skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If it's under inflation, this equity deal is a bad one for the bank.

The bank is already in a tough spot. They're $100K+ in the hole in a foreclosure situation, so going a lesser amount in the hole is an improvement in their situation. You cannot compare to the "don't make the original mortgage loan case" and say that because they're "giving away" $65K in value that it's the worst of their available options.

> No - you were claiming that this sort of deal made sense for a bank.

Please show me the text that makes that claim. (I happen to think that it does, but I don't believe I actually made that claim.)

> And, there are many deals that a bank can do, so inventing one isn't actually all that interesting.

> The relevant deals are profitable.

There are many. OK, please propose maybe two alternate deal structures under the above facts/circumstances that are materially different and better for the bank. (Saying they'll take 18% equity for otherwise the same loan mod is not materially different IMO, even though it's obviously better for the bank.) Ideally your proposed deals would have a chance in hell of the bank offering and the borrower accepting.

> And, you still haven't addressed the real problem, that the vast majority of these folks can't afford an $800K loan either.

The fact that people who once got a million dollar mortgage and now can't afford an $800K mortgage is not my problem to address. I didn't loan them the money, and unless they're in my neighborhood, it's such a vanishingly small part of my damn business or concern that I'll choose to spend time on things that do matter to me or that I can influence.

If the bank lent to someone who couldn't possibly repay on the day they took the loan, that person needs to get foreclosed on, the bank needs to take the losses and look at its underwriting standards, and the borrower should have their credit rating dinged for their own irresponsibility.

If a job loss or income change prompts the foreclosure, then I feel more sympathetic to both the lender and borrower, but some portion of loans are going to go bad, and in the "less than 20% down" loans, the bank was knowingly taking larger risks, so I don't feel too bad about their larger losses. The borrower in this case has still made and failed to keep a commitment, which speaks to creditworthiness, so again the credit downgrade is fair/appropriate, even if it seems like "piling on".

For people who could afford an $800K mortgage (and many of them could afford to keep current on their $1mm mortgage), but there are some who would choose not to because their mortgage is non-recourse and they're far enough underwater on the house that it's literally in their best financial interest to walk away. Those people are the ones for whom a loan mod could make more sense to both sides than a bank foreclosure.
After 3 years, admin of Free Rainbow Tables has decided to quit
Verizon brings an app store to FiOS TV
Certainly MS does put a lot of work (and money) into trying to improve their UIs. Unfortunately, whether it's due to the huge feature set of the Office applications or legacy support required by certain clients, the result of their work is not something most would hold up as a shining beacon of UI design.

While Office 2007 is a step up from 2003 in a number of ways, I'd have to agree with onreact that I wouldn't expect much from the eventual web app version of Office. At least not in the initial release.
"What I really love is tackling something no one else knows how to do, or maybe no one has ever tried to do. That's the most magical thing of all, figuring out how to write a program to do something totally unique, or even seemingly impossible."

Thank you, codist! That is the best description of myself that I have ever read. Whenever anyone asks my biggest strength, I tell them that the answer is always "yes". Whenever they ask my biggest weakness, I tell them that I don't want to work on something that someone else can do.

"Oh well, I am beyond getting the usual jobs via the usual methods, since no one hires a 51 years old programmer with up to date skills and 28 years experience being a passionate programmer who still loves to program."

Wrong. I'm older that you, codist, and I'm never out of work. It's got nothing to do with age, or skills, or politics, or dollars. It has everything to do with results. I'm currently helping a customer's customer solve a 9 figure business problem with software that none of them ever even imagined, because we just kept digging until we came up with it. Once you deliver something like that, people like them don't let people like us get away.
Please let us know if you shoot some code. It could be a good open source project, according to the interest. I'd personally go for defining a community whitepaper / wiki maybe for the concept and solutions.

What do you think? In the mean time we can build some prototypes on different platforms.

The real reason why we don't know how and if this interaction model would work in practice - is the obvious absence of implementations.
Nice timing. We're getting ready for OSCON this coming week; our first trade show. So, I guess actually it's a week or two late, since we don't have time to change anything at this point. Nonetheless, an interesting read.

We're keeping it super-cheap; even with 500 T-shirts, two nice and huge banners, a projector and giant screen (80" diagonal), a nice printed quick reference card to give away, and paying someone to help us out with the booth (not a "booth babe", though she is cute) since there's only two of us who can be in town for the event, we're coming in well under $10k, including the cost of renting the booth. Of course, the fact that it's local is a big help. No travel expenses to factor in.
What do we need to get on Ruby 1.9?
Why business blogs should focus on cheerleaders, not lead-generation
but a typo in the FIRST sentence is such a turn-off

Get over it. For 3 reasons...

1. hn is international. There's a decent chance that English is not OP's primary language.

2. To meny strumbos I work with knitpick on grammer and speling becuz they aren't capabull of evalu8ting the kontent. I don't ever want too be like them. I bet u don't either.

3. Grow a thicker skin in order to learn more. To me, "hacking" and "turn-off" seem like they oughta be mutually exclusive.
not really. CMS is essentially different than a fs, but I see your point. While I won't go into explaining why it is, I have to say that some concepts from both should be brought closer. File should not be seen as a unit, but a set of tightly bound data. I wrote about this too recently, I'll post soon for opinions.
> then a top-tier school would make you a 10 instead of a 9. Big deal.

Ummm, there is a huge difference between a 9 and a 10. The horse that wins the race by a nose wins 10 times more prize money than the second place horse. Was the 1st place horse 10 times faster? 10 times stronger? No, he was a nose faster - and it made a huge difference.

Think about this in terms of search engines. are Googles search results 10 times better than Yahoo. Absolutely not, but they are a nose better and thats why we all use Google.
Do more than 1 in 4000 people really die from falling in the shower?
"One of the more annoying traits of marketing is that it gives new meanings to words that already have a perfectly good and accepted meaning. Sell means to exchange some item in return for some currency."

According to merriam-websters: "sell: to persuade or influence to a course of action or to the acceptance of something <sell children on reading>"
Interesting. I'll have to think twice before upvoting my housemate's comments.
Showers or tubs are pretty dangerous, but not for the 18-35 demographic.
python packages that include stuff like scripts hardcode the full, explicit prefix in the #! lines.

Such scripts are broken. One should fix the scripts instead of mangling the environment. It's a one-liner:

find /opt/myproject -type f -exec sed -i 's/#!\/usr\/bin\/python/#!\/usr\/bin\/env python/' {} \;

but if you move it, everything breaks in unexpected ways.

If you move it then PYTHONPATH is your friend.

Once you have a python build for each project (which you want to have anyways) you'll notice that you don't need virtualenv or other kludges anymore either. Yep, it's really that easy. 4 lines of code. How many lines was yours again?
I predict that the future of computing (in business anyway) will have much less to do with technology that with what applications we write, who we write them for, and how we write them.

10 or 20 years from now, 100 million corporate drones will be sitting in cubicles looking at screens that look more like 37Signals or Wufoo than SAP or Oracle. Nimble web apps will steal the enterprise away from the monoliths just as surely as the PC stole it from the mainframe.
Of course. Even a user who has never seen the source code can infer that.

Vote something up or down, log out, and come back. You will never see an arrow next to that entry again. Why? Because the intersection of your login and that entry must be storing that fact that you already voted on that.

(I cannot infer from this data alone which way you voted, simply that you did vote.)
Out of interest, what are you working on?
Did you read the comment above this? Sed is the initial hack to fix it, but it's still a hack; not a fix. Eventually I punted on it for the Linux dist, but I'm probably going to be stuck with the sed fix for OS/X.

As for pythonpath - that has nothing to do with moving the entire directory path, including the interpreter, /bin dir, etc.
I know you're being facetious, but asking someone to learn a new language and then familiarise themselves with a project's whole codebase just to answer a simple question about privacy is not exactly helpful. Especially when the site is served by Apache, a whole separate program which keeps its own completely distinct logs, so the suggested course of action is not only a huge imposition but can't actually answer the question anyway.

As others have said, the answer is obvious from the behaviour of the site. But even if it were not, other aspects of the server's configuration would be highly relevant, indeed central to the matter, and the source code is unavailing.
i like unix terrorist's definitions from phrack 65:
"hackers are people that gain unauthorized access/privileges to computerized systems...And what is up with the use of the term "cracker"? As far as I'm concerned, that term applies to people that bypass copyright protection mechanisms."
It all depends what books you read -- say if you just read programming books and no theory, which tends to be drier and less interesting because the pseudo-code examples, if the book even has them, won't compile directly.

Which is what university does. Picks the books. Then tests to see if you really read and understood the material. Plus you can go to lectures if you like to have the prof explain what's in the textbook with notes and examples on the blackboard.

I have a degree but low tolerance for the academic environment (nothing wrong with it, just doesn't suit my personality).

That said, I think I've met a few self-taught programmers during my career that read the wrong books, or more correctly never read the right books (since wrong books are just an opportunity cost). Some are great technicians but will never be engineers. Some have massive blindspots in their knowledge.

Some of the textbooks I read in university I would have never read on my own. So university forced me to read them via degree requirements. Not knowing some of that stuff would have been a handicap at times.

So there's university education for you in a nutshell: forcing you to read books you didn't want to so you'll know a few things you otherwise wouldn't have. Totally worth the four years and big bucks.
This process merges a UV/IR photograph with an ambient light visible photograph. However, if you want to take a photograph of someone in the dark they're going to end up looking like the bogeyman.
Fixing it is good, but a nicer to start an interpreter, which handles whichever is the preferred location to Python, is to call env, which is always in usr bin.

#!/usr/bin/env python

Will dynamically start whatever Python is in your $PATH.
Nit: setuptools does not do this. Proper setuptools packages use the console_scripts entry point, which points to a function will never specify a shebang. A good example is Paste Script [PS]. "paster" is linked the function "paste.script.command:run". When this is pip-installed into a virtualenv, you can `cat` the "paster" executable. It'll look like something like this [pr]; sure enough, the entire thing will have been automatically generated, taking into account the changed Python binary. Slag on setuptools all you want; PEAK got entry points nailed down perfectly.

[PS]: http://svn.pythonpaste.org/Paste/Script/trunk/setup.py

[pr]: http://pastie.org/550423

On the other hand, distutils has a `scripts=` keyword that points directly to a file, which then gets copied and pasted into the bin directory. Since the file has be word-for-word the script, the shebang is written directly. It depends on env, which should normally function; but, if it doesn't, as in the OP's case, there's no fallback. A good example of this is Mercurial [hg]. (Note: I actually haven't used raw distutils all that much, so there might be a work-around for this. A few fruitless minutes of Google Code Search hasn't turned up anything interesting.)

[hg]: http://selenic.com/repo/hg/file/47ce7a3a1fb0/hg
There's no doubt IE is a piece of junk, but I would imagine that has more to do with the business end more than anything else. It's not as if programming a browser is that difficult; choosing exactly which features to support can be.

The web development world is basically the Wild West. There aren't really any rules. The standards we do have can be vague or incomplete. At some point you find yourself making the decision to follow web developers' intent instead of a so-called standard.

Pile on top of that a desire on Microsoft's part to take every opportunity to keep people on the Windows platform and you've got a recipe for disaster for anyone who has to support multiple browsers. I don't think there's any group of developers that could produce something in that kind of environment that we would be happy with.
Sorry, I just can't follow where your exact problem is.

I have 9 python projects under /opt/foo* right now. Each of them has their own python in /opt/foo*/sys/python. I su to the respective user who has PATH and PYTHONPATH set appropiately in its profile - and everything works as expected.

I also don't follow why you consider sed a "hack" here. A hardcoded hashbang line is clearly a Bug - but gladly one that is trivially fixed with that one-liner. On the other side we have your "fix" that involves permanently mangling the environment in strange ways. In my book you are the one proposing the hack here.
In both your argument and that of edw519, you accept that a better school (or any school at all) makes a better developer. I'm not sure that's necessarily the case, though I don't think going to a good school hurts, I'm not sure the people with a high level of passion and the right mindset for being a developer could very well be held back by a lack of schooling.

In thinking back on the most effective developers I've ever known, there's a pretty wide range of backgrounds. Though I guess most of them do have some sort of university degree, not all of them were in CS and most were not top-tier schools.
Ask HN: Event-driven web development
Came across http://nitrogenproject.com/ and thought wow cool. What are other even-driven web development frameworks and what do you think of them?
Cobol time is still in place and more important than ever, governments, banking, military, all rely on it. Problem is that 'good ol' Cobol programmers are hard to find nowadays.
Devoid of any interesting content. Microsoft simply said that people are welcome to report bad behaviour. Then there is a Terminator image and a meta-philosophical "is it skynet?" question. Can't downvote yet, but I would.
> The seizing is typical when coming back from a blood choke - not good, of course, but it's what happens.

LOL at the casual way you say this. Not a criticism, really, it's just waaay outside my experience.
It's not the school, it's the fire-in-the-belly that matters the most. Some people are driven to excel. Their drive focuses all of their energy on whatever topic they are pursuing. They want to know their field better than anyone else. That's the person I want to work with.
You learn CS from books.

You learn programming from code.
I disagree. There are enough cases where a JPG image looks the same but has a smaller file size. There is no reason to not use JPEG in that case. You are overexaggerating with the "blurry and larger" part. Using PNG just because is a mark of an inexperienced graphic designer to me. Know your options and choose the right one.

Just keep the original work file (which surely is not a PNG either) and change that if you have to.
I also thought that was kind of misleading. Probably more than 1/4000 people who die are killed in the shower, but that's not really a relevant comparison. When people get old they probably die in the shower fairly regularly. There was definitely an implication that the probability of getting vc money for your startup is less than the probability of you dying in the shower, say, tomorrow.
I wonder if he's found anyone to take it over - shame to see it die (I learnt a lot from the site)
How to implement Facebook Connect with your Wordpress Blog
Interesting. Apparently two people here want to be like him (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-415786940752241012).

This is deeply disturbing.
The Great Ruby IDE Smackdown of '09
There are 100 million electric bikes in China
This article should be called "Some cool new GTD apps". David Allen was "digital" when he published his book. He purposely made GTD implementation-agnostic, and personally used a Palm pilot. He sold (maybe still sells) a plugin for Outlook to make it more GTD-friendly.
The iPhone sniper buddy
That's a little naive. You never copied a book a thousand times because you don't own a printing press. There's no market capital overhead to prevent you making a million copies of an e-book.

You obviously don't support property rights if you're willing to pirate products. You can recognize property rights by not buying their product and complain, that's your legal recourse for a market decision you don't like.

When you buy a creative product you are completely restricted in how you use it, regardless of if you bought a book, an e-book, a song or a CD. You can't use it for public events, you can't sell it on without the authors/publishers permission (in books the permission is implied hence legal, with e-books the permission is not implied hence illegal), you definitely cannot make copies. These are their property rights, they made it so they own every right and those rights extend implicitly from every post-it you write on to every photograph you take. Until you, or an author says, 'yes you can use that' (when you buy their product you have automatic right of private use) and if you ask an author if you can copy their book/song/movie and they say yes, well then you have that right. Until then it's a crime, that's why people get punished for it.

So please don't be ignorant and claim you support companies that recognize property rights, they all fully recognize them because they have ALL the rights. If PubCo Inc recalls its book it has to do everything in its power to retrieve the book, which can include legal action. It can happen with everything from cars to microwaves, it also could happen with a book. And it happened with an ebook, Amazon had a recall obligation and they got every single ebook recalled like they're obligated to.

Quit your whining, change the laws if you care so much because you obviously don't understand property rights and obligations if you're complaining a recall of a product goes against your rights.

If you own an illegal product through legal means, it's still an illegal product! Microsoft offers to replace your OS with a legal one if you can prove someone sold you an illegal copy of Windows and they've offered that for years, because they'd rather get the distributor than the purchaser. However it's your legal obligation to make sure the products you buy are genuine. Microsoft can still sue you for illegally owning a copy of their product, even if you paid someone full price believing you bought a real MS Vista. It's then your legal right to sue the person who defrauded you!

The only things in this world that you will legally own is your land and house. God forbid the zoning laws change or someone wants to put a bypass through your property. You can also own anything you make, so if you want to own your books, make your own. You want to own your computer? Make your own, out of parts you made yourself.

I don't even own my animals, because if I don't care for them like I'm legally obligated to, they get taken away by the SPCA.
A fabric with vision
Ask HN:What happened to Download sites?
Today I checked traffic for some big download portals: download.com, brothersoft.Com and tucows.com

I found out (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/download.com+brothersoft.com+tucows.com/) that they lost very important amount of traffic; very very important.

I began to search and fond that it's happening for most (all sites i searched!) download sites; sites like download manager (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/freedownloadmanager.org/) that were growing quickly and bigly, lost traffic and "in the same time".

Does any one know why? I'm really curious to know what happening to them?
Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did
It's nice to be able to put a face to IE6.
I think we can agree on that. The question is: is a "fire-in-the-belly" for getting good grades and getting into a good school and doing well at that good school (which, let's face it, involves many factors other than programming) correlated with a fire-in-the-belly for building real world projects?

I can say with confidence that I've known serious over-achievers in school who went on to become non-achievers in life, and vice versa. In other words, I'm not sure that what school someone attended is a good indicator of their ability or their enthusiasm for the work. The more top-tier school alumni I meet, the less confidence I have in the predictive value of that data point vs. other data points.
> PG confirmed that it was one user that had done all the downvoting

This is trivial to deduce from the webserver log alone.