skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also find this a sensitive subject.

I always thought that the learning process was held up by the need to constantly reinforce things I learned a long time ago. For example, electrical circuits classes at Purdue do not allow you to use calculators and must therefore make numbers that work out nicely to keep the math manageable. However, this means that your problems are not particularly realistic; 4.7 uF capacitors, 33 mH inductors, and 2.2 kohm resistors are far more common than 1/2 F, 1 H, and 1 ohm resistors. When I taught senior design, I was stunned to find students looking for super-huge capacitors, but that's all they had seen on their exams up until that point. Likewise, complicated FET sizing problems may require a complex system of equations. Students are short-changed by having to design circuits with only one or two unknowns so the math can be done by hand.

On the other hand, mathematics courses are supposed to teach you how to solve these problems by hand. A TI-89 or Mathematica renders my first three semesters of calculus useless. However, those skills are necessary for understanding probability, electromagnetics, and all sorts of advanced material. Calculators with symbolic manipulation cannot possibly be allowed in those classes. Otherwise, students will have superficial understanding of all the dependent courses.

IMHO, the only answer to this question is "it depends." We can explore much deeper levels of mathematics, science, and engineering if students aren't burdened with basic arithmetic, but we must ensure that students are only able to take shortcuts after they have demonstrated mastery of the material using manual computation.
What percent of all trades in anything don't fall under the umbrellas of hedging or speculating?

In synthetic CDO's, precisely zero. Consumption goods are purchased for other reasons, however.

I assume Paulson's not being charged because it wasn't Paulson who told ACA he was long, it was Goldman. As for why ACA couldn't figure out he was short on their own, I don't know.

Paulson and ACA were in direct collaboration on the creation of the CDO. They talked to each other directly on many occasions. If Paulson deliberately pretended to be the long side, when they were really the short side, that sounds like clear cut fraud on their part. So why isn't the SEC going after Paulson?
Lists and Lists - A Zork-style Lisp Tutorial
Reminds me of the montage of Jamal's writing in Finding Forrester. I saw it commented on in a few places as an obvious attempt to imply such sublime writing as the writers couldn't actually write.
Fatal Distraction: 15 to 25 time a year in the US, children die in hot cars
Paulson didn't bet against homeowners, anyone who owns their home wouldn't be involved in a subprime CDO. He bet against people that owned less than any of their home. (eg. 0 down cash back subprime mortgage)
Firefox 3.5 Linux, PhenomII 3GHz (ATI SB700 built-in graphics): two molecules at unsteady rates, mostly 30 to 60 fps. Nice work, thanks.
One way would be to put the downvote arrow on the right-hand side of the meta info: ...xx minutes ago | link [down-arrow]

If it's a good comment it'll probably get more than one upvote, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Stuff happens.
The conversation must be about federating social networks
Find another comment or submission from the same person and upvote it, if you feel bad about reducing the guy's karma.

Apologize in response to the comment, if you feel bad about taking the shine off the comment.

Move on.
I don't know about any of these advanced features, but it looks like even simple images won't load when looking at photos.

My wife has been asking me all morning if the net is down. No, it just looks like FB is broken.
ACA did put it together independently. Paulson sent a list of suggestions which ACA was not required and did not include in the way Paulson wanted.
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Thanks man, always like honest advice even if it's from 'random internet strangers'. That sounds, well, amazing. I had a few ideas a short time ago but I guess I'm not really very confident about my skills yet. But it's going on the whiteboard
The current title ("How to manipulate people with font type") relays two pieces of information about the article: that it is about fonts, and that it is about psychology (manipulation of people). The original article title does neither, at least to one who has not yet read the article--it could be about those inspirational posters, for all I know.

Though perhaps the title changed between our comments? I cannot tell.
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Online Poker and the Multi-Tabling Effect
The identity of the short wasn't relevant because it was "the famous John Paulson", it was relevant because it was the person in the room negotiating the reference portfolio with them. They want to put together the best possible portfolio, yes, but don't forget they're getting paid to do this. They're going to put together the best portfolio that still brings in the check.

And the ACA that ended up long was the parent company, "ACA Capital Holdings, Inc", not the management company, "ACA Management LLC", that worked with Paulson to put together the portfolio. I won't claim to know what the exact relationship between the two companies was, but the former didn't actually enter it's long position until 3 months after the latter signed off on the portfolio.
the security rules of browsers don't allow you to access cross domain iframe content, so it isn't an issue
Hate to say it, but this is par for the course every time Facebook releases new APIs. They move at an insanely fast pace for a company of that size, and there's no free lunch, so the tradeoff is buggy software.

I don't see a lot of first mover advantage with the new stuff, so my advice would be to wait a few weeks.
I don't think that even a sophisticated investor could understand many of the instruments that Goldman was selling; so for the most part I think people should have taken that as a warning. (Hell, even Warren Buffett was saying he couldn't understand derivatives and the odds of a given investor being sharper than Warren are low).

I agree with you on the ethical issues but I didn't believe them to be particularly trustworthy in the first place, all of their incentives are lined up to do things that will make them money and their advice will be tainted by this.

Re: Index funds and cash - yeah, they aren't going to get you stellar returns. Cash in particular gives you poor dividends. The point of these is that the chance of your money vanishing is low and they require little time investment, enabling you to focus on your area of expertise instead.

If I had to choose areas to invest in that would (potentially) give better returns, I'd try:

1) Investing in oneself. ie improving skills, becoming better known, etc. Much easier to get above market returns here, of course.

2) A small number of small/medium size companies in unfashionable areas you can study and understand; basically stocks where there is the potential for decent growth and comparatively few people are looking.

3) Well chosen property for the leverage. You'd need to really spend time choosing well or the leverage would potentially fuck you over.
i was using the wrong nyt url.. works better now
Here's a point I haven't seen made elsewhere:

Sixth -- how will Goldman defend themselves? The standard defense when two parties to securities litigation are "sophisticated investors" is to argue the parties were essentially big boys and knew the risks. That defense isn't possible in this case, largely because of the statute employed. This case comes down to whether or not Goldman lied -- period. Either they did or didn't misrepresent facts. The financial standing of the purchaser of the security is irrelevant. Goldman's only defense is to somehow demonstrate they did not lie about the transaction. Given the complaint filed, I don't see how that argument is possible.

Since the "big boys" argument has been frequently cited -- it's basically the "caveat emptor" defense running through most threads about the case including this one -- it's worth noting that if this guy is right, it's irrelevant.
I upvoted this mainly because of reason 7. The joy of side projects particularly contrasted with feature lists in the day job really struck home, having just recently finally launched a side project (http://lessonslearnedby.us/) with a friend, one made possible by being written in a dynamic language no less.

The point about writing the minimum to make something useful is something I've only recently fully grokked and I think the humility of saying "mistakenly believes he's better" is good to keep in mind.
Salary is priced by the market, and that requires regular testing. Saying you don't want to hire regular job-changers is saying you don't want a functioning market. That, of course, is just what one would expect from companies who don't want to pay people what they are worth. Talk of 'loyalty' is effectively propaganda.
The SEC's Case Against Goldman: Key Questions About John Paulson's Role
Not true. ACA was being paid by Goldman to put this thing together, who in turn was being paid by Paulson. As long as Paulson wasn't satisfied with the portfolio, Abacus wasn't going anywhere. The fact that they didn't accept his first list without changes does not imply that he didn't directly influence and sign off on the final package.
It's certainly arguable that a series of attacks by foreigners in an auto-conspiracy (a group of like minded people) that is explicit and public about its goal of destroying the United States (as a political entity) and enslaving its population (well, those who don't convert) constitutes an "invasion".

Heck, half of those 19 were reattacking a target that the auto-conspiracy had failed to destroy earlier (while it woudln't have worked, they were trying to topple one tower into the other; fortunately the bomb prematured on a ramp).

So I don't count this as "flagrantly unconstitutional".

One frequently mentioned example nowadays of this is the Nazi saboteurs who landed in the US from submarine and were dealt with as spies, not afforded the civil liberties of the period.
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Actually I was more referring to the hard work we do to avoid that kind of vulnerabilities by design:

http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2010/Apr/1023839.html

and

http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2009/Apr/1022140.html

Everything we do we consider security first and do threat modeling.

All remote connections are done via TLS, we don't cipher the database on the disk but if there is a demand for it we'll add the feature.

We've been extremely thorough to review the code an reduce the possibility for buffer overflows to occur. We use only safe API and validate input thoroughly. Buffers are encapsulated by a class in such a way that unsafe writing is difficult to do.

I'm not claiming we'll never have an exploit, just saying we're doing the best we can to avoid it.
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This is both absurd and sad at the same time. Also, it shows how little (or not at all) Woz has influence at Apple.
Because that's what he said.

>>>In light of the recent stuff that Facebook has done, I'm deleting my account.
I can't believe that some people concentrate better with distractions than without them.

Personally, I last 2 or 3 times longer when doing anything mental if I have music playing. Easily. I'm also happier.

Trying to pass your beliefs off as our experiences is doomed to failure. There's always an exception, often millions of them, if you look around a different corner than you live on.
Luck seems to have no mention. The existence of people who've happened to bet on the correct side of the 9 or 10 huge events in the last 20 years surely exist, and that is sure to make them at least moderate successes if they don't do completely stupid things.

Given enough series of die rolls by enough different rollers, there is inevitably going to be some with long strings of success.

It only takes looking at 1024 cases before you find someone who bet correctly on 10 binary decisions.

There are assuredly more than 1024 funds.

He might have some special sauce, or may have done some smart things, but it is just as possible he's just #1024
You're correct. Paulson did suggest 123 bonds that he thought should be included in the CDO. And since Paulson was considered smart by ACA he did have an "expert" influence on the final offering.

BUT. ACA as an independent portfolio selection agent only selected 55 of those. And only those 55 were used.

But since the first 123 were selected by Paulson we should ignore this fact.

Since we have already dismissed that ACA independently selected the portfolio, we shopuld also dismiss the fact that ACA's parent company invested $900 million in the CDO, because they believed in the validity of their choices.

But then again how is that in any way saying that they approved of the contents of the CDO.

Since we have established this,let me try and convince some law firms to start a class action against all colleges, universities, b-schools etc for giving students multiple choice questions, to try and influence their judgement that the answer can be something other than the right one.

Not exactly the same case as Paulson, ACA and Goldman, but its soooo close!
You are generalizing from one example -- because this is how you are, this is how everyone else must be. This is fallacious, for obvious reasons.

> 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.

Why can't you believe that? I personally find myself completely incapable of concentrating in silence. You think the music, or tv, or whatever is a distraction, yet for me it's sorely needed to drown out my own diverging thoughts. I need the constant distraction, or I will very soon find myself thinking about or designing something completely different from what I was supposed to be doing.

What kind of environment you need to be able to work is, however, is not really that important. Much more important is learning not to generalize from yourself. I am utterly dumbfounded that this is not taught in schools at an early age -- I find understanding that you are not me to be one of the crucial life lessons needed to turn people into decent human beings.

Please read at least the 10 first paragraphs of http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ , it won't take that long, and for a lot of people I know reading it has been a real life-changing experience.
Discrete, not discreet. I had a lot of trouble parsing that sentence (oh, so the status bar application has flashy graphics by default and OS X somehow forces it to have less flashy graphics?) before I realized what the title meant.
No, it isn't. As others have mentioned, most HN readers and YC founders are not (yet) wealthy enough to be accredited investors. If you were to try to treat it simply, you would wind up in serious legal trouble, and possibly in prison. Selling shares to any non-accredited investor, who is not a founder, requires dealing with a lot of legal issues, and potentially opening yourself up to significant liability.

The side effect of this law intended to protect people is that the average person can no longer participate in the highest growth sectors of the market. The rich get richer, and the poor don't have as much choice in their investments (and once a company has gone public, its astronomical growth is probably over; it's very rare for a company to be as successful as GOOG or AAPL, and even those, if you'd owned stock pre-IPO, you'd be incredibly wealthy today).

I would love to be able to invest in some of the YC companies, other than my own, but I don't have that ability yet. But, the first few rounds of YC companies have produced some accredited investors already, so the circle of available investors who "get YC" is getting wider.

You could get a personal loan from friends and family, and then roll the money into the business, but you can't sell shares without dealing with the extra paperwork and liability.
related:

http://muslimmatters.org/2010/04/25/salon-misreading-the-qur...
Do you have any evidence that in collaborating on the portfolio, Paulson ever said or represented that he was on the long side? Or that ACA that ever asked? Maybe the SEC doesn't, either, but they do have Goldman's emails on the matter.
He played a role only to the degree ACA allowed him to and failed in it's fiduciary duty.
the powerpoint and the video aren't working. Anyone have an alternate host or cached version?
I was being conservative with worst case scenarios.

The purchase of a single 99 cent app likely costs apple money. The purchase of a free app does as well, but usually a much smaller amount (the cost for the download bandwidth).

1.99 is probably guaranteed profit. We work with some of the largest downloads in the store from what we can tell, and even at amazon s3 rates, a 1.99 sale should generate a few cents for app.
Was this part of Apple's game plan all along - to turn Android into a Flash ghetto?
Apple isn't "using discrete graphics for that app", Apple is using discrete graphics for a given set of APIs which CloudApp is using to do something. Did they need to do it that way? Maybe, maybe not, but the onus is on the application developer, not Apple. It's not like Apple has some master list of applications that use discrete graphics, it kicks in on certain API calls.

Silly little rants like this, where someone doesn't quite understand the way a system works and so blames the wrong provider; these things are the reason for Apple's crazy draconian SDK terms. Imagine a similar situation on the iPhone: "Waa, Apple killed my battery life when I run this application at boot!" 10 million retweets later, Apple is having to explain some third party application's deficiencies, and it could very realistically effect their bottom line.
Somehow it's controversial to argue that corporations should have responsibilities other than to their shareholders. You don't have to take many steps back from our present-day paradigm to see that as awfully weird. Personally, I'd have thought the controversial view would be that corporations shouldn't need to balance shareholders' interests against, say, employees' and public's. That seems like the ideological dogma to me: this idea that if you place one set of interests above all others, magic will happen.
If you have already working app, you can wait a few weeks. But I'm creating a new one - I have no desire to write it using the old libraries now just to rewrite it later.

For me (so far) everything was working except that they haven't implemented some very needed features from the old FB JS lib in the new one :(
To my knowledge, using S3 and/or cloudfront accomplishes this as well. Can anyone confirm or disprove that?
I hoping that was a reference to this classic Zoidbergism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3QRTToTLzI
I think a civilization that masters interstellar travel doesn't care too much about us.

They'd probably only observe us for scientific purposes. We have nothing else they could be interested in.

They probably can transform matter into energy and vice-versa, they don't need "water", "iron" or anything we might have.

We'd be no more a threat to them than ants are a threat to us.
Ya, sorry...but no financials for year 5
I’m sorry, but the only reason any investor asks for your projections or valuation in 5-6 years is to see how crazy you really are. There is no possible way for anyone to predict where a company will be in that time frame; there are way too many unknown factors. It’s just impossible, it’s pure guessing. If you get an investor to seriously believe in your unaltered numbers you produce for 5-6 years, I would love to meet you. Now, if you’re an investor who has believed in these numbers, I’d like to meet you even more so. My number is 407 716 6237 :) .<p>Now, I refuse to provide numbers past 3 years, and to me, that’s even stretching it. The best you can do to convince an investor is to come as close to providing the numbers that they are typically looking for as is possible in 3 years. Now, that doesn’t mean your numbers can be pure bullshit…just a little.
What matters most is applying consistent growth and adoption rates backed by other known numbers. These rates then become your goals and milestones that you need to hit after financing. Now I still do believe you have to be a bit crazy ambitious with your goals– without that you can’t get anywhere far. I believe that as an entrepreneur you have to shoot for the moon and hope for the stars. But in doing so, you face the risk or investors seeing you as a risk because your numbers don’t look good without shooting for incredibly high rates. A much better philosophy to put forward when dealing with investors is to shoot for the clouds and hope for the moon (while you are secretly still hoping and working towards the stars :) .
Good news though, once you’ve found numbers that you don’t feel will be embarrassing to show to investors, you can use those numbers to double-check and even reverse engineer your costs. In fact, I think it may be better to start with your revenue drivers and then work back towards your expense drivers. Why? Because you then have your numbers you have to hit and it’s much easier to determine the number and type of employees necessary to hit your target revenue numbers than it is to determine how much revenue or how many users you can derive from your team.
I would share my financials with you so you can see how I’ve organized them, but that would be crazy. So the best I can do is explain my method for getting to those numbers. Also, don’t forget how incredibly important your financials are to investors. However, what is even more important is your explanation of the financials and your strategy for hitting your milestones. This is where you convince investors that, yes, the numbers are high, but here is how we achieve those high numbers.
I will be writing another blog post very soon on what I feel you should include in your presentation materials to any investor without writing a full business plan (which I see to be a waste of two times the amount of paper you should actually need). Hope this helps.
A synthetic CDO can not even exist unless some party believes the securities it is comprised of will go bad.

Not true at all, you don't necessarily have to think it will go bad, you just have to be afraid enough that it might to pay an insurance premium.
Especially if you are in space already there are plenty sources of water and iron already there, so why come to Earth to get them?
Of course. Short-term trading is way too hard.
So he gets to pick the first 55 and sign off on the last 37, and you don't think that constitutes significant influence?
I see your argument; actually it's very good and I mostly agree with the point made.

But still I'd prefer to see other, more applicable, laws used.

Proving somebody saw these nude images (if there are any) is going to be a huge legal minefield. And even then classing it as child pornography is difficult for a variety of reasons.

When I talk about intent I mean the intent to see it as sexual content. Clearly the proper thing to do is delete any inappropriate images - and in this respect there may be some indecency laws that apply. But CP is about the sexual abuse of children and the use of indecent material in a sexual context. This has already been watered down here in the UK to the point of making a conviction barely an inconvenience to them.
Or rather 'make something you wish someone else would make for you' :)