacracy that has a chokehold on our nation at the moment. If the banks that have received huge amounts of taxpayer money in the form of bailouts refuse to right the abuses that they created then it is incumbent upon a free people to stand up or continue to be run over. It is unfortunate that our federal legislators have allowed things to get to this point. Local governments are going to have to do something as the legislators at the federal level are unwilling to go against or are themselves corrupted by the corporate lobby. This is why we should not allow for career politicians.
Dunno, but you can download and install Ubuntu 12.04 or Fedora 19 rather easily.
Yes a human language or grammar doesn't come into being the same way a programming language does, but the notion of correctness still exists and I'd probably define it as:

Correct === Tradition + Lots 'o' Time

And Matt wasn't arguing this, but I have to link to Eric Lippert whenever I can so:

The idea programming language isn't 'correct' is kinda wonky. As I learned from Eric Lippert's [Three umpires](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/09/three...):

Three baseball umpires are having lunch together.

The first umpire says "Well, a lot of them are balls, and a lot of them are
strikes, but I always calls 'em as I sees 'em."

The second umpire says "Hmph. I calls 'em as they are."

The third umpire slowly looks at his two colleagues and declares "They ain't
nothin' until I calls 'em."

When a designed language is presented to you, you can't really argue about correctness, only suitability to a particular purpose or taste.
The point is that because Microsoft is focused on making money, they don't have time to change the world. Since Apple has "changed the world" multiple times, they end up making more money total, but they don't maximize the profits. Amazon is expected to also make more in the future while they have not made that much profit in the past.
Something like Speed Dating without the implication that you are searching for a significant other, then?
So basically for everyday people it's:

Heads (banks keep mortgages): You Lose, because the market value of your home is artificially high, and when the bottom goes out on the market again (unless you happen to be drinking the kool aid and equate a life time of mortgage payments as owning a home), you'll either find yourself on foreclosure or trying to refinance again.

Tails (City and PE get mortgages): You Still Lose, but now you have to pay a PE firm those monthly mortgage payments while the above still applies.

Am I missing something?
As much as I agree with the criticism of Microsoft's implementation of stack ranking, if the stock had kept growing like it did in the '90's I think you would have seen a lot more happy employees.

Nobody cares too much about the review system when the options you got three years ago are making you a millionaire.
This is why progress bars shouldn't try to reflect actual processing (unless they can measure it in a way that maps close to linearly) and instead should be based on estimation. A progress bar should be a way of telling to the user how much longer you think a task will take so that their time perception doesn't slow down. Using it to indicate wait times accurately or precisely is, at best, a waste of time.

I'm currently working on a side project which is a library for driving progress bars using this principle. You give it an estimated amount of time, and your progress bar fills based on that (not linearly; my testing indicates that deceleration results in a shorter perceived time). If the estimate is way off, then it can switch to an indeterminate indicator instead of filling and stopping. To make the estimation process even easier (especially in the face of variation in user environments), it uses linear regression to adjust the estimates to be more accurate.
No, the premise is spot on. Steve Ballmer is possibly one of the worst CEOs ever, but one of the greatest employees in the history of the industry. He was the first product manager on Windows, and created one of the most profitable business franchises in history. The Windows empire was so important to economic activity that Thomas Friedman cited it as a major influence in globalization in his book The World is Flat. Throughout the 90s Ballmer led sales at Microsoft, as it became one of the fastest growing companies and took the lead in the software industry from Borland, Lotus and IBM. In 1998 he championed the cause of getting Microsoft into enterprise computing; few appreciate it today, but Microsoft was laughed out of the room in enterprise sales engagements at the time--today it's a multi-billion dollar market for them.

The reason Bill Gates gave him the reigns as CEO is that besides Gates he's the person most singly responsible for Microsoft success. Circa 1998 they were the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of $500+ billion. Early in Ballmer's CEO tenure, they returned one of the largest dividends in history. It was an economic event so large that the Federal Reserve cited it as affecting the macro economy.
By default yes, but like most ORMs you can ask to populate only some members: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#...
Medium: Odds Are Against You When Making a Mass Consumer Product
Strange, my Appleinsider link, from a few days after yours, shows that Samsung have closed the gap massively over the last year or so and was within 3 percentage points at the end of last quarter, a whole two months ago and just before the new iPhone announcement. Not generally a big sales period for Apple.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/31/apple-takes-53-of-...

They've been publishing that data for years and never once questioned it before. I wonder what happened that got one of their staff so riled up about the issue? Oh yes, probably Samsung overtaking Apple in smartphone profit share.
Django has it too. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#...
Great post, Luke! Brands need to focus on the customer interaction for sure, but the most important part is that a brand is made up of people. Brands need to market to people like they're marketing to themselves. We're all people. We need to stop pushing and start treating people how we would want to be treated. That's the way to build a business around customer experience.
Strava.com is down too. It seems that Amazon is having troubles with AWS.
You have to A) know about this ridiculously named package called "south" and B) remember to install it everytime though. That's why it's not "out of the box".

Here, Google even backs us up on this - https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+out+of+the+box

"Out of the box is the term used to denote items, functionalities, or features that do not require any additional installation. ..." - via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_box
>performing tasks that no human wants to do

Most humans will perform any kind of task to avoid starving/abject poverty. If there are no constructive tasks available then destructive tasks, such as crime and insurrection, will be created. Depending on the strength of the state, the end result will be either decreased mass security (parts of Mexico, for example) or a burgeoning prison population.
A very good point, although in the table I was able to find (http://www.streetinsider.com/ec_earnings.php?q=amzn) they've actually only reported two losing quarters going back 2 years, plus one that was 1 cent per share. 6 estimate misses, though, as many times as they exceeded expectations.

So it's clear they're not buying "traction" by grossly under pricing their offerings. So given that so many of us know for an absolute fact it's a well run company, and the obvious potential, if not likelyhood of becoming the next Sears and Roebuck (that was a good thing in my lifetime :-), well, they have a way above average story.
Introducing a brand new way to share everything.
IIRC it's one of the few big applications written with Mercury functional logic language.
I took a job after the dot com bust where I knew at the interview they were not a high-quality team, but I felt like I had no choice. I took the job and was told after a year there and at age 25 that my tech skills were "the finished product" which was high praise, but just made me sad. I was by far their best programmer but only because the rest of the team were nearly worthless.
I've asked why people prefer Rails to Django repeatedly on HN. The best answer I've gotten [1] is that they're more-or-less feature-equivalent now, but historically speaking Rails beat Python to the niche and got entrenched due to network effects.

Can you give me some specific examples of stuff Rails does but Django doesn't?

Also, Ruby sucks. I know over a dozen languages, but every time I've tried to learn Ruby it's been an awful experience that's ended with me quitting in frustration at the totally unnecessary obtuseness and complexity of the core language's syntax [2] [3], before even getting into the enormous number of additional moving parts in a web framework as complex as Rails.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5784117

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157886

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872899
It depends how invested they are. If they already plan an extensive rewrite, they may very well change their underlying technology to someone they feel more comfortable with than .NET.
I think a big problem lies in the individualist approach combined with a reserved attitude toward others. When you start a 'new life' in a new place where you cannot rely on massive amounts of free time, or structured 'community' (university, high school, church), you have to find shortcuts to making 'significant' connections.

I've done okay on that front, having moved to a completely new place very often in my life. I find that one of the secrets is being extra honest, and extra open, instead of waiting for 'organic' moments of connection. These moments happen if you have loads of time to spend with people. If you don't have the time, too much can happen to get in the way of making such a connection before it is too late.

I rather like this quote in the context. Can't remember who wrote it:

"We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable."