skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"but this would create a perverse incentive to ALWAYS default on loans."

Statically, yes. However I'm having a harder time mentally analyzing what this would do dynamically, which is a much more interesting problem, since the real world is not static.

My first approximation is that because "everyone" would know this is something they can do with their debt, that lending would consequently become much more rare, and lenders would be much more careful about securing their loans. The initial impact on the economy would probably be sharply negative; what happens after that is probably a "your guess is as good as mine" situation, even amongst economists. Attitudes about debt have varied widely throughout time and space. Some will say tightened lending will wreck the economy longterm, others would suggest that loose lending has already wrecked the economy and the initial shock would simply be paying down damage already done, after which the economy would be much healthier. Which side you fall down on probably has more to do with ideology than education; given how much trouble economists have explaining even our current economy I'm not willing to give even experts much credence for explaining how such a different one would work.
Great start. It's easy to imagine communities building up around different project areas.
It's like you took all the best parts of Evr.st, but stripped away all the pretentious bullshit because you're genuinely into the idea.

So yeah. It's awesome. Congrats!
CC companies have no idea what you can or cannot pay, nor do they care. What they care about is that you haven't made a payment in a while, despite letters and phone calls urging you to pay. After a fairly short time they want (and perhaps must) clear the debt off their books, so they sell it to a collection agency. They appear (based on the article) to sell at a fixed 5% rate rather than auctioning the debt to the highest bidder.

So, if the debtor can afford 5% but no more, the CC company achieves their goal of clearing the bad debt for the same price they would by selling to an agency.

Why not hold out for more? The debtor has already shown an unwillingness to pay under the current terms, and time has run out for holding the bad debt.

Why would the debtor be willing/able to pay 5% but not the current terms? For a CC, it's probably the interest rate and interest balance. In this situation the CC company is usually charging 19% - 25% interest and including accumulated unpaid interest in the balance. If the debtor makes a payment, the terms say that the payment is applied to interest first, so the debtor's principal is not reduced at all until ALL of the interest is paid. That can be lifetime indenture to the CC company. A 5% payoff is a renegotiation of the terms which will terminate the account and prevent any further interest charges. That's worth scraping together the money needed for the payoff.
It's using Markov chains from your existing FB posts, so that's why it needs auth. (FB's API requires auth even for public posts.)
> As an aside, is there not some elasticity to medical care?

Trivially true if you define 'medical care' to include cosmetic procedures, which then gets you into case-by-case debates on whether this or that orthodontic or dermatological procedure is 'cosmetic' or required to live a normal life. Which then gets into debates about what pressures society places on people to have a certain look, and just how much social damage is done to someone who has a visible port wine stain, for example.

There's also a certain elasticity of demand for preventative care and palliative care as well. For example, flu shots and pseudoephedrine: Most of us here are not going to die of the flu, and most of us aren't around people who can die of the flu and cannot get vaccinated. Similarly, most of us here can get through a cold without taking symptomatic treatment for it. So there's a certain elasticity there, depending on the person.

But giving flu shots to everyone is likely a lot less expensive than losing even a single person to a serious flu infection. A similar case can be made regarding cheap pseudoephedrine versus losing some productivity to feeling like crap without the pills.
It would be nice if you used GitHub properly and put the source code in the actual project. Thanks!
Am I being too simplistic when I think the following holds?

Easier to make a DSL => Wider adoption of new languages => Better grounds for experimentations => Much more creative stuff => More accessible technology
I see it as well. Using .num{width:.9em} fixed it for me.
shoot me an email kevin at frameri.com I am updating our pre-order page and I'd like to run the new ux by you, since I creeped and saw you do that full time
But the OP suggests the debtor gets first refusal.

What I don't get is why, if the lender is going to sell the debt for less that the debt its self, the lender cant offer to settle with the debtor for that amount.

The problem is a social one and motivation to settle in full.
It seems like censorship or manipulation when no explanation is given. Even if it is on the up and up, it'd be nice if someone could comment as to why the changes occur.
This is so amazing, but probably dangerous.
> The key argument in favor of a language VM is the development process.

> If you’re writing JavaScript, your “compile step” is just refreshing the browser.

This is not a really strong argument: the development process could be exactly the same if your development environment automate certain task, as syntax checking (like with jslint), recompile when the sources have changed (ie file watch functionality), reload when save (like with tincr)...
Finbarr's co-founder here. I personally love the Seinfeld method and use Lift to help with that. We want to make videos of before/after, but with the whole journey. We've made a video of one of our users, who is re-learning how to walk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHSMUq0bDLg
Um, yes they do

http://blog.soylent.me/post/64789154918/soylent-funding-anno...
Curious - what's the origin of stack ranking? Was there any science (psychology/sociology) behind it?
"Military organizations already spend a lot of time and money on food, given its overwhelming importance in things like fighting wars"

Correct, which is why military branches are deep-pocketed potential buyers.

"I suspect "Valley nerdchow-paste" is not going to do a lot to raise morale."

In a military context it's not a meal replacement, per se. More of an emergency MRE or HDR replacement, provided it's more shelf stable and can compete on nutritional factors. (Big ifs, of course.) I don't disagree that morale is a concern, though. MREs are nasty, but they're at least attempting to be palatable within the confines of their purpose.
For a point of reference, a charged car battery's acid is about 4 times as concentrated, and there's a lot more of it.
Good job Finbar+crew. :)
>Soylent is doing nothing more than accommodating to the needs of humanoids who continue the endless pursuit of some vague promise of capitalist fulfillment

Or, I'm just really lazy and would prefer something remotely healthy and cheap compared to, say, ordering a pizza.

It isn't meant to replace all your food intake, but, it seems like a good thing for when-you-just-don't-feel-like-cooking or don't have time because you have other things you'd rather do, then spend time cooking and eating (don't get me wrong though, I very much enjoy eating)..

As a student, this seems like a super product for someone like me...
> Fact is that Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Eric Schmidt and others also screwed people, and in some cases, probably more than Gates.

I don't recall any of them being being brought up on anti-trust charges and losing.

And no amount of saving lives wipes away those you ruined.
I've developed software in Java,.NET, Php & NodeJS. I ll rate JVM higher than any other platform. But when it comes to simplicity, easy scalability, Node ranks way higher. Php isnt even closer at all.

NodeJS literally takes 5 minutes to get started writing scalable apps without even thinking about concurency at all.

Write a software in Php yourself and let people download and run themselves, there are endless pain. Actually Php sucks in many areas which I dont want to touch right now.
Look Inside Apple’s Spaceship Headquarters With 24 All-New Renderings
Remember scales - there is a lot more entropy in 160 bits than there is in 100 bits.
man uses less
I know very little about what's available in Ruby, but I would have used the Pandas library to accomplish this task in python. Their in-memory data structure, a DataFrame, is more than capable of handling those operations.
The problem is that companies will always have more data and can do more with that data than an individual.
I've read on the Soylent message board and various related sub-reddits that Ensure and similar products are indeed not as nutritionally optimal. Specifically, many of them are loaded with sugar so that they taste good. Which may be okay for 1 meal, but bad if you are using it regularly. Also, they probably are more expensive.

That said, Ensure is usually the product I hear has too much sugar. I'd be curious if anyone with more knowledge has looked into this issue more, or compared the nutritional components of the major players in that market.
Custom Spaces - Create your company's dream space.
We do not: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/tsa-completely-remo...
Amber 0.12.0 released
The new release includes a lot of improvements, from the new package management to the AST interpreter, as well as improvements in Helios, the CLI tools and the compiler, among other changes.
This is cute, but I don't understand how it's going to make money.
Saving lives doesn't wipe away past wrongs. Your argument is fallacious.
While all auto is cool, it doesn't seem like having to download data once/month would be all too terrible, and it certainly shouldn't stop you from the larger project. You could have the system prompt you to do it.

Like balancing your checkbook once/month. (You see, we used to have these little books called "registers," and ...)
Work Is the Magic Bullet
Inhabited solely, of course, by True Scotsmen.
I'm not sure that I'd lead with speculation from the Winklevosses in order to convince a skeptic. Your other three points are much stronger.

Also, only the latter two are actual economic developments, rather than analysis. The upcoming Congressional hearings might be newsworthy too.
For Puppet you can use a validation script and a git commit hook to shorten the feedback loop on syntax errors: http://spoop.net/devops/2013/11/12/validate-puppet.html
Chrome provides pepper.js, which converts PNaCl into JS using Emscripten, so it will run anywhere.
How to migrate/update to Devise 3.1 in Rails 4
"clean design" has been around since the 20th century. It just went away, but came back, and it will go away again and will most likely come back again. So yes, design is in trends, just like any other field has trends, but "clean design" has pretty good odds to come back again. 90s grunge design.....not so likely.
Househappy.org -- Visual Search for Real Estate, Free for Owners and Brokers
It seems that writing browsers is hard. Oh well, let's just continue using exactly the same javascript stack forever then.
Being Relentless and Doing Follow Up E-mails
Awesome way to steer culture. Awesome recruiting tool. But seem pretty pricey. Certainly an investment.
>there is no such thing as full security, just varying levels of insecurity

Six in one hand...

But it is good to realize that there really no such thing as perfect security. If it can be accessed, it can be accessed nefariously.
I think CoinMKT with its verification seems like the only solid place....
I agree, it is unfortunately much more rampant in those areas. Starting there should have the biggest social payoff.

I think it's such an important area neglected by tech industry. One reason is that there is no commercial payoff. In fact, the opposite is going to be the case. We need someone like him who has the fortune to invest in these projects.
I think this is a great idea. However, I'd like to see a follow up. I'd like to see how they do in their first year, first 5 years, etc. Wish them luck!
For me: because my background is mainly Java. While I understand prototype inheritance, I'm not as familiar with the programming style of Javascript. I like being able to create strict class structures and use those. Prototype structure allows for ad-hoc creation of a class. This makes code analysis and tooling a lot more difficult to do properly.

(I do have to deal with the fun that is Perl on a daily basis, but I'm still more a fan of Java style OOP).

Also, my entire professional career has been working on projects that are worked on by 30+ people with a very large code base. When you have large teams using a language that doesn't enforce strict structure, you tend to miss things that could have easily been found at compile-time with proper tooling. This can be accomplished in languages like Javascript, but it requires strict internal controls. Having the language give you that kind of support out of the box is nice to have.
I saw this vintage chemistry set at an antique store in Bisbee, AZ. It includes a booklet called "Senior Chemcraft Experiment Book -- Instructive and Fascinating Chemical Experiments -- The Porter Chemical Company, Hagerstown, Maryland" and something labelled "Bryan Chemical Illustrators -- An Exclusive Chemcraft Feature".

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5477/10826914195_23dc191246_h....
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5471/10826917855_dfe388f77c_h....
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5478/10826957096_a0eec5199e_h....

I recall thinking how fun it would be to have that set, as well as how risky it could be. I probably should've bought it.
I saw what you wrote about your dot product speed issue. Did you try using NumPy's einsum function? http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.ei...

It's really fast for this kind of stuff. Happy to give details about how to use it if you need.
That was the first thought I had. "She looks familiar" check the front page and instantly knew who it was.

I love this idea and the implementation is pretty slick. Hope the exposure from the dance video helps push this along. Best of luck.

BTW I would sign up, but I won't do it via facebook or twitter. If you add a normal email password I will be in.
The nascent shitstorm was the story PandoDaily wrote that cherry-picked the mold and rat incidents from the Vice piece to make the content more salacious than it otherwise was.
The @ in the url kills twitter's url shortener (on OSX desktop app) when deep-linking to a specific day…
What's your definition of 'need'?

If your belief system relies on not compensating other people's hard work, then it is destroying the social fabric of society.

By not acknowledging software as property, you are entrenching the power of those who control other forms of property. We can make software through our own efforts, but we cannot make land, or other natural resources.

You may wish to trade your time to provide support for free software to powerful corporations, but that seems like a grim vision of what's possible for humanity.
This seems really close to the Chrome Developer Summit (http://developer.chrome.com/devsummit) so I guess it will be launched there!
It is not open source, then?

It's open source, but all committers are Googlers and/or have to sign a copyright assignment. It's controlled by Google (which isn't a bad thing necessarily).

And Java is controlled by whom?

Oracle. They own the Java trademark, so any fork cannot be called Java unless they certify it.
Yes ruined, and most businesses fail because they're bad, not because of illegal monopolistic practices by the industry giant.

Chinese workers... red herring, nothing to do with this.
How could you, you've just peeped it for a minute, you don't know anything about what they're thinking!
What are the early signs of scurvy? I didn't see mention of that in the Vice article.
I got a bunch of emails from people who had seen my dance video, and invited them to do the 100-day challenge. The earliest version of 100 was people sharing videos with us via dropbox folders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w
IBM PC XT (Model 5160) running Windows v1.01 in your browser
Does it still phone home by default?
The Sad State of In-Game Ads
And definitely not 50 of them. </sarcasm>
iterating on the beta, transactional eating, exponentially better way, etc.

Give me a break.
An low focus activity that you do together achieves the same thing as a meal together. Going for walks, etc.

But people are not going to just replace all family dinners with the foods they love with a meal replacement shake.
Show HN: RedditKit – Ruby and Objective-C libraries for the reddit API
Thanks! We want to make a native mobile app so it's even easier to upload. Right now it's clunkier than we'd like (especially through web)
> So in theory, if you can pay $1,000 to buy your own debt, somebody else should be willing to bid at least $1,001.

Not at all true. Suppose I have, for instance, a debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, which has a current balance of $10,000, and $1,000 in assets. I might be able to pay $1,000 to purchase and settle the debt, but I'd have very little reason to pay $1,000 on the debt without it being a full settlement, and there's pretty much no reason for any third party to be willing to pay $1,001 (or any value not substantially less than $1,000) to purchase the debt.
Smokers huddling in the doorway means there's a nice big cloud of smoke that I need to walk through and breath in, which then gets blown into the bar as soon as I open the door. Even if smoking in completely unconfined spaces is harmless due to the smoke dissipating too quickly to be concentrated enough to cause harm, what winds up happening when you ban smoking indoors is that people just smoke huddled up in the doorway (especially if you live somewhere cold, where the smokers huddle in the door for a quick smoke, and then drop their butts all over the ground).

Setting aside the danger, it's quite obnoxious. It's a powerful, unpleasant odor to many people, and can trigger asthma attacks.

Smokers seem to believe that because they want to inhale something, everyone else around them must want to inhale it as well. Why do they think that?

Anyhow, if it is shown that there's no secondhand risk from e-cigs, and they turn out to be less obnoxious than regular cigarettes (I've never walked through a cloud of vapor from a bunch of people using e-cigs, so I can't say), then I would be happy to allow them. As long as they don't affect me, I welcome you putting whatever you want into your body. Heck, I'd welcome them if it meant not having the huddling smokers outside and pile of discarded butts on the ground. But if they are harmful, or if they do lead to obnoxious odors (and I find many perfumes offensive and wish those were banned too, so telling me that they are flavored or smell nice won't help), they should be treated similarly to any other form of smoking.
I fully agree with you in this particular case; it's clear the philanthropist has added more value to humanity than was taken away. Still, it's worth evaluating the person within different contexts: a ruthless businessman taking a run at Sainthood. Quite the dichotomy.
I think Mt. Gox, the most reputable exchange, is the only solid place. This sounds like self advertising.
You've saved me from building my own. This is amazing, thanks.
healthcare in Canada is still pretty horrible, and over flooded. Having to wait ~10h in emergency because of a minor problem... might as well not go. (lived 10 years in Canada so I know!)
>there is science that supports Soylent.

Since you made the claim, what specifically is the science that supports Soylent? I assume you can provide references to peer-reviewed stuff, given the nature of your claim, and I look forward to reading it.
Any chance I can use this with OpenId or sign up for an individual account some time soon? I really hate using my social accounts to sign in. I know it's probably super low priority.

I think it's a pretty neat idea :)
you are for sure
I've been burned before by startups that got hacked and spammed all my twitter friends. Sorry, normal signup or I'm not doing it.

Love the project though.
It should be a Spec that supports some generic operations and a spec for a standard library (interaction with dom etc.). Maybe bytecode is too low level, how about some kind of stackless 3-address intermediate representation like Soot uses for JVM bytecode (jimple has afair ~15 operations, see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58....). This would lead to a language one can wonderfully compile to. asm.js is probably already this idea in practice.
Confirmation bias much?

Those that are 'DO-ing' and aren't documenting, you don't see.
There's a new one! I absolutely love this set of posts, haven't seen something added in ages.
Mouseover video playback its kinda crappy when your scrolling, if your mouse cursor is crossing over several videos you just keep hearing too many random sounds. Also since everything is recorded at different volumes it makes my ears bleed.
What this really means is Ensure and the like just need an image overall. Rebrand something like that and they're probably on equal footing again.
This is a similar idea to the MSR Embassies project: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/embassies/
> I disagree. Low quality articles like this are part of the reason why many undergrads are full of strongly held opinions about things they don't know much about.

I doesn't happen with undergrads only (but that doesn't make the whole profession guilty of it all the time).

> They think you can dismiss a huge paradigm with a glib one-liner: "functions are not objects".

I don't think the article dismisses any paradigm whatsoever. It dismisses the entrenchment in one paradigm at the expense of any other. That's the main point. The explanation given is perhaps a little bit careless, I can concede it.

> Think about it a little bit and you'll see why they are actually very related.

Relation does not imply causation, which I perceived in your wording, but I might have been mistaken. Was I?

> His statement about Java is meant to imply that proper higher order functions and OOP are in opposition in some way

I don't think he meant that, but rather that the way Java never included functions as "primitive types" was a mistake because of that need of OO purity. The Runnable interface (or any interface containing a single method) is an example of that problem (there are other reasons which may support the existence of that interface though).

> I am saying that proper higher order functions alone are enough for a very pure form of OOP, so there is clearly no opposition.

That's debatable. I totally agree with you on the idea that FP let you implement OO. Likewise, OO let you implement closures easily (there's a duality there obviously, as in algebra vs coalgebra). However, I think that OOP (or FP) as a full fledged paradigm included in any language - and not just a library built on top of closures (or closures on top of objects) - makes a lot of sense: it let the language incorporate syntactic sugar for all the specific constructs related to OO, and it also enable the compiler to perform better code analysis (though I suspect that it should be possible with a library based implementation, but that would imply either the compiler to know about it, or it having a very flexible - plugin like - mechanism to include enhancements as libraries as well). I don't think that the latest evolution in Java to include FP is a coincidence. Many languages have already been mixing these paradigms with good success.

> I'm going to ignore the digs at me [...]

Good. Let's get that out of the way. I'm glad we're having a saner discussion.

> If he can't make a simple argument correctly, how am I supposed to have faith that his research isn't similarly full of errors?

I understand your point better now. Initially, I was very afraid you'd be having the very same issue.