skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My half brother had his first episode around his 20th birthday. I was 8. His behavior still haunts me, we were very close. On a trip to hong kong I met and was subsequently stalked by a schizophrenic girl for 3 years and I also worked briefly in a psych ward.

People with the disorder can drift in and out of health. On some level their symptoms are related to stress (and meds), so you can have a normal conversation one day and the next they can become obsessed with ghosts living in the shower. I guess the hardest part is that when they seem somewhat cognizant at first in a conversation. They initially try very hard to concentrate and can make a fair bit of sense, but after a few minutes they start getting a little fuzzy around the edges, drifting off, mumbling to themselves talking about things that didn't happen etc. Eventually they start confusing you with jesus or a dead relative. I could go on with incidents...

It can be incredibly disturbing. I have nightmares about the behavior, its just too much. I once talked to a psychiatrist who told me its better off separating yourself. Its really hard to do (and this comic doesn't help, its misleading) but spending any amount of time trying to cope with it and rationalize ends in frustration and sadness.
Why are CDOs bad?

Why are crashes bad?

I think the point that you may be missing is that there will always be booms, busts, panics, euphorias, etc. Those are byproducts of human psychology.

The real problem is when people blindly expect the market to always be stable, to always increase in price, etc. Most of the people who lost money in the recent financial crisis were people who couldn't afford to lose on the bets they made or who had essentially let it all ride without understanding that sometimes share prices go down too.
It's amazing how quickly you can single out people using supposedly anonymized datasets like this. There's a CMU paper noting that 87% of Americans are uniquely identified by their birthdate, 5-digit zip code, and gender: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/your-secrets...

Statistics are neat.
Was the Google Nexus One a flop? Not even close.
Has working at Google while being an active investor ever led to any conflicts of interest?
Fair enough. Can you say even 1 million Facebook users gives a crap?

The fact that Facebook really isn't reacting much to this outrage (albiet justified), farther solidifies the point that people who are vocal about it to the extend that they are ready to stop using Facebook is a very small minority and it will not effect them much, if at all. When you have 400 million users, do you really care losing 100k users who are most likely tech savvy and using Ad-blockers anyways?
This is interesting actually. Browsing some common keywords it seems that out of 200 million users very few seem to have open status updates compared to the same test 6 months ago the number has more than halved.
Search this doc for "speculators" to see where this is really coming from. The modern arguments against speculation are just echoes of this.

http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij23.htm
Make Free Calls By Using Gizmo5
Http://www.officialbay.com/mens-shox-monster-shoes-white-p-28199.html
Well, that's the next milestone, probably in 2-3 months.
What are the underlying problems?
How Linux Saved A Fast Food Giant.
I generally avoid stuff that relies on heavy SEO or otherwise obviously directly competitive. Although I'd avoid some of that stuff merely because it is bad for the ecosystem before I worry if it bothers my employer.

I'm pretty clear where I work and what my burden of responsibility is. So entrepreneurs will end discussions when they learn where I work if I wasn't aware. Usually if there is a conflict issue it ends there.

I invest small amounts relative to my net worth and am unlikely to compromise my behavior for an investment. The E(v) of an investment, if you assume the 33% chance of a > 3x return is still not that big.

Although: Yahoo compliance forced me to pass on the first round of Twitter. Yet another reason I am annoyed at them.
And explain which side is which?
What is the reason for plugins being sent in the headers? If it's only for the 'you must have flash 10 installed' messages than I'd like to disable that.
The above solution is just plain ugly, HTML in Python.

Another PITA, where Django templates just fall down, is forms. Suppose you have a form:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
name = forms.CharField()

You then add that in the template:

{{ form.name }}

All well and good; but what if you want to change the size, maxlength, or add a class ? These things clearly belong in the template, but no, you have to either add them in the form declaration:

name = forms.CharField(widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'class' : 'foo'}))

or in the view:

form.fields['name'].widget.attrs = {'class' : 'foo'}

Both of which clearly break the separation of concerns. yes, you could write a template tag to get around this; but it's not in standard Django.

Contrast the following in Jinja2 (using WTForms, but you get the idea):

{{ form.name(class_="foo") }}
I liked newmogul, submissions were of good quality. Comments were of quality too, but had not yet reached the critical mass where a longer discussion can develop.

Problem with finance aggregrators is filtering the high quality articles, so much of finance writing is subpar.
Mens Shox Monster Shoes White
This will change my life :)

(sounds more dramatic than I mean it, but seriously: this is really going to save me time)
Statements like the title of this article make no sense to me. They suggest nothing ever changes and external forces have no effect. 50 years of technology and markets suggests very few things don't change.

Look at the auto industry. Look at the state of finance and banking. Lots of changes that hit like a ton of bricks. It's probably safe to say Samsung is a safe investment. But calling it 'uncatchable' leaves the suggestion that it's not at the mercy of the markets for some reason.

But then again, I digress. The reporter has his job, which is to get people to read his article.
I almost exclusively consume video content through the iPad. I download almost all of my TV shows and have my video podcasts download via RSS.

I then stream it to the iPad with Air Video. Probably the most kick-ass app I've seen in awhile. TV shows are almost all XviD or X.264 and Air Video converts them live on your machine and streams them over WiFi to your iPad (both local and remote).
If, hypothetically, you were starting a new venture yourself, what kind of change would you want it to make in the world if it succeeded?
It's funny you should say that. I have the exact opposite intuition: message passing is substantially slower than method calls, especially statically bound method calls in a statically typed, compiled language.

You're right that message passing is a different way of looking at things; but obviously it's something different to method calls. Delegation, for one thing, is much easier with message passing, as are other strategies, like default implementations, remoting (never mind how poorly RPC scales), etc. On the other hand, getting two objects to communicate over a private channel can be more awkward, as they need to share pre-arranged references, rather than simply being friends / package / internal visibility, or similar visibility override.
1099s wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to choose between three layers of carbon paper on non-8.5x11" special paper that you have to order ahead from the IRS weeks in advance, or pay-per-file non-IRS-but-IRS-approved third-party electronic filing.
Delicious started getting noticed a great deal. Press, etc. I think I had 30-40k users right before I started talking to Fred. This is in the days before user inflation, mind you.

I got several offers of acquisition for delicious in the 250k-500k range, and felt that if I actually worked on it full-time it would be worth more.

I turned down eight or so acquisition offers before I took VC.
Don't you remember the incident just a short while back that revealed how many Facebook users Google 'facebook login'? These weren't necessarily 'stupid' people, they just wanted to check on their friends and share what's new with them. Anything else (like learning a bit about how the internet works) is just an annoyance.

And before you say it, no, this didn't affect 'most' Facebook users, but these aren't the only ones leaving their privacy settings on default.
It's a good book.

Reading it inspired this: http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/09/amateur-economist.html

Curiously, I was a quant before I did delicious.
Thinking in terms of messages passing makes you think of the objects in a proper way.

Objects just aren't structs with methods on top: you can create lots of those without them ever being objects in the proper sense. Objects are a separate concept.
Agreed. This comic was incredibly misleading. I've known more than one person with the disorder and they've all had violent episodes.
The only information they have is about trades that are about to hit their private trading network (before they go out to the market as a whole).

It would seem to me that if this were a problem, private networks would emerge that either disallowed the look-ahead option or allowed the party placing an order to declare it off limits to look-ahead (which would probably result in an increased transaction fee).

So in other words, the only time this could really result in exploitation is if one party lacked the wherewithal to use a different trading network (or a large trade broker) when trying to do a large transaction a few shares at a time.

This seems like the sort of thing that would attract innovation and would be fixed before anyone could blink, as trading network firms realized they could make more money by offering both options. My guess is that the lowered fees available in the sort of ecosystem that exists today would limit the demand for a trading network that disallowed it. After all the feature was added on as a desirable product fairly recently and nobody complained about it... until HFT became the scapegoat du jour for the financial crisis.
Thanks for looking at it.

This is something I wanted to do for sometime, Salman Khan's video just re-ignited the passion I had when I first thought of it (I still have the detailed ~10 page draft lying around somewhere). I am hoping to go all-out on this, not sure how to approach some of the non-technical problems but I am researching/working on it. One way or another I will find a way and make this happen. rápido.
Home Loan Eligibility Post Recession
The recession has ensured that certain precautions are undertaken while giving home loans on mortgage, home finance, down payment, and also any other form of loans.
So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion

I, personally, would like to hear both sides' arguments. So, please exclude myself from your version of 'we'.

Also, how's it supposed to be a place of discussion, if we have 100 people here saying 'FB is bad, very bad', and 0 people saying 'it's not as bad as it seems'. Doesn't sound like a productive discussion to me.
How did you host/fund it prior to taking VC? Was it so low maintenance that this wasn't an issue?

(Many have said this already, but thanks for starting this thread. Very insightful.)
That's where we disagree. I think checklists are not the way one should approach a problem.

You don't want developers to follow a checklist, you want them to use their intelligence.

One hour is enough to make developers realize they know nothing about cryptography. Once they reach that point, they will be on the right path (ie really learn about the topic or ask someone who knows).

The most common error isn't improperly used algorithms or techniques, it's improperly used cryptography.

Example: securing a file with AES-CTR and having the password hardcoded in the binary.
> For example, Python's power and flexibility is roughly equivalent to Ruby's, but the design philosophy (and the community's) is very different.

I'm a Python guy and I notice that too. Ruby has a great sense of 'everyone can make stuff using Ruby! It's fun and easy'.

Being fun and easy is true of Python too - you have finance guys, natural language guys, and web people, none of whom have traditional computer science backgrounds. But they often exist in their own groups, and they find Python by themselves. There's no _why showing people cool stuff in a fun way, no 'hey use our deployment tool, it's easy and fun' in the Python world - or at least, a lot less than Ruby land.

What do you think of a meetup for people who make stuff, using Python? Maybe a couple talks about things that people have made, with the aim being that by the end of it the audience knows enough to make the thing themselves, then drinking.
If you think the idea is worth it, spend the time at the first go. :)
One axis along which businesses find themselves has "direct utility" at one pole and "perceived utility" on the other. Perceived utility is stuff like sugary drinks, or pictures of attractive people, or whatever; we're drawn to like those things because of our psychology and evolutionary background. I don't mean to sound negative - if people like the things they can be good things. Like video games, for example.

I think that no business or product exists at either extreme (delicious, for example, over-empowered people's need to collect things; video games are inadvertently good at improving reaction time etc) but I'm pretty sure anything that leans toward direct utility and is large is going to have a significant positive impact in the world. I think Google is a pretty shining example here.

The things I like to build tend toward the "direct utility" side of things. Hopefully they will be large...
You need to read some of Ebert's Great Movies reviews. The man is one of our great living humanists.
It was a joke! Why all the downvotes?
Oh come on. If you think that was trolling, you don't know what trolling is. He was civil and presented a cogent argument. The fact that you disagree with him does not give you the right to lob ad hominems.
I don't know the cannon world very well, but those guys talking about Nikons 18-200 is truly one of the best lenses there is

What's the best camera? The one you have on you when you need to get a picture. There's a lot of sneering about "vacation lenses" like the 18-200, but the tiny drop in image quality is well worth just having the right lens on the body when you see something neat.

Sometimes the best hack is the simplest.
Diaspora: Selling a Dream at 170k (current price)
I worked on the Word Viewer web app for MS last summer (my team also owned the Word Editor) and complete preservation of rich client formatting was considered a core feature. Trying to cast it as Microsoft "[touting] its proprietary document formats" is kind of...silly. Preserving formatting is a feature, and a useful one at that.
Installing things is the single greatest improvement when switching to a modern Linux distribution. Click, click, done.
This article is about Microsoft's web-based alternative to Office, not the Office rich client.
I'm interested as well, and also in seeing pictures - no award-winning goes without pictures so there have to be some.
Another funny story:

So it must have been 2004 and Stewart from Ludicorp wanted to show me this new "Flickr" thing they'd built, which was a sort of online flash chat thingy. I'd logged in and poked around, and said something to the effect of "this is neat, but I wonder if somebody's mother could use it." Stewart said to call mine and see what she thought, so I did.

A few minutes later, my mother comes into the chat room that Stewart and I are talking in. If I recall, nobody else is even logged into the system at the time.

"Mom, this is Stewart. Stewart, this is my mother."

Stewart says hello, she says hello, etc.

My mother says: "This is very nice, but I have one question."

Stewart: "What's that?"

My mother: "How is this going to make any money?"
It takes over 100 clicks to make a FB profile completely private, and the settings aren't permanent. That's clearly a business decision. You don't need to be a UX expert to understand the aggregate effects.

I can't even fathom how anybody could look at such a system and claim that the users all understand the ramifications with a straight face.

It's really insulting that you're trying to sell such an utterly asinine claim by pointing out that people sometimes overshare on twitter, in blog comments, and in line at Starbucks. The FB privacy system is broken by design.

Search just happens to offer an amusing window into content that is, in all likelihood, x% people who would overshare anyway, and 100-x% people who thought they were just talking to their friends, or friends + FoF, where x is nearly guaranteed not to be 0 or 100.
In my mind, Microsoft has to keep fighting this battle against Google, who gives away a product for free just so that the battle is waged on the web rather than on the desktop.
Google acquire Global IP Solutions
An Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg: “Don’t Do A Mugabe To Facebook”
I think she's lauded as wise because this story gives the reader an easy bromide disguised as deep understanding.

She never once in this story actually sat with her partner and tried to understand what was going on with him. She gave him an answer, made a few demands, and flat out refused to listen.

Reading this story broke my heart. I couldn't believe her utter weakness and lack of compassion.

The truth is scary. Love is scary. Change is scary. These things loom over our comfortable lives threatening to expose us to the changes going on outside our realm of control. You don't own your lover, and the truth may one day be that they're unhappy, and need to leave. That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.

If this is indeed a true story, I sure hope the guy has since managed to find a good divorce attorney.

ADDITION:

I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head
that told me my personal happiness was only as good
as my outward success, rooted in things that were
often outside my control.

This is a huge red flag.

Whenever some says that they've "finally managed" to fix themselves in some major way, be very suspicious. It doesn't work that way. We keep our patterns, and they find new ways to manifest until we learn through repeated painful experience to turn them to our benefit some of the time.

There is no switch.

Her happiness was still clearly very much rooted in her "successful" marriage, her ability to provide a traditional two-coupled-parents environment for her children, etc.

The first step to Happiness is admitting one's neuroses.

The second is admitting that the first didn't make them go away.
I have a google chrome extension for quick plugs, I just open it and write down the idea. I'm into mobile apps these days, so it works really well for me. When I'm done with one App, I go to the next in my ideAa Box
> They also skirt the question of whether producing the requisite 10,000-hour grinds may prove to be as inegalitarian and hypercompetitive as the emergence of geniuses ever was.

It's a little scary that the author just assumes that being inegalitarian is a bad thing. Excellence is inegalitarian by definition.
But (ironically in this context) when bets are available, there will always be people making bets they can't afford to lose. People blindly expecting the market to always be stable is a by product of human psychology!
> Would you ever fund a person you believed in for that kind of exploratory work?

I've put money into a few things based on people's prior work, but generally the idea itself has to be interesting.
http://orgmode.org/ is a brilliant tool for this kind of thing. And you don't need to know emacs to get started. If you're unfamiliar with emacs then getting it setup does require some persistent effort, however once your over that hill, it's really easy to work with. And I have mine set up so that I can hit a key binding wherever I am and a window will pop up so that I can enter a note or todo item.
My iPad gets a ton of usage. It's almost replaced paper for me. Instead of sketching out notes and ideas on paper, I use Adobe Ideas on the iPad.. I get a permanent record and it's even better than paper (bigger canvas, colors, etc). This is about the only "content creation" I do with it, but a very essential activity.. I'm getting a lot more done thanks to this.

Beyond that, it can't be beat for checking e-mail and the Web just before going to sleep/after waking up, in the bathroom, or while sitting on the couch.

I've also started to read a lot more. I haven't had any weight issues with it at all, but I have a 9 month old baby so I'm used to holding a ton of weight in awkward positions for ages.. :-)
I'm trying to fix the same problem.

My attempted solution is to blog at least a paragraph on it. This way I have a public record of it, the opportunity for feedback, and some sense of progression.

It hasn't worked very well so far, though, because I'm still much more likely to pop open an idea.org buffer and append it into a category where it will gather dust.
Hyman Minsky distinguishes three rough kind of finance: hedge, speculative and Ponzi. He argues that the movement of the economy towards speculative and then Ponzi finance is one of the motors of economic crisis. The implication is that a certain amount of regulation is useful here.

... and I don't think you can draw any lines between Minsky and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Indeed, "all criticism of speculation is anti-semitic" is as much a "conspiracy theory" as any other hot-button generalization.
I wonder why these die hard Windows fans stick with it when they realize what kind of things you can do with Linux.
If interoperability is important why did Microsoft not get behind OpenDocument? I know this sounds a little passive-aggressive but I'm genuinely interested to know if there was a reason other than NIH.
I do all my brainstorming, schema creation, and similar "idea sketching" work on mine. Doesn't sound particularly serious, but it's an essential part of my work now.

I've also seen a few pro-bloggers claiming to produce entire posts on the iPad, but whether they've kept it up or not is a different story.. :-) (It would drive me nuts!)
1. Do you ask startups how exactly they are going to spend money? Or are you fine investing even if team doesn't know where each penny is going to be?

2. Since you must be involved with a lot of startups, how much time, attention and guidance you are able to give to an individual startup?
It surely doesn't come from that, which you must know is a kind of lame slander, the usual "the Nazis did [x], so you're a Nazi" non-argument.

General attacks on speculation and finance go much further back than anti-Semitic worries about "Jewish finance", to long before the medieval era when European Jews became associated with finance--- the Jewish scriptures themselves, and writings of the early Christians, both have a bunch of attacks on finance in them. Surely the Talmud itself isn't anti-Semitic?

And a modern quantitative understanding of the role of speculation is pretty unconnected to Jews (most financiers are atheists or Christians, anyway).