skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Started giving your personal information away to third parties without your consent.

Deliberately ignored your privacy settings when doing so; even if you had your account set to the strictest privacy settings, they still started giving your information away to Microsoft, Pandora, and Yelp.

Slightly longer ago, suddenly changed everyone's privacy settings from defaulting to sharing most information only within your network (college, city, etc) to sharing it publicly.

Basically, they've repeatedly reduced the privacy of your account, causing you to reveal potentially embarrassing information to a much wider audience than you had intended. In some cases, you could get the old privacy settings back, but only by laboriously going through many pages of privacy settings and resetting them, every time Facebook rolls out another such update.
Yeah well even Klingons settled for peace finally.. ;)
As I said it is completely off-topic.

I'm not trying to justify the Iranian regime, my father have dual Brazilian/Israeli citizenship and I do have the majority of my relatives living in Israel right now, I do not have any sympathy for Iran, but I still think we ignore some interesting facts (and useful if we are to understand the world around us) just because of animosities between countries or because governments needs to release propaganda against its enemies, this was for me the essence of this interview about North Korea.

And I do agree with you about Iran at large, but there are far more problems with Iranian foreign policy, specially in relations with its neighboring countries.
Just be careful with the optimism. Last time we had an "Economic Miracle", it proved more disastrous that the 10 plagues of Egypt.

In the mid 90's we more or less recovered from the last "miracle". The danger of surviving a near-fatal experience is to try to repeat it.
2010 Adidas Ayakkabi Modelleri
They did a lot of infrastructure work, to be fair. Brazil had a chaotic telecom structure. The Ethanol fuel ecosystem is also very interesting.
at the risk of soliciting downticks, caveat emptor surely? It's not like the underlying instruments were not known.

Edit: I can't believe Goldman really said - here's a basket of triple A's, when in fact they were junk. Expressing an opinion on whether they were likely to go up/down is a different matter. Of course a salesdesk is going to promote the investment in positive terms.
Try squeezing considerable value out of your iPod. It's much more likely that it will squeeze value out of you. You are still better off with 0 dollars in worthless stock.
Ask HN: Online learning model through competition
You're confusing two different launches discussed in the article. The X37B can stay in orbit for weeks, but the PGS test was a Minotaur IV launch from Vandenberg.
I think that he may also just be joking that an 'iPad-based portfolio' is not exactly 'conservative.' (I mean it's a brand-new product, it's still risky no matter how hot it looks to be in the market)
A "professor" that teaches writing skills that uses "gonna" and "gotta" in print.

If it's any consolation, prescriptive grammarians have always been wrong. :)
JSON is just a notation to structure information, not a query language. MongoDB uses JSON documents as specification for queries. Eg: The expression db.People.find({ name: Fred }); could be translated to the SQL: SELECT * FROM People WHERE Name = 'Fred'.
The cost of an Apple IIe in inflation-adjusted terms vs the same amount of stock back in the day... vs the price of an original working Apple IIe on ebay now?
True. But ironic.
Yeah but the real problem is spotting it in time. The sky is really big.
In _The Killing Star_ advance probes locate almost every settlement in the Solar System and every one is hit with relativistic projectiles. Earth itself is blanketed with an entire grid of such impactors -- from opposite directions, so the whole surface is bombarded. 99.9% of humanity dies in the space of several hours.

Since the projectiles are relativistic, there is no warning.
For reference, the law's URL, which was cited in slantyyz's reference, was out of date. Here is the current link; http://www.mass.gov/Eoca/docs/idtheft/201CMR1700reg.pdf
> If quality gets too bad, or prices get too high, someone is going to come and try to eat their lunch.

The problem is that in monopoly, things have to be really, really bad and prices must be really outrageous before anything changes. Healthy markets are the opposite - even a minor decrease in value creates a niche that is filled by a competitor.
What I meant was interpreted correctly by dschobel. I agree that Erlang is more appropriate for the case, however, being MongoDB an open-source project, I believe MongoDB will develop faster because more people will be empowered to make corrections and add new features.
i see some strange things in the truth tables.

first, the left and right operands are ordered differently. on second glance, this smells like gray code, so only one operand changes to the next line. nevermind my reaction here.

then, the NOT AND table contradicts what python evaluates the forms to.
I am relatively new to Python and wrote a Django app using string.format through and through. Then, I had to install it on our server... which apparently uses Python 2.4 and we can't upgrade at the moment. It all had to be changed to the printf style to be compatible... so, I think learning that is still relevant since it works in every Python version.
Could the launch be preparation for a strike on Iran?
Irony, then?
1) If the monopoly is used specifically to upkeep the monopoly, it's evil.

2) Any successful monopoly will grow to be a large corporation.

3) Corporations will try to upkeep any monopoly they've attained.
A lot of people mention Dive into Python. I'm curious, what are the opinions out there regarding this online Python book?

http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/python.html
I think that's disingenuous; and is the same point pg makes when he explains that wealth != money.

Take me for example; my nano has barely left my side for the last 2 and a bit years - I work best with music around :) it's worth a lot.
If it were up to me, you will not be on the first contact team! Not sure if this makes you better or worse than Gaius Baltar. He betrays humanity for nookie with someone who looks like Tricia Helfer.
I agree with you, and thats why I added the word "theoretically". :)
I wish they'd offer a home edition of mathematica that wasn't hundreds of dollars.
That's why we have courts, in this case it seems pretty clear that Goldman Sachs did materially misrepresent the nature of the instrument they were selling to their customers and colluded with Paulson to engineer something that Paulson could bet against.

Caveat Emptor is a fine thing and one should always be cautions when buying investment instruments,but outright fraud and deception through material omission strike at the credibility of the market itself.
"I thought JIT was a fundamental part of how Java works, so I'm a bit confused."

Suns JDK has had JIT since 1.2 (J2SE in marketspeak), but it is not a prerequisite for Java. It just speeds things up (after a short pause for compile to native).
What Microsoft Could Learn from Avatar
Syncing between machines (including phones).
I regularly read HN on three different computers; on my work desktop, on my home desktop and on my Android phone. These devices do not share browser history unfortunately.
It's said that it can already execute such large projects as Eclipse. Has anyone tried that and can compare the performance (and the memory resources it needs) to the Sun VM? I would love to see a VM which takes less memory and has better performance.
re Section 10.2:
I'd suggest defining operator precedence rather than asking the programmer to, for example, memorize tables of logical operations.
Teachers matter in twin study
(0 unread) Yahoo Mail, rikspears
Ah, and LLVM ftw!! :)
What is the future of the music industry?
Crowdfunding is part of the answer.
News report with more details on this study with a genetically sensitive design:

"Poor teachers may hamper good students: U.S. study"

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63L5MM20100422
PubSub messaging: scala, Redis , Akka Actors
On open source projects, the bulk of the work is done by a few core people. Mongo will progress faster simply because it's got a better core team.
The first example print statements in Zed's book have backticks (`foo`). I don't know Python, but I'm guessing those should be single ticks ('foo')?
Choosing a Good Titles for Research Paper
Students must have a decent topic, which they can discuss while presenting their term papers. Hence, they should make a list of good titles for research paper.
There's zero evolutionary reason for aliens to behave altruistically towards us.

If the aliens are still living in cities and orbital structures, then they'll want to wipe out a star faring human race. Any species capable of star travel can also accelerate and target enough low albedo impactors (perhaps relativistic) to wipe out a planetary or even system-wide civilization. There would be no warning, so there would be no possible deterrent. The only logical way to avoid genocide would be to strike first.

If the aliens have uploaded their consciousnesses and have all become spacecraft themselves, then we would be safer when encountering them. Wiping out such a civilization would be too difficult, so there would be a deterrent factor working on their behalf. There would be no need for them to act first to avoid genocide, and there would be no options in our case.
That is a risk. But if you don't mind rooting the phone, you can run Cyanogen and other's mods on it with plain Android. That way you will get the latest version really fast, if you feel you need it and is willing to sacrifice Sense.

Also Google is working on making future versions of Android modular, so users can download minor updates through Android Market. Big OS number changes will then hopfully come much more seldom and be reserved for major kernel updates and so on. Hopefully this will make it easier for HTC and others to release updates faster.
Maybe its for having it indexed by search engines. (I think HN disallows indexing of their site.)
The original "Lisp OSs":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)

http://www.unlambda.com/cadr/index.html
> The problem is that in monopoly, things have to be really, really bad and prices must be really outrageous before anything changes.

That's the theory, but do you have any examples of a company abusing monopoly power without government backing for any extended period of time? I don't know any examples of a non-government-backed company abusing monopoly power for any considerable length of time without losing market share.
Did Russian elementary and middle schools indeed require that students "do real proofs (and not the bullshit proofs of “geometry” courses)"? If so, what was the failure rate of students?

Secondly, what's "bullshit" about the proofs of "geometry" courses? And why do you put "geometry" in quotes?

Always requiring proofs in elementary and middle school is inappropriate for many reasons. I'll give a few. There's hardly sufficient time to demonstrate and exercise the mathematics as it is. Secondly, learning to do proofs properly are important only for those who will become academic mathematicians at universities.

The demonstration of proof in geometry class is both elegant, precise and appropriate.
These Good Research Topics Are The Key To Great Research Essays
Choosing good research topics is a very easy task if you are able to create a list of the possible topics you could write an essay about. The topics you choose should have a certain requirement.
My understanding is tech specs are generally used to maintain price points.

"Yes, it's the same price as last year's model but look at the specs."

When I first saw the iPad I immediately drew a comparison to two other technologies -- the netbook and the Kindle. I guess I did the tech specs for the iPad by proxy.
I agree, vim is overwhelming at first. It simply does not work like a new user expects... i.e., you can just start typing and using arrow keys.

Nano is much more straightforward.

What these people should really be using, though, is Kate on Linux, or Notepad++ in Windows. I gather that Textmate is the equivalent for Macs, but I've never used that personally.

Syntax highlighting and a multiple document interface goes a long way.
No http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt
Dan Savage declares May 20th "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"
I second Scite. My favorite features are the ability to print with syntax highlighting and copy to the clipboard as RTF with syntax highlighting.
My point exactly - the original quote is odd in making a comparison between SQL and JSON.
LMFAO!
Where did you get this from:
"GS has access to huge amounts of credit at zero percent interest from the Fed"??
whereas in fact:
They had "10 billion" shoved down their throats in Oct-Nov 2008, in exchange of preferred stock, with the condition that they had to take the money, and had to keep it for six months.

Which they repaid in full in April-May 2009 along with 23% interest. 23%!!! thats more per annum than a sub prime individual with no security would pay!

Your interests in what exactly? You don't even know the facts of your own investments.. if at all you would like to call it that. i guess you meant interest as in the 23%!

Go dig up the archives for 14 Sep 2008 - 30 Nov 2008, since I dont remember the exact date for the statements "We dont want or need any funds from the TARP".

Why not, because in Sep 2008 they had already raised 10 Billion from buffet. Not to cover their asses etc. but to use the money to make more money.

Of course this also brings up the question whether the motive of force funding GS was to save them or just get a slice of an awesomely lucarative delicious pie! something you the taxpayer profited from!

But of course you could have easily missed that, due to a beautiful blame shifting concept called "dissonant discomfort/cognitive dissonance". google it.

Question:
1. Which we the people are you referring to, the ones who understand issues, or just carry a vote without any knowledge?
2. If everyone understands the issue, I am sure you realize that "don't require evidence of a 'crime'", is an unlawful non-democratic statement in every way.
..... and hence you could definitely not mean "we the people"?
3) Again, what interests exactly?

in conclusion:
are you really under the illusion that you are going forward ? LMAO!
I don't follow you: Is someone claiming that trade secrets imply computer crime?

The strongest claim that I see is that REACT is an appropriate resource to assign.

Do you see anything about REACT that implies otherwise? http://www.reacttf.org/10701.html

It says on the bottom of their front page that they investigate trade secret matters: http://www.reacttf.org/2101.html

Why harp on the phrase "computer crime" in the first place? I don't see it mentioned on the REACT site at all. It appears to have been an oversimplification invented by a journalist and propagated here by jrockway's question.
Related to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284420
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1284466
And in the process, much of the promise has been lost. I suppose it should be no surprise--television was hailed at its invention as a medium for education and culture even though within years it degenerated into an endless stream of fixed quiz shows and formulaic sitcoms. And now personal computers are for most people more of a distraction and an impediment to creativity than they are any help.

Maybe it's right to be cynical--new technology can't reach a mass market without turning into just another form of television, because the mass of people won't create no matter what. I just wish that making computers accessible to more people meant giving more people the creative potential that this guy had in 1982, rather than just giving them another television with 500 channels of cute kitty pictures with amusing subtitles.
What about battery life? device memory? screen resolution? Triangles/sec (for GPU/games)?
Delegates ... are essentially just syntactic sugar for a one-method class

No that's not entirely true. There are a lot of similarities but there are essential differences as well. Delegates in .NET are truly functions as first class objects while single-method anonymous classes is Java are first class object wrappers around functions. This means that while in Java an anonymous class is a tuple with a reference to the instance of the anonymous class and a reference to the instance of the container class, in .NET it is a tuple with a reference (pointer actually) to a method and a reference to the instance of the owner class (if not static).

This is a subtle but important difference and is entrenched all the way down in the .NET type system, not just on syntax level.
Analytic tricks can help reduce a problem that is either numerically unstable or simply too big to estimate quickly into something that can be estimated in a stable or way or at all.
I'm not sure if that's technically possible... You'd have to get the content that's inside of the iframe, and I think that would break some sort of cross domain rule.
Sunday Sauerkraut: The Sauerkraut Balls Edition
Arbitrage can mean buying a package of items and selling another equivalent package of items. So in horse racing (vague 20 year old memories here), it might mean betting on the a certain proportion of your money on the trifecta and other proportions on each of the horses not included in that trifecta. So you'd have do the math for each combination of 3 horses that could appear in the trifecta, and the corresponding payoffs. I doubt he had something that placed the bets automatically (because betting wouldn't have been on the internet) but he had some software to take the odds and identify arbitrage opportunities.
That really depends on the market.

In a market with strong network effects (e.g., operating systems), you are correct. It costs money to switch from windows to linux, and this may preclude a switch for a small cost gain.

In a market for commodity goods, this is not true. It costs nothing to switch from Alcoa aluminum to little guy aluminum.
The idea of aliens conquering earth for sole purpose of collecting resources seems pretty ridiculous to me. Given the scale of planetary evolution, they are much more likely to be a million years more advanced than us than a couple hundred. There would be so many celestial bodies out there rich in resources for such a civilization to choose from, why wouldn't they just take one of the millions of bodies that doesn't have nuclear weapons on it?
http://crookery.blogspot.com/2010/04/nasty-derivatives-tale....

This is an example of committing the same crime Goldman has allegedly committed. You'll notice that if you're an accredited investor, you can call your broker up right now and do this. In act, if you do much options trading, you may have already more or less done it.
Maybe they are good writers and this guy has a very peculiar sense of what is good writing? His essay didn't fill be with awe. He's not complaining about results. He's dumping on students because he doesn't like how they write. Could there be a more arbitrary metric? I don't think so.
Not in the rendering I see.

But backticks are valid python syntax, but relatively unused, these days. The contents of backticks are evaluated, and the result is returned as a string representation.

>>> `1+1`
'2'
It's posts like this that remind me how now, 10 years out of college in my software dev career, just how much math I've completely forgotten. I like to think I'd pick it up again quickly if need be - but that's the thing... I've forgotten it, because I've never needed it.
Would you like your surgeon who is charging you money to save your life to also take out a life insurance policy on each operation?
Offering stock to members of the public is an "initial public offering", which in itself costs millions of dollars just in regulatory costs. Yes, we're still members of the public, except for the millionaires among us.
Have you read the sales documents? They list the reference portfolio--every single bond. So you're arguing that both sides knew that ratings agencies were going to incorrectly rate all this stuff BBB. The only missing datum is, allegedly, who constructed the portfolio. However, Paolo Pellegrini, the SEC's main source, says that he had a meeting specifically to disclose exactly that information.

The big news here is that ACA looks really pathetic. They're saying "We had all the fundamental information we needed to judge the merits of this transaction. We could investigate every bond in the reference portfolio, and even every underlying mortgage. Our quants could build a model that would tell you exactly what would happen for any given default rate, interest rate, home price fluctuation, war, natural disaster, or act of god. But we didn't know that some know-name merger arb who liked to dabble in real estate derivatives was on the other side of the trade. If we'd known that, we would have been terrified." I mean, come on.
gedit works well on Snow Leopard.
Your incredulity aside, they absolutely did say that, or at least they convinced the ratings agencies to say that. That wasn't the lie, though - according to the (horribly broken) models, they were AAA (or whatever rating is in question).

The lie was that the package of underlying mortgage bonds was selected solely and independently by a 3rd party who had an interest in putting together a quality instrument, when in fact Paulson played the major role in the selection.
I did not realize that my parents were stock investors, who look up Price:Cap ratios when deciding what phone to buy.

Not to be snarky, but most people don't care about a company's stock value or market cap. They tend to care about less meaningful things like "is it popular?", "is it pretty?", "is it easy to use?", "is it affordable?"...if they are particularly shrewed "what's the return/replacement policy?" and/or "can I get this on sale?". Not everybody in the world cares about the latest tech news or stock market reports. In fact, most people don't care about those things.

They heard about Adobe and Apple, and they know vaguely that Adobe makes things that allow people to make things that work on computers, and that Apple makes computers and iPods and iPhones (they don't yet know about the iPad). In their minds, their question was "if a company that makes things that allow people to make things for computers isn't going to make those things for Apple, it must really be a powerful signal that Apple isn't worth Adobe's time. Should I get an Android for my next phone?"

I filled them in on the details, and Apple's rationality for causing the issue, but not every person has somebody who can lay it out for them because honestly, most people don't care enough. If I hadn't done that, their next phone would not have been an iPhone.
Was any of the fundamental data in their presentation incorrect? They listed all the bonds in the reference portfolio. Were some of the bonds themselves deceptive? If so, why would Goldman just step into the middle of the transaction, instead of shorting them?

You're acting as if Goldman, by virtue of being lucratively evil, had predicted the whole subprime mess. But they lost money initially, made it back on hedges, then lost other money elsewhere. If they were as well-informed as they should have been to commit this crime, they would have made far more money in 2007-9.