skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that Burry is simply arguing that the methods he and other shorts used to call this crisis (which Taleb refers to as a gray swan -- since so many called it) should be more closely examined, rather than being simply dismissed as statistical aberrations. Maybe investors/wall street can learn a useful thing or two from them.

To me, spotting bubbles is not so difficult. There are a few great investors who have excellent track records when it comes to dodging bubbles/crises. They may not profit immensely, but their downside is usually protected and they are cash rich to pick up securities on the cheap.

The real difficulty comes from figuring out when a bubble will burst -- which is really anyone's guess. Burry himself ran into trouble on this end which created friction and eventually lawsuits with his investors.
I managed to make it work in Chrome (well, Chromium) by splicing in some support functions from another script, and tweaking a line at the bottom.

http://gist.github.com/355697

To install, click the 'raw' link at the top right of the source.
I'd bet that app was poorly written and doing something else in the background. An app that is just listening for data from an open connection should be using roughly zero CPU.

It would be too much work to vet every app for good concurrent programming. It's a much better idea to disallow it and add an API with resource controls later. This is the only way to protect users from resource hog apps.
Using the Django ORM my application is built much more quickly than if I were to write SQL by hand. That matters more to me than most anything else, especially since the performance is perfectly reasonable and caching helps for the rest. Of course I still have to add indexes and certain constraints/triggers by hand, but the payoff is huge.

One could also say that the more you know about SQL and RDBMS's, the better you are able to properly use an ORM.
Common programming idioms, for example iteration, are hard to express in a SQL query, and I think if you try to force iterative ideas on this declarative language the result is frustration or fear.

The need to be able to express yourself iteratively was a motivator for Microsoft's DryadLINQ - a programming language for distributed computation that has SQL-like constructs integrated into C#, giving you a high-level language with some of the declarative benefits as well as some of the imperative benefits (including more natural ways to express iteration).
Good; so there is at least a glimmer of possibility that the iPad can be useful for something.
Android dev: Why the iPad and iPhone don’t Support Multitasking
He came up with the credit default swap trade where you buy insurance against mortgage backed securities failing.

This was really a great trade because his losses were capped at around 5% a year while his upside was huge, imagine a 6:1 payout.
Like real estate agents, most recruiters eventually realize that it's more lucrative to increase the quantity of placements they make, not the quality.
> People aren't successful because they have an MBA,

This much is supported by the evidence, which is why it is so remarkable that MBAs typically attract orders of magnitude higher salaries than the average staffer, and having an MBA seems to be considered an advantage when applying for senior management positions in large businesses.

> but getting an MBA certainly doesn't make them less likely to succeed.

This much is not supported by any evidence I've seen so far in this discussion, so those of us who have only ever encountered MBAs who are walking stereotypes right out of this presentation find it a bit hard to believe.
Title is definitely linkbait. However, that VNC app is actually pretty neat on the iPad and seems much more functional than one on the iPhone/iPod touch.
Then maybe it's time to take an economics class, and go out into the real world, because in the real world, cities are far more expensive than farmland due to increased services. And in the real world, most people do not have the opportunities nor the skills or mindset to easily increase their income.
Linkers and Loaders by John Levine is not exclusively about Linux, but it does a great job of walking you through in great detail common formats for executables on Linux and the work it takes to get a program running. The manuscript chapters are available at http://www.iecc.com/linker/. I loved the book so much I bought a hard copy.
For Smalltalk and OO, Precision Systems has never let me down. Every single other recruiter attempting to provide Smalltalk recruiting has been remarkably clueless.

Disclosure: They are cutting my paycheck on my current job, but I said the same thing when I was vetting their services and on someone else's payroll.
> You're assuming there's no existing hierarchical power relationship. The obvious example is child-labor: the parents decide whether the kid goes to work, not the kid.

If the kids want to be fed, the family must have sufficient resources.

Do you really think that the family will be better off if the kids don't work? How do you know better than the parents?

Seriously - I want an answer, complete with relevant details. How are those families going to have sufficient resources, food, shelter, etc, without the kids working?

Note that your answer can't depend on anything other than keeping the kids from working, as providing additional resources from the outside can happen whether or not the kids work.

> How would you deal with child labor?

You're assuming that child labor is the biggest problem. It almost never is. In fact, it's typically a result of other worse problems.

And, pushing child labor underground makes it even worse.
I was signed in using WiFi, and I normally have WiFi enabled all the time and get over 24 hours of battery life. Maybe some wireless chipsets suck too much power, but it doesn't appear to be a problem on the N1.
A case for learning assembly as a penetration tester
I think songbird is pretty out competed on the linux platform. There are a bunch of really great media players on linux, and songbird (the last time I looked at it) could not match them.
- Posting misleading job descriptions
- Posting bait-and-switch job descriptions

Tactics once used to recruit for porn. Still used to recruit for prostitution.
I have been on both sides of a recruiter, and don't really see the point. On the employee side, a recruiter placed me at a job that I already knew about and would have applied for myself if it were allowed. All this achieved was costing my employer a ton of money -- I probably cost them about 2x as much as I would have if they didn't have to pay the recruiting agency. Everyone seems happy, and it's not my money, so whatever.

On the other side, the thing about recruiters editing your resume is true. We have interviewed candidates that claim they have some buzzword we are looking for, like TDD, but can't write a simple unit test on the whiteboard. It's nice that you know what TDD is, but not so nice that you don't actually know it. No hire.

(FWIW, my resume was similarly embellished. I intentionally omit things I know so that nobody expects me to do them; TDD is one of those. Lying is in the recruiter's best interest, since they get a lot of money if their candidate is hired. If the candidate's reputation is damaged by their lies, well, oh well, they can just get another candidate.)
Suppose that a foreign investor is thinking about loaning my company $1M. This rule says that 30% of my loan payments will be seized at the border.

What sort of interest rate will that investor demand?

> If you make a profit in the US expect to get taxed on that profit.

You didn't read the regulation - it says nothing about profit. It says transfers.

The obvious hack is to buy goods and export those for resale. This increases transaction costs and leads to comparable export control regulations.

Congrats - you've just killed your economy.

> you'll find a lot of developed countries have had this on the books.

Oh really? Please provide relevant cites.
Which is why Safari IS actually multitasking. You can leave it, launch another app, go back to it and be right back where you are. Sometimes Safari doesn't quit and you're back in a millisecond. Other times the OS closes the browser in the background, and you will have to wait a few seconds while Safari reloads the page you were visiting.

It's surprising how few people realize that the built-in apps (Mail, iPod, SMS etc) run perfectly in the background. The lack of multitasking is limited to 3rd party apps, which helps explain why most iPhone users never complain too much about the lack of real multitasking.
The Art of the Introduction: Top Ten Tips
1 is a delicious option, yet what has happened to the human race that we must rely on this stuff to get things done?
This sort of specialization is probably the right way to do recruiting. Someone that just reads you a list of questions and writes down your answers for the employer is not really adding much value. Someone that knows someone else's work from experience and recommends them for a job is much better.

Incidentally, a branch of my employer is listed as a Precision Systems client. I didn't know we had any Smalltalk!
Already working with a FreeBSD dev on yp. Nothing serious though.
Not a huge deal. It's sad to see a promising project go, but let's face it - it was bloated and not receiving the attention it deserved, not living up to its real potential. At the moment, clementine seems to be the best linux music player.
> If he was really so sure of his assessment back then then why didn't he short sell a bucket load of these mortgage backed securities?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." is the traditional response.

The problem was "obvious" in 2001.
Perhaps it was to help others who won't understand that you did not imply otherwise.
http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Sort-Naturally-1.02/lib/Sort/...

Available since 2001.
The whole idea for square doesn't seem very intuitive. Their goal seems to be to make credit cards completely ubiquitous. I can already use my credit card card at just about every place I go. My opinion is that Square is trying to make a solution without the problem.

That being said, the entire payment process seems very awkward. The fact that the merchant has to hand the physical register over to the customer for the signature doesn't seem very practical; who is responsible for a dropped/broken iphone/ipad?

I can understand the need for this service for merchants that previously didn't have access to credit card acceptance, but why not try and change the outdated and antiquated systems that we all use today, instead of making them more prevalent?
At a loss.
> Notably he did speak up about Fannie and Freddie in the early 2000s but was silenced by the GOP's drive to make war

Wrong. Fannie and Freddie were protected by Dems, not Repubs. Mccain got his teeth kicked in over this one.

Interestingly enough, Fannie and Freddie execs during that time were largely Dems, most of whom who landed in the Obama administration. While at Fannie and Freddie, they took out millions.

Oh, and during this time, Fannie and Freddie were lying about the mortages in their portfolios, which threw off everyone's risk evaluation. (Their portfolios contained far more subprime than they admitted to.)

If Fannie and Freddie weren't politically connected GSEs, folks would be in jail.
FWIW: I grew up in the 'burbs and currently live (without a car) in an apartment in the 'burbs, not all that far from the neighborhood I grew up in. As a kid, I hated my hometown and wanted nothing but out. I did manage to get out for 2 decades by marrying a career soldier but ended up coming back during my divorce (to live with family while job hunting, not because I had any desire to be here). I am currently contemplating & researching a possible move to a more walkable neighborhood closer to downtown and it has caused me a lot of food for thought about my perceptions of the city I grew up in -- including the fact that I didn't actually grow up in the city at all, I grew up in the 'burbs and my family had as little as possible to do with the city itself.

One thing that has occurred to me is that going downtown (by car, of course) was always dreaded because of the traffic, alien culture, lack of parking, fear of having the car vandalized (or other crime), etc. But if I live closer to downtown, in a more walkable neighborhood with better bus service, all of those concerns disappear: Parking is not needed, there is no car to advertise my wealth or social status or get vandalized/stolen, etc.
I am in the process of making a couple of these to see if they produce better(and more plentiful) tomatoes than the inground variant:

http://earthtainer.tomatofest.com/

Time will tell if it works well.
I last checked out Songbird two years or so ago and again today. That program really got a lot worse – from rather lean to bloated. Quite a disappointment, especially because I liked the idea. A good music library app besides iTunes for Macs would be great. (iTunes is pretty good but some details could be better and I would prefer for it to rather not become this huge syncing hub. Using the exact same UI which is used for tagging songs to tag ebooks cannot be a good idea.)
Hooray! The children are saved!
I think if you try to force iterative ideas on this declarative language the result is frustration or fear

But fortunately we have (tail) recursion to fight back in most declarative languages. Which is something that's completely missing from SQL. There should be a way to express recursion in SQL queries in my opinion.
The relationship between Wall Street and Washington blurred the lines too much. As a regulator, its tough to recognize a fundamental flaw in the investing practices of the firms that these people used to work for.

The "good old boy" network was reluctant to admit that they all screwed up.
Neuroscience of Free Will
It might work in a place like New York City. One of the Android groups here is doing some OpenGL stuff. We're trying Blender, but most of us are a little challenged.

http://www.nycjava.net/JSPWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JavaMobileStudy...
The problem is that SQL is not a high-enough level of abstraction over the relational algebra. Application developers want to say "Give me all the blog posts with 8 replies written by users with a karma more than 42." This is pretty trivial to code if you are using real data structures, or if you have a compiler from set arithmetic to SQL ("ORM"), but pretty difficult if you have to write the statement manually. SQL doesn't abstract relationships, it abstracts set operations.

Programmers want to avoid SQL for the same reason they don't want to write their applications in assembler. Assembler doesn't abstract computational abstractions, it abstracts away the CPU microcode. Since we want to write programs in terms of computations and not CPU micro-operations, assembly is tedious and pointless. SQL is the same way; we don't want to write apps in terms of inner joins. We want to write them in terms of the high-level relationships. ORMs allow this.

(Key/value stores are also the wrong abstraction, they don't abstract much except physically writing the bits to disk. "Yay.")
At this point it should be called iHydra, given how many separate roles have been shoehorned into it.
> The fact that no one went to jail or even got fired for total malfeasance suggests that both regulation and internal oversight are grossly inadequate.

Which folks in the SEC do you want to jail? (They're the ones who granted the bond ratings monopoly.)

Which bank regulators do you want to jail? (They're the folks who "encouraged" fannie and freddie stock ownership. They also "encouraged" "safe securitization" via insurance.)

Which of the Fannie and Freddie execs do you want to jail? (They lied about the contents of their portfolios. Many of these folks are now in the Obama administration. One of them, Gorelick, is currently writing privacy policy....)

Which congress critters who protected Fannie and Freddie do you want to jail? (This group is almost all dems.)
At first I suspected that this person may have felt offended
by this for some weird reason, but now it seems obvious to me
that you are most likely correct in your assessment. Rest assured I have only honorable intentions in noting my little
observation here. Sometimes I guess it can be easy to misinterpret information by adding more information to said information that may or may not come from past experiences or from somewhere else entirely; Perhaps context?
The way I think about ORM is that I'm navigating through a data structure. The ORMs I've used (DBIx::Class, SqlAlchemy) represent joins as arrays, so if I want to get all the Employees from the Company object, I just do:

employee_array = myCompany.employees

and out pops all the records.

It's easy to understand in the base case. Anything with any real complexity to it is doomed to failure, and then you have to start monkeying around with SQL in your mapper anyway.

I won't start a project with a pre-existing database with ORM, it's too squirrely to get the mapping right. However, if I need some persistence for my app easily, ORM provides a good fit.
> We may need comprehensive immigration reform, but we will never get the immigration re form we need.

We had comprehensive immigration reform in the 80s. Amnesty then in return for future enforcement was the deal. The enforcement never happened.

Note that the tech industry could get "brain immigration" separately.
AFAIK Linksys did not intentionally make the WRT54G hackable; they were forced into releasing the OS source when it was found that it was based on GPLed linux components.
Slightly OT but is anyone aware of variant OS installations on iPad (was the mentioned Cydia one example?).

Love the feel of device, would be much happier browsing with Chrome, and copying media/software as I wish. The Apple hardware/software coupling always frustrates me.
Politics is the Mind-Killer

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Politics_is_the_Mind-Killer
Myth. The methods used are already illegal under existing copyright law.

The idea that they were trying to get it made illegal comes from the EFF's attempt to get it specifically exempted (i.e. made legal). There is a triennial process for getting such exemptions made, which the EFF in 2006 called "fundamentally broken", but yet returned to participating in in 2009. Apple objected (using that same process) on the grounds that that the EFF's proposal did not meet the criteria required by that process. The EFF reported that as if Apple were trying to get the law changed, but it was in fact the EFF proposing a change. And from there the myth spread.

Even if you agree with the EFF, it's not accurate to say that anybody is trying to get it made illegal. To be frank, I don't agree with the EFF, but here I'm just trying to correct the facts. I would link to the specific documents, but the Copyright Office site appears to be down. If you're interested, look for the DMCA 2009 rulemaking comments and responses.
I agree. My former marriage was a prime example of that: Two intelligent, literate, articulate people who spent years arguing with each other on the false assumption that because we both spoke American English more proficiently than average, we fully understood each other. So not.
Article reminds me of this quote:

"42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot." - Steven Wright
"The iPad is a LEGO set that can only be assembled into the (at the moment) 150,000 pictures drawn on the box (with many more to come)".

Fixed it for you.
I like Amarok.
Six coders can do anything and there is nothing six coders can't do
Thanks Mark, I appreciate the message on Facebook. I haven't had an opportunity to get back to you yet (my day has been hectic), but I'll send you a response later when I have a chance to do it justice.
Looking for iPhone/iPod Touch game beta testers
It might be more fear than shame...the note is a signal that the person is resolute, prepared, and part of a larger movement.
This could be total confirmation bias but I myself was somewhat amazed that everyone seemed to have been so surprised by the crisis. I don’t care all that much about what’s happening in the US (not being from there and all) but I have been clicking through the current New York Times cartoons for the past few years or so. In retrospect it looked to me as though there were constantly crumbling houses in those cartoons (I was always confused by them, it was only later that it made ‘click’), years and months before the bubble burst. If even the cartoonists knew it …
The results that your company got from hiring someone to take care of biz issues does not imply that said employee's MBA is relevant.

> In theory yes, but we hadn't managed to do that in a couple years since we were so focused on tech and not spending our time learning some of the more arcane businessy things

Those aren't arcane things. They're SOP,

Let's look at it another way. Would you excuse a software house that didn't use source control because they wanted to spend all their time on programming?

A tech biz is still a biz, at least if it wants to be successful.
The Evolution of Local Advertising and the Economics of a "Check-In"
You are right that the government and corporations are going to keep robbing us, but there isn't much we can do about it. Look at the recent case of multi-time convicted Pfizer: the laws mandated a corporate death penalty, but a 4th level shell company was penalized anyways, with explicit acknowledgment by the government of the facts of the matter. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm...

If we can't hold Pfizer accountable for it's crimes, which have actually directly resulted in the deaths of many people both in a direct and statistical sense, there is no way we can hold the government and Wall Street executives accountable.

Unfortunately, we do not have a superior political system. I think at this point that corporations and their inseparable ties with government are going to be here until the Singularity.
Thanks for clarifying it for me.
Filtering out stuff you don't want to read != sticking your head in the sand.

Except you don't know you don't want to read it if you're using something as crude as looking for a string in a headline. I maintain that blindly ignoring content that has a single mention of a particular term is sticking your head in the sand (but everyone's entitled to interpret the situation as they like!).

Your fictional app would likely rely upon categorization as an indicator. On news sites, content managers determine the interest areas for a story and you can then filter them. Stories that are really important will spill over to other categories (such as, on most news sites, the "main"/general category) and stories that seem to be about one topic but are really about another should, ideally, be categorized appropriately (e.g. "iPad Designer Jonathan Ive Dies" isn't an iPad story - crude example, but just to make a point).

Filtering out items based on a string of letters in a headline (as suggested in this case) is not as elegant or robust. You might filter out "football" but still be interested if the plane carrying the Dallas Cowboys went down wiping out the team. You might filter out "health care" to avoid political discussions on HN but miss out on a story about a healthcare entrepreneur. It's as crude as early spam filtering. (And like spam filtering, could be improved by software that analyzed the content of the destination pages.. but relying on the headline alone is too flaky.)

As a temporary measure to filter out a glut of stories (as with the iPad affair), it can work, but as a mid/long term strategy, filtering by headline is crude and prone to covering up stories you might actually find interesting. The quickest and most precise filtering device out there is the one connected to your eyes.
> Perhaps a program that helps startups by paying the wages for the first 3 or so employees for up to a year?

What could possibly go wrong....