skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure he received funds from Harvard

I think this is the main point. It's not that he fooled admissions to get into the school, it's that he took money away from other students.

> This is very similar to the way many citizens and legal immigrants feel about the current government failure at the southern border

While I think there are a lot of anti-illegal-immigrant crazies out there (cough Sheriff Joe cough), saying that it's A-OK to get around rules and regulations by being a fraud, tears at the very fabric of society. If all that matters is that I 'came to work,' then what's the point of any rules and regulations. Should I be just as willing to lie, cheat and bamboozle my way into whatever job that I can, just to remain competitive in the job market?
Robots replace girls.
So population ages.
Who will nurse them now?
Mac OS X did it right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1356203
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion
Lied on his admissions, too. Took away a spot from someone who really deserved to go to Harvard.
>I am interested to know if the stop command was a "save your own skin" move or a "save the market" safeguard.

Definitely "save your own skin." The consequences can be dire when trades are "busted" (as many were). Consider this hypothetical situation:

Shares of a stock are trading at $50. After that plunge on Thursday, it's trading at $18, and an algorithm jumps in. The shares rally and at $22, the algorithm sells the shares for a quick profit, and calls it a day. The shares go back to $45 by the end of the day. (This is basically what happened).

The next day, NASDAQ rules that all trades at a price below 40% of the price before the plunge [are invalid](http://www.streetinsider.com/Insiders+Blog/NASDAQ+Busts+A+Nu...). Now that purchase at $18 didn't happen, but the sale at $22 did, and the high frequency trader is short the stock at $22, with the current price $45. That's why lots of high frequency trading shops shut down when trades are in danger of being busted.

Note: I don't do high frequency trading, this was just from interested reading after that plunge happened last Thursday. It seems bizarre to me that they can rule a purchase invalid but keep the sale, but I believe that's what happens.
Are you doing it for financial reward or for the enjoyment of it?
That's nice in theory, but in practice it seems to lead to trial-by-media.
I agree with dimarco. Start with the 50mm f/1.8 fixed lens. It's good quality for the price. The real professional lenses cost between 900 and 1600 dollars. Fixed ones are cheaper. Zoom are more expensive.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens $99.95 -- if you buy this, you MUST buy the UV filter
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00007E7JU?ie=UTF8&tag=...

UV filter (protects lens' glass):
Tiffen 52mm UV filter $9.95 -- goes with the Canon EF 50mm lens (trust me; this is the correct size filter)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004ZCJG?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Tutorial Book:
Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera $17.13 -- Bryan Peterson, the author, is a god of photography teaching
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817463003?ie=UTF8&tag=...

Tutorial Book:
Beyond Portraiture: Creative People Photography -- $17.13 -- Bryan Peterson, the author, is a god of photography teaching
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0817453911?ie=UTF8&tag=...

My credibility is that I have been a digital photography hobbyist for three years. Here are some of my photos: http://billpaetzke.smugmug.com
pretty close. They're talking about designated "market makers" (of which specialists are a subset) who get into a contractual obligation with an exchange to be in certain markets for specified percentages of the trading day. They've been part of the exchange landscape for a long time, and they've been largely displaced by HFT firms. To say that this changing landscape is somehow to blame for the flash crash is dubious, at best, however.
> Entrepreneurs need to understand that [ ... ] or I will stab their eyes out. Please fill in the blank.

Communication is key. If you want people to do things, you must communicate in ways that facilitate the action. Make it easier for me as I am bandwidth constrained.

> What is the most broken thing about angel investing?

I haven't been doing this long enough to have a sense for that, which is surprising. I am frequently cranky about things that don't work well.
Probably the second, currently. I haven't seen a lot of return in real dollars.
Agreed - when I purchased my Nikon D200 a while back, I got an 18-200mm telephoto and a 50mm 1.4 prime. Most of the time the telephoto sits in my camera bag. Learning to shoot with a prime made me a much better photographer.

Definitely skip the telephoto unless you're planning to shoot wildlife or have a similar specific use. You won't miss it.
This is why I think Apple adding multi-tasking to OS 4.0 is a mistake. Nobody really missed it, and now a lot of people are going to have to concern themselves with understanding what is going on, when they do not want to. Or, they are going to wonder why their new device is so slow, and the battery does not last as long.

I understand people wanting to listen to Pandora in the background, I do not think there are that many people like that. I do not think they warrant this huge change.
IAMA is my guilty pleasure.
Eponysterical!
Ask HN: Optimal shop sorting?
We have an online shop has a lot of user submitted items.

Up to now we sort by default by newest, but it's becoming a mess now, hard to find the good items.

Are there any algorithms or suggestions for best sorting?

We are considering a ranking based on:

Sort by revenue generated with a weight for age (previous 24 hours sales * 100 + previous one week sales * 30 + previous months sales * 20 + previous year * 10 or whatever)

Any suggestions?
Personally I would be ok with either. I know great investors in NYC. There are more investors in the Valley. If you have something that is harder to get funded, it may be easier here.
I am not fond of secondary franchises. If you are going to live in the shade of one tree, it'd better be a huge fucking tree.

I am also not fond of temporary opportunities. If you are doing X for Android because there's a successful X for iPhone and nobody has done it yet, then it's not a scaleable business.
Openbook
A fantastic demonstration of why the state shouldn't control the cirriculum. Even if those who share your ideas and ideals are in power now, it's short-sighted to assume things will stay that way.

It ought to be a fundamental right to educate your children in whatever ideological tradition you please.
Well if everyone starts paying the bribe and if there are limited resources, then sooner or later the bribe amount is going to adjust itself to reflect the supply and demand.
Funny story: When I see names in the press that look familiar, I often check to see if I've communicated with them. I saw an article about a company that raised money, and checked, and sure enough I had talked with them about it.

The entrepreneur had written ten paragraphs. I sent a "sounds interesting, send screenshots or a prototype" and they wrote ten more paragraphs. I didn't follow up.

However, smarter people than me invested, so what do I know?
Incidentally, I have sent at least three startups to your blog, just for an example of crisp thinking they needed to emulate.
“Several high-frequency trading firms that I know about stayed in the market that day,” he said, “and had their best day of the year.” Some of the very biggest HFT players stayed in the market, partly because they are obligated to being liquidity providers, and retrospectively because it became a very good day for those that did.
$300-400 is going to buy you plastic crumby lenses. I do a lot of various photography... weddings, family, portraits, kids, landscapes, etc. If you bought your DSLR to take more photos than quick shots at family gatherings, invest in prime lenses.

That being said, the best (cheap) lens I have ever used/bought was 50mm 1.8/f lens. It was for the Nikon, but Cannon has one similar. The price is about $100 depending where you go.

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. In terms of what it can do and cost. I bring it when I travel alot because it's small, great zoom, great wide angle (all considering), great in low light, great for outdoors and decent indoors.

Another thought is to visit your local camera shop and rent some lenses. Try them out for a weekend. Borrow from fellow Cannon owners. Go out on Flickr meetups and see what they are using.

Quite honestly hackernews crowd is the not the best place to find other photographers for advice :)
I think you're looking for a self post in /r/Apple.

I could write a bunch of crap about the different pieces of functionality that are lacking in touch applications or the wasted screen real estate or touch interfaces in general.

But these types of articles are around the internet everywhere and this post simply isn't worth the effort to discuss.
Imagine, for a moment, a bank that doesn’t suck...

A bank that display funny pics when system goes down...
The money in your account is eventually consistent...
A bank allow users to type command to transfer money, e.g. "accept $1000"...
Gaming Could be a Possible Growth Area for Google
Agreed. Slicehost servers are great and so are EC2.
Isn't this the version that also substantially reduces the salt content?
3000 Airforce communications officers are now cyberspace officers
So I took this advice a bit too literally when this article came out, and was in denial about all the tantrums my wife was throwing. This weekend, she told me she's hired a lawyer and moved out with my daughter. Should I "buy it" yet?
"Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said."

Bernard Madoff used to have a reputation like that. I rather suspect that the only way to be a winner that consistently is to do something as shady as what Madoff did.

After edit: noting downvote, I'll give one example of a possible shady practice in this industry mentioned in other comments on this thread. Not following the price time rule, which the trader mentioned in this thread says can happen "unwittingly," despite a regulation requiring the first order placed to be the first order filled.
Leaked Screenshot of New Digg by Kevin Rose via Twitter
real connoisseurs who could tell the difference would be able to tell the wine was overpriced

As long as people like that are the ones buying most $60 wine, then wine sellers have an incentive to be honest. If people like me are buying lots of $60 wine, then there's going to be lots of plonk selling for $60, forcing connoisseurs to be more careful and less adventurous.

Unless you are an extremely frugal minimalist you already implicitly do spend money on things which do less for the greater good than a good charity, so arguing about quite where you draw the line to 'excess' is a bit irrelevant

I may gladly give in to consumer desires, but I don't feel sad when my consumer lust is not excited. I don't send out a plea saying, "Somebody, please get me excited about shaving cream. I want to spend a lot on it and feel good about it." That's like a porn fiend who has satiated himself but remains at the computer looking through porn, trying to find something that will make him horny again. That goes beyond fulfilling desire; it's addiction.
The problem is access to liquidity. People do do it themselves, but they can only trade very small amounts of money and thus make only a little return (albeit with pretty limited risk). If you have a good brokerage account (like most prop firms) or are a bank you can essentially trade for free. Your brokerage account will only charge you for the overnight holding as the cost of capital (you get charged transaction costs but no need to buy leverage). So, firms with a good amount of capital can use their balance on a brokerage account and who do not have overnight holding (common for these strategies) essentially don't need capital to trade.

Its just how much you want to scale. Also, if something goes wrong, you can lose your capital very quickly. An easy risk to cover for a multi-strategy prop firm, but it could sink an independent trader. I've spoken to a lot of these guys, and a new strategy mysteriously losing 1MM+ in a couple minutes is pretty common.

Back to access: The types of connections these firms have to exchanges are very expensive. If you dont have the scale necessary to cover 10k per month per connection than you can't compete with all of the other players in the market. Then it goes down to execution speed, colocation, etc - those are the things that make non-bank prop firms like Tradebot or Getco successful. The strategies are only a part of the equation, the trading systems are what really separates the pack.

Most of these firms have way more developers than traders, and the developers they have would make Google jealous.
Your last sentence comes pretty close. I have several passionate 'hobbies' that are each rather time-consuming, let alone all put together. I can't imagine even continuing a conversation with a woman after she'd suggested I give something up that I considered a part of me (and of course, in turn, I would pay her exactly the same respect). She would have to harmonize with who I am and what I do; but between two people with two sets of motives it is much easier to introduce dissonance. So in my case it is not about completion or finding happiness, it is simply about finding a pairing that adds more to both people's existing lives than it subtracts. You're probably right that she'd have to have a similarly driven independence and be unusually low maintenance. Tall order, I know, but unless the terms make both people better, I can't strike the bargain :)
MySpace To Simplify User Privacy Settings
I mostly agree with this.

I do think that there seem to be some problems with the "PRICE TIME" rule. My understanding is that is supposed to mean that if two orders get placed at the same price, then the one placed first gets filled first. However, it appears possible for some players to work around this rule and jump in first. That seems unfair to me.

Tradeworx says this too:
Jumping ahead of an order that was placed earlier at the same price by another trader is an UNFAIR practice, because it
undermines the principle of PRICE-TIME priority on which our equity markets are premised

Unfortunately, this UNFAIR practice is widespread, due to a deficiency in Rule 611 of Regulation NMS

HFTs should not be blamed for exploiting it – in fact, many HFTs who exploit this deficiency do so unwittingly

Instead, the regulators should work to correct this deficiency in the market structure ASAP !
(page 17, http://sec.gov/comments/s7-02-10/s70210-129.pdf)
Great. Any thoughts on parameter values?
Whats the best place to raise $200k for an early-stage internet startup. A single angel? A group of angels? A seed fund?
A good friend of mine is blind. I think it has not made it to market because it's an over-engineered solution that doesn't solve the problem better. Most blind people would say 'Why the hell would I want a buzzer on a heavy cane?'. It buzzes when I am near a stair (aka all day long). Or it buzzes when it hit a step... like it does now when I hit it!

Great story, neat solution, not market viable.
Thanks, that is a wonderful compliment. If you have something specific you like crispified, I'd be happy to do a summary post about it. (The user experience of accessing my blog for the first time is terrible if you're not coming to a particular article, since it degrades into "what am I thinking about this week" and doesn't usually include context for the last four years.)
Google Will Push Real-Time Feeds to Browser
My favorite was the unsalted ketchup. it tasted kinda sweet
Bottom line is that it works. The theory behind how it should work may be nice and dandy, but the reality is that it doesn't work as advertised. Whether it's because I haven't waited enough (why would I need to wait in the first place?) or whatever other reason, the unit slows down over time quite a bit and killing processes brings it back to life.

The fact that current devices are underpowered has nothing to do with the issue. N1 works just fine after a reboot but slowly degrades in performance. If it was "massively underpowered" if would not have worked properly in the first place.

I also don't understand why there is no easy way to disable some applications from auto-starting. For example I've never used the MP3 Store application, but it always starts up. There are a number of similar apps that do this and to my knowledge there's no way to prevent this from happening.
For more on that, you might enjoy Charlie Stross' "Accelerando": he discusses lots of awesome singularity topics, including so-called Economics 2.0. He posts on HN as cstross.
David Deutsch TED Talk on scientific explanations
Haha! If that is a virus, then so is this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1354731

:-)
This is a horrible response that doesn't exactly help you build trust or market your new banking product.

It starts with a disingenuous comment and it barely addresses the most basic of concerns(FDIC) and does so in a snarky and somewhat rude manner.

I would think you would have learned how to handle criticism and concern for a product of yours a lot better than this working at Twitter.
According to Fred, 2 in 3 startups return even or fail, and 1 in 3 succeed.

Assuming I'm doing as well as he is (which I doubt) and that an exiting startup gets 10x the input, the formula suggests 25% or so.

This seems high. Also, startups are not independent bets. Who knows?

I've done 34-ish investments. One small exit. Two are doing very well. Two or three dead companies (sometimes, it is hard to tell.)
The New War Between Science and Religion
I guess anything that works.

In my experience, companies raising less than 500k are making a huge mistake.
There are and will always be large classes of apps for which Javascript in a browser isn't a reasonable approach.

Why wouldn't JavaScript and browsers continue to evolve until that isn't the case?
You probably already know the site: www.dpreview.com

Also, when you get a Canon telephoto lens, make sure to get one with Image Stabilization.

Check out the guardian iPad app - each day they post a photo and discuss the shooting choices made by the photographer - http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2010/apr/06/th...
What are you wearing?
The more abstract the better! I love category theory.

Curry-Howard isomorphism blew my mind when I read about it; that's the sort of thing I'd like to read about. Do you know of any good treatments from the lambda calculus perspective?
For the record, I must say, Matthias, you kick butt. I've used your tools (swftools.org) for the last 7 years and found them to be extremely well built and useful. And the "tech support" has been amazing (you just complain about a bug or make a feature request on his mailing list and you get a fix / enhancement within days). Incredible work. Scribd made a really, really smart move bringing you on board to lead state-of-the-art document rendering. Please keep up the great work.
I read this a little differently. I think she made a smart bet.

It seems to me he was having an affair. Knowing that most relationships don't work out, she positioned herself perfectly to pick up the pieces when it failed.
I agree about the liquidity.

I'm not convinced about the access thing, though. http://www.interactivebrokers.com has decent looking connections for non-crazy prices, and their brokerage fees are good too.

I don't think you'd be able to do a pure HF strategy using it, but it's possible a strategy based on volatility trading could work maybe(?)
It wasn't advice, it was an anecdote. I'm very sorry to hear what you're going through though, I can only imagine what that must be like.
I realize this is getting off-topic from investing, but since that's the spirit of an AMA, is there an interesting story re: your mother meeting moot?
I find it an interesting comparison with the "I want to quit my job" feeling.

Except I'm stonewalling myself because I know the unhappiness is in my head and that with a change of opinion it wouldn't exist anymore.
There was a long blog series on OT not long after the Google Wave that is linked from the Wave docs:

http://blog.wavenz.com/2009/07/introduction-to-operational.h...
http://blog.wavenz.com/2009/07/operational-transformation-al...
http://blog.wavenz.com/2009/07/operational-transformation-an...

(full disclosure: I helped edit these)
Is font obfuscation why the text of http://www.scribd.com/documents/31051131/Scribd-HTML5-The-Fu... gibberish?
I am wearing a red "foo camp" tee shirt from 2007, jeans possibly from j-crew, and white gym socks I bought at walmart.

a year or two ago I threw out all my mismatched pairs of socks and bought all identical white socks. now I do not have to match and fold the socks when washing them. I just pile them into the drawer.
Ask HN: anyone in SF, attending Google I/O?
I am. Just curious who else will be too.

I don't have any 'real-life' hacker news friends and wouldn't mind making some. If so, any of y'all going to any of the standard after parties? (All I know of).
I know from your other posts that you don't live here in the United States. Really, truly readers of the mainstream mass media in my town understand that reports of ACCUSATION of criminal behavior are just that: reports about accusations. Some defendants are acquitted at trial, even after extensive press coverage. There is currently a businessman in my town accused of multiple financial crimes. He is still out of jail as prosecutors prepare for trial, and he still has friends, lawyers, and various forms of practical help in dealing with the accusations against him.
Leaving the Wheelchair Behind
good times had by all
Yes but the original author in this very thread has said that the data loss was through MQ(Mercurial patch Queue) delete. mercurial queues are an optionally controlled patch queue, so he had some code stashed it in an uncontrolled queue, deleted it and was surprised that it was really gone. This is rather analogous to what I posted for git. It was a bit of bad luck on his part but switching to git doesn't close that hole his code is still vulnerable to the same set of actions.

So his whole reason for switching is I shot myself in the foot. And instead of learning more about his weapon of choice to avoid doing that in the future, he traded in his gun for one that is slightly more complicated.
It looks like he wants the old days, where salespeople in shops new everything about a product. They new the customer by name, because they had been coming there since they were young. And there were only 5 fridge types anyway.

Unlike the present, were you walk into a computer shop and the seller doesn't even know the difference between dual core and dual processor.

Those days are gone.
Line of sight networking was obsoleted by WiFi and Bluetooth. What problem does this solve?

The plant using to light to communicate "water me" is cute though, hehe.
Rate of good versus bad pitches you get?
"Meanwhile, The Longest Day was reissued in 1994 for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. It still sells—a fact that belies the glaring omission of Ryan’s work from so many anthologies of literary journalism, and also offers a powerful lesson for a trade trying to figure out what people will pay to read. There is nothing, it turns out, like a densely reported story propelled by the palpable sense of a reporter chasing his story."
Bradley - Great to have you involved in building the Dallas startup community.
Can an Enemy Be a Child’s Friend?
If I were BPs execs, I'd be worried about more than my job.