skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know this specific situation, but NPR's This American Life just did an episode about a hedge fund called Magnatar. IF the description was accurate (authorities will have to determine that), this was the scenario:

Magnatar aggressively bought the crappiest traunches of CDOs so that banks would be convinced to create more CDOs. The banks could then sell them, saying "even the crappiest traunches are selling like hotcakes - you can confidently buy these less-risky traunches."

But actually, even the least-risky traunches were VERY risky, and Magnatar was pushing to have riskier stuff included in the higher-level traunches, setting them up to fail. Meanwhile, Magnatar's inevitable losses on the crappy traunches were nothing compared to the bets (CDOs) they were taking against the CDO as a whole.

They might invest $10 million in the crappy traunches and effectively put an $100 million insurance policy on the CDO as a whole.

A good analogy would be if you bought houses next to a dam you thought would burst, thereby convincing developers to build more such houses, and you then took out large insurance policies on all the houses in the neighborhood. Except that you're not allowed to take out insurance on houses you don't own, which is sane, but you ARE allowed to buy credit default swaps on CDOs you don't own, which is a recipe for disaster.

So to the CDO investors in THOSE deals, at least, what the brokers told them was "these investments are rated as super-safe and everybody is buying them - the magic of bundling takes away the risk of the underlying mortgages."

When the reality was, the brokers KNEW that the CDOs were created with the help of someone who wanted them to fail, and the ratings agencies were being paid by the people who wanted the investments rated well. (Another insane situation - it would be like if the food safety inspectors were paid by McDonalds when they came out to check things. How can they be objective?)

Yes, there were investors who saw the crisis coming. But the banks did completely omit the fact that the investments were created, in part, by people who WANTED them to fail. If they had been up front about that, nobody would have bought them. So they lied, and had ratings agencies to back their lies.

Not exactly a situation where the investor has a reasonable chance to make informed decisions.
Interestingly enough, the "It's a UNIX operating system" moment from Jurassic Park used real software. It's called fsn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
Thanks to sgrove.

I would never have launched this app. I was a lazy bum who took his own sweet time (2 weeks) to finally add the print button and launch the next day when you told me to :)

Thank you once again sean - without whom this app would have died as a rails3 tryout app in my netbook.
Difficult to apply if you are content and need nothing.
I tried it. Don't waste your time.
Will they have the guts to fine Goldman even one millionth of the amount they earned through the fraud? I seriously doubt it. For all intents and purposes, Goldman Sachs IS the United States economy.
Does Your Computer Lab Scare Away the Girls?
WRT 3: If you think about it, a system has to be in "phone home" mode when it leaves (the school LAN in this case) for an anti-theft system to work.

As I recall from my interpretation of what the school's sysadmin said (and perhaps others), when the system connects to the net and it's not the normal LAN, it automatically starts taking pictures and sending those, screen shots and the usual (IP address etc.) to the school's servers. But I may be wrong.

ADDED: But I'm pretty sure I'm right, these are Macs with their hardwired "camera on" lights. Which many students noticed blinking and were assured was merely a "glitch". At least according to many accounts ... I guess we'll find out in the upcoming trials.

"Activated" in that context is using the theft server software to look at that already stored info. The only question then would be if administrators also looked at the pictures in one way or another outside of the scope of a "stolen" or whatever laptop.

Whichever, it sounds like some of the were having a little too much fun spying on their charges. Which should have told them something....

WRT 1: There's the theory that laptop use in the classroom is good. I think this is bogus (it's been much discussed in general) but they were working on that theory. Laptops also allow work to be completed away from fixed workstations, including obviously in this case at home. Use of the laptops was mandatory for various classes.

WRT 2: They did require some sort of collateral or payment, but still had situations where a laptop was out there without it. I think this lawsuit is one of those cases, or they are now claiming so.
Capitols attract protests. I work two blocks from my state capitol, and I see more protests than I have anywhere else. I doubt the percentage of government employment is as high here, but it's still decently high.

There are more variables involved than you're accounting for. I'd say your logic is more flawed than hers.
WePad
Hopefully history does not repeat itself this time around. I can see no compelling reason to sell (unless you count wealth and having an exit under your belt as one [or two]). What would they gain from selling this service to Yahoo, or anyone for that matter? Doing that would likely start the countdown to another great service destroyed by M&A.
Early Look at Twitter Annotations
I wish this article would get past the "disabled people don't use computers" straw man (at least, I hope none of OP's technical friends really espouse that) and address the reasons that designers marginalize accessibility in real decisions.

For one, most of us are ignorant as to just how many users fall outside the "able" use case, and in what ways. Among product managers, if you can't quantify that unusual use case, it's going to be termed the "10% case" or the "1% case". And that is the kiss of death.

For another thing, few of us have any idea how people outside the majority want to use software. It's just as ludicrous to assume that a legally blind person will use a cameraphone the same way as you do as to assume that she won't use a cameraphone at all. Perhaps she's far more likely to use it for document scanning, and far less likely to demand the option to apply a wacky sepia tone effect to her photos.

Getting the answers to these questions into designer's heads is going to have more impact than any number of "come on, you guys" appeals.
What Programming Langauge Are You Learning?
I'm always studying or learning some programming language. Lately I've been studying x86 assembly using NASM. What programming language are you learning?
Well it's an insane offer, if they don't take it they are insane...IMO
The space is getting crowded...
I thought this was a great quote from the Anti-Mac article:

"The desktop metaphor assumes we save training time by taking advantage of the time that users have already invested in learning to operate the traditional office with its paper documents and filing cabinets. But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies."

It reminds me of a recent (non-computer related) incident in my own life. My son's preschool teachers recently had the students in my son's class do an art project where they made phones out of two pieces of construction paper and a piece of yarn. The two pieces of construction paper were cut to look like a old Bell telephone handset and base. I'm sure some of you can see where this is going... the amusing, to me at least, result was that all of the children followed directions and built their project, but couldn't identify what it was. Most of them had never seen telephones with a cord and couldn't figure out how an object too big to fit in your pocket was supposed to be a phone. :-)

I think this illustrates a long term problem with computer interfaces that mimic real world objects and/or interactions, even in the simple case of icons that resemble real-world objects. The real world changes. We haven't had to deal with that much yet, because visual computer user interfaces have only been prevalent so recently. But as time wears on, I think this is only going to get more awkward.

As an example related to my story above, both the iPhone UI and the Android UI use an icon that looks like an old Bell telephone handset to represent the dialer. That image still makes sense to my generation, but IMHO to my kids it's just gonna look like a wierd abstract symbol. Similarly, many applications use an icon that looks like a Rolodex to represent the "phonebook" application. Heck, I think I've got co-workers who've never seen a Rolodex!.
going to Mars does not get you a new subway
Well a decent undo would fix that
...and try to cherry-pick some cool ideas for dialogs...

See, I think that's part of the problem. Dialogs pretend that the computer is something that can engage in conversation. But computers don't understand human and (many) humans don't understand computer. So the illusion that computers can engage in these 'dialogs' only exacerbates the problem by perpetuating miscommunications.

I think what interfaces need to strive for is a different model of how the user is expected to interact with the computer. It used to be that most people worked with creating and editing files, but I think modern use has shifted towards navigating between places -- unfortunately the old UI paradigm of file management is still dominant among a significant portion of modern software.
SSDs do degrade by around factor ten (!) in write performance when full, although not in read performance. (Tested this with an x25-m).

Sadly, recovering from a fragmented SSD on OSX right now involves opening the machine and booting linux. (I tried that, and it works: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=841182)
that would be great
If they had misrepresented their deal, then yes. If Goldman Sachs lied about matters material to the valuation of the deal then they've committed fraud.
I would like to agree... I can't quite agree with all points

Permanent delete: Believe me, you can fill up anything. Space exists to be filled. Junk multiplies.... XD That said I am looking into deduplicating WORM storage for my own use.

Disk full / charged more: Not an appropriate business model for many customers. It's hard enough to keep a cap on your phone bill where you only have to worry about 2 or 3 factors (time used, time of day, distance). On a disk, god knows what wants to store temporary and permanent files, it's not immediately clear how much space each picture or movie or song file will take...
> Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily happen.

I took it that GP is stating that we shouldn't only consider this to be a big deal if nude photos show up. We shouldn't have to hope that the 'child porn' card is played to have people suffer real consequences for what they did at that school.
What's the issue really? There are three things mentioned, none of which is very controversial (okay, so part of the last one is).

* noatime - which is a standard setting on Linux these days

* Remove the hibernate file - which is valid, if you know the tradeoffs. And the author does describe them sufficiently.

* Move temporary files to ramdisks - this is a pretty common speedup too. The controversial part is what to put in the ramdisk.
What? Long lines are hard to read. That is a fact. If you want some life examples just go to a random news site.

My browser is fullscreen as almost all my applications are if I use them. It would be silly to small-window it just to make a website more readable.
Yes. This renews my fury about the bank bailouts.

You know what's REALLY too big to fail? Capitalism. And rewarding market failure is the surest way to take it down.
"Can you do it with an iPhone?"

Yes, the blind community are quite positive about their iPhone experiences. Last month, Artur Ortega, an accessibility evangelist at Yahoo, demonstrated how he uses an iphone in every day life.

Effectively the touchscreen is a big thumb-pad, and using easy to understand gestures he is able to use most of the functionality on the phone, including the Safari browser.

The main limitation of the iPhone, currently, is the inaccessibility of the Facebook application. Pity since the first Facebook app on the iPhone had decent accessibility.

Apple have done an interesting job on iphone accessibility. It's one of the rare devices where the screen reader is built into the operating system, thus essentially free.
The broader CA unemployment rate is relevant, but I can't see the special concern about unemployment in a few low-population CA counties.
\usepackage{float}
...
\begin{document}
...
\begin{figure}[H]

But LaTeX is often better at determining where a figure should go. There is usually no reason it has to be right after a certain paragraph - books and magazines certainly don't do that. It's just another thing to get used to coming from Word.
The district has said it turned on the camera in Robbins' computer because his family had not paid the $55 insurance fee and he was not authorized to take the laptop home.

This is puzzling. First of all, if he didn't pay the fee, why did he even have access to it to take it home? Secondly, if you already know where the laptop is and who has it, what's the point of turning on the camera? (Other than to satisfy your penchant for voyeurism)
They are all pretty much designed to minimize the amount of writes to the SSD. This is more about extending the longevity of the SSD than anything else.
It’s certainly not world class but its still not the worst I’ve seen around here. Give the guy some constructive critique, give him a chance.
On the contrary, I actually enjoy that part. That makes the "story" of mixergy more interesting and makes the thing more personal.

If he would stop that, I would not watch
Your use of the words "intuitive" and "revert" in this context betray that your models are driven by how you expect centralized version control to work.

While Git and Mercurial are nearly isomorphic in implementation, their UIs differ significantly because they're written with different models of DVCS in mind.

Basically, I would argue you haven't fully grokked Git. To the extent that I have understood Git's model, I have found it extremely insightful; if you want this insight, you should spend a little more time trying to understand it before giving up on it.
Quite funny, I read this comment, then clicked the link (Missed most of this interview), and heard Andrew ask "And can I ask you, what can I do to improve?" Timing was impeccable ;)

Here's my 2c:

I clicked on the link, and am in "Live interview chat #3", with 2 other people. I hate it when chatrooms overflow and create other rooms. Makes me feel unwanted :(

I'd also really like to see more interaction with viewers. Pick up questions from chat. Maybe if the person being interviewed says something controversial, ask the viewers if they agree or not (Have a spot poll).

Keep up the good work though, always useful bits of info in each interview. And I much prefer video to a transcript.
It would be juicier if she mentioned more about how Paul and her get along. I bet that co-founder relationship is at the heart of YC. How many co-founders used to date anyways? Maybe its private.. but the most interesting stories are.

Anyways, great interview and cant wait to read her next edition of FAW!
Football News: The defender attempted to pass
She could have asthma or emphysema. No reason to assume breathing issues are weight related.
Actually an awful lot of people protested against this kind of thing when it was George W. Bush doing it.
I can't believe how insensitive you are. Do you know how many kids that computer you're using could feed? Sell that computer and buy orphan food. Right now. Otherwise you're Hitler.
"Sure, sure, we'll take your horse bets. You think the horse will win, this guy thinks the horse will lose. Place your bets and we keep the fees.

Oh, you lost? Too bad. Yeah, we forgot to tell you that the other guy knew your horse was poisoned. Yeah. He poisoned it himself. We saw him do it - we helped him, really. Oh well.

Security guards? Oh, they work for the other guy. He pays 'em. Tough luck for ya, though, kid, real tough luck.

You win some, you lose some, eh?"
HTML5 And Filling Gaps Between Web and Desktop/Mobile Apps
I also second this. Same experience with me.
Good job! You guys hit every big point I was hoping for. I think it's cute JL and PG have similar mannerisms :)
This is not how US politcs works. If you agree with a side on some points and disagree with others you are ostracized by all groups. It is stupid, but unfortunately the US is a place where (for example) you are pro-death penalty and anti-abortion or pro-abortion and anti-death penalty. If you are pro both or anti both, almost everyone hates you.
I don't live in the states so I'm wondering if this stats could also imply that more people are becoming self employed/starting their own business?
Surprisingly? What, people thought it could only be used to run approved apps?
http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/
See, I don't know. I sort of understand the appeal of having a one-sentence license you can just give people, but at the same time I like attribution, and the WTFPL doesn't offer that. In fact, it explicitly gives it away. Are people allowed to take my work and pretend its theirs? I don't know. I'm guessing it depends on the legal system. I definitely don't like that.

It's not like BSD or MIT licenses are much longer (and the size of my LICENSE file doesn't keep me up at night). And "you can do WTF you want" is about as short as "it's MIT-licensed", and carries almost the same meaning.
Mapreduce in a bash script
Advertising? Beer advertising in banners? Joining with a beer review newspaper?
I sometimes wonder if this fad of having a massive gloss mark right across screens will pass. It's like they're trying to say "You can be absolutely sure this will reflect everything so that you can't see anything on the actual screen".

When displayed on websites they just seem to take it to extremes. Half the device is black and half is white? :/

Hardware looks quite sexy.
I can not agree more on the point of the Simplified Billing and Monetization Mechanisms. In my opinion it is one of the greatest contributors of the Apple app store success and should be copied in the SaaS world as soon as possible as often as possible.
Looks nice. One suggestion, when you change from products to services, it could change the quantity to hours and per unit to per hour as a default?
You know, having taking a look at FSN's home page I really don't think I would want file sizes represented in either of the ways it does.

I've been using Eagle Mode for about a week - a zoomable UI - and while it's ugly I really can't praise the file manager highly enough. It is a fantastic improvement over the best conventional file managers, but representing file size visually would ruin it.
http://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
Hey guys, so I'm in front of the comp now and these are just my thoughts. if you have something youd like to add (like an actual paragraph) leave the comment here and ill insert it+attribute you. I'm pretty sure there are more gaps and things I don't know.
> As I recall from my interpretation of what the school's sysadmin said (and perhaps others), when the system connects to the net and it's not the normal LAN, it automatically starts taking pictures and sending those, screen shots and the usual (IP address etc.) to the school's servers. But I may be wrong.

Wouldn't it make more sense to query the school system to see if the laptop is flagged as stolen before using the camera?
This is going to sound a tad trite but - the answer is all of them that I use. I never stop learning new ideas and it is just great when you get to switch a technique or construct fro one language to another.

One thing I have learned is that there is nothing that you can do in one language that you can't do in another (assuming Turing complete of course and excluding the odd API call with particularly strange data types - is that cheating?)
The site is also listed in dmoz.org (almost impossible to get included in these days)

The biggest part of "how he did it" was creating something people wanted to share and link too. The feature on killerstartups got him past PR2, which I haven't been able to do after a year on any of my sites. Then Shady Email got him to 4.

It was much less hard work than I was hoping, it was much more the development of a fun idea related to another previously successful site, Shady URL
I think they thought that they would get a photo of the thief and it would make it easier to prosecute. (And giving that photo to the police would put that person on their radar as well).
"This sort of app should not have been rejected in the first place — shouldn’t even have been considered borderline. Resubmission and hoping for a different reviewer sometimes works in cases like this, but at this point, there’s no way for us to know whether Fiore is getting reconsidered only because of the publicity stink. It’s possible that it really is Apple’s policy to reject any app related to political satire. It’s also possible that it is not. That’s the core problem — that we don’t know."

— http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/16/fiore-resubmit
Is Groupon The Next Google?
Google Suggest Becomes More Local
Details:

http://www.neofonie.de/files/product_specifications_WePad_10...

Positives:
USB ports, Java, Flash, Android apps, built on Linux, Webcam

Negatives:
Less battery life than iPad (6 hours vs 10 hours)
Here are two ideas that could be interesting, while keeping the product bloat-free:
- Add an option to print the invoice in another language;
- Add a link to a PDF version (although I could "print to PDF" if I weren't lazy).

I'll bookmark it for sure, though I am waiting for the French version of the invoices. I've had such an idea a while ago but never really went forward with it, you beat me at it ;) By the way, I love the name!
Exactly! We should file suit against the US Treasury for propping up Goldman and others with our tax money. They defrauded us by forcing us bankroll the bailout while providing limited upside for the massive risk we took.
Non-Apple's Mistake
> No one owns guns.

Bullshit. Canada has extensive gun ownership.

Why they don't have as much violent gun crime is an interesting question though.
I'm not talking about no one receiving output. I'm talking about this case:

You write a program called "thefirstprogram". Who cares what it does. However, a user is pushing its (standard) output into a second program called "asecondprogram". Now imagine "asecondprogram" has melted, but not terminated. It's basically in a screwed up state.

So the run command was:

bash-2.04> thefirstprogram | asecondprogram

I believe the flushing scheme advocated in the article is to be considered harmful, as you will in fact never see an error message if asecondprogram gets in a bad state and stops reading from stdin (and the buffers fill up).

I do agree the flushing makes for nicer ordering of error messages, but is more fragile.

Only used flushed output when you really need flushed output otherwise you'll get less resilience in the case of meltdown of cooperating programs.