skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Textbooks are enough of a boondogle. Forcing entire generations of students to learn things like Matlab and Mathematica only sustains their ridiculous price tags. The student versions being so cheap does not make the situation better, it makes it worse. It's borderline rent seeking.

There are plenty of free (capital and lower case 'f') alternatives, like Python, Fortran, etc. They may not be as 'powerful' of tools but they are adequate for teaching the basics of how to translate formal mathematical reasoning into concrete code. The only things that Mathematica, Maple and Matlab add are pre-packaged library functions that do all the hard work for you. This is what makes them powerful tools and if the student, after he or she graduates, decides that power is worth the price that's fine, but getting them hooked on it while in school is detrimental to their learning for all the reasons being discussed in this thread.
I was just thinking that cooperative behavior seems to have pretty good survival value, at least for the life we can find. That, of course, says very little about life we can't find, since we don't know how different things might be.
But it makes sense to me that a cooperative form, where different members of the species can have different but complimentary roles, is likely to be useful even in circumstances we can't predict. And once a species can cooperate with itself, my belief is that it can cooperate with another. All it takes is the insertion of a member of each species into the trust hierarchy of the other species. (Of course, the possibility is far removed from the realization.)
Why Mark Suster is wrong about not hiring job hoppers
Ah, I didn't read that update:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194421
But look at what could go wrong. Steve Jobs' health for one--one skinny guy with a history of cancer and a used liver gets another life threatening illness and your investment is worth bananas. (As in, you would have been better off buying banana futures.)
McAfee's Response
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#killingstar

A darker, more games-theoretic take on first contact.

quoth this link:

They won't come to get our resources or our knowledge or our women or even because they're just mean and want power over us. They'll come to destroy us to insure their survival, even if we're no apparent threat, because species death is just too much to risk, however remote the risk...
Do you want a cookie?
The other thing I see all the time is people who think their way is the only way, or that the things that they care about are the things that really matter. Sometimes you have to learn one way of writing for one professor and another for the next. I personally would rather read something written by someone who has something to say rather than some who writes well but doesn't say anything useful.
At what point in that story did the bank lie about who specifically had assembled the reference portfolio? In other words, where's the parallel with Goldman using ACA as a marketing tool and shield?
Your facebook account is not linked to your real identity, either, unless you want it to be.
I tried signing up for Facebook with the name 'Jimmy the Greek' and it was denied. However, they then accepted 'Jimmy teh Greeko'.
Actually, empty praise bugs me more than anything. Even earned praise can seem awkward for me if it is earned in an ill Manner.
Still, my writing is rather horrid. So bravo for that call, at least on my part. Now, since she neglected a solution after all that speculation, anybody have any tips on improving your writing -- preferably free online material (but there's always the library otherwise).
Alright, first of all, not it isn't.

The senate has a ton of horrible, nonsensical bills that are introduced, but they never see the light of day.

This is just linkbait and a two paragraph explanation of some obscure McCain bill that nobody will care about.
I may be misunderstanding, but it looks like you're giving them both the post-split number of shares and pre-split price, which would double the value of the investment? Great number sleuthing, though, thanks!

Oh, on reread - perhaps the stock split in 2003 would have been the second time?
If you delete your account, they'll have one less user. Why would they want that?

Anyway, I'm sure any deletion is a soft delete. They still keep your data so they can paw over it and sell it to people.
Yes, but as a species we have a tendency for risk-aversion.
So I think you have to set it up as risk versus risk, rather than risk versus benefit. Weigh the negative outliers on each side against each other, instead of weighing negatives versus positives.
If we don't contact other species, what are the chances that we'll kill ourselves? (Global nuclear warfare, environmental destruction, what have you). If we do, what are the chances that they'll kill us? (Personally, I think it's quite likely that we'll end up killing ourselves, in the long run. That makes contact the better option.)
If you are offshore, have not network and cannot relocate your best bet is to hire a local recruiter.

Personally though I'd just be staying up late and calling people direct.
If it's not then it's closed as soon as it's discovered though.
A synthetic CDO is NOT a mortgage backed security, it is backed by credit default swaps. It is not a mix of mortgages at all, high quality or otherwise.

A synthetic CDO can not even exist unless some party believes the securities it is comprised of will go bad.

Your analogy to people selling consumption goods is ridiculous. A synthetic CDO is a bet and only has value for speculative and hedging purposes.

It's like me making a bet with my friend that the yankees will win. What a jerk! He took my bet, all the while thinking the yankees would lose!
In these kinds of instruments, though, the short isn't always clear. Paulson himself was never short on the instrument directly - it's not like a stock where you can borrow shares. To be short, he had to go and buy a CDS on it (and one of the quirks of this setup is that there can effectively be a lot more short money than long on the instrument - lots of people can buy the insurance, but the underlying instrument is only held once).

The direct shorts that everyone knew about were the people selling the underlying mortgages up the chain, and the reasons they were short were well understood by everyone involved (cash now vs. over 30 years, etc.).
dude... I just realize that you registered this account (srslydude) here 16 hours ago especially to make this bold Declaration of Yahoo Independence?!? Why? Why you take it so seriously? And you say Yahoo don't invest enough in people like you :) Make sure they read this then :)
I have no doubt that they keep your info. If nothing else, it may be helpful if law enforcement or a court came looking for info. Soft delete is generally a best practice anyway, as far as I know, and also, it is convenient for referential integrity.
Thing is, with the size of the universe, our signals may only reach civilizations with sufficient technology to understand, millions of years from now. And a million light years is minuscule in itself.
I believe NewsCorp just sold Photobucket?
And the beer I drink also improves my coding skills, and the coffee and the nicotine.

Stop trying to pass your costly and possibly damaging addiction as something that improves your life and brings you value.

I guess I'm asking to get heavily down-voted but I'm not all that into music. I know some coders that can't work without radio but radio is a torture for me when I try to concentrate. I even read about one guy that thinks that he codes best when he has TV on (spidweb guy, you have to give it to him that he makes amazing stuff all by himself, but I personally think he would have no problem concentrating with pack of buffaloes running over his body). I tried once coding with TV on and I lasted a minute before It drove me nuts. I can bear songs if they are in language I don't understand.

I know that some people have better or worse resistance for distractions but I can't believe that some people concentrate better with distractions than without them.
Scam Constellations and Link Architectures
I'm proud to say that I mistrusted and hated facebook from the very beginning, and don't have to delete my account because I do not have one I've used for anything other than to sign in and look at pages that require one to be signed in.

That's right: I'm so hip, I knew Facebook was a horrible, horrible company which I hate before it was cool to think Facebook was evil.
> Like murderous humans or murderous rogue states, they tend to die quickly

So the most prosperous human civilizations have tended to be peaceful? The states who colonized and expanded throughout the world were the least "murderous"?
While it is true that (broadly speaking) nothing is ever really new under the sun, I believe an important shift did occur in America concerning entitlement thinking, and it did occur with the boomer generation (of which I am a part).

When I grew up as a kid in the 1950s, there was a huge emphasis on making sure that kids, unlike their parents and grandparents who had grown up on farms or had come to America as poor immigrants or had endured the privations of the Great Depression or the horrors of watching millions die and suffer in WWII, would get the very best education and all the modern conveniences.

Even more important, theories about child-rearing changed dramatically in America from about 1950 on. Dr. Benjamin Spock (http://www.answers.com/topic/benjamin-spock) became wildly popular with his ideas promoting "permissive" child-rearing and eschewing discipline. This meant treating kids like little adults, seeking their consent, and never using a switch on them when they misbehaved. Everybody was to cater to "little Johnny." Of course, the kids grew up feeling they were supposed to be catered to, and, voila, you have the hippie generation - the "me" generation, as in "it's all about me."

There is no doubt that the Spock babies marked a turning point in kids having strong entitlement expectations and this has led to such things as heavy emphasis on self-esteem (which the WWII generation would have laughed at), grade inflation ("all A's"), denigration of honors programs or anything else that makes some feel less recognized than others, indiscriminate showering of trophies on kids for mere participation, and the like.

Of course, every generation eventually grows up and matures through life experiences. But the broad change in American culture since the 1950s is unmistakable and has carried through to this day in a form that earlier generations had never known.
Andres,

Thanks again for your comment. Just to be clear and not mislead anybody, I have not sold a business, but as I mentioned, I believe the collective experience of the people I am trying to involve is the closest you can get to here in Mexico.

I agree completely with your second recommendation, the main point being that it needs to be a competitive product no matter where it ends up being used. Thanks again for your comments, they are quite useful. Regards,

Hugo
If the projectiles are relativistic, then warning could only be a few days or even a few hours ahead of time. Even relativistic impactors are unnecessary. Low albedo impactors coming in from angles far off the ecliptic would be exceedingly hard to spot.
Why, is there some reason I can't just post vague messages which don't link me to any particular, identifiable human? How would they know?
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.

I have a number of quite odd and very apparent pseudonyms among my Facebook friends. Most are married women with children, who have some well known reasons to desire more online privacy than young single men. I don't know how those names were approved. My entirely real name on Facebook took a long time to get approved when I initially opened my Facebook account, which I thought was quite silly.
This is perfect - I was never quite sure how to argue that a product entering a medicore but saturated market is worth investing in.
The point wouldn't be to collect resources. It would be to ensure that those monkeys with nukes and star drives don't try to do something bad. They won't try to steal our water. They'll just try to wipe us out, probably with bombardment from distances far beyond orbit.
This (and any other move by Twitter to restrict unfollowing in bulk) is just an anti-spam measure.

Direct marketers follow as many people in bulk as they can without being flagged as spam, a small percentage automatically follow them back, everyone else gets bulk unfollowed, repeat. By doing this you can eventually accumulate an account with thousands of followers which you can then pump commercial messages to. The system works but it's a volume game - if you can't automate the process, you can't make enough money for your time. By breaking tools that enable mass unfollowing, Twitter makes the automation harder and therefore fights spam.

ManageTwitter almost certainly knows this.
I think the chances of humans discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the next 1000 years is essentially zero. So why bother thinking about it?
Comment on "Feed us some sort of argument on par with the Fermi paradox."

The only paradox in Fermi's paradox is the unjustified exclusion of UFOs as signs of ET existence and visit of earth.
> it described Flash as "closed and proprietary". Apple preferred to support more open standards which replicate everything Flash can do

> The hypocrisy is self evident in both cases

> It isn't

Color me completely and totally flabbergasted. If this is not transparently hypocritical, please share with us a definition of "closed and proprietary" that does not include Apple squarely in the middle.

Apple's rules define a system so closed, that their own efforts in open and non-proprietary language, authoring and tool chains are unable to operate on their own platform!

Really, you don't see this on your own?
This only applies if they are still living in cities and orbital habitats. If a significant number of them have uploaded their consciousnesses into spacecraft, effectively becoming spacecraft, then they become exceedingly hard to wipe out. Then they will have no motivation to act preemptively.
I have a severe (self-diagnosed :P ) case of Not Invented Here. It prevents me from hacking on Somebody Else's Code. It's why I use Ubuntu instead of Plan9 or HURD or Movitz. I really want to move toward one of those, but I just can't make myself make the time to get used to them to the point where I can add enough to them to feel comfortable that I'll be able to do anything I need to. Is there a tutorial for people like me to learn how to get involved with such a big undertaking as contributing to a partially-completed OS written by someone else?
It's hard to relay how "fast" and "crisp" it feels with numbers, which certainly seems to be part of the game apple is playing.
Crashed for me the first time on Ubuntu Linux Chrome 5.0.342.9.
Tried it a second time and it worked okay.
How to Backup and Launch your custom EC2 Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala machine to S3?
In this case, the existence of the short side is completely clear. The only thing unknown is their identity.

ABACUS was a synthetic CDO. The short side wanted to buy CDS on a set of underlying bonds. The long side wanted to issue the CDS.

The only relation it has to bonds is that ACA structured the transaction to behave similarly to a set of bonds. The synthetic CDO could not have existed if someone was not explicitly trying to short the underlying bonds.
Yes aliens exist but chances of them coming to earth any time soon are slim. The universe is huge, there are probably billions of worlds with aliens who are hundreds, thousands and millions of years ahead of us technologically.

And the reason we haven't see them?

Well there are a few things I can think of:

1. Maybe faster than light travel is hard to do. Sure it's nice to dream of it in science fiction...but how hard is it in reality? Not only do you have to figure out how to travel faster than 671,000,000 miles per second. But then you have to figure out how to build a shield system that has the energy to take abuse of millions bits of space debris hammering at it every millisecond.

2. Even if the aliens had light speed, and hyperspace...you have to ask yourself who would be there to hear us? It's only been ~80 years since the first TV broadcasts....so there are probably only a few hundred stars that the signal reached so far(out of trillions)...and we have no idea about signal distortion...who knows maybe 3 light years from earth, the tv signal can't be discerned from the universe's background noise? Even a thousand years from now, even if the signal remains just as strong as it is on earth, the signal would still only cover an insignificantly tiny portion of the universe.

3. Even if they heard us, if they have light speed, they probably know of thousands other races, making us nothing special....they might get around to sending us a research mission...a few years from now, when the university that found us gets the funding to send interns on a space trip. And if they don't have light speed, it'll take them another 500-1000 years to get here.

Frankly the way I view it, is that on galactic scale we are in the boonies...if there is any big alien empire, it exists near galactic center, where there are hundreds of stars within a small distance.
Ask HN: What can I do with $1-2k (Australia)
I'm a young 2nd year CS student at a Melbourne university. I have one or two thousand dollars I would like to play around with. Well not play around with - I don't want to waste this money - I want to invest it. I just want to do it in a way where I learn some new skills or have an interesting experience. Talking to my friends we came up with stocks, gold or some kind of small business. All of which I know sweet all about. So I thought I might ask you guys.
> their refusal to allow Flash on the platform is good for the Internet; it's driving companies towards HTML5.

I do agree with this sentiment. But you're splitting hairs regarding your permissiveness of some kinds of close/proprietary software vs. others.

You also seem to have a strange disconnect where you don't realize that web applications built using flash are not permitted on the iP* platforms as well. Not just flash derived native apps.
Many tech specs have been close to incomprehensible to the average consumer for some time. Remember the gigahertz gamesmanship Intel was playing with the P4? The clock speed number was being inflated for marketing purposes, even though it resulted in hotter, slower chips.
Goldman stepped into the middle of the transaction because that's what they were paid (I think it was 15m?) to do.

You're right that the buyer should have taken a closer look at the underlying mortgages themselves, but that's the other part of the story, that the ratings agencies that everyone trusted to do that work for them were either on the take, stupid, or both.
I suspect that is inevitable. This is a heinous violation of the privacy of minors in their parents homes. I suspect that prosecutors will be forced to reach for the biggest hammer they have.
October $210 puts are $4 a share. A bit pricy, but that would protect you from the catastrophic downside.
The use of a minimum viable product that wasn't actually the product (a video) was an awesome idea.
One piece of advice I've had with Synctus is that the best person to sell a product initially is the expert (in my case: me).

The advantages are:
- I can understand the situation my customers are in because of years of previous experience with them
- I know the product inside out (as I made it!)
- I know about all the alternative solutions and all the pros and cons of them
- From a customer's point of view, I am the one they are best off speaking to

Salespeople will of course learn some of this this, but ultimately they cannot match me. So I am learning sales (and there is a lot to learn!), rather than trying to get a salesperson to learn my product (I've tried this and haven't been convinced - technical products are hard to understand).

I would say that this applies for an early stage startup like me. Obviously this cannot scale, so at some point having salespeople would become necessary.

I'm not sure how this applies to you because of the territorial aspect - but I do believe that you'll be at a disadvantage if you are unable to sell your product yourself.
From a pricing standpoint I have found Rackspace to be more flexible at the lower end 256MB slice but once you start going higher toward 1.5GB RAM it gets more pricier than Amazon. I am guessing you were referring to RackSpace Cloud. The pure Rackspace solution is very pricy compared to AWS.
Thanks for this info! This is a lot of software. Is it better to then build the stack one needs on top of the basic OS and then store it in S3 (cheaper than EBS) as your custom AMI and fire that up as needed?
Any time a stock transaction takes place, one party believed it was a good idea to sell and the other party believed it was a good idee to buy.

This is not entirely true, and I can think of two counterexamples immediately:

1. A long-term stock investor who is at or near retirement will tend to want to convert stock holdings to bond holdings in order to reduce the volatility of the portfolio and start to receive cash income to meet daily needs regardless of his/her opinion of the quality of the stocks.

2. An index mutual fund will sell/buy stock shares in response to investor redemptions/purchases of fund shares without regard to the quality of the shares or the state of the market because the fund is in the business of matching its benchmark and not trying to pick the best stocks.

The market is not always a zero-sum game because participants have different goals and time horizons. There are even more examples than this in the derivatives markets.
An Agile Approach to Science Education
"at least, not right away."

I.e., as detailed, the "common advice" that they "need to cycle through different ideas with as little time and money as possible to discover which of their assumptions are wrong."

Which at this point in the game can be done rather cheaply. As pointed out in a recent discussion, "lean" meant something different in Web 1.0, where you had to spend a lot of money just to get basic infrastructure of all types.

Today we are incredibly leveraged, not just in obvious thinks like renting cloud time instead of buying servers et. al., using high (enough) quality FOSS software, but also in just finding out stuff with Google, Wikipedia, etc. etc. etc. What works? What is this bug? What did someone do that worked when they faced this situation?

In the '70s Jerry Pournelle predicted we would fairly soon achieve a state where the answer to any question could be rapidly found. He packaged this neatly (e.g. ask your implant which talks to an AI...), but I think we've already achieved a crude and significant level of this.
Twitter running on an Apple ][
Ask HN: Who can create custom-branded decals for Netbooks?
We are preloading Asus Netbooks with our proprietary software and reselling them to clients as a turnkey solution.

We want to brand these netbooks with our logo and company name.

Can anyone recommend someone who can provide us with a beta run of a dozen or so custom decals?

Thanks in advance
I posted this 5 days ago but no upvotes or comments. It might be the plaintext format that makes this version more appealing, because it is a large read.
Honestly? If you haven't got a sound idea on how to invest it, I would say leave it in the bank and accrue interest until you've got a decent idea on what to do with it, otherwise you run a high risk of essentially blowing it.

If you're still adamant about blowing your cash, might as well spend it on something tangible like towards a new macbook pro or something.
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