skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Collateralized debts are sold in tranches: One guy gets the first 50% of the money, the next guy gets the next 20%, the next gets the next 20%, and the final sucker gets his share back only after the other 90% has all been paid off. (Actually, it's a bit more complicated than this, but you get the idea.)

Even with a 50% drop in market prices, the guy with the "senior" tranche is happy; he's getting his money back. The guy with the last 10% was never expecting to get all of his money back, so while he's disappointed about being completely wiped out, he's not altogether shocked.

The collateralized debt crisis is basically all about those people in the middle -- the 50%-90% range. They thought their money was safe (they couldn't imaging the market dropping by more than 10%) and they paid a correspondingly high price as a result (i.e., they didn't get much of a discount vs. the face value of the debts), but it turns out that they're taking some of the losses too.
If you like peopleofwalmart.com then this equally stupid blog should impress
I was surprised too. You can view the video on Channel 4 website: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-mind-control... (hopefully that's the one linked).
I'm surprised I didn't read more commentary about the Christian symbolism in Avatar - Garden of Eden, Tree of Life, etc. Maybe people no longer look at those symbols as predominantly/exclusively Judeo-Christian?
Can you elaborate? Sounds like there's an interesting story behind that comment.

I had something similar happen once, several customer service reps insisted that a message I was getting was entirely impossible: it told me I needed to buy competitor's prepaid card instead of theirs. I'd just assumed they had a deal with that competitor for prepaid card distribution.

They fixed the message soon after I ended the call, but when I called back later they still didn't believe me. Finally I pointed out that when they fixed the message they forgot to change it from their competitor's prepaid card number format. Then they finally credited my account.
I think he largely misses the point. Like many other sci-fi pieces, Avatar is a fantasia and not a serious look at our possible future.

Much of the human technology was obviously modeled after current American military tech, and that was a deliberate choice. This approach allowed Cameron to tap into current feelings and cultural currents. If things had been more 'realistic', then it would have been alien to modern audiences. Really, properly modeling the future would have made the story far more difficult to tell.

It's darned hard to make a story that's universally accessible. 'Avatar' is a pretty decent sci-fi movie that's understandable to people all over the world. It will also revolutionize cinematography and filmmaking from this point onward. Any proper analysis of the film should keep those points in mind.
Got it. Thanks very much.
Then you write "we were lucky, and most investments did much worse than this". But it looks like the slice involve here is large enough that it will probably do a good job of illustrating things.
By "stagnate" you perhaps mean "failed to achieve massive technological progress and massive population growth".

If the areas in question lived well and were happy with how they lived, then this would be a good thing. If they lived badly and were miserably, then it would be, indeed, a bad thing.

So your comment leaves with the original question of whether life in these societies was desirable or not.
Check the wording carefully...by saying they are "not prerequisites" this does not mean having money can't help you.

It's a matter of degree. With a powerful state people are more likely to obtain positions of power due to favors, or who they know rather than merit. The reason being that if you're a government official and you hire the senator's son over a more qualified candidate (to gain his favor) it's not as big of a deal if he screws up because it's not your money he is losing (it's the tax payers).

In a free society you're more likely to hire the best person for the job because it's your own money on the line if he screws up.

As Milton Friedman once so elegantly put it, you always spend your own money more carefully than you spend someone else's. And this can be a powerful incentive.
That's not how it works. What happens is a bunch of mortgages of varying quality get thrown into a pool. The pool is then sliced up into a bunch of different investment vehicles. The lowest risk (and lowest return) investments get paid off first, and the highest risk (and highest return) investments get paid off last.

The 2.7m -> 36k transition is on one of the higher-risk portions of the pool. The investor who paid in 2.7m basically bet that there would be plenty of money left over after the low-risk betters below him got paid off. He was wrong.

The total value of the total pool probably only went down by 30% or so, but that's enough to completely wipe out the highest-risk level investor. Add on the fact that they were probably leveraged to get into the position in the first place, and now you understand why 2008 was a major clusterfuck.
Ask HN: How to interview programmers
I plan on hiring a programmer or two on a part time basis. These will be undergraduates in Computer Science. What kinds of questions would you ask to determine a programmers competence during an interview?

Edit: Im looking for Javascript and python programmers
> That would be nice, but it isn't the way things work.

Yet.

Wait 'til the Pirate Party's been in power a few years...
[..] and they reply saying 'It sounds interesting, but I don't have time for it unfortunately.' Thereby implying that you are lazy, and they are busy.

Don't assume they're implying you're lazy, it could very well be a way of telling you that they don't find it that interesting without being rude. Besides, what's wrong with having different interests? Isn't it normal that one person finds something more interesting than the other, and therefore is willing to spend more of his spare time on it? That doesn't imply one is more lazy than the other, that just means they have different passions.
Server-side Javascript running on Android, via Rhino
"I see you have some cows here."

"Ah yes. Flour. Very good."

"Excellent work on this bucket. But why orange? Ha ha ha!"

"What is this, a fishery for ants?"
Your assertion about the battery life is utter nonsense, since streaming audio requires an active data radio (which is a huge battery drain) and CPU activity.

To clarify, I meant that little additional battery power would be consumed relative to what the user would experience if he'd just left the streaming app running in the foreground. This is not a valid reason not to support it. Let the user worry about the battery.
A common phrase on a trading floor: "there's no such thing as a bad bond -- only a bad price."
Tell HN: Thank you
I hope it doesn't come across at too corny, but I have to say, "thank you" because you guys on HN improved my work @ Mixergy tremendously.

In the early days, if my posts got on HN at all, they'd often have negative comments. I emailed the HN'ers who wrote those comments and I asked them how I could improve. Almost every single one gave me meaningful, useful feedback.

(That feedback is why I don't shout my intro, for example.)

Then, as I started improving, you guys voted up my work more often and helped me get real traffic, which led to some sponsorships.

Recently, I noticed that I have access to more of the entrepreneurs and investors that I want to interview because they tell me that they know my work from HN.

It takes me hours to research and put together an interview. The people on HN make it worth the work. Thank you.
It reminds me of this article from little while ago.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1169875

Nerds want every question answered with a reason, even if that question shouldn't have one. Why is Superman strong? He gets his powers from the sun. Why does he get powers from the sun? Because his skin is a solar battery. Well, why is he still strong at night? Well, he's charged up for years as an adolescent, he has a lot of stored power. Ah ha! Well, in issue #626, the Parasite drained him of all energy before Batman saved him - shouldn't he be back to zero and weak by dawn? No, they say, because of...
Chinese minister insists Google obey the law
I actually thought the film was much less anti-corporate than previous work by Cameron. In Aliens we have the corporation that is the acting force behind the military. In Avatar the Ribisi character is weak and even somewhat sympathetic.

As far as the script goes, my favourite line was Sigorney Weaver's toss-off about the Tree of Souls: "I'd die to get a sample of that". Between that and the obvious dualism intended with the mechanical and natural avatars, there's enough evidence of a thinking screenwriter to justify the film. Too bad it never really comes together.
any specific mentalism books you'd recommend?
I thought the low-tech choices for the military were kind of fun. Especially that huge knife for the exoskeleton. That's not something I've seen before. Also the detachable gun.
Nitpick: the contraction of "you are" is "you're," not "your." You may also be treated with more respect by certain people if you learn to make this distinction.
You know what, I felt that way too.

Sometimes I want to shout to the world that they need to hear about the people I interview.

I can't do that. Most people wouldn't understand. So I post it on HN.

Thanks for checking it out and for the compliment.
I thought that rather than a general "anti-corporate picture" it was supposed to be an allegory to what actually happened in North America wrt colonization.
Edit: that is, until it switches to Hollywood mode in the final battle.
The Rackspace Cloud CSR could have just been lying.
Source?

I've seen this claim a few times, but never a study on it.
> That XP app is probably 32-bit, too, and if you are on 64-bit Win7 I hope the app isn't looking for "C:\Program Files" to find itself, since it's now in "C:\Program Files (x86)".

I think most applications don't hard code system directory names since they differ not only between versions of windows, but also between languages (for example, I believe the aforementioned directory would be c:\programme on the german version of windows xp).
Sounds like a pyramid scheme to me.
Quicksilver + python + dropbox = awesomeness
I'm posting this up because I found it very useful, and you probably will too.

I needed away to quickly record my thoughts, whether its a startup idea, some task I have to complete, a quote I read somewhere, anything. I wanted the process to be super fast and very easy to do. Now of course I could've just made a todo.txt file and just open it up, but that's stupid.

I wrote a script that takes a string as its parameter, it lowers the case, caps the first word, adds a period, and puts a plus (+) at the beginning, and appends it to a file. Both the script and the file live in my dropbox folder, so its accessible from all my computers. Then I setup quicksilver on my mac so that whenever I type ctrl+space+(t)(o)+tab+(string_to_save)+enter, it executes the script with the string and saves it in the todo file in my dropbox folder.

So now whenever I have some really cool idea I don't want to forget, I just immediately save it and I'm good to go. I hope you guys find this as useful as I did.

<code>
#!/usr/local/bin/python

import os,sys

if len(sys.argv[1:]) == 0:
sys.exit()

todo = str(" ".join(sys.argv[1:])).strip().lower().capitalize()

un = os.popen('whoami', 'r')
path = "/Users/%s/Dropbox" % un.readline().strip()

with open('%s/todo.txt' % path, 'a') as t:
print >>t, "+ %s." % todo
</code>
Ars longa, vita brevis - originally from the Greek (Hippocrates), where the original read in full (as translated into English):

"Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment fallible, judgment difficult."

The original Greek of this is a sublimely succinct rendering of wonderfully expressed aphorisms. It is found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis) along with a pretty good explanation of what it all means in the original.

Of course, the underlying philosophical issue concerns man's standing as what has been called a "cosmic orphan" in the universe, i.e., the one creature acutely aware of its own mortality even while striving and dreaming to make something out of life while it exists. The Stoics, like Seneca, essentially said that we are wise when we make the most of what we have, whatever its temporal duration.
According to the article, glucose is (pretty much) directly responsible to our level of willpower. This surprised me because the less sugar (in any form) I take, the more willpower I seem to have (and the generally better I feel).

Does anyone have willpower 'mind-hacks' they're willing to share? I find the hardest thing is to just get started, after that everything's easy.
A lot of it depends on the actual contract you signed. I would take a look at that to start off. Maybe post your findings back here if you feel open.
Neither a tree of life nor a paradisiacal existence in the past are unique to the middle-eastern fables.

See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life
In the online real-time strategy game Starcraft, there is a term called the "metagame" that refers to (among other details) the current trends in how the game is played.

There can often be large shifts in the strategies that a majority of players are using. They often start with the professional gamer who first developed it and dominated with it, thus popularizing it. People end up getting exposure from watching the pros play, and also from having the strategy used against them. The more someone loses to a given strategy, the higher they will regard it.

I'm curious if this happens with design trends, as you were saying.

For more info on the metagame, see http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Metagame
>It's a matter of degree.

Maybe it is, but that's not really how he presents it.

As far as hiring decisions are concerned, I think you're just picking one factor our of many thousands that are operative and assuming that it has the biggest influence.
I found this post by Steve Yegge to be really helpful, it's aimed at phone screening but you can easily extend it to a face to face interview

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...
Sounds like our priorities are less about getting to that distant star than finding additional resources or efficiencies. Whoever's had the best track record with improving/maintaining the systems so far is getting the bulk of my attention/help.
Remember that your body's reaction to sugar is not simple. Eating refined sugar causes a spike and then crash in your blood sugar, while eating complex carbs and "healthy stuff" generally releases energy slower, and doesn't cause your body to freak out. Maybe your lowered willpower occurred during the crash phase?

As far as willpower, try studying a martial art. I studied for 10 years, and taught for 6 of those. Best case, you want a martial art that is both a contact art, and also does the "meditation" side of things.

Aside from regular exercise, a good martial art will teach you a lot of mental conditioning. Meditation for stress relief, breathing regularly while on an adrenaline high, ignoring pain, and thinking your way out of a stressful situation, rather than letting the reptilian part of your brain take over.
So if your weakness is not being able to cut on sugar intake you're pretty much screwed...
Google: The Beast File
Thank you Andrew for all the work you do to make Mixergy a must have resource for me(and everyone else) on my journey into the startup world.

And a BIG thanks to the HN community as well!

I know my calling in life is to start my own company someday(soon!). Hacker News and Mixergy have been indispensable resources along the way to discovering what I love and want to do.
Yeah, the cows look like they're smiling.
Reasons for taking a paragraph and expanding it into an article:

1) SEO
2) Increased mind-share authority for the brand (real-life PageRank)
3) Revenue (Create enough material for two articles so you can make the first one free and get people to sign up for the newsletter/review/magazine/etc)
> society gives you a bunch of options, including working four hour days if you want to pursue scientific endeavors.

I didn't know that was an option. Are you thinking of university research? I think the hours there tend to be longer. Saving up money and starting a lab in your house?
Yes but the interesting thing is how much cultural currency the Biblical tales may have lost (in days gone by, it was a case of 'there's Christianity/Judaism, and then there's everything else').
Agreed. Economic systems that lend themselves to negative externalities do concern me.
A long bet: Over a ten-year period, the S&P 500 will outperform hedge funds
Do You Really Even Need VC?
What part of this conversation proves Rackspace stores passwords in the clear?
I've always been fascinated by the pictures people manage to get out of North Korea. This Flickr account is home to an incredible collection of photos inside of Pyongyang http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernbeisser/collections/7215760... and out in the country http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernbeisser/collections/7215760...
Merit Scholarships the Ivy League cartel
Ask HN: Freemium: how far upwind should I stay
Say you build a web app that cannot exist commercially without paying users (not a facebook). Yet you want to upwind the competition (to use pg's analogy) by being benevolent and offering free features - making it easy for users to get up and running with your software. The question is, when do you draw the line - when does a feature become "for paying customers only"? For example, how did Dropbox decide 2GB would be free - why not 10GB, why not 100 MB?
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
Luckily it's one of the ones that doesn't affect readability too much. I'm not too interested in people who deal out respect based on minor grammar mistakes either, sorry :)

(the one that really gets me is when I split words I.e "thi sis". Can't spot them for the life of me)
The problem with monetizing dating-style sites is the same as trying to make money with health care. Your system is at its best when people have one short trip and don't come back. This lack of repeat use means that it has to work so phenominally well that success stories are regularly referring their friends, or you need a unique method to suck as much money over that time period as you can (not to sound bad about it, but it's the truth).

The ideal method would be to charge money upon "success", but there's no good way to measure a successful matchup. Thinking about this...I think a reverse charge system may work (note, I haven't tried this and if you do go with it, be prepared for flaming fireball of doom, it's an off-the-cuff, not thought out idea, just top of the head thing). Most sites seem to either charge a monthly fee, or they charge for communications. Now, rather than charging someone money for TRYING to talk to someone, why not charge them based on people ACTUALLY responding. Say, I have 5 message points. I send a message to 10 people. I still have 5 message points. Let's say 3 respond. I can use a message point to read each message, or I can just not read it. If I don't have enough points to read a message, I only see that I received one. Now, this should only count for messages that are from someone I sent a message to previously.

This way, initiating contact is free, and responding to initial contact is free for the contacted. The lack of needing up-front costs to start trying to meet people is likely to drive people to sending that initial message, and if they get a response, they now need to spend money to read it...and it really is a response from the person, so they most likely really want to read it.
Except that this wasn't a design-by-committee approach... This appeared fully done from the internal design department of Canonical a day before UI freeze, which just reeks of everything FOSS shouldn't be :(
> It allows free interpretation of scripture

Check

> demands difficult personal decisions

Not really. Haven't given up anything because of a difficult decision

> imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user

Not at all. Everything is very simple, from the bottom up.

> not all can achieve salvation

Why not? Every Unix that runs on a regular PC (or a Mac) is a free download. Chances are you can run some flavour of Unix on your watch. Or toaster.

> To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself

No way. Running most programs is a point-and-click business. On any modern Unix (such as Solaris, Debian or Fedora), installing a programs is a point-and-click, very app-storish thing.

Without the DRM part, of course.
There has been a lot of this recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661984
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848839

...and some others, one of which sited the same papers (but i cant remember post title.)
Does the author of this article not know about 2-way encryption? It can be used to store encrypted passwords in a database and the original value can be retrieved.
The first problem with saying 'I just don't have time for it' is its a bare-faced lie! I have to resist the urge to scream 'BUT YOU HAVE TIME TO WATCH EASTENDERS?!' ;)

The second problem is - why not just tell the truth? 'It doesn't really appeal to me, personally.' (talking about neutral subjects here, not requests for favours etc)
May I propose a different title?

> How Mixergy uses HN to get Access to Entrepreneurs and Investors to Boost Traffic and get Sponsorships for Free!
No, thank you. Your work is invaluable and I continue to be dazzled by the level of professionalism you bring to both the interviews and the subsequent feedback you receive here. Keep doing what you're doing!
Keep up the good work brother. We, fellow HN users have seen you and mixergy evolve into something we look forward to.
I hope you will be able to monetize your effort as well as keep most of us around.
I will admit, the quality of show has improved significantly from your earlier interviews (for instance the early intro made me cringe every time) Some of your interviews have really made an impression on me.. and for that I thank you back!
50 AD for a somewhat relevant post... that's going to be tough to beat.
Google looks worse the longer they keep censoring results. Once they made their decision, they should have realized that there was no point in "negotiations" with a government that enthusiastically shoots dissidents. They should have gotten all non-Chinese employees out of the country as discreetly as possible, then simultaneously turned off google.cn filtering and issued their public statement.
Yeah the title is technically wrong. But a hosting provider having access to clear passwords is still atrocious.
"Synchronicity"?
Letting a random employee to see your password on demand is just as bad as storing it in plaintext. Now the employee knows you and knows your password - for most people that means free access to their mail account, which means free access to all their accounts.
I saw him speak in Chicago at the CEO conference a couple years ago.

He spoke then about political aspirations. Perhaps we'll see a trend with people like him and Steven Welch, who was on Mixergy today.

Not only is he successful, he seems completely driven to make a positive impact on the world by doing things the right way. Very inspirational.
Keep up the great work.

Andrew, I'd be interested if one of these days you sat on the other side and let yourself be interviewed by a colleague.. in the same fashion.

(it might also reveal why you're staying in Buenos Aires :P)
I have a blue belt in Judo. What I learned from it is that if you're small and don't weight a lot, people toss you around and you will never get an ippon ;)

That being said, you give solid advice. Studying a martial art definitely gives you more willpower.