skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the driving factors behind the bad mortgages that were issued pre-2008 was the lack of ongoing oversight and poor risk assessment with regards to those mortgages, driven primarily by securitization.

Your linked article itself tells that Geithner and his ilk admit to securitization being at the heart of the crisis, saying that "other factors were more important in causing the 2008 crisis, such as bad mortgage underwriting, poor work by the ratings agencies and a securitization market gone crazy."

But strangely, they write this as a defense of Glass-Steagall's repeal, as if those factors came from nowhere. In fact, those factors were the specific result of the efforts by the largest banks to sell as many of their banking products as possible--and offload as much of their risk as possible--through their investment banking and securities divisions. Many suspect that some banks took advantage of the inherent opacity of mortgage-backed-securities to knowingly hide bad assets (and possibly even fraudulent, non-existant assets) and sell them to unsuspecting securities buyers at fraudulently inflated prices.

Would securitization have become such a problem if the repeal of Glass Steagall hadn't effectively pushed all of the money center banks to acquire or build their own investment banks? Would it have been so easy for bad actors to have committed fraud in this area if it wasn't so easy to keep everything "in house"?

The main reason that Glass-Steagal was enacted in 1933 was because the Crash of 1929 was in-part caused by Banks' selling over-hyped, over-priced securities to ordinary, unsophisticated banking consumers. OK, so it happened in the reverse this time. That doesn't mean that the crisis wouldn't have been prevented by the same firewall, had it existed, from 2003-2006.

Yes, none of the institutions that failed initially were deposit taking. But maybe that was because this time around they were the outsiders and the rubes. Who had a better sense of what kind of risk mortgage-backed-securities actually represented, than the people who were originating them?
Gehry's designs are more recognisable because they're consistent: Disney LA looks like Guggenheim Bilbao looks like Gehry designed jewellery. He has a signature look and it's part of his branding.

Hadid's a lot more exciting because she evolved from boxy to hyper-aggressive acute angles to a final style that was combined softness with acute. It's great to look back through her oeuvre (see the other links in the thread) and see the evolution.
Don't submit the same article on different domains. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398188
Having used Bison as well has my own hand-written compilers, I personally would suggest that Bison is not worth it. With recursive descent, you end up writing the same BNF structure anyways, but you don't have to fight the Bison file structure just to decorate the tree and you can much more easily work around syntax errors.
Promoting reliability in web software companies
Have you cleared out your ~/.zsh_history recently? I periodically need to reset mine to increase init time.
Swift Style: Are you a 4-denter?
Their current economic situation has very little to do with overspending. In general, they didn't. The country has it's traditional tax revenue problems and has never had a great economy, but without the Euro they would have simply devalued their currency (among other tools available only to governments) and left the debt unpaid for a few hundred years. Just like every other country does.

So what happened? Greece was effectively used to send 5 trillion (with a "t") in bailout money back to the banks big banks of Europe.

This was possible because of the idiocy that is the Euro and the ECB, which removed exchange risk and devaluation risk from across the European currencies. The banks of Europe did a volume convergence trade, effectively betting against their sovereigns that their new debt would have to be bailed out as they became "too big to fail".

Supposedly one of the bankers involved explained the scam like this:

You borrow at one
You buy at ten
You use the spread
To bury the dead
You bank it at four
And repo more
And then go knock
On the ECB's door﻿

Except the ECB wasn't a lender of last resort and EU banks - and the EU economy in general - has been in a slow-motion crash ever since. The recent-ish use of QE is a stupid way to fix the economy, but it's better than letting the entire economy crash.

I'm leaving out a lot of details, of course. Anybody intrested in Greece and the EU (and the world economy in general) should watch Mark Blyth's very informative overview of how we got here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6vV8_uQmxs#t=673

See this more rent talk for a post-negative-interest-rate update, where Blyth observes that Europe is looking a LOT like Japan did during their "lost decade"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fP6YSCpm8g

...and this discussion with the former Minister of Finance of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMk6aVsl8Rs

> austerity

Austerity is always a terrible solution to economic problems, because just about the stupidest thing you can do when the economy is bad is shrink the GDP. There is even a historical record of austerity (approximately) always leading to a smaller, more stagnant economy... and some nasty political shifts towards populism. The politics of austerity are terrible, because it's effectively a class-specific "put option". We are very good at socializing the risks of investment while blaming the lower classes for "overspending".

Unfortunately a lot of people make the mistake of assuming governments see the economy the same way the people or businesses do. This leads to the idea that government debts are zero-sum like personal debt, but the rules change when you are the group that prints the money and sets economic policy.
Aren't protocols of seized items signed by witnesses? Or US Police is just a bunch of gangsters?
The headline is evidence for his theory. It's just not particularly strong.
I don't recall saying that it was obvious Amazon would destroy the brick-and-mortar book business, or that Amazon would come to control significant chunks of internet infrastructure. Your comment was about the fiscal viability of selling books online, and that's what I was responding to.

As you've just pointed out, people were already buying books from catalogs, and profitable companies were built around this activity. There was a clear market for it, and centralization of this activity via the internet just happened to provide a bigger boost to Amazon's success than many people would have predicted.
What's the benefit of breaking up compatibility? What's the end-game there? The whole point of this, beyond allowing developers to develop without having to run a VM, is to allow *nix apps to run on Windows. If they break that compatibility... people will just ditch Windows. They don't care about the OS, they care about the apps that run on top.
I can't decide if this is a deliberate or accidental Mac joke.
And how do you verify that your checksum-verifying code hasn't been corrupted with cosmic rays?

The real world is messy. We can mitigate that, but we can never have mathematical purity.
Streamline Your Finance and Accounting with the Right Operating Model
I'm sorry if I've been unclear. I do not in any ways support Erdogan. Though I insist that freedom of speech does not mean that one can be irresponsible of what he says.
I didn't think about RoboVM. I would definitely be interested in the future of that project.
Erdogan is loving this New York Times article right now.. This is exactly what he needs.. A so called non-muslim enemy to rally his supporters against her. Somehow he made his supporters believe USA Russia Iran and Israel are all supporters of PKK (Kurds) at the same time.
Turks on average read 1 book every 10 years. I don't blame Erdogan, I blame the generation came before us not to educate themselves.
> Civil forfeiture is also how they confiscate contraband, or anything that is itself illegal to own.

If something is illegal to own, then there should be no difficulties charging the owner with a crime.

> I imagine without CF law enforcement would be forced to charge you with a crime to remove illegal property from you.

Exactly.

> I'm not sure about requiring a 16 year old to be charged with a crime for a police officer to take him beer away

Just like an officer can choose not to write up a ticket, they can tell a first-time offender "Throw away the beer right now and I'll let your parents deal with this; otherwise I'll have to charge you." That doesn't require civil forfeiture.
On another inspection I was probably confused by the use of "they" and figured "you" was supposed to be the applicant and not the company.
http://brianreiter.org/2010/08/24/the-sad-history-of-the-mic...
This reminds me of the book "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0016IXMWI/ref=dp-kindle-re...).

While I don't want to spoil too much for the HN crowd (more than I have already by posting it under this link) it's a great SciFi book that hints at some really cool theoretical questions about life, space travel, and inter-species communication.
1) I'm not his manager. 2) I've sent him half a dozen papers about topics ranging from heuristic search to genetic programming to general good ML practices. He's read none of them. 3) He believes he knows what he's doing.

Those who do not want to be helped cannot be helped. And an intensive course won't fill all the statistics and math requirements he doesn't have.
Residential installation in Denver CO at $2.16/W after federal incentive. Just about exactly grid pairity. Their $3.50/watt number is way high compared to the reality of today in the US.
> Azure Functions allows developers to take action by connecting to data sources

Could I connect to a database on a socket, or is this for 'pure' functions without side effects?
If you can get into a top 5 (10?) school, I'd absolutely go. It's utterly unfair (and probably not backed by actual facts), but the cachet from a top school is real.

University is also a great time to have fun, develop relationships, and become a proto-adult. I'm not sure that 4 years of "head start" (by skipping college) is a good decision for the average 18-year old to make. By all means, if you have a great idea or a compelling thing that you're running "towards", that's fine, give it a go. But the default "go to a good school and get a degree in engineering, math, or comp-sci" is pretty sound advice for most. I had no idea (more precisely: the wrong idea) what I wanted to do with my life when I was 17. College gave me time to figure more of that out and I don't feel like I lost out, in fact quite the opposite.
Tank – #BDAY (feat. Chris Brown) – Hamilton Evans Choreography
That was part of her alpha-ness: she actually got her stuff pushed through and built. The sort of personality necessary for accomplishing such a feat is so incredibly rare -- just think of how difficult it is to get people to adopt a new programming language or something, and multiply the inertia by 1000... She really pushed society forward in terms of the boundaries of what could be a real-world built form.
Without a trial, it isn't "real" drug money. It's accused drug money. In the United States, we nominally presume innocence until guilt is proven. Since civil forfeiture uses kangaroo courts, there is no proof and so it isn't "real" drug money.
Great questions.

1. We have experimental support for a few other languages (F#, Python, PHP, Batch, etc.). We'll be improving those as we get more customer input on how it should work and we have time to do it. You can track our progress and post issues here: https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-script

2. We have a service known as Azure API Management which can do that and we're working to integrate first class support for Functions into it. Today, you can manually construct a Swagger with Functions for API Management, but we want to make it even easier in the near future.

3. Monitoring can be done via the Monitoring tab in the portal. We have logs and a streaming realtime view. They are VERY early and you'll see big progress for those views in the next two months.
Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 Broadwell-EP Review
Linux Command Line on Windows Discussion Video
Apple Releases iOS 9.3.1 with Fix for Web Link Crashing Bug
Probably need a company to do it. Like Microsoft made Typescript, Facebook made React, Google made Angular, etc... We need Dropbox to make this, since they have Guido and he can push this on the python 3 community to make this a standard library. Dropbox please rescue us and pull the python to javascript community together. Please!!!
Without significant developer mindshare, long-term MS is toast.

The new gen devs simply refused to buy into their old school closed shop practices.

evolve or die.
Sorry if it came across wrong, but I was basically trying to write "rule out the obvious, and then seek medical help". Physicians can help with some causes of delayed sleep syndrome. Often they can't, but they can at least give you a diagnosis that you can take to your employer.
Yes, a serious problem but not insurmountable. It is something that you can at least address with yourself if you understand what it is.

It is true that you can't expect actionable feedback in a real job interview. Mock interviews when done with the right person really help. Of course it means that you have to be open to criticism and handle it with grace. Some folks have reported success with a career coach for this stuff, but that will cost you.

There's also another way to get some feedback. If you develop some rapport with a 3rd party recruiter who sets up interviews with their client, you _might_ be able to get debrief on how it went and what your strengths/weaknesses were.
Poll: How much would you pay for someone to clean an Excel spreadsheet for you?
Limited code-completion, but Atom has an F# plugin, you could also just use any plain old text editor. This is what I have been doing, personally, and I just use FAKE for builds.
Surprised they didn't call it Delegates, haha.
From their page (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/fun...):

> Write any function under a minute - either when you need a simple job to cleanse a database or to build functionality that processes millions of messages from connected devices. Use your development language of choice (C#, Node.JS, Python and more). Pay only for the time your code runs and trust Azure to scale as needed.

Sounds like you'll be able to connect to other stuff.

IMO functions without side-effects are useless in many contexts, I'd guess that this is one of them, as you probably want to use the results of your computation somehow.
This is awesome! Until now nuclide (nuclide.io) was really the only way to do React Native work. VS Code is much faster and I vastly prefer it in almost every way to Atom. Can't wait to try this on my current React Native projects.
More info

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.htm...

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...
Yeah my system was way lower than $3.50/watt last year too. Their numbers are surprisingly out of date for being 2 years old.
F#, Microsoft's FUNCTIONAL programming language, can not be used to write Azure FUNCTIONS? You can even see them borrowing from F# with the .csx files for writing C# functions. I'm a constantly dumbfounded at the way Microsoft neglects this wonderful language.
Developers, developers, developers.
Guess by the downvoting that there's a reason people feel the "metrics collection" shouldn't be Open Sourced?

I'd like to hear what that is, as it seems (to me) to be a stellar example of what really should be.
Half as much for the Latitude? I checked the Apple/Dell stores, and while the MBA i7 upgrade has a slower clock speed and is limited to 8GB RAM, it's also less expensive ($1750 vs. ~$2000; http://imgur.com/a/ELQm6).
I mentioned this in the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398402), I'm Chris from the Azure Functions team. Feel free to AMA. :)
A new way for psychology to address its replication crisis
It's partly a gimmick, it includes huge fines related to the Madoff case and huge fines paid by Toyota (neither of which are particularly gross examples of law enforcement excess).

http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/crime-and-justice-news/20...
Um.. hi.. Presale owner here! I bought my eth, with btc, which i eared by mining using a few Antminer S1s in my shed. so.... yea...... It's not like they fell on my lap for free.
> From the puzzle: how can it be that evolution produces a creature (ants) where 99% of the individuals are sterile? And the answer: ants are not the organism, the ant colony is the organism. This idea was introduced by Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype".

That has nothing to do with the definition of the word organism. Maybe you want another word for the unit of reproduction, but the word /organism/ already has a specific meaning, independent of reproduction.
PHP's file-based layout is one of the biggest mistakes in web security I can imagine, coupled with the lack of a built in secure file upload functions. I've seen so many websites coded with checks like "if .jpeg in filename", which is easily bypassed. Then once the file is up there you just have to navigate to it and BAM, you have RCE and a shell. Ridiculous.
Thank You for Not Sending Your Resume
This makes sense if you make the assumption that Big Bang theory is correct. In my opinion the theory has quite a few leaps of faith.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-scientific-criticism-of-th...

If we consider the possibility of infinitely old universe with no beginning or end, the answer is yes, most likely, but it's unlikely we ever know. Those strange blobs of light could very well be living, thinking things or parts of them, but everything that happens on their physical scale is so slow that we can only observe a mere snapshot of their state.
Looks nice, and if I ever have a need for something like this I'll use it over Lambda, because of C#.

But, why no F#? Seems like an obvious language to support.
An oversight, we have just been very busy improving our core F# support before we unleashed a suboptimal experience.

You will be happy to know that they are coming (and Miguel who runs the team loves F#)
Intel Xeon Processor E5 v4 Family Debut: Dual E5-2697 v4 with 72 Threads
Google Cloud Datastore simplifies pricing, cuts cost for most use-cases
‘Ryan’s Law’ proposed to allow you to cancel Comcast online with one click
https://www.google.com/search?q=centos+market+share
Norwegian geolocation app with big dreams
> Make all government agencies that seize property responsible for very clearly logging and indicating where it was found, the condition it was in (photographically and by description)

That might be difficult to enforce... Maybe some kind of inventory management system for personal possessions? Institutions have been doing it for a while, it seems like the biggest hurdle is initially entering all the items.
Err.... there's nothing there? Calling 'eval' is just using the existing machinery already in place, it's not really an interpreter.

Tcl is a pretty easy language to create an interpreter for:

* Jim: http://jim.tcl.tk/index.html/doc/www/www/index.html - originally written by antirez, now maintained by others.

* Hecl: something I wrote in Java, for mobile phones. Not much maintained any more. https://github.com/davidw/hecl/tree/master
i didn't know they had an open API. scared of using this though as robinhood is directly connected to my bank account
Are there any significant differences between this and AWS Lambda? I know this sounds accusative and I swear I don't mean it that way: Lambda is awesome and if this is more-or-less the same thing, this will be too. I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly what the service is :)
We had to make some tough scoping calls, but we are actively working on full F# support, based on our C# implementation. You can use F#, but right now it is pretty basic. Check out this sample which you can also deploy via the portal (experimental category): https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-templates/tree/ma...

Thanks for the feedback!
A mesmerising webGL Bitcoin transaction visualisation
How Microsoft is serious about supporting Linux and cloud rivals with OMS
Robinhood (https://www.robinhood.com/) is a 0 brokerage fee app for trading stocks
Folks might be interested that the new episode has been posted: http://atav.st/1UWp09h

It follows the arrival of a mysterious arms shipment, and Paul Le Roux's shift toward violence, with a cameo from an animal trainer who worked with the whale in Free Willy, and also, Le Roux's private militia in Somalia.
My main problem with attending my university is a lot of my time is spent dealing with classes I can't care about.

Right now my in major GPA is above a 3.2 while my cumulative GPA is hovering around a 2.9; I just don't care about non-cs classes.

This would be find if being at a university had any noticeable benefits, but it only has detractors.

- No one will hire me for a paid position
- I have to waste most of my time on classes I don't care about
- No more time for my side projects that I use to learn.
I generally agree with your point. However, I have to nitpick a bit:

> Turks on average read 1 book every 10 years.

How did you end up with this conclusion? http://mentalfloss.com/article/55344/which-country-reads-mos...

> I blame the generation came before us not to educate themselves.

Do you really believe that your generation is properly educated?
Did this cause any problems for third party contributions to mono? Did everyone agree to have their work relicensed? There's well over 400 contributors to mono.
Hawaii is another great example. $0.40-$0.50/kWh for their oil generated electricity. Solar comes in even cheaper than the article mentions. There have been so many solar installations in Hawaii that the power company has effectively put a moratorium on installations that don't include storage because they can't cover the swings in demand when a cloud rolls through town.

They expect things will get better once they install a connection between the islands to connect their grids, but for the moment, the power company can't handle the market penetration.
It seems unlikely to me that evolution would result in your neurology being THAT different.
Great news! Thank you.
The return on TARP money was far below market rate. The difference is unquestionably a gift. In addition, had the TARP money not been sufficient to get the businesses back to profitability an additional bailout would have followed. It's heads-you-win tails double-or-nothing game. The recipients understood this was a gift, which is why wall street cheerfully awarded itself 18 billion in bonuses after receiving 125 billion in bailouts.
Actually,

I think science, quantum mechanic in particular, points to hard randomness being an inherent part of the physical laws.

On the other hand, I don't think you need any really specific physical laws to have intentional thinking - I would say that any computer program that works with tree search, alphoGo or even much simpler alpha-beta pruners, is going to be engaging in intentional thinking on a level where they act in the present to attain their most desirable outcome in the future - and if that future somehow loops back to the present then the only stable situation is one where the intentional-thinker's efforts are thwarted or otherwise stabilized - ie, the only stable solution is artificially constructed for the instance of the closed causation loop.