skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/business/07markets.html?hp
Yes probably a much better idea :)
BBC News has this on the subject: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10101581.stm

Seems to be about Greece.
Remember, deactivate != delete.
HFT algos going crazy? ZeroHedge is going to have a field day with this one
What an awesome marriage of Qt and Ruby. Two of my favorite languages and toolkits used appropriately to solve a real problem.

Well done! And thank you for open sourcing this.

Well done!
You're the only one who has that experience. I didn't authorize anything and I have 5 extra apps in my profile.
It's amazing how many of the automated trading programs think exactly the same.
I hadn't seen screencast-o-matic before, I've been using camstudio, but that seems like a better product. I'm going to give it a try.
How To Fly An SR-71 Blackbird
I have a question as a complete outsider: how much of what's happening is being driven directly by human-driven transaction and how much is automated computer-driven trading? (Yes, I understand these are hazy terms.)

And, perhaps more fundamentally: how much of market volatility is the consequence of automated decision making? It seems, again naivete is at play here, but it seems like that could be a pretty unstable system.

I guess I think of it like this: the U.S. utilizes Permissive Action Links and other security measures to provide for launch security. Given the centrality of the economy (though not wanting to overstate it), it seems like a large-scale mistake in some models could cause misfiring in ways we wouldn't want but that a human agent could (theoretically) prevent.
that was my first though too, but Im hardly knowledgeable in these things.
http://finance.yahoo.com/ is down.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100506-717535.html?mod...

This seems to have been expected given the European markets today. It's all over concern for Greek default. Which makes Spain and Portugal up next, which is the bigger concern since they are a larger part of the Euro-zone economy.

One benefit of this all (to Americans), is that the dollar has gotten stronger against the Euro, so while the markets are losing ground, the dollar can buy more from Europe.
It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
Thank program trading for this one fellas! People lost their high frequency trading shirts on that move.

Some happy people in the futures market who bought the effects at < 10k!
Read the article again, there's an update. It was a bug.
Apple's losses are likely just in line with the market, but it could be the AT&T extension. The market would like to see iPhones on Verizon sooner rather than later.
Early plunge: panic.

Current status: probably a fairly rational reflection of the badness of the situation (which is not new, and although serious, probably not catastrophic).
Greece may default. Sovereign default, lagging the initial market crash by a couple years, was a feature of the Great Depression, so there's an emotional component. Greece's economy may not be compatible with the Eurozone; because they can't control their money supply, they can't make their exports competitive. So they may eventually jettison the Euro. There's concerns that Portugal and Spain could follow. So then there's also drama with the currency market.

There are 100 people on HN that know this stuff better than I do, but maybe by babbling I'll irritate one of them enough to explain.
Really? A while ago it would add itself back at render time even if the block is removed from your theme template.
To clarify, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user’s Application Settings page that the user hadn’t authorized. No information was shared with those applications and the bug has since been fixed.
Lessons on Leadership from Jeff Bagwell (former Houston Astro)
Hive: Simplified WebWorkers with jQuery
<my first and hopefully last facebook rant>

I never joined facebook, myspace, or linkedin and have no intention of ever doing so.

About once a week, a friend of mine tells me I really ought to join facebook, and every time, I ask them why.

Lots of reasons, they tell me. To get reaquainted with long lost friends. To find out what others are up to. To let others know what you're up to. etc. etc. etc.

To which I say:

If we lost touch, there was probably a reason.

If you want to tell me something, email me or call me.

If I'm not important enough for you to single me out outside of a social network, then I don't want to know.

If I want you to know anything about me, I will tell you.

If I want to market myself, I will, in a manner over which I have control.

If I want to find something out, google is my friend.

I do not want anyone to know who I am, what I'm up to, or who I communicate with unless I specifically tell them myself.

I never thought of myself as a privacy prude, but it seems like every week people are bitching about facebook privacy problems. What did you expect?

I realize I'm in the minority here at hn, but I still don't get it. What's the big deal about facebook? And what did we ever do before?

</rant>
This is a genuine panic -- probably the start of pretty dramatic decline. Sovereign debt is going to be the new contagion. If the contagion spreads, the gains to consumption over the past year could be demolished. These gains were bought at the price of government stimulus -- i.e. soverign debt. Businesses are not yet stable enough to weather another downturn soundly; governments are already grossly over-extended.

Oh, happy days.
It really boggles my mind till today what the hell do they do with so many employees?

Is it a standard practice for startups for keep many employees to justify raising more funds?

They have no significant changes in how the site works, at-least in the last 2 years or so. The site speed, though better, still sucks. No new features. Site gaming is rampant (just look at the comments).

What are they doing?
From: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/news.2010.194.ht...

...the interbreeding happened about 60,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean and, more recently, about 45,000 years ago in eastern Asia. Those two events happened after the first H. sapiens had migrated out of Africa, says Long. His group didn't find evidence of interbreeding in the genomes of the modern African people included in the study.

I find this very surprising. We know that there was a genetic bottle neck when we left Africa. This is why today people from two different African ethnic groups can be MORE different then any two people from ANYWHERE in the rest of the world. An Inuit and an South American Indian are genetically more similar then a Touareg and a Lemba.

How could a separate species like the Neanderthals, who spent 200 thousand years in isolation in ice age Europe, contribute so little genetic diversity?
Seems like a very sudden amount of worry for something everyone has known about for a long time. Did an actual event trigger this?
What a terrible website QuickBooks have!
Hardly any product info for the online only version...and almost twice the price of the competitors with only half the number of features. I guess they'll be merging Mint.com into their QB service?
Did Greece just suddenly get in the hole? This drop was extremely sudden. It seems odd for such a seeming non-event as "Greece is still in trouble."
Likewise with Left 4 Dead, another Valve game.
Dammit. The iPhone is great, AT&T isn't. I was really hoping to pick up the new iPhone and switch to Verizon this summer
Many iPhone customers would like to see iPhones on Verizon sooner than later. Including this one.
I think kyro's point is: if you're going to truncate a word, truncate following the initial letter, then you can't possibly form an undesired word.
But sometimes it's easier and faster to build something
cool than to try to build a useful business product.

I'm facing that dilemma now. Should I focus on the product I want to build and possibly fail months later with nothing to show for the effort and no budget left to live on (I'm still recovering from the last one)?

Or should I build several smaller demo projects as portfolio pieces I can shop to get client work to fund the part-time development of my eventual product? Especially considering that my walled-off enterprise projects are inaccessible and built with tools other than the open source ones I'd prefer to be working with.

It's almost like starting from scratch.
I'd go to Facebook to delete my profile but that would involve logging in which means might end up making things worse. ;p
If we had papered over our economic problems, I could see this drop as justified.

but we've paid people to buy houses, cars and appliances. And we've given billions to banks so they can lend it back to the government at a tidy no-risk profit.

So, this correction makes no sense. The stock market should be zooming to the moon.
I think you hit it on the head. Also, they are simple morality tales with names changed to protect the innocent.
Opera joins in Jobs v Flash argument
Accenture (ACN) went from $40 to $.01 and back up to $40.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=acn
That's a great post, and yes, I was certainly working under the assumption that a nuclear explosion would have a distinct spectroscopic signature when compared to the emissions of our Sun. Is that false?

If we can (eventually) detect the oxygen atmosphere of a planet through passive spectroscopy, then it does seem to follow that we could easily detect nuclear explosions from the surface of that same planet. Unless I'm missing something...
as a UC Davis student, I can say it's a much better change than what we had before (and my on-campus work switched to Gmail from OWA as well). definitely will hate to see it go ..
If you wanted to position yourself to make a lot of money if Greece defaults, what would you do?
I find the current state of that wikipedia page questionable.

Refutes is a very strong term. Humans and Neanderthals look very similar and children have different proportions AND the differences between individuals are great thus the inference you can make from just ONE sample does not warrant terms like "refutes".
If you need to truncate the word, keep the initial letter, then use the "…" character (one char instead of 3). That lets you signify words as late as pos 24.
Most likely it was all algorithms. You'll note it was a slow downtrend then it hit a window that triggered massive selloff cascade. When it hit the bottom from February the other algorithms were set to buy. I am betting few humans got through an individual order during this. It was mostly software.

This is what cause the crash in the eighties, we have some fail-safes in place to slow it but most trading is done by tuned algorithms during stuff like this. In fact, the PPT (Plunge Protection Team) might have kicked in...
I'm really not sure why you're being so argumentative with me. I didn't mention anything political or about who pays. Just that the tax situation is different if you get health insurance via an employer vs an individual plan. I spend 10% of my income on health insurance. I'm okay with that, but I also have just about the cheapest possible health insurance that isn't major medical and is from a reputable company.

Your original argument was about it being an issue in starting a startup. If I had preexisting conditions, the plan I'm on now would not be available. It's also difficult to find plans that cover pregnancy. I'm healthy, so it's true that it's not much of a concern for me. But if the situation were different my insurance could easily be 30-50% of expenses. Or if I got pregnant, I could afford to cover the 10,000-20,000 cost of a normal pregnancy, but if anything went wrong it would cost hundreds of thousands. I'm not saying someone else should pay for my pregnancy, but women shouldn't have to roll the bankruptcy dice when they get pregnant. This is what risk pools are for.

The problem is also that it take lot of time to deal with. The plan we're on is an HMO. We've moved a little bit away, so now I'd have to drive 85 miles to see the doctor. I could change plans, but then I'd have to do a lot of research again.

I don't want health insurance to cover maintenance, people need to be aware of how much things cost and make economic decisions with respect to health care. Which is why I purchased the plan I did. But the plan is really difficult because price comparison shopping for health care is an unreasonable process. I got a blood test last year. I asked the doctor how much it would cost. He was very surprised by the question and said about 100. I got a bill for 500 for the test, plus all the doctor's fees.

I don't have dental insurance and I need a filling. The first quote I got was 363 dollars. Which according to some internet research is far too high. So now I have to spend the afternoon calling around dentists. Some of them won't even give quotes without a visit to look at the cavity. It's hard to price shop and the prices are inflated due to insurance.
we lost touch with people for no other reason than keeping up with where they were was annoying and hard.
You're absolutely right.

I was listening to two different people at the same time, and I'm away from my real-time charting program so I coudln't check.

I just changed the title to reflect.

Holy Shit. Accenture dropped from $40 to $0.01, and now it's back in the high $30s.
This would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a standard because of this.
The Web Struggling To Keep Up With The Stock Market Crash/Bounce
I don't think I'm one of those 100 people, but from what I've been reading, many European banks (particularly the German, French and British banks) have more exposure to Greek, Portuguese and Spanish debt than they ought to. If any of those countries (Spain in particular) were to default, the losses at the big banks would be so great that people may want to pull their money out for now, just in case. And you know what happens next.
Circuit Breaker: a small but real-life example of Clojure protocols and datatype
Typo.

google for proctor and gamble fat finger.
Good lord, if you'd put $10 into that during the panic, you'd have $40000 now.
I dunno... seems more probably a blip in the data rather than value actually falling to $0.01 momentarily...
Lamb futures.
I hate AT&T with a raging passion. My iPhone's data plan is in reality 40% of the data plan. The other 60% of the time my phone doesn't think I'm on the internet even though I have full bars and the 3G icon.
Woah. link bait title much?

As I said the other day I don't currently read much into what Facebook are saying - it's a legal argument as part of their much wider fight with Power.com. The EFF are, quite rightly, stepping in to try and stop any ruling in this case opening the way for ToS violations to come under criminal law.

I'm yet to be convinced Facebook are claiming this generally; the case is much much wider than this one issue.

EDIT: I see "data portability" is a site dedicated to open/portable standards - rather than a service which was my initial reaction. In which case the title has a little more merit.
Have you looked at the site? What should I bet against? There are a lot of choices :-)

I don't imagine a clear divide between 'rational' and 'irrational' betting (for want of a better description), I'm just saying that I would expect there to be a lot of both going on.

If you're wondering why I believe this, the book 'Predictably Irrational' by Dan Ariely springs to mind as a good read about the subject. Also 'The Tiger That Isn't' (Michael Blastland/Andrew Dilnot), not about human rationality as such but rather, how easily we can be foxed by information depending upon how it is presented to us (in the context of 'reasoning poorly' about the election).
More Information about the BlackBerry Tablet
Riots because of Eurozone-pushed austerity measures; Greek citizens would (understandably) rather not cut services than comply with a largely foreign monetary policy.
Not so sure that's entirely it. See from two days ago:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/05/market-changes-tone-dur...

and one day ago:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/05/cash-100/

(Some of) the technicians were looking at a lot of money on the sidelines, a rally that looked like it was cresting, a lot of profits to be locked in - and anticipating a big correction.

There's a lot of luck to it and maybe even some feedback so its sort of a joke but Ritzholz cashing out (and blabbing about it) by yesterday, and turning to shorting opportunities, just confirms that he's a Sooper Genius.
well considering the debt now has junk status you'd just buy it at pennies on the dollar (like the people buying the bad mortgages) and hope the austerity measures pass and they get their shit together.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/02/weekinreview/0...
More details here: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100420/full/news.2010.194.ht...

The ancient mitochondrial DNA came from a piece of finger bone, which the groups haven't identified by species. It could be Neanderthal, a new Homo species or some other archaic form — like H. erectus, who spread to Oceania by 1.8 million years ago.

. But the age of the bone has been questioned by researchers, who say the cave's sediments may have been reworked, making the bone's layer older.

Could the bone turn out to be much older?
They say it's because of Greece, but I think this may be Romania. Their government JUST announced drastic measures to avoid becoming next Greece.

Which means the debt issues are spreading in Europe... Not that US is in a much better position...
http://bloomberg.com is down too.
"I wish I had a definitive answer," said William Fitzpatrick, an equities analyst at Optique Capital Management. "I think the information from Greece and Europe continues to get worse and that is what is weighing on investors."

The phrase 'weighing on investors' suggests that they are making measured decisions, and investing carefully, concerned with the long (or even medium term) prospects of what those investments stand for. None of that really seems reflected in the way the system operates today. It seems to me, the large part of the transactions are automated and so far disengaged from the real world (derivatives etc) that they are effectively meaningless. Everytime the market does move, every expert has their own interpretation of what the Brownian motion means today.
Pure PHP IMAP & POP3 Message Retrieval and Parsing
can anyone explain how accenture just went to a value of a penny even if it was momentary?
Chaos - opportunity
the price of euro also fell to 1.25USD

http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=1&From=EUR&...
short British banks? just repeating what I saw online ;p
Someone has to actually sell you shares at that price for that to happen. It was likely a data error. No one is going to sell Accenture shares for a penny.
Wtf stock-market-people. Panic causing reaction causing panic isn't helping anything. Chill for a few seconds.
One trader left to go to the toilet and everyone else panicked and raced after him.
I've heard some suggest that one play would be to buy gold in euros.
Greasemonkey script to auto-log out of Facebook
German bonds
Kicking myself right now for not putting a limit order to sell puts I bought a couple of weeks ago...could've had a nice long vacation :)
According to CNN it "might" have bee a computer glitch causing a huge volume of trades and corresponding panic that followed pushed it further down.

Things seem rather stable at -4% now...
Sportmeets launches to get you organized and sport - your feedback?
Google Finance is working nicely:
http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI
As I understand it, all it takes is one share to have been sold at that price. Probably indicates someone having a "sell n shares at any price" order where n > buy orders at that moment..?

Regardless of the details, this is an example of how markets aren't perfectly efficient.
The other big issue that is causing concern is that there is a very volatile populace in Greece. There have already been riots/protest over the proposed cuts...

A major problem is that the Euro covers a very wide and very variable region; some economies are on the tipping point already.

(and I am so glad we (UK) didn't jump into bed with the Euro now! :D)
Probably because low salaries are a proxy for commitment, not because of direct cause-and-effect.
I am really curious who has problems with AT&T coverage and who doesn't. In MN it is fine, ND is iffy but actually getting better (they don't offer the iPhone in ND), and SD seems to be good.
I'm not sure how FEC is going to help, unless I do this.

Send lots of packets, bit the first bit of each packet is an error corrected byte of the file to be transmitted. Then if a packet gets lost I simply make up a random one and let the error correction deal with it.

If I use 2 bit correction then I can lose two packets and still have uncorrupted transmission.

Hmm.

I still need to know how many packets I expect, how big the file is, and some sort of checksum to ensure that I haven't error "corrected" to the wrong value anywhere. It seems very complex compared with just a simple re-try of packets that haven't arrived. Advantage is that it's forward only, but that doesn't help much since I do have a two-way connection.

I'll think about that though, because although it's non-obvious, I can see that it does potentially have advantages.

Not necessarily in this specific case, though.
Follow the action live on Google Finance
(one of the few finance site still working):
http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI
People are talking about computer errors, but NYSE is saying no.

According to the data I'm seeing for ACN now, the whole drop happened over a 1 minute period, and was back up the next minute.
I read through the EFF brief yesterday (in connection with a related post) and summarized the key points of the legal dispute on this issue here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320040.

Essentially, the criminal statute prohibits unauthorized access to user data on a network (among other things), a precedent exists by which ConnectU was found to have violated the criminal statute for having scraped user emails (and spammed the users) without their permission and in violation of Facebook's terms of service, and Facebook is now claiming that Power Ventures is similarly violating the statute by accessing user data in violation of its TOS - EFF (filing its brief as a "friend of the court" and not as a party to the dispute) claims that this is absurd given that users own their own information and therefore it cannot be a crime for Power to access it with their permission (even if it is a done in violation of the TOS).

FB's position on this does in fact appear to be absurd, and I would strongly suspect the claim will be bounced from the case.
It was likely a data error. No one is going to sell Accenture shares for a penny.

Or a bit more precisely: Someone might have entered a big sell order at $0.01/share by mistake, but when this happens the stock exchanges usually undo those trades, so even if you think you bought ACN for $0.01/share, you probably didn't.
To give some perspective, it is the biggest intra-day loss since 1987.
I don't have any applications added when I visit the sites listed here, and this happens whether I have third party cookies blocked or accepted. There may be something else my system is doing to block this behaviour, or it may be a feature only rolled out to some users.