skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "shadow banking industry" essentially consists of the commercial paper, repo, and other over the counter markets where bonds are traded on a short term basis. Essentially, banks and corporations that have 10s or 100s of millions of dollars lend it to each other, using bonds as "collateral" (protection against default). This market is now bigger than the regular banking industry, and there is evidence that the demand for investment-grade bonds to use as collateral was a contributor to the growth of the securitization industry and the sub-prime bubble.
We have a couple of servers at the office handling various duties like file serving, staging environment, backup email and support website in case our data center goes down. We used to run a few sites on them before we migrated to fully dedicated hosting.

It's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'd probably not do it again now that cheap VPSes are a commodity. Outsourcing the physical management allows me to not worry about assembling hardware, backups, power outages, network outages, burglary, fire and flooding. Neither will the server leave users hanging every time someone on the network downloads alot of data.

Unless you're doing some serious processing, a cheap Linode VPS should hold you over until you're profitable enough to upgrade to some real hosting.
This is one of my SE prof's close colleagues. He showed this in class.
Thanks, I really needed to hear that right now. It might turn out to be bad advice, but I love getting excuses to do what I really want.
The second Red Gate million dollar challenge
in WEP's case, your AP would receive an auth response encrypted with the keyphrase... you'd have to get quite a few of these to deduce the password, in general. people find it easier to just sniff traffic and deduce the key from all the traffic generated from someone downloading crap.

i don't think this is at all realistic with wpa.

you could just set up an open network with an equivalent essid, but that's nothing new is it? :)
Reason to Not Not Do a Startup: The Idea
I think it's fine to go to Rails 3 at this point, so long as you're aware of the potential pain points (and as a older seasoned Rails dev, I'm sure you are). I would still probably shy away from Ruby 1.9.x unless you knew that all the tooling/libraries you would need were supported, or wanted to go through the upgrade process on other people's libraries/write your own.

That said, if you're willing to do that, Ruby 1.9 is quite nice and a bit more performant as well.
I bricked my Iphone the first time I ran the jailbreak. Here is what I did to get it working again.
1. Start itunes and plug your iphone into your computer. Nothing will happen right now, just do it.
2. With your iphone plugged in and itunes started hold down the home key and the top button.
3. Keep holding down both buttons during the reboot and blank screen. Don't let go until you see a disk and a usb cable.
4. Select restore from itunes.
And you have more fun in the process.
I'm sorry but could you elaborate on "porting later versions of ZFS to FreeBSD would require non trivial changes to the FreeBSD kernel"?
Funny how he's the last person to realise that he had a contract that suddenly makes him an 84% stakeholder in facebook. What are the changes of that do you think? And only on the off chance that he had to pay off some people so he was looking for 'assets' that he could liquidate. NFW.

The only reason this lawsuit ever got started is hoping for a settlement and the only reason there is a chance of a settlement is because Zuckerberg is under fire from about every angle regarding the origins of facebook, which are indeed murky. But not so murky that a judge is going to side with this character. It's going to cost a small fortune in legal fees on both sides during the intermediate time though, and if facebook wants to IPO they'll have to settle because there is no way they are going to be able to with a 'cloud' like this.

You can't possibly give stuff like this any credibility. It's right on par with SCO saying they own all of Linux, someone claiming to own the patent on hyperlinks and other outrageous claims.

It's fodder for the tech-sensationalist press but nobody even remotely knowledgeable about this sort of thing will give better than 100:1 odds that this guy will prevail if the suit is going forward, it's an ordinary case of harassment using the legal system.

It's just another bottom feeder trying his luck in the lottery called the American Justice System.

Lawyer that take cases like this ought to be fined and disbarred for life, they give all the other lawyers a very bad name.

Yuck.
I just meant that most people are not that interested in living their lives to their fullest, and are just not interested in asking deep questions in whatever domain.

Now if that isn't an insult I don't know what one is. You don't have to grok Haskell to live your life to the fullest(especially if your Domain isn't programming languages.)
> I don't think it works like that. Put enough barriers to adoption (lack of: easy install, good documentation, friendly community, good error messages, bug free implementation, good libraries) in front of your prospective hacker audience and you'll find that adoption will suffer.

I can see your point, and I agree on principles. I disagree on "good documentation", "friendly community", "bug free implementation", "good libraries"... If there are either lacking of "good documentation" or "bug free implementation" or "good libraries", that just means a language either is academic or not ready yet for production, thus you'd better skip it. About "friendly community", I'd rather say that there are self-selecting communities. For instance, many people complain about "social problems" of Lisp, yet I had a very nice experience while asking even controversial questions on comp.lang.lisp.

> If you haven't reached a certain level of confidence that a path is the right one within a given amount of time the natural thing for an experienced programmer is to abandon the path, after all, there are so many technologies to choose from that you can't afford to invest too much time into something that feels like a dead-end, even if in the longer term it might turn out to be great.

That's why I've resolved to put my time only in both time and battle tested languages like Common Lisp and Erlang.

Thanks for sharing your view, Jacquesm :)
What happens if you frame the question thusly: "How do I foster relationships with people so I can trust them with my well being?"

Going on the internet to look for a start-up co-founder is putting the cart before the horse. Its backwards really. I know HN is a great place to connect with like-minded people and if a start-up has come out of this online-co-founder-dating model I'd love to hear about it.

Don't worry about obtaining what is considered "success" in some communities. Screw co-founders, funding, cool new web stacks, etc. If you're even relatively close to being able to handle these sorts of things, opportunities will come and you will recognize them.

Simply my $0.02. I hope your search goes well.
I'm not a coder, and I wouldn't be building stuff today if I didn't have PHP. I think a lot of people probably feel that way.

Programma hatas gon hate.
People who are really concerned about security starts from a clear design with security in mind.

PHP lacks any kind of design, it was just an rapidly evolved toolchan. ^_^
The one thing that I liked about the movie was the absence of white and black morality. There's no villain, and the protagonist's aren't good guys either.
"@neildavidson Just had the first #redgate million dollar challenge entrant. Wow - that was fast." http://twitter.com/NeilDavidson/status/20137466241
But pi does contain the finite instruction sequences for programs that generate the digits of those numbers.
I am half way through Richard Branson's biography "Losing My Virginity" now and really recommend it to anyone who wants a fun read - http://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/... -

He made a lot of REALLY bad business decisions (i.e. decisions which lost him lots of money) in the first 25 or so years running Virgin which is pretty good evidence that this blog post is not just PR.

On an unrelated note, something else I learned from the book is his success was pretty much 100% due to a cousin of his from South Africa showing up in London unannounced and looking for a job - turns out that cousin had a great ear for "what's cool", which resulted in Virgin signing their first successful artist (a studio musician who hung out at one of their studios), whose record sales kept the company afloat for its first 10 years.

Just goes to show you the importance of the right team - as well as being in the right place at the right time...
And from a business perspective:
3) It's easy to hire for
He's not saying it's an either / or, he's saying it's an AND.

Branson is well known for being a shrewd businessman and only looking to enter markets where he thinks he can compete and be financially successful.

Consider his recent investment into Formua 1 racing. Last year he sponsored Brawn GP for the first few races for a paltry sum of money (because they were desperate). Due to the team being sold off by Honda and they came back from the brink and had the fastest car - he got a ton of free PR and decided not to invest more money because he didn't need to.

This year he has created his own F1 team - Virgin Racing, and to save on costs the team are designing the car purely using CFD, whereas every other team are using windtunnels and building scale models and say you can't use CFD alone. Time will tell which one is proven right
Why an insult? Actions speak louder than words. How many people say health is one's most important asset, yet they don't take any action to really take care of it? Would you still think they care that much about their health? How many people would like to do that and that, still they don't take any action toward it? OTOH, if those same people were starved to near death, don't you think they would resort to extreme actions, because then their foremost interest would be getting food?

Again, I don't mean using a dismissive tone. If it feels like that, that's just because I'm not a native English speaker, and I already struggle to say what I think.

I do think that many people taking it easy are sorely needed by society. Innovative minds do push our culture forward, yet armies of "average Joes" - who just take every day as it comes - keep up with day-to-day tasks, are loving and unselfish people, and so on.

And of course you don't need to grok Haskell or even programming to live your life to the fullest.

Not being interested in some smart subject does not mean you're stupid.

Peace.
I agree, although I think the "bigger picture" is only interesting if the story is too specific and the "examples" part would only be useful if the subject matter was hard to understand. My personal feeling was that the whole text didn't really add anything.
If you're a billionaire, and you're still in it, you're NOT in it for the money, that's pretty obvious. Branson has FU money, and then some. He could retire and live very comfortably, but he's still working. Don't tell me he's motivated by being able to buy an even larger small country.
Blog: Enough already: Get over the West Coast envy
The titled could have been 'In it for "stuff that matters" not just the money':

"Most people feel that they can create something that is going to make a difference to other people's lives - that is how they start their businesses."

Reminds of Tim O'reilly post "Work on stuff that matters"

1/sthg that matters to you more than money

2/ create more value than you capture

3/ take the long view

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...
I'd model a criminal conviction as indicative of one of four possibilities:

1) Defendant is guilty and the police did their job right, bringing strong evidence to the prosecutor.
2) Defendant is innocent, but there's a weight of misinterpreted evidence that his defense fails to overcome.
3) Defense is exceptionally shoddy in the face of an average-to-weak prosecutorial case.
4) Corruption.

To disentangle the effects of gains in (1) & (4) on increases in the conviction rate, you need a metric of police efficiency that's unaffected by corruption.

For instance, a country with DNA or fingerprint forensics will have a higher conviction rate than one without DNA/fingerprints, but as a result of solid police work, not as a result of corruption.
It may not be as flashy in some respects, but things like the time slider are killer

http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs

It they aren't done already, I suppose integrating these parts to newer versions of Gnome is, at least, in the pipeline for *BSD folks (and, once ported to current Gnome, they would be rather easy to adapt it to BtrFS, which is to be fully supported by canned linux distros by the end of the year).

Just now, OpenSolaris is a very cool server OS with a slightly old Gnome desktop on top of it.
If you assume that pi is a normal number (unproven, but likely) then it is almost certain (ie. probability 1) that the digits of e and the square root of 2 are subsequences of the digits of pi.
Because you are in the software business, not the hosting business.

Over the long run, a hosting company should be able to keep your website up and running "in less time", "higher quality", and "cheaper" than you can.

If your business can host websites more efficiently and effectively than a hosting firm, maybe you are in the wrong business and should become a hosting company for other firms?
I have some experience with lucid dreaming. And the movie is nice entertainment, but real dreams don't work that way. Even lucid dreams.

First: Dream time is approximately real time. (There have been studies to confirm this. Exercise to the reader: How would you design such a study? (Drop me an email if you want to know how the scientist did it.)) Second, you can tell you are in a dream, if: (a) Flipping a light switch doesn't work, strangely your dream imagination can't cope with rapid changes of illumination. (b) Gravity works strange. Try jumping up and down. When you can stay airborne for more than a second you are probably dreaming. (c) If, in general, strange things happen. There are some more signs that you find in dreams.

Fortunately, habbits you have in reality carry over into dreams. So if you make it a habbit to check for dream signs in real life, you will probably check them in your dreams too, and recognize that you are dreaming. Enjoy! (Although I often feel the urge to wake up, once I realize that I am dreaming. It takes a while to resist it.)
Do you have a UPS in your garage?
> The things Solaris brings along, ZFS (...) are not hugely relevant to the desktop

Have you ever accidentally deleted your MP3 collection? ;-)
The Dark Side of C++ [pdf]
I am, uh, highly sceptical of the value of this. That is, even ignoring the variance between runs of the same code, differences between implementations and within an implementation with slightly different objects.

Writing code based on "what is fastest" is an overall awful strategy.
Ask HN: Are there any disadvantages to being niche?
It seems everyone is preaching the niche way in terms of doing a startup. Its hard to believe that being niche has no cons to its pros. So what are some of the disadvantages of going niche?
Disabling the GC means your benchmark is worthless.

1. Valid GC during execution: you are removing an actual factor;

2. "Invalid" i.e. unrelated GC during execution: your benchmark is too narrow in scope.
He has FE (Fuck Everyone) money.
Incompleteness Theorems - a knol by Carl Hewitt
Ask PG: Do comments from new users get auto-killed too easily?
Some comments that definitely aren't spam earn the status of 'dead.' For example:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567347

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1566744

Those posts seem to have two things in common:

* they are both from new users with low karma

* they both contain links.

Is there an auto spam-killing function on a rampage? :-)
Tesla Experiment, aka JavaScript Lightnings
Gandi.net
To play the rom on your own machine try Stella. http://stella.sourceforge.net/

Also as part of a class dedicated to the Atari 2600 I made these games: http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/atari.html

Let me know why you think.
Fire and thieves do happen (seen a couple of times at customers who were hosting their servers themselves, unfortunately).

It's an option though if in your context, you could tolerate a week (not a couple of days) of downtime, and buy everything again!

Oh - and energy/piece of mind is I believe the scarcest resource for an entrepreneur, too :)
"as well as being in the right place at the right time..."

Just going by your statement that he "made a lot of REALLY bad business decisions...in the first 25 or so years," it seems like he was at a lot of different places at a lot of different times. This very much increases the probability of eventually being at one of the right places at one of the right times.
Add to this an idiotic attempt to replace SystemV startup scripts with some insanely non-obvious java-based (of course!) crap, badly ported in a great hurry outdated 32-bit userland (when at the same time x86_64 version of Fedora or FreeBSD-ports were several years old), some in-house designed and quite alien packaging system (pkg) and so on.

It is dead. As dead as Irix or Tru64 or even OpenVMS.
A quick google search shows this to be unsubstantiated. Highly unlikely such a juicy tit bit wouldn't be on a reputable news site, let alone not on any site anywhere.
You should have sent at least one email
to someone you have never met telling
them that they should stop using tables.

But I like tables. There's so organized. I hate this floating div crap.
Me too but the separation of content and layout is important.
While this is mostly just a take-down piece about Ballmer and his lack of vision, there is some new insight here that I'm not sure I've read elsewhere. At least not written explicitly:

"...when he’s [Ballmer] done nothing but extend their old business, Windows and Office, which is fine, but there are a lot of other CEO’s who could’ve done that just as well or better. Businesses don’t last forever. It takes someone special, a visionary, to create new growth opportunities in the company."

Some time ago, there was a little storm around how poorly Ballmer had done as Microsoft CEO, mostly because of the flat-line stock. There were some good rebuttals showing growth in profits under his direction, which seemed to shock everyone in to believing that maybe he didn't do all that badly. Everyone seemed to kick the dirt and say, "Well, we all know stocks aren't the best indicator of success or failure of a company. While Microsoft is doing fine from financial perspective, Wall Street simply doesn't recognize it."

But let's back up a moment and realize that Wall Street isn't interested in what you're doing today. Stocks are bought and sold based on what people thing you're going to do tomorrow; next quarter; next year; five years from now.

Apple's recent growth can be attributed, in large part, to iPad sales. This is a new market. Speaking from Microsoft's market perspective, this is money that, at best, would not have been spent elsewhere. At worst, it was money that consumers might have spent on a netbook. I've seen research both ways, and honestly, neither side is terribly convincing.

The bottom line is that while Ballmer has managed to squeeze a little more life out of Windows, he hasn't moved Microsoft forward. That's inexcusable for a company with the engineering and capital resources Microsoft has.
I find it very hard to believe, that he independently invented the mouse (ten years later?), given both spent their youths in the military as radar operators doing tracking.

http://ewh.ieee.org/reg/7/millennium/fp6000/fp6000_datar.htm...

Is Markoff the one, who trashes his MB Air along with the old Times, just because it is so slim (in accordance to the PR message)? Believe him if you want to...
Rands in Repose: Being Geek
The costs of Curt Schilling's move of 38 Studios to Rhode Island
Google has made no secret of the fact that they designed Android as a hedge against MS control of the mobile landscape. It wasn't until Apple came out of nowhere with the iPhone that they had to set their sights on both targets. Ballmer should be very concerned about Android. Microsoft is a software company. They make money selling software licenses. Google is an advertising company. Therefore, Google can give operating system software away for free all day, without hurting their own core business (in fact, the goal is obviously a net benefit). This has MS backed into a corner. If they compete on price, Android devices will be cheaper. If they go high-end, they bump into the maw of Apple with excellent design and tight hardware/software integration. The mobile versions of Windows need to be so compelling that consumers are willing to pony up the extra cash, but not so expensive as to draw comparisons to Apple. Talk about threading the needle. The main play MS has is tight enterprise integration (sharepoint, Exchange, Office, etc...). There is probably a way for them to make a case to IT managers about the benefits of the total MS stack. But it's still not clear how big an impact the enterprise is going to have on the mobile space, which seems to be driven largely by the consumer sector.

Interestingly, Apple is is using this same jujitsu on Google. Apple is a hardware company. They make money selling shiny, physical stuff. They are trying to hit Google where it hurts by offering advertising revenue to developers (and taking a comparatively small piece for themselves). If they want, they can ratchet up the payout to developers all day without impacting their core business. Google can't do that.
A Core 2 Quad server with 2 Gigs or RAM at ServerBeach is gonna run you $99 per month, bump it up to 8 gigs of Ram, and you pay $160 per month. You get 2 Terabytes of bandwidth over at least a 10MBit connection and a 250 GB hard drive. ServerBeach will fix that bad boy if anything goes wrong -- for free.

Yeah, I have a server in my garage, AND Comca$t business class (30up/5down with 5 ips for $79 here in Miami), but we only run dev and staging sites on it. Production is always outside.

However, IF you already have the comcast business class, then buy a cheap quad core dell at BestBuy for $699, they generally come with 8 Gigs or ram and 1 Terabyte hard drive. Thats our development machine. Its super-quiet and runs cool in the hot garage.

The only problem is Comcast goes down here a bit too often for my liking. They're maybe down or slow around 10% of the time.
Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age
Absolutely, rvm, per-project .rvmrcs and bundler are a winning combination. Not sure how I worked before these were available.
I have an unused dell pentium 4 box running my website at my parents house :D

It just hosts an info site and blog for my android app on a pretty basic wordpress site that I have backed up. It's also a nice dev/filehost server. I figure I'll deal with scaling if I ever get to it.

The most visitors I've ever had is maybe 50 a day and who knows how many of those are robots. I wouldn't want to run any extensive server side code or an actual web app on it though.
> Yes, the PI really contains all information on the world, since it's an infinite non-periodic number.

Non-periodicity doesn't suffice. A number that has increasing runs of zeroes divided by ones, is non-periodic, but doesn't contain everything.

It's conjectured that Pi is a normal number [1], which would make your statement become true.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
The end user doesn't directly care, but if you solve their problem in a hacky unmaintainable way, they'll care when it takes you days to do what should take hours, weeks to do what should take days.