skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a novel legal theory. Goldman is being sued because they did not disclose that people on the opposite side of a trade had opposing opinions. Basically, they facilitated a transfer of wealth from the stupid to the smart, and now they're getting punished.

If Goldman made some kind of material misstatement about the quality of the products, that's a different matter. But so far, there's no indication of that. They helped execute a deal between two consenting, informed parties; suing them is like suing a condom manufacturer because they facilitated the one-night stand that turned into an unpleasant relationship.
Another one I see all of the time is "there" being used for "their." Like fingernails on a blackboard (do those even exist anymore?) for me.
America's Army comes to mind: They could learn strategies from players by creating scenarios and levels that exist in real life and see if any highly skilled players develop better strategies than they have had the time to develop.
How to Create and Present a Kickass Technical Workshop
Isn't that for the best, though? If you want to communicate a moral message, you should target it so the people most in need of it will consume it as part of their daily routine, instead of having to go out of their way to find it.
I'm aware that they're trying to monetize with ads. Everyone is trying to monetize their social media service with ads.

The problem with that approach is that social media is not really a value-added product in its own right - it may facilitate conversation between participants, but it's the conversation, not the platform, that users derive value from.

The question that commercial social media faces is how to monetize emergent conversations between third parties. The typical answers are either pay-for-play or third-party ads. The former drives users away; the latter interrupts their conversations, also driving users away.

Really only Google has succeeded at an ad-based model, and they've done it not by attempting to develop their own walled-garden social media platform, but by recognizing that the platform is the internet itself, and developing their services as a layer that augments the entire network, regardless of what users are specifically looking for. I don't think Twitter is comparable - it may plausibly be a fad, but the internet itself certainly isn't.
I really don't believe anything anybody says when they use phrases like "tea-bagging", "tree hugger",or "pinko". I have lived in rural areas most of my life, and I don't think any of the current discussion is over these people's heads. I think it is a comfortable way of dismissing and diminishing people. It makes you feel superior. This has happened since the beginning of the country (ignorant colonists) through the ages (anti-war protestors, suffrage).
It's a different Paulson: "John Paulson [founder and president of Paulson & Co. referenced in the SEC link] is not related to former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson." (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paulson)
I launched Penolo (a twitter app for sharing sketches: http://penolo.com) a little under 3 weeks ago; it's already PageRank 4 (if you can believe the checkers).

Didn't do any link-building, just happened.

I guess give people a reason to link to you: saves you a few months of effort.
I should point out, I linked to it from my personal site, which is a Pagerank 5, and probably didn't hurt... :)
Yes you do, and linprocfs must be mounted.
You matter more than you will ever know
Life imitating art and vice versa.

Sci-Fi has a great influence in developing new technology, as it's a great source of ideas. Take the moon landing as an example.

To follow on from the quote you gave above, the next stage is thought-control of machines. It's got it's own difficulties too though - it's very difficult to clear your mind to the degree necessary to control things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyrd0uOuyms
What is the real difference between this and what China was trying to do to gmail? The government wants to get access to private emails of people they don't like without having to demonstrate real evidence that the person has done anything wrong.

The biggest difference to my eyes is that the one targets "human rights activists who would like to bring down the government" while the other targets "terrorists".

Yeah, yeah. There is the whole "we're just going to take the emails". However China only went down that route after Western companies got leery of handing emails over due to the negative publicity that was incurred when Yahoo did so a few years back.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is that the mortgage securities were, in large part, designed by people who would benefit if they failed. It's like selling someone a lock that was designed by burglars.
The press is my biggest concern.

"Why is this not enough?" - this is a little higher Maslow's hierarchy then worries about jobs. Plus, the fourth estate has totally failed the people by not going after this. I am still amazed with a 24-hour news cycle how little is covered.
Really well written article, thanks for sharing. One thing I would change though:

"It is hosted under blog.whyspam.me because a subdomain’s PR goes towards the main site."

In my research and experience, its more beneficial for SEO to host your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com. The reason being that Google treats subdomains as different sites.

You're still linking from the blog to the main site, so a good bit of PageRank will pass through, but you might have an even better impact were the blog hosted on the same subdomain.

Cheers!
I thought the article was too critical. Some of the arguments they levy against companies like Xe and Pepsi were not well argued and degraded to a game of finger pointing.

It inferred that any company name that does not have at least some indirect relationship with what the company does is an immediate failure, citing company names like 'accenture'. Granted it isn't the greatest name, but 'Apple' tells me no more about what the respective company does than 'accenture'.

In a design class most of these arguments would never fly in a formal critique without some substantial reasoning behind them, which this article just doesn't have.
To me, many of the issues are the computer telling the user about stuff they shouldn't have to worry about. For example, wouldn't cloud computing solve most of these problems by not giving the responsibility for the problem to the user?

Change your battery
You shouldn't lose your work if the battery fails

Formatting this volume...
People would not do sys. admin themselves like this

Permanent delete
With storage so large nowadays, there is no particular reason to delete something for space reasons.

Disk full
Shouldn't happen, in the cloud it could never happen, you just get charged more. Gmail for example was designed never to get full.

Checking for software
In the cloud it would always be upto. date

Downloading messages progress bar
Well with web apps it's either loaded or it's not.

Of course these are not the only problems, but are the type that are most difficult for users because they are more about sys. admin than getting the task done.
To discourage misinformation, here's a copied and pasted summary for those who aren't going to read the whole thing:

According to the SEC's complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the marketing materials for the CDO known as ABACUS 2007-AC1 (ABACUS) all represented that the RMBS portfolio underlying the CDO was selected by ACA Management LLC (ACA), a third party with expertise in analyzing credit risk in RMBS. The SEC alleges that undisclosed in the marketing materials and unbeknownst to investors, the Paulson & Co. hedge fund, which was poised to benefit if the RMBS defaulted, played a significant role in selecting which RMBS should make up the portfolio.

The SEC's complaint alleges that after participating in the portfolio selection, Paulson & Co. effectively shorted the RMBS portfolio it helped select by entering into credit default swaps (CDS) with Goldman Sachs to buy protection on specific layers of the ABACUS capital structure. Given that financial short interest, Paulson & Co. had an economic incentive to select RMBS that it expected to experience credit events in the near future. Goldman Sachs did not disclose Paulson & Co.'s short position or its role in the collateral selection process in the term sheet, flip book, offering memorandum, or other marketing materials provided to investors.
Arstechnica also has a write up at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/in-multitasking-...
Paulson was Secretary of the Treasury, not Federal Reserve Chairman. There's a big difference; a Secretary of the Treasury is a normal Cabinet post subject to Congressional oversight, while the Federal Reserve basically isn't subject to oversight by anyone.
Good content drives good SEO, and good SEO drives people to your good content. It really is a chicken-and-egg scenario when it comes to search engine optimization. Ultimately is no way to artificially boost your position for long, and your content will have to drive visitors.
Classic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljv1knm9N4o#t=5m40s
The webcam story blowing up is probably a good answer to roc's question about "Why is this not enough?". If they find something that sends some rage into the community, then I would expect this to bubble up again.
How to write to stderr so people will like you
3D TV: Don't watch while drunk, tired, or pregnant
So true, part of reason why I loved The Screen Savers back in the day - there was pure chemistry with the cast. Even though they're rock stars individually, the cohesion made it what it was.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
Or...give people a reason to link to you and do a little work to get incoming links.

There are plenty of stories of people who had success just fall into their lap, but the vast majority have to work for it.

The whole "build it and they will come" story is fun to tell, but c'mon people, let's all be serious: marketing is at least 1/2 the work of building a successful site. Ignoring that only hurts you.
Is that a NUMA box?
Thanks, I've been wanting this feature. It's good I like it.

I'd rather the color of the friends names be the same orange as around the Y in the logo; it looks brighter on my monitor. And, I wish friends posts on the main page weren't quite as dark, and possibly not bolded. There, but more subtle.

Thanks again.
It's true in a lot of cultures. I know in pre-colonial Hawai'i, being huge was attractive. I hear it was true in parts of Africa, too. It's not true in the states just because the bar isn't that high to get 2-3k calories per day. I think it's generally true that standards of beauty follow whatever implies a higher standard of living. Look at America today: facial and hair complexion to show quality, not just quantity, of food; muscle tone and tan to show spare time out of a desk job doing exercise; and of course flamboyant displays of money, the ultimate objective measure of success.
I actually trained myself to use the arrow keys because of my RSI. Moving my hands away from the home row slowed my typing down a touch and alleviates some of the constant pressure on the fingertips.

But now that my RSI is manageable as well (two words: wrist breaks) perhaps I should try going back to hjkl.
oh.. tequilas, tacos, mariachis and sky level corruption :)

im from mexico, its actually worst than what you think ;)
If any SEOs are out there reading this, we're looking for a consult at my startup. Check profile.
I have this problem with Ruby and even moreso with Perl. It's not that I don't understand the reasoning behind $GLORIOUS_FEATURE, my question is how come I don't miss it when I have to go program in other languages? And how come even though the other language doesn't have $GLORIOUS_FEATURE it sometimes still works better in the other language?

Perl <-> Python is my canonical example; I program professionally in Perl and only as a hobby in Python, so the time spent with each language is probably about 5:1 (but still quite substantial with both, as I've been programming with Perl for a long time), so I'm actually more familiar with Perl if anything. Perl is shot through with features, syntactic nuances, and all sorts of magical features both by default and in CPAN, and I even use some of them (selectively), but if it's all so awesome how come I never miss any of it in Python? (And how come the feature I really miss is the ability to use objects as the key for hashes, which Python has and Perl does not? Yes, I know about the CPAN modules, which are hacks and not something I trust, not like Python's built-in support.)

When I look at languages, I want to look at and talk about the global effects the language has on my programming. It is far too easy to get caught up in how awesome this little feature is and how awesome that little feature is and miss what global effect it is having on your code.
The SEC alleges that GS committed fraud by not informing investors that the "3rd party objective manager" who cherry-picked the assets that were packaged in the CDO was at the same time betting against the very assets he picked.

That, and recorded conf calls show that GS analysts as trying to convince rating agencies to inflate the ratings of the underlying assets in the CDO.
Sure, this example is bad, but can you really not see the value of an abstraction based on the behavior of the kind of block of code that is attached to an if or for statement?
Targeted ads on social networks make big money
I thought it was funny.
Populus.
See "Rich men do have more kids" (http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/rich-men-do-have-...)
Do you know any concise resource comparing current private space transportation businesses? I'd prefer reading one run-down article over investigating each company individually.
U.S. Accuses Goldman Sachs of Fraud
Making sure that there is plurality in the media is a task of the state. That’s my opinion, alright. I have thought that through. (That first sentence is also a true statement in at least some countries.)
Ask HN: How should we approach remote code interviews?
We've nearly exhausted local candidates and are starting to look at remote interviewing. How do other companies approach this? We've got a small programming problem that we have people do if they pass a phone interview, but I sure do miss the ability to put them up on the board and see how they work out a problem.

Flying the person in for a final interview is an option, but are there other screen sharing strategies or something like that to see how people approach an on the spot problem?
Ask HN: UK Election thoughts
I'm interested to hear what people here think about the UK election, particularly with the first televised debate last night, and the fact that only the Lib Dems oppose the Digital Economy Bill.
If this is indeed similar to the ProPublica report (referenced in another post in this thread), then this isn't a case of someone in the "opposite side of a trade". The trade would not have existed without the hedge fund committing to buy the worst parts of it - the party buying the worst tranche was called the "sponsor" for a reason.

Not only that, but the sponsor wasn't short on just their portion of the trade. They were short on the entire CDO. They've got a bet that pays off if you crap out. Without that bet, you don't even get the prospectus - you don't even know about the security in the first place.

I recommend reading the ProPublica article.
I don't see where tgerhard claimed that was a desirable outcome. I only see tgerhard reporting on the opinion others have from a position of knowledge.

I live in Michigan, half my family works for car companies one way or another, and I was and am still against the auto bailouts. Locally healthy for me, perhaps, but in my opinion still bad policy for the country. (My point not being that I want to debate that point, but that location does not have to dictate opinion.)
True. But marketing != hype.
I bust my ass Monday through Friday; in any given week, I've built networks, deployed servers, launched new services, designed fliers and marketing or promotional materials, interacted with scores of clients, sat in on meetings involving everything from personnel to computer security issues, cleaned up hacked websites, scoured workstations clean of viruses, and sometimes even presented seminars locally.

On Saturday and Sunday, the phone gets quieter. I typically only get a couple of calls. I get to sleep in until 8 or so. I get to work on my truck or my speedster, or the garden, or any one of my other projects. Friday evenings, my girlfriend and I go climbing down in Rancho Cordova.

I'm not less busy on Saturday and Sunday, but the stuff I do on those days gives me the energy to get started on Monday again.

So, yes, thank "god" it's Friday.

(Hmph.)
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Just to be clear I wasn't actually disagreeing with you. Just adding to what you said.

So you don't like the phrase "tea-bagging" and you don't like someone seemingly decreasing a group of people's relative value. I'm on your side.

Saying "tea-bagging" was lazy. Forgive me. As for the second cause for offense (perhaps too strong a word), well someone has to be qualified to make decisions. That's why we're a republic and not a democracy, because a mob (a group of people) can be ignorant.

And keep in mind that I was talking about technical understanding, not intelligence.

Anyway, I don't really have time for this right now, which is part of the reason I wasn't too careful choosing my words before. And this post will probably turn out to be not-so-fleshed out too, which I don't really care about right now.
DIY Mushroom Growing
Obama selected Joe "I wrote the Patriot Act" Biden as his VP. This is the same Joe Biden who tried to ban Turing machines because they could be used to encrypt files that the government would be unable to crack.

Plenty of people knew this, but voted for Obama anyway.

For many people, "the government is violating privacy rights" is not a genuine policy position. It's just a club to beat their political opponents with.
The Times article says that the SEC has been investigating those deals for months. Has this been in the news and I just missed it?
One nude photo of a student changing, and this is going to turn to a shitstorm.
You could do an iChat/Skype combination with Google Docs/Etherpad. All you need to know is in the face, so a webcam can be fine to see how they react and such.
The use case mentioned can be fulfilled by another feature ruby already has, if I'm not mistaken: first-class continuations. Simply have "return" be syntactic sugar for invocation of a contination that is implicitly created by a "def"-defined function. No need for a separate type of object, just add some syntactic sugar and hey presto.
Too little. Too late.
It was a private school, wasn't it?
Not to be a downer or anything, but do you think this would encourage voting cabals? If I noticed every post my friends added, I'd probably end up upvoting them quite a bit more, and perhaps quite artificially.
Hacker says that Microsoft's security process is better than Apple's
My understanding is that this is, in a word, wrong.

Equinix, Switch and Data, TelX, perhaps. Leaving managed services, perhaps. Building their own, no.
I agree. I've even noticed this with python <-> java. Python is great and has a lot of time saving features, but I haven't really noticed that my work is better or more well tested than what I do with Java. I also haven't even noticed that the work gets done any faster, and I've been doing a lot of python lately.
I disagree, but I can see where you're coming from based on the examples I picked (which were all biased toward operating system maintenance actions, given the source material).

From the point of view of a naive user, there are new types of interactions that can have massive social implications: e.g. changing Facebook relationship status. At the moment, the notification of that status change to the user is pretty minimal. It does not, for example, make clear that that change will be propagated to, say, over 500 people, and all of their contacts.

There may be people who are more concerned about their social standing than whether they've accidentally formatted a volume or not.
Then again, you can't call recent startups successes until they've had longevity. Cromemco, Northgate, Osborne, et al.

If you pay attention to TV, you can find people who starred in a TV series and then basically disappeared after that. Some of these series didn't even last a season, But when they got the part and were doing it, they probably thought they had succeeded. Did they?
I worked on a DARPA project to do exactly this called the Policy Analysis Market. Ask me how well that turned out ;)
Because we've been "heading to" a paperless society for 35 years now, and we've still not reached it.

Sometimes a piece of paper is just _better_ than a laptop/tablet/PDA/phone.
Anything with "diet" in the name is not automagically healthier.
I have to put my vote in for the Kinesis Advantage as well. For anyone reading this that might be on the fence about the cost, you will not be disappointed. I was suffering from excruciating pain in my forearms, wrists and fingers. That pain disappeared almost as soon as I started using the Kinesis. For me, the big difference is having a wide split between home rows. This keeps my arms almost completely parallel and alleviates the forearm pain. The key layout is a little funky at first, but what I have realized is that each individual key is positioned exactly where your fingers naturally curl and extend. The other change I made was to add a trackball. I keep the trackball on the left and my regular mouse on the right and switch up usage as often as I can.
Do as I say, not as I do?
Is that still a popular way to communicate moral messages?

Even coming from Disney in the first place the message came across as the old argument of a priest-of-past-sins being preferable to a priest-of-purity.
I guess in my experience with this site, the vast majority of folks are capable of viewing life and the world around them from many different perspectives, which is why the conversations are so engaging, and why I keep coming back frequently.
Assuming that the techniques the author describes really work, is it any different from taking a pill to relieve the pain? I tend to operate under the assumption that when our bodies present us with pain, then we are doing something to deserve it. Instead of attempting to remove the pain we should be trying to discover what we are doing to cause it.

Vacation, chiropractor, surgeons, acupuncture, massage, micro-breaks...but no exercise? A light dumbbell routine and a few walks or runs per week can work wonders on RSI and any other aches and pains we encounter while at the computer.

There is a certain "common knowledge" among computer workers that RSI is the result of poor ergonomics. This fails to explain why some people can work for long periods of time under conditions of atrocious ergonomics, but not experience the same pain that I did.

In my experience, an increase in RSI and back pain correlate directly with my level of physical activity outside of the work environment. A combination of fitness and ergonomics have absolutely made the difference.
Public school. Harriton High School in Lower Merion School District
i made this a while ago: http://360.io, its more of an annoying conversation thing on top of links and shit than just a shortener
Given the healthy options didn't exist up until a few years ago I'd call that moving towards healthier menu items. Of course they're going to try to appeal to already existing audience that wants junk food but in the end we've gone from "no healthy options" to "a variety of healthy options" in less than a decade while the junk food items have declined (McDonalds doing away with Super Sizing as just one example)