skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It does happen out of the blue like that sometimes, though. A little over a decade ago, my biological father who lived in another state had died suddenly. Because I had been covered under his social security plan when I was a minor and had battled cancer into adulthood (resulting in a $400,000 bill), the remaining debt of nearly $100,000 ended up in my lap. The only way I found out was when my wages began to be garnished. It turned out that a judgement was entered against me in his state, not in mine, and I never got any notice of a court date. Of course, I couldn't show up if I didn't know about it (I didn't even learn of his death until months after, he had been out of my life for many years) so a default judgement was entered. The other state's court system somehow didn't have my home address but knew where I worked and how to garnish my paycheck.

After speaking with a lawyer about it, I was told it would have ended up costing me tens of thousands of dollars and years of court battles with no guarantee of resolution. I ended up filing bankruptcy not long after due to the garnishment and other factors causing me to risk losing my house, and by some miracle the federal government allowed the judgement to be attached to the bankruptcy case.
In practice it's a rip off when people aren't able to pay off the debt, because lending entities simply constantly parasitically profit from that debt.
Good point. The guy in the article didn't just go on one vacation after another and then stopped paying when his balance reached $7,000. The article clearly said he lost his job, spent time living at a friend's place, and because he didn't have another job he had to somehow survive, which meant using credit cards.
YES! Let's get the next five billion messaging, emailing and browsing through the systems of one company. This will be great for freedom, privacy and competition!
Transcript is here: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/89201006992/this-is-p...

The timed link in the grandparent post goes to this point in the video (the video uses “I hate Nickelback” as something to compare and contrast "I hate Phil Fish" with):

------------------

On the internet, celebrities are famous only to the people who talk about them, and they’re only famous because we talk about them, and then we hate them for being too famous, and make them more famous by talking about how much we hate them. Could there ever be anything more self-defeating than this?

If Nickelback decided tomorrow that they didn’t want to be famous anymore, they would have to give up the tours, the roadies, the record deals, the billboards… things most of us don’t have. They would have to settle for normal life.

The only way out for Phil was to give up what most of us consider normal life – openly being ourselves on the internet. Because his normal life is what made him famous. Anything Phil says in public is newsworthy. He had to quit or privatize all social media. He had to stop speaking to his friends in public. If he goes to GDC or PAX or IndieCade, even as an attendee, there will be photos.
Mojang's new roadmap starting next sprint -

Minecraft kart racer, brawler, side scroller, kinect game, store.minecraft, themed COD maps, Forza tracks, minecraft 2 pre-order beta access
Interesting application. Is there a way to recommend merchants/stores to add? (e.g. there are no entries for HEB, a grocery store, in Austin)
Muzli – The ultimate designer's toolbox
This project immediately won my heart by starting off with regular expressions. It amazes me how many coders flip out at the suggestion of teaching/advocating regexes to novices, as if the first thing a novice will attempt to do is parse HTML with regex or build a credit card validation application.

I've spent most of my life in the journalism world, and I imagine parts of it, especially the investigative projects time, share some characteristics with the law world...in that you're dealing with messy documents and data. You would not f--king believe how much time is wasted on manually reading lists of names/addresses, because the person has no idea how to split "Smith, Bob -- 1020 Broadway, NY" into a spreadsheet. Nevermind the countless hours spent hand fixing whitespace or other formatting errors, things that could take seconds with even just Sublime Text.

Regexes are amazing because they teach people how to think in patterns, and that manually defining the pattern for your specific domain can be a very powerful thing. I've greatly increased the speed that I can research things across large document sets...simply by grepping documents for patterns that fit proper nouns, or even large money values (for example, /(?:\d{3},){2,}/)...when dealing with messily OCR'ed documents, in which phrases/words will have common mistranslations, being able to grep in order to find a key name/number/noun is incredibly powerful.

IMO, regex is exactly the first thing you should be teaching people like lawyers and researchers. It's a very powerful programming concept, but besides that, it is immediately useful to anyone who can use a text editor. And it opens the door to programming in general (because find-and-replace with a text editor gets old, you'll soon find the need to run grep from the CLI)
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”

The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”

The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-...
It doesn't need to be a native code extension; that's not what I'm talking about. In Chrome, you can write browser extensions that are essentially off-screen web pages (in simple HTML and JS).

Two advantages of "do it in the browser" are, in theory it would run on every platform that browser is installed on with no additional run-time required (like Python or Java), and two, it could run on Chromebooks. Say, in Incognito mode.
should have an android version, just saying
More like “I was famous once, it was awful.”

His fame had never much of anything to do with the success of Minecraft. It just came with it and it didn’t really work out. It doesn’t seem like he has a problem with many people playing his game (or making money doing what he loves to do), he has a problem with being famous.

Watch the video he references, it makes many of the same points.
Seems like the closest we've got is OAuth with your Google/Facebook/GitHub/Twitter account.
nice job...NOT even for me that am a coder is quite messy.
That is ridiculous. Most people are able to figure out that they are better off with money then without, even if the money are not primary motivation. There is no contradiction in it.
I wouldn't be so sure they're missing it, exactly https://www.google.com/search?q=minecraft+birthday+party&saf...
Well, 54 million copies across all platforms means that there's still seven billion potential customers. With the Firefox OS and new Android One phones, as well as other efforts to increase the amount of computers in the non-rich western world, I can see Minecraft becoming the next Tetris for a lot of people in the near future who never had access to computers before.
Top 30 Programming Interview Questions
How I started tracking my body (and how you can too)
This is very important point, I use jQuery and structure my code into quite specific MC(V) pattern (not yet using a second library for this) - jQuery itself is largely structure agnostic.
If one is unemployed, can't find a job for x amount of time, do you think it is acceptable to use credit cards to survive during that period of time?
Fair enough - though to me, the question is just how much of my governments efforts, resources, and monopoly on physical force I'd like to devote to getting a creditor his or her money back.

We can say to a debtor, maybe you shouldn't have taken that loan, sure. But can we say to a creditor, well, why did you make a large and completely unsecured loan to someone with dodgy credit at very high interest rates?

Creditors need to be careful too. I do agree that this sort of thing is better handled with relatively lenient bankruptcy laws, and I do understand garnishment (through force of government) will have to be one of the functions of a court.

So this is more about my general attitude, since I doubt we'd disagree much on the specifics here. I just don't have great innate sympathy to people who get upset about defaults when their business is making high interest unsecured loans to people with poor credit. They're welcome to do this, I just wouldn't want to see my government bend over backwards to help them.
Ford’s Big Gamble
And a financial disaster for CC companies because, let's face it, the whole credit system is significantly supported by exploitation of less fortunate people. If situations like this article describes didn't happen CC companies would be missing a lot of profit.
Why would they do that?

Heck, you can broadcast to Twitch from the new Xbox. I think MS fully understands the value of fan created videos and supports them.
At any point he could have said "I have enough now" and lowered the price of Minecraft to a sustaining level, or made it open source, or just stopped developing it.
Leaked Win 9 Clips Show Return of the Start Menu
Here's my (very ignorant) take on it:

Having worked through half of the Nature of Code book and implemented all of its physics examples, I realized that the physics libraries are all approximations (not simulations) of the real world. To make the approximations as close as possible to what we see in the real world, you need to make many more fine calculations. This limits the frame rate at which the simulation can run. You either run your simulation less accurately at 30 updates-per-second, or you run it with increased accuracy at 10 updates-per-second. When demo-ing physics libraries, authors usually want to showcase the small details that increase realism. This leads to more calculations, which leads to a greater slowdown.

I think gravity is the first force we notice when it's off, because we're very used to seeing objects fall. For gravity to feel right, it needs to feel like 9.8N/kg at a specific framerate. If you update less often, you'll slow down the world. If you update much faster, objects will fall faster. You might want to increase the value of gravity to 19.6N/kg if your fps is 50% slower to maintain the illusion of the real speed, but that effectively means that objects will skip ahead 19.6 units instead of just 9.8units, and that affects collision accuracy. There are a lot of parameters like this that can be tweaked, but since many results are then used as inputs to other calculations, changing one parameter affects the entire simulation. Once you reach a certain level of realism, you don't want to adjust those parameters again for a different rate of updates-per-second.

In theory. this shouldn't happen if you run your physics library as a state machine that takes time as input, and outputs the state of the system into your renderer. This should let your physics simulation run at 30 updates per second, and your graphics rendering at 60fps. In practice, they're all running on the same machine, along with any video capturing, and are competing for resources. This leads to slow-downs, which you notice as slow-motions.

If anyone can explain this better, please do chime in.
>It's only a rip-off when they're empowered to charge interest in excess of that.

Which is what actually happens in reality.
Exact opposite for me. Getting fabbed boards where I live takes forever (and is expensive) so I etch my own. Populating an SMD PCB takes forever, but, no interns for me as a small indie so I work in my basement till 3am with tweezers and a hot soldering iron.

Injection molding is actually super cheap in volume -- the expensive part is the metal mold which costs an arm and a leg. Mess up a mold and, bam, your project is no longer profitable (or breaking even, if you were lucky).

3D modeling is actually easy now with packages like Sketchup. If you have the dough the pro's use Solidworks or Inventor (my fav), which abstracts the development process to 2D sketches which can then be pulled, extruded, cut etc... analogous to what you would do with your hands on paper or with clay (or legos or whatever). It's really best to have a vision and use a designer to bring it to life but when you don't have that option it's still possible to get _something_.

You didn't mention it but setting up and running a crowdfunding campaign is time consuming, difficult and crazy stressful. I'm about to launch mine in a few days and am basically not sleeping.

Props to Ryan -- what he has done is NOT easy and he deserves all the success he as achieved so far.
And then the fisherman got a horrible toothache and there was nothing he could do about it. A few years later, overfishing led to near-depletion of the local supply, and new restrictions were implemented on fishing licenses. The fisherman was unable to afford one, and yet he had no other means of supporting his family. By the end of the decade his wife and children were begging on the street.

Meanwhile, the businessman was getting a massage at a ski resort in Switzerland.
This dashboard is limited to HN, because otherwise Reddit would totally engulf the HN responses. But here's one for Reddit: https://karmalytics.co/dashboard/30b2c4a3-7238-4dd6-987d-079...
In my experience, there are frequent linux-specific bugs. If linux support isn't something that is valued by the developers, then it may linger for a while but it will eventually rot away.

https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-174?jql=project%20%3D%20MC...
Terrible or mediocre for whom? The audience? He clearly states he is doing this for himself, so let him be the judge of that.
50% interest over how many years? I never ever hold a credit card balance but even I would not be able to turn down a capped loan over decades if I wasn't getting punished for it.
Could someone take these guys to court and force them to rebrand themselves as a SISP (Some Internet Services Provider) ?
Bought an HP DeskJet 2540 for £39 for home. Has WiFi, colour, a scanner and just works over the LAN without any effort so is probably the opposite to what you desire.

However I've lost count of the number of times the scanner/copier has been useful even though I didn't want that bit to start with and the WiFi actually makes it easier to use. No more finding that USB cable.

It's the peak of value to be honest and a worthy trade off.
I don't think I've ever met anyone - in real life or in the UK educational system, anyway - who referred to George Eliot as being a "he" without instantly being corrected.
> The founders: Notch, Carl, and Jakob are leaving. We don’t know what they’re planning. It won’t be Minecraft-related but it will probably be cool.
Mods, please fix the title to match the article. Millions are having wages garnished over "credit card debt, medical debt, and student loans." No breakdown is given among categories.

This is a serious enough issue without misleading headlines.
He already had "fuck you money" before that deal, it's not like he needed the deal for that.
You can get a "general feeling" about your customers without actually feeling responsible/bad about the individual opinion of each of your users. Actually IMHO it is probably not possible to run a company caring in depth about everyone of your users. Of course there is from time to time this totally stranger that may send you a well argued / fact-supported opinion that may ring some bell, and this is great when happens, but here I believe we are talking about "Notch you suck because of the TOS change!" or similar toned messages.
342,000 Swings Later, Derek Jeter Calls It a Career
Phil Fish "needs" to hide because he's an asshole who, amongst many other things, successfully bullied a sexual assault victim into apologizing for talking about the fact that he'd been sexually assaulted.

Edit: and even then he doesn't have to hide from the internet except to avoid the flamefests he keeps actively starting, fueling, and turning into Twitter pileons against people he dislikes if he doesn't.
As far as I know, correct me if I am wrong, D does have many of the features Go lacks, like generics, and also has very fast compile times.
Hmm, I think notch's life is interesting but I doubt the wisdom of trying to learn lessons from it. At any rate I dunno that he is necessarily aiming to make mediocre things so much as not explicitly aiming to make popular things. Good work can come out of such a mindset, he just won't be the one to steward it to popularity.
New algorithm could help ‘cheetah’ robot outrun humans soon
Down for me. Here's a cached version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140703130707/www.vupen.com/blo...
Yeah, exactly. Dealing with social media as a divisive personality is exhaustive - either you completely shut it off and let some underpaid underdealing deal with it, or you will get horrendously burnt out by all the negativity.

I hope he will produce another master work, but either way, I wish him a very happy life with all the money he earned.
The variance in programmer ability seems likely to be higher than the variance between frameworks.
Windows 9 video leaks: Virtual desktops and Notification Center in action
Scott Heiferman Interview, CEO of Meetup – Executing on Your Vision
No this is not the same thing.
I don't think I've ever used a scanner since the camera became half decent on the iPhone. Even when I have 40 pages of text to scan, it's more straightforward to just snap it from my desk than to walk the 50' or so to the $8000 scanning/printer we have in the office. And, when I'm in the field - well, you get the idea.

I guess if I was scanning hundreds of pages, It would probably be worthwhile to use a desktop scanner, but for 40 pages or less - smart phone camera wins every time.
Almost 20 years ago I interviewed with Capital One. They were drawing graphs of people's debts like it was calculus class, and asking me to come up with strategies to maximize consumer debt.

It's a little bit on me that I didn't say "this is evil" and walk out, but I was much younger then and the job market for developers wasn't anywhere near as good as it is today.
Competing with Google's built-in search results with a separate application is highly challenging and I wouldn't recommend it unless you can add tremendous value and even then I think it is a tough sell for the large majority of users.
Der Spiegel: Treasure Map, NSA’s “Google Earth for Global Data Traffic”
A different style, but wonderful to read and illustrative of the often craziness of law, is Margaret Hagen's work:

Law Flow Charts: http://www.margarethagan.com/drawings/illustrated-law-flow-c...

Law Cases:
http://www.margarethagan.com/drawings/drawn-law-cases/
I find it hilarious that they pitch Tor as for criminals, despite the US military being the largest backer (and source) of the Tor project.
Like others have said I think open sourcing was always unlikely. But I think a real clean mod api is a real possibility now.
I have a ~ 10-year-old HL-2040 that's somehow still running. I use it for printing throw-away stuff like notes or recipes. It was maybe $30. It predates even the toner cartridge caps being welded on, so refills are relatively painless and $4.
I have this printer hidden in a corner. You would never notice it is there until it receives a job over the wifi. Simple and just works.
Just out of curiosity, I noticed that mongo is used in all the demos, and seems to be the only DB supported.

Any thoughts on how or whether this would be support other backends like redis or more traditional sql databases like postgres and mysql?
Probably more like they killed Skype on linux: Keep it on 'life support', much like "sloth" in Se7en.
Join the NASA Space Flight Simulation Study
I funded MicroView on Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1516846343/microview-ch...). I think they also ran into problems with manufacturing a large quantity of devices. However, I got the device in a reasonable time frame and I'm very happy with the quality of the product. I'm not sure whether they are the rule or the exception.

In the end, it's unfair to assume that this project will fail to deliver shipments based on unrelated failed crowdfunded projects.
> Surely they'd never ban VPN.

Wait until all file-sharing is done through VPNs. Or maybe they'll require people to pay for a "business" plan to use such a "business" feature.
Cellphones are easy to ship. Hell, used cars are resold people in developing countries all the time.

http://www.economist.com/node/719514
Option 3 works unless it's a debt to the government, like student loans or tax debt.
Press Release: Comic-Con Accolades Heighten DARK PROPHET Momentum
This is awesome! The UI is so amazing
He said he'll do things he likes. I'm not getting mediocre out of that sentence.

Keep in mind Minecraft started similarly.
No, he probably wouldn't have sold it to begin with if they were the only ones buying. Notch specifically said he wouldn't create a Minecraft version for the Oculus Rift after the Facebook purchase because he found it 'creepy'.
I think what pg might have overlooked, looking back at his old essays, is that hackers of old, driven by their love for their work turned into paper-toiler entrepreneurs today. There is nothing precluding a hacker from leveraging the economy to scale up his favourite hack (which I believe pg's early essays were about) or, as Notch did, just to secure himself a peaceful and secure environment to continue his hacking without having to worry about things like food, health and shelter. But that is a different type of hacker than the ones that are attracted to the startup scene nowdays.

I guess part of the reason I feel the word "hacker" lost its meaning today is the rise of paper-toilet hackers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319102).
Hah. Funny, but Brazil has socialized medicine.
Microsoft is buying Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5B
The end note is just a legal in-joke which could be paraphrased as: 'because I say so, so there!', but he does give good reasons in the first paragraph (and the legal profession would not have to be persuaded of the usefulness of more powerful automated search).
Running Crate Data on CoreOS and Docker