skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Buffett has been more prudent than much of the rest of the financial industry, and he should be commended for that. However, the primary business for Berkshire Hathaway is reinsurance. As such, other insurers pay them to take on the risk that claims will exceed a certain level. If New York got nuked, the reinsurance contracts that Berkshire has written with the property and casualty insurers of the area would be invoked and Berkshire would be forced to assume the bulk of their obligations.

The "money you don't have" part of the definition of leverage isn't necessarily money that you must pay back like a loan or bonds; it can also be money that you may have to pay under certain conditions. Writing naked puts and selling reinsurance is the latter.

From http://community.reinsurance.org/Data/Leverage/Und%20Lvg%202... , we can see that Berkshire's 2005 leverage ratio was 143%. That's fairly low for a reinsurance company, and Berkshire is not highly leveraged.

However, I'm still going to maintain that the marginal increase in leverage from the specific derivatives deal I mentioned was rather high. Most insurance companies have noncyclical liabilities (e.g. the mortality rate doesn't increase in recessions) and procyclical assets(e.g. stocks and bonds that fall in recessions). The sale of puts added a procyclical liability, increasing Berkshire's leverage at the margin.
Google Pack
Does math lead to love?
Actually not. Economic theory says that most consumers will spend less for what they get and get greater value for their money if they buy equivalent services piecemeal. The reason is simple, when you buy a bundle you get a mix of things you want and things you don't. You therefore are willing to pay the sum of the values of things you want. But once you have purchased the bundle the marginal cost of consumption goes down and you will use things out of the bundle that would not be worth your while to buy piecemeal.

However in practice consumers do not want the hassle and prefer bundles. Vendors like bundles as well because they provide a convenient way to get people to try things they wouldn't otherwise try.

However in this case bundle versus piecemeal is not the appropriate comparison. The problem now is that one vendor buys the entire feed, and then doesn't offer all of it. If it was sold piecemeal to different vendors, then you'd have the option of watching everything, including things like hockey that are not currently being shown. And for avid sport watchers the extra cost is nothing for the simple reason that you probably have already purchased a bundle from the cable company that gives you most of the likely channels on which things you want will be there. The result then for the end consumer is that the Olympics are on more channels with greater variety, and therefore people will get to watch more of what they want. The additional people in the seats will result in more eyes for advertiser dollars, and everyone is happier.

Incidentally there is an interesting fact about selling services piecemeal versus bundling. If two vendors compete in the same market with those strategies economic theory predicts a nasty price war until one is driven out. See http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf for the gory details.
When I think about it, I'm thrown off by this pattern whenever I see it, too.

It's also interesting to think about text input versus dropdown select if you decide to go for manual state entry. I prefer just typing in the abbreviation, but I'm not sure that's suitable for a wide audience.
In the UK, a lot of sites just ask you for your postcode and house number. The postcode allows pretty much everything else to be looked up. I assume there's a fallback to full address in all of these sites, but I've never had to use it. It's a great timesaver.
> Does this MP3 sound right after compression?

A quick check for this would be to have a bunch of wav files that demonstrate different properties that the encoder is supposed to compress on, run them through the encoder, and then read them back out through a standard decompressor, and then verify that the waveforms match within a tolerance. With any release, you'll want to do some manual testing, but you can gain higher confidence on small changes between milestones.

> Does the typography for this combination of letters look right?

Same sort of thing, generate a bitmap from the output, compare against a pre-approved sample using a heatmap to determine differences.

> Is the user interface responsive enough?

Define what responsive means in quantitative terms. For most interactions, you're going to want sub 200 ms. For stuff where you want the user to wait, you'll have to define wait times ahead of time. Maybe you make changes that cause the latter to break because of a significant change in what you're doing, but it's good for people to know about that ahead of time, right?

> What about the crash that only occurs in just the right hard-to-duplicate circumstances?

Hey, nothing's perfect. But this objection is tautological. It's only hard to duplicate because you don't understand it yet.
"Proof by fiction is even worse than proof by anecdote."

Where did he assert "proof" in that article?
Sony Ericsson W715 Unlocked
Sony Ericsson W715 has come out to provide you the best services and features. Sony Ericsson W715 has amazing design to give you the beautiful and attractive personality with its splendorous dimension of 95 x 47.5 x 14.3 mm which can be easily fit to any pocket.
I tend to use the "inversion" argument, but mostly with vacations and not physical stuff:

"We should go to Barbados for a week. It's only $1000."

"If someone offered to give you $1000, plus an extra week to accomplish stuff you want to do, wouldn't you take it?"

This works with appliances, too: not buying that juicer means getting a few square feet of counterspace and $100.
I agree that this list is utter nonsense. It's pure linkbait and imho way under HN niveau.
You're using straw mans to criticize Munger's position. You're the one who's being manipulative.
Whenever the unit testing comes up, people always cite GUI issues as untestable. But it should be pointed out that in Fred Brook's usage of the terms, this is an accidental problem, not an essential one. GUIs are hard to test not because GUIs are hard to test, but because your GUI doesn't contain provisions for being tested.

Nothing stops a GUI from being very queryable. Nothing stops you from being able to query the locations of two widgets and making assertions based on those locations. Nothing stops you from getting text back out, or verifying fonts, or verifying the lack of overlap, or lack of popups... except that GUIs are written to be opaque monoliths, graveyards of data. This is correctable, but not by the end programmer.

So it is true that GUIs are untestable, but this doesn't have to be true. But it's going to take a conscious effort by QT or GTK or someone to make their GUIs testable before anything will change.

(I acknowledge your other issues; don't agree with all of them but the GUI issue is what I'm passionate about.)
To make sure I understand this, BetFair is a simple betting platform. People make bets, and other people take those bets. What he proposes to do is play both sides of an event, and hope that some takes both of them. That way, regardless of the outcome, he turns a small profit.If I understand this right, he's basically just doing arbitrage on the betting market.
Yeah, I prefer CBC as well. CTV just paid more money for this package being that it was more lucrative with them being in Canada. I think the IOC sells the TV rights as a package for both summer and winter. So if you want the winter, you have to buy the following summer. If that's right, CTV will probably be broadcasting the London games.
Frankly, your short comment was more enlightening than the article itself. It's so easy to say that with the right features, upgrade prompts, and pricing, things will work out -- much more difficult to actually do.
Offering a freemium model based on something like a simple metric (such as the 2GB example for dropbox) can work - for a while - but it will also become an Achilles heel.

Microsoft (hotmail) & Yahoo for the longest time offered < 10MB of storage, enter Gmail with 1 GB instantly changing the game.

So if you decide to make your free to paid conversion dependent on a single metric better have a battle plan ready in case someone decides to start giving away that which you sell.

Better than just a single metric is a combination of a lot of items, things that people will not feel the need for at first, but over time they'll wish to have those features. That's good, especially if the need arises at a point in time when the cost of switching becomes higher than the cost of paying for the extended features. Make sure that it is really value for the money they pay, not just some pacifier or 'feel good' feature (you're supporting the site, or something like that doesn't cut it, there has to be a balance).

If you combine freemium with ad support then make sure that your paying users never ever see another ad, and put a 'get rid of this ad' link near the ads, leading to a page that explains the benefits of signing up (other than removing the ads).

Essential features should be functional in the free package, but stuff that is hard on the server or that requires a lot of capital outlay can justifiably made part of the paid offering. Users will understand that, especially if you make some effort at explanation.
In a bit of spectacularly poor planning I resolved to write this after I got home for the day. Then I got off work too late to get home for the day. So I thought I would dash this off at the Internet cafe and then check into the hotel before they close the doors at 2 AM. That will be inconvenient for commenting -- my apologies in advance.

On the subject of social pathologies and the idiot men who sign up for them: T minus 30 work days until I am no longer a salaryman.
Customer Development Checklist for My Web Startup – Part 2
$150 for an ISBN? Really?

I'm pretty sure you can get them for free or less from government (or at least could 20 years ago. More recently my friend got an ISSN (magazine version of ISBN) for cost of filling out form.
I can only guess about applications since this is pretty new, and only a proof of concept. I doubt anyone has had a chance to consider this for any production solution.

However, I think the possibilities could be pretty compelling for any distributed computing project that can be gpu accelerated. What if all you had to do to contribute to the seti at home project was to visit a webpage. No client to install. If the algorithm is sufficiently implementable on the GPU there would be little or no overhead compared to a C/C++ solution.

Historically javascript has been focused on user interfaces, but perhaps it has been overlooked as a distributed computing platform.
The location of one's death and the cause of one's death are not the same thing. It sure sounds nice...and there probably should be some limit on whether or not we 'care' about 'one-off' causes of death in the same way any sufficiently complex system is going to have undesirable outcomes. But that doesn't mean we should stop trying to avoid them: if I could save 26 lives by some simple means, I'd gladly do it.
Apple - Supplier Responsibility
Yeah if I was getting 5 cent CPC I would stick with Google too :)
Wealthy people don't savour the little things in life
Ouch! That's horrible. You made me look it up. http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php
It seems like in section 14, Downloads, they're against malicious downloads. Did they accuse your software of being malware, or did they straight up say NO software?
California Senate Passes Amazon Tax
It's little more than a commercial. It says entrepreneurs are motivated to create jobs, but many are actually motivated to eliminate jobs and waste people's time -- like this commercial did. One minute I will never get back and because of it, I will never use the service it advertises.

If you are going to waste our time with a "viral" ad, please at least make it interesting and if you can't succeed at that, shoot for accuracy, or at a minimum, empathy with your target market.

Sometimes humor works too, however, and unfortunately, this ad was absolutely void of any humor whatsoever.

Flagged as spam...
Perhaps in response to the article:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/18/foxconn-apple-crime-journal...

discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133843
What's the relationship between this site and androlib.com? It's just weird to click on a link and be sent to a different but very similar site. Makes it feel like a bit spammy.
yawn Another one of those deadly serious holy warriors from olden times.
11 million new domain names were registered in the last quarter of last year
Privacy in the Era of Personal Genomics
The Facebook games that millions love (and hate)
From what I have read, investing in Goldman was Buffet's idea. Are the any articles that list Munger talking about the equity stake in goldman as well?
That has not been my experience. While no one here would correct you, I've never heard it pronounced otherwise except when discussing the pronunciation (which comes up a lot).
It's weird to me that you aren't using your own product on your website. Or if you are, I looked around for it for a long time and didn't find it.

You don't think it would be a natural fit for your own start-up? ;-) You could display all the positive comments you are getting on your website, and updated in real time!
Light on details - but interesting that only specific regions are needed to create "general intelligence" - "One of the main findings that really struck us was that there was a distributed system here. Several brain regions, and the connections between them, were what was most important to general intelligence,".

Anyone know how this relates to HTM? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory )
Very enjoyable. I've had similar conversations with my better half. I need to simplify my life as well, I just moved and have boxes of cables to electronics I no longer own. Why can't I bring myself to get rid of that first gen tivo hard-to-find console cable? I don't know.
To Fasten Your Seatbelt, Insert The Flap Into The Buckle
No relationship.
Please share the link and I'll gladly update the entry (with citation)! I wish I'd known.
I've always found moving to be the best time to get rid of things. If it hasn't been used since the last time I moved or I don't feel like packing it, it's gone.
Yes, if you buy one they are about the price. However, if you buy 10, they are about $250, so buying in bulk makes a lot of sense if you're planning to publish more than one book.
There is a claim in the movie that Bloom box uses half of the natural gas that would be required to produce same amount of energy in the power plant. If that's true (even if it includes price of energy delivery and income of energy producers) it's really going to be revolution in energy production. Especially considering how much energy is currently produced from natural gas.
This article is long and pointlessly avoids saying things in clear text. Your list:

Gay Jewish man in New York, an Englishman in London, a 4th generation zainichi kankokujin (ethnically Korean who was born in Japan), and an Irish Catholic dogmatist

Could be as diverse as anything, but they could also be very similar. I actually think they are very similar, because in foreign countries, the collaboration that usually falls in place is similar to that.

Real diversity happens when age, gender, culture barriers are crossed. English, New Yorker, Irish and even an Australian man of roughly the same age have very similar though processes, because they consume the same media.

It also points at a fundamental misunderstanding - intellectual diversity does not mean bringing in people that think the same as you, but have lived in slightly different neighbourhoods. Intellectual diversity actually starts when you find it difficult to understand the other persons point of view. When the cultural difference is so large that there is a difficulty communicating, then you have created an intellectually diverse place.

These oh-let-me-pat-myself-on-the-back posts are boring and offer exactly the same arguments as the other two posts. If you want to write a blog post where two other blog posts have been written, then make an effort to actually offer a viewpoint that is really unique to the situation.
Immediately after reading an article that points out that we don't know what salt intake does, in a fully scientific sense of "don't know", you feel empowered to make a recommendation about what salt intake I should have? "Don't know" does not mean "Well, play it safe and cut it down", it means don't know. Cutting down salt can have an adverse effect too; it is an essential nutrient you are recommending we "keep an eye on" after all!

I find myself wondering how many more times we're going to read things like "Before changing public policy, Dr. Alderman and Dr. McCarron suggest trying something new: a rigorous test of the low-salt diet in a randomized clinical trial. That proposal is rejected by the salt reformers as too time-consuming and expensive. But when you contemplate the potential costs of another public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign, a clinical trial can start to look cheap." (Emphasis mine.) No, your judgment is not so awesome we can just bypass the scientific process, for any value of "your judgment".

Might I also add that you still seem to be stuck on the "public health debacle like the anti-fat campaign"; I find the scientific evidence against saturated fat to be wanting. As that paragraph implies, ultimately they did the same thing you're advocating here for salt: They skipped over science because we had to act now!!! and it was OK to substitute their judgment for science. We'll be another decade or two minimum flushing out the wrong idea that fat is bad for you, decades in which those wrong ideas will cost hundreds of millions more their lives and health. (Excluding transfats, which I think the evidence is clear that they are.) The stakes on this stuff are high, you'd better be damned sure you're right before you make public health pronouncements.
Just got home and I have to say that it works great if you have a decent connection! I can even watch the 'HD' version.
This is hardly used in the US because a lot of things depend on the city and county of a property. And sometimes one zip code overlaps several counties or cities. Besides, everybody insists on using the city/state/zip entry pattern.
In short: Yes, it's weird, but there's a good reason! ;)

We're integrating realtime content pretty deeply into our site. It's a full redesign and we're still in the midst of the makeover. In the meantime, we wanted to start getting feedback from the community earlier rather than later.

(edited for clarity)
I have several large boxes that haven't been opened in 2-3 moves. I still can't persuade myself to get rid of them.
In Toronto simply dialing "9" on a POTS will (apparently) connect you to emergency services. This is especially stupid since 905 is an area code.

My sister once dialed "9", and stopped when she realized she forgot the rest of the number. We didn't believe her until I unplugged the line and hit redial.
It doesn't matter how to be popular, let's not forget the power of being a hardcore technical blogger who only have few visitors (but awesome followers). Blogs that only a few can read and understand. There is nothing wrong with, we can't expect that every niche blog will have millions of visitors.

If you want to be popular choose popular topics, explain them in the most clear (KISS) way, then keep doing it. Now and then post a blog with some religious stuff in it. Post obvious stuff but, put lovely pictures, cure kittens and try to explain one simple thing like no one knows it.

Unfortunately more and more blogs are getting empty, good stories, lots of bollocks but not a damn real thing, or the same things over and over with a new narrative...

So please, please, please don't improve your technical writing style to be "yet another 'I write nice blog posts about mass technical(ish) people' blogger.

No offence to Joel or Jeff, they are doing something nice, but we don't need more Joels or Jeffs, that area already have been covered.

Write pure technical blogs and deep subjects if you dare, not stories.
NoSQL Live speakers are announced
Node + Redis = Fun
The New Rules of War
Interesting website!
I loved how the diagram of the hardware had an apple II in it.
you can hire a stay-at-home mom with a graduate degree in Middle America for less than $10 an hour. If you figure out a way to exploit that, you’ll end up very, very rich.

First, just to get this out of the way, it's kind of embarrassing that pornographers are once again in the vanguard. Now that that's out of the way, the author has an excellent point. There must be a lot of educated moms who are having second thoughts about staying at home, for economic reasons or otherwise, but they look around and think, "Crap, how the hell can I get a decent job here? I'm stuck in Middle America, nobody cares that I'm an excellent writer and researcher, and even if I wanted to work as a receptionist, I'd be ridiculed by my coworkers for the lack of return on my graduate degree in anthropology." When people have second thoughts about their lives, maybe they persuade their families to turn their lives upside down, or maybe they decide not to. Telecommuting from home is a great option for those who don't. I suspect there's a culture gap between educated stay-at-home moms and ragingly ambitious (and sometimes very narrowly educated) twenty-something software entrepreneurs, but they're basically from the same class and should be able to get along without too much effort.
Motivation hits zero
Interesting video about future of "these types" of games:
http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the...

and comments about it on YC:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142424
It doesn't really, except as a very gross analogy. These guys are correlating localized brain damage with IQ. They don't have anything causal or they wouldn't have had to publish in PNAS.
Welcome New Google Buzz User. Now Get Outta Here
Bah. Addictive should be replaced by well-known or somewhat recognized. And in the world should be replace by in the narrow strip of culture the author inhabits and first kisses and sweaty palms should be replaced by vague interest in something familiar from long ago. Then, the whole article should be thrown out as good for nothing.
I'm in my mid 20s and this is actually a concern of mine. I love designing and building software systems and I would be happy to build them into my 40s. But people may wonder why I'm forty and still "just a programmer". I hope to have a stable buisness by then and won't have to deal with this problem.
He explores various strategies for using Betfair other than arbitrage, outlined here [http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/2010/02/four-trading-s...]

He also notes that simple arbitrage opportunities have long been exhausted [http://automatingbetfair.blogspot.com/2010/02/betfair-bots-a...]
I'm lost. What's the connection to pornography?
Good overall point of view. But the author sounds like he's talking to his mother, not his wife.

You have to be authoritative if you're going to undertake something that goes against the norm.
Fifteen years ago I had numbness in my fingers from lots of hacking. I ended up talking to the dr who invented the "pilosplint": http://www.painreliever.com/IMAK_IMAKPilo.html who suggested the problem may be in how my wrists are positioned when I sleep. You need 6 hours a day in a neutral "at rest" position for swelling to subside. I was often sleeping with my hands curled up. Eventually, I retrained myself to sleep with my hands in a more relaxed position and all symptoms have gone away.
Thanks for sharing our site, Payjo, and thanks for the great feedback everyone!
Interesting idea!! For now, at least, it does save your last 5 location searches for easy switching between them.