skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For good reason: many large financial institutions were based on fraud."

Where's the fraud in these investment banks? Maybe your referring to the brokers (in the high street) who actually sold the subprimes to people buying houses? Maybe.. but that's certainly not investment banks.

The article says: "and instead dealt only with hedge funds, insurance companies, and large financial institutions, so-called qualified buyers that, under SEC rules, are expected to understand the risks."

They sold it to people who can understand these financial instruments.

"because there really was nothing backing up their deposits."

FDIC was backing up their deposits, well to 100K at least.

"This will either have to be covered by punitive taxes for decades"

The Treasury just didn't give them free money, they sold them warrants (AFAIK). The money is starting to come back in. The US Treasury just made $8B in profits from Citibank: http://goo.gl/rM9E
Interesting. How much space saving do you see? DAWGs work for sets, but can it work for key-value maps? (I don't see how, because a final leaf can belong to multiple key prefixes, and therefore multiple associated values).
"This is my technical blog, so there’s a lot of programming and related crazy talk going on here."

Well, that is for sure true. Crazy talk.
The iPad is a Starship Bridge Accessory Lacking Only Janice Rand to Fetch It
I thought about this just today. Closed systems like the iPhone allow for programs perfectly customized for the hardware, OS. This is great news for the users as the interfaces and other standards are rather consistent.

What was the success of Microsoft in the 80s and 90s? I believe it was that they had an open system. They reached the critical mass, by letting everyone in.

Today, being open is their fallacy, as it is hard for Microsoft to bring all their 3rd party programs into line. (Into line refers to interface, security, and other standards)

To be successful a closed system, it must fulfill one point: It must have exceeded a critical mass of users.

I guess open is better when you can't rely on a multi-billion marketing budget.
Welcome to the iPad Video
We're very fortunate to have a young and motivated MBA in my company. We're full of engineers, scientists and tech nerds. Our CEO is an experienced engineer with a decades long background in software. But for many of the basic business processes, the grease in the cogs of the machine, our MBA keeps things moving along very nicely.

In just a matter of a few months he reduced costs by 40% without reducing the capability of the company in any way by cutting back on unnecessary expenses, putting in place standards for expenditures and R&D, finding inefficiencies in our contracts and partnerships and other such things.

Could we, a bunch of engineers done all that? 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 -- like renegotiating technology contracts to be more favorable. We're not yet profitable and he probably single handedly managed to extend our life out another year on the same funding, giving us a much better chance of reaching the magical 5 year mark.
This would be true if Android didn't suck.

I've had an iPhone for three years and got a Nexus One, supposedly the best Android handset, last month. My company makes some of the top book apps on the iPhone and we decided to pay for a port to Android. So, I used the Nexus One as my primary phone for a month.

It's awful. The keyboard is inaccurate, the interface is awkward, the default mail app requires the use of hard to hit hardware buttons to check a different account or even compose mail. The icons have no consistent theming, making the platform look thrown together. Android just is just not a good operating system.

The hardware itself? Fine, though the OLED display oversaturated colors, which makes the apps all look 'off'. They had developers targeting one type of display, then changed to one that makes everything look strange- not exactly stellar platform planning.

To say that Android is following in the footsteps of Apple and then improving on the product is ludicrous. Android is like Windows 2.0. Maybe in another ten years they'll have a successful clone of the iPhone OS 2.0, but, for now, they're still nowhere close to being there.

And of iPhone 3.0 or 4.0? You've got to be kidding.
Interesting. The guy I work with lives/works in Pune but seemed quite familiar with Mumbai.

Do you order stuff online? If so, does it arrive as expected? What are shipping charges like for, say, a 5000 rupee (~ $100?) item weighing 1 kg? Is insurance included? I specified that price point because I think it's the maximum insurance payout included in UPS's basic pricing in the US. Just curious.
really, guys? In less than a week it'll be back to normal.

I don't understand why people are all "not in MY HACKER NEWS" - this is what people are talking about. In 3 days we'll be back to Clojure and Haskell and "rate my startup" and "I built <clone of popular site> using <new technology> in <some trivial number of hours>."
I find that Kashi seems to do a good job of providing food like you describe.
Becoming "well read"
Personally I hate cars and consider it a luxury to be able to get by without one. Living in the suburbs and going everywhere by car sounds like hell to me.

I think in the future it will seem odd that we give so much space to the ugliness and pollution caused by cars. Just as it seems odd to us that people just used to dump their shit on the streets.
3 days? I think even 3 months would be an optimistic claim.
And if there's anyone here who doesn't know regex - go and learn regex. It will take 30 minutes max and the investment in time and brain space will pay off countless times.
"a penny-pincher mentality"

I see this in the US among people who have limited opportunities to earn additional income beyond their current job. If you are an office clerk making $25K/year, your best means of "earning" an additional dollar might be to procure the same goods for $1 less. Unfortunately, way too many people in the US have few good ways to earn 10% more by working more.
Although technically he said he 'DIDN'T know', then why did he think it was worth while saying it? He wanted to use the word 'treason' in his argument for affect, without taking responsibility for it's use. Too bad. I'm calling on it.

It's like me saying "I don't know if obesity is related to use of baseball caps but i've lost my trust in the government". Yeah.. it's ridiculous.
So build some technology to make it ridiculously safe to carry around. Can't be that hard ;)
Always carry a licensed Pistol for your personal safety if you wanted to fight corruption in India http://to./3h22
Was there any difference from the default hackernews view?
People over-state here the ease of getting funding as a first-time entrepreneur. If you're an average 22-year-old, it's not happening.
There is a Greasemonkey script called 'HN Toolkit' which performs a lot of useful functions, one of which is blocking articles based on regex matches. So all you have to do would be to enter 'iPad' into the toolkit options and it'll hide all links with the word in it.

Apart from this it also adds a searchYC box and has support for split view.

Link: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
That was not wrong. I have more than one India friends told me that the postal workers would open the the boxes and take whatever inside. The system is simply not trustworthy enough for people to do online shopping.
I think the whole point is that while the average Joe shouldn't run .exe's from e-mail, the fact that you can't ruins this easy way to load your own app on your own machine because Apple is assuming everyone that uses their device is an idiot. Would it really be that hard to allow for a .exe blocking feature that can be disabled?

I think the whole point is that the $99 and having to use Apple's development package and going through Apple's approval process is an impediment to development. You can't write an app for whatever you want (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/19/banned-iphone-apps-...) because Apple censors App development. True open source should be open. Iphone and Ipad are not truly open.
With similiar goals as the OP this fine-tuned protein shake has become the cornerstone of my food intake:

3 dl of non-fat milk (taste & liquid)
1 dl of ice cream (taste & carbs)
1 dl of whey protein powder (taste & protein)
5 ml of dry-pressed sunflower oil (omega-6 fats)
5 ml of dry-pressed flax oil (omega-3 fats)
1 cl of ispaghula husk (fiber)
1 cl of freeze dried fruit powder (antioxidants)

The energy intake is divided quite evenly among carbs, protein and fats. It provides 1) the essential fats in a decent ratio, 2) a good dose of varying amino acids, 3) enough fiber for the digestive system to function and 4) a good dose of antioxidants. With a quick preparation now and then it is super fast to produce, takes almost no cleaning afterwards and the taste can be varied with different ice cream flavours. It might take a few drinks to get used to the taste if you have never consumed protein supplements but if you pick the right protein powder, use milk instead of water and get good ice cream, this tastes very good. And for some reason I haven't gotten bored with this even after months of almost daily use (on several meals).

For fast consumption buy a big bowl (with a lid as ispaghula reacts with moisture without it) and mix 10-20 portions of protein, ispaghula husk and dried fruits in the correct ratio. Store a dedicated 1 dl cup in the bowl. Prepare a ready mix of flax and sunflower oil in the correct ratio and keep it in the fridge with the milk - you can learn to pour about 10ml of it by hand fast. Cut a whole pack of ice cream in small (about 2cl) bits in advance and store it in the original pack in the freezer. For mixing I use a protein shaker which can be flushed with water after use.

I get my protein powder, fruit powder and the shaker from http://myprotein.co.uk/ in bulk, which makes this one of the cheapest healthy snacks (below 1$ per serving of about 400kcal). My preferred protein taste is Chocolate Smooth. Ispaghula seeds I get in the form of Pfizers laxative medicine (which is nothing but ispaghula husks and a bit of added sweetener) which goes by the name of Vi-Siblin in the nordics. You might find it with the brand Isogel. I prefer Vi-Siblin S which is sweetened with sorbitol instead of sugar.

Don't let the "unnatural protein shake" scare get you. This is a balanced and healthy choice proven by active athletes around the world and it provides your essential macronutritients in easy form. You should still make sure you get enough micronutrients elsewhere as the dried fruid powder is in the mix mainly for it's antioxaditive qualities, but also on that front I would not shy away from the vitamin supplements as this drink provides a good essential fat balance which helps the intake of fat soluble micronutrients also in that form.

For those who are trying to get leaner, the drink works pretty well also without the ice cream. This shifts the calorie balance heavily on protein and good fats which keeps you fed for long and provides pretty much all you need to sustain muscle mass while losing fat.
this is possibly my all-time favorite book. i just thought "oblivion" itself was more appropriate this thread.
I'm not ready to "declare it healed", but the probability that our depression becomes anywhere near as severe as the 1930s Great Depression is very low. It has created a lot of suffering, and will likely cause a lot more, and we may not get out of it until the 2020s, but I don't see it as likely that people will starve in this country, nor do I see widespread bank failures as likely.
Humor. Simple Mathematics.
If your code compiles, that means it's bug free?
Maven is clearly ant++. The concept of XML as buld descriptor language is clearly lifted direcly from ant.

It's a tragedy that the java environment is so comparatively weird that make & cousins weren't obvious choices to build java projects.

I spent a majority of the last decade & change dealing with ant and maven builds on million line projects. My hatred for both is from years of bitter experience.

Sorry, I hate them both with the zed-like fury of a billion suns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2j3AGeeLg4
A Google tech talk on 'Graphics Processors, Graphics APIs, and Computation on GPUs' gives a bit more detail on the design of a modern(ish) GPU
Dynamic programming practice problems
I don't think anyone would argue that you don't need business people, e.g. the type of people who tend to get MBAs. But are the degrees themselves necessary? I'm not sure. (Although the OP is obviously a one-sided advert for his own content.)

I don't think MBA programs encourage immorality, and I'm surprised at the 56% figure he quotes, but they nurture extreme arrogance of a sort that leads to all kinds of unethical behaviors.
Well, the great thing about this is that it is a welcome change from the "HN is being overrun, please stop posting/upvoting articles about X or from site Y" complaint. This makes a point by distributing a tool, that seems very hacker-ish.

I'm upvoting it for the spirit even though I probably will remove it after seeing whether it works in Chrome.
I have a sincere question here. I really am trying to understand all of this.

Can people chime in on why exactly, charging for ipad apps is a bad idea?

I mean, it seems to me that for an outfit like the WSJ this will probably work. They can take all of the content off of their web site and make it available only through the ipad app. Their target market is likely to be able to afford an ipad, and would think nothing of buying one. If they would not, then they are not the WSJ target market.

Why is this a bad business move for them? There is something that I haven't considered, I'm sure. But I don't know what it is.

UPDATE:
BTW, what I mean is that WSJ would have just a barebones website with all of the links to the content that makes the WSJ the WSJ informing you that you need to access it via the app. The links to the, sort of, 'not even AP' type content would be free.
How about privacy?

As you're a danish citizen you're probably aware of the data protection and privacy standards required in the European Union.

Example: Usage of Google Analytics in Germany is illegal (except you've a prior user acceptance of recording which is not possible for most websites).

Source: http://www.research-live.com/news/legal/google-analytics-ill...
read linked article first
read comments first
You can't get the onions taken off a burger at McDonalds?
> Mac OS X comes with a command-line terminal and a variety of other ways to mess with and, yes, break your system.

When I got my hands on mac for the first time I was frustrated by user interface, but when I finally located terminal I brightened up "Hey. It's unix. I know this!"

I can't even imagine how terrible would be to have cool device that can do much but it's sealed from tinkering.
I wanted to give the Python target better support for characters outside the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane. I.e., I was smoking crack.

"I think it shines when you are working in an environment with many projects with inter-dependencies between them"

I haven't seriously used Maven, obviously, but its basic design violates the separation of concerns principle. A combination of projects is simply a higher-level project, whose targets can perfectly well be created by a Makefile that downloads them. Maven is a shining example of what happens to people who don't understand recursion.
Firstly these are not loans or insurance policies. Credit Default Swaps (as well as other financial instruments) are used to hedge your position. Maybe CDS do need regulation, but that's another discussion.

To reduce this risk, trades are collaterized, (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/collateral.asp) and that's what GS called on AIG, and AIG couldn't pay any more and asked the government for help.

e.g If you took a bet with Joe Sixpack for $10M and after the first day, the market moved in your favor say $1M, then based on the contract, Joe would have to give you $1M as collateral. If the following day it moved $2M in Joes favour you would have to give Joe $3M (his original $1M + $2M)

All banks do this. This is nothing special that GS did. The monies involved are FAR greater than $10M so that really everything has to be collaterized.
Looks great but how are you different from Clicktale? Are you competing primarily on pricing?
The fun-part: 99,9% of end-users don't care about any of what you just said. They care about being able to get a fancy touchscreen handset with "apps and all" for $99. That's how android is gaining initial market share.

I personally have a G1 and yes, it sucks. But I've also seen the progress they made during the one year I have owned it and it's quite impressive, to say the least.

Your assessment that android is not up there with the iPhone yet is correct. But the nexus is much closer to the iPhone than you make it out to be. For each of the shortcomings you mention there are also upsides (multitasking!). I'm giving it 2-3 generations before the android handsets surpass the iPhone. Unless apple comes up with some big changes ofcourse - like introducing multitasking which will be considered a basic smartphone feature soon.

If history has taught us anything then that open always wins. If the apple closed platform manages to suppress the android open platform perpetually then that would be a first.
interesting. was it easy to set up on app engine?
It does. Works under GreaseKit on Safari too.
We won't, but this is a discussion regarding Apple and their policies regarding the Iphone/Ipad and not whether or not we should buy an Iphone/Ipad tomorrow. You are making the "if you don't like America, you can just get out" argument where you discourage discussion of criticism by reminding everyone that if they are going to criticize, then they should shut-up and not participate in the discussion.
This is the future of computing.
Brain has ability to adapt and change through life
I'm with you; I have no idea what that headline is supposed to mean.
I've done a bit of work with tries and hash functions and found that in-memory tries are almost universally faster than in-memory hashes, no matter how good the hash function is.

The difference though is on average around 20-30% faster if both implementations are well optimized. But they come with lots of downsides that need to managed well, tries explode into memory very quickly requiring all kinds of memory optimizations to the naive tries to keep the tree depth short (usually with a small hash on the leaves). I remember building an in-memory trie library once in Perl that outperformed a native C hash library by 70%. The development team's jaws dropped when my code was running, they were insisting it wasn't actually doing anything at all and I was faking the output. "There is no way Perl code can outperform our C." It was an interesting learning experience all around. Suffix trees likewise are insane for full text searching.

Hashes on the other hand have a few benefits, they are more compact in memory, on average have fast lookups (though if you try and constrain the hash table growth algorithm too much the can spend a lot of time on both collisions and on table growth operations) and have many many more high quality implementations in most standard libraries, including many very good and very fast on-disk hashes that only consume another few percentage points (single digits usually) off of speed.

The problem with tries is not that they are fast, there really isn't anything faster (in memory) that I'm aware of for lookup and retrieval problems. But tries are like sports cars, really fast, but lots of downsides. Hashes are like an upper end practical family car.

If you try and put the trie on disk, you end up with all sorts of problems that you don't really see in modern on-disk hash implementations. Coming off of disk, hashes tend to be the better option (in fact many of the on-disk trie interfaces I've seen actually just use hashes for the on-disk portion and optimize for tree depth in memory to keep things small).

So it depends, if the set of things you want to use for lookups is relatively small and you can cram it all into memory in a raw trie, it'll be a bit faster. If the set is big, and you want to use it off of disk, go with a hash.

Also, if the values you wish to store don't map well to a trie, like floating point numbers, you pretty much have to go with a hash. Fortunately, the hash function in that case is really easy ;)
From what I heard the corruption in China has decreased due to mulit-prong approach to fight it there. Public execution/long jail, increased wage, more media exposure, forced financial disclosure, anti-corruption agencies in multi-levels with broad power, and other measures. It helps that the government takes anti-corruption up as one of the top priorities in its agenda.
IPad Will Be Huge, Just Not With People Like Me
Why men don't listen
Well, I love cars and like having one at my disposal. But yeah, driving to work would be awful, especially if it was more than a few kilometres. I can't fathom why some seem to think it's preferable. Personally I won't take a job that's more than a 20 minute train ride from the station 2 minutes from my apartment, and I resent losing even that amount of time. A hour-long commute in gridlocked traffic would drive me nuts.

Investment in public transport is expensive, sure, but it's better than the other option - forcing the costs to the individual level, where everything is far less efficient, not least in lost time.
Carboxymethyl cellulose! This article is good, but flawed. There are no conclusive studies that link higher intakes of fat to higher rates of heart disease... but higher intakes of fat AND carbohydrates are a different story. Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Scienc...
I sympathize with the substantive criticism, but let's not pull a Reddit.
The best part about this is that you don't have to go find someone to get these notes. If you have a printer, you can just print them out yourself, how many ever you may want. I'm a bit sceptical of all the success stories though. I'm going to try this with the local traffic policeman the next time he pulls me up, and check his reaction.
Really depends where you live, in some places it's not really practical to get around everywhere you need to go without a car, either that or it takes a large amount of time longer. For example my girlfriends would take about 2 hours to get to with a combination of trains and a walk yet takes me about 20 minutes to drive.
So what your saying is that the CEO who used to run the most successful bank on Wall St and probably knows more about financial markets than the majority of people shouldn't be used to run the FED?

Who would you want to run the FED? An elected politician? :)
True, but also is nightmarish to ship anything there.
Because producers A/B test their food, and rapidly find that (a) things that increase shelf stability at the price of freshness don't cause consumers to buy less, and (b) things that increase increase perceived sweetness, saltiness, and unctuousness do cause consumers to buy more.

In any mainstream market there's room for a cost leader than operates at atypical economies of scale, and for several narrow-line high price niche producers. People who shop at Safeway aren't going to pay $10 for frozen pilaf. You're either going to be driven inexorably towards cheap, highly shelf-stable, highly marketable products, or you're competing at Whole Foods.

Cooks Illustrated finds this all the time when they test ingredients. They don't always pick the sweetest (say) tomato sauce, but the hyper-organic natural brand with no additional sweetener often comes in last. And that's a test panel of chefs.
A 'Craigslist' for the Twitter generation...
Apple May Build a Search Engine to Shield iPhone Data From Google