skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand Apple, Xbox, PS3, iPad, Linux, Solaris, etc. fanbois ... but can't understand the Goldman Sachs variety.

GS is one of the scummiest of Wall Street's firms, which is saying something.

That they were selling MBS tranches to clients, then simultaneously taking out options that would pay GS money when those exact same tranches failed, really tells you all you need to know.

GS' crimes are so varied and so well documented, I find it hard to believe you could not be aware of them.

Simply asking yourself "what part of this investment is something you would expect a commercial bank to invest in" as you reflect that GS is classed as a commercial bank in order to have access to Fed lending at essentially 0% interest, should perhaps give you pause.

EDIT: note for clarification, that the MBS tranches were assembled/packaged by GS themselves; GS was not simply selling a third-party product.
Hacker News DC Meetup has had a lot of success bringing the community together. I'd encourage anybody in the DC area to check it out - http://meetup.hackernewsdc.org/. I see no reason why people shouldn't do it in other cities as well. Having a happy hour once every month or two is a great way to meet new people and talk about current issues in person.
Obamacare AdWords: Partisan Outrage Or Public Education?
I believe Facebook is overvalued. I cannot provide hard evidence since I cannot look into their finance books, but from what I understand their yearly revenue is about 4% of their latest valuation. I also do not see how their business model can sustain itself, let alone grow exponentially. Yes, they have a ton of users, but they manage to extract precious little money out of them.

Getting back to my original point: I believe FB is overvalued, but apparently someone out there is willing to buy their shares at these prices. Eventually, it will come to light that while FB is profitable, etc. they are not going to grow much and their stock will plummet. Until then, the FB stock craziness will continue.
Another thing I like to see is when the posting talks about what sort of projects you'll be working on.

Yes, for me this is critical. If there's nothing to convince me that it's not just another job working on the same CRUD I could be working on at any other place, I won't give the posting any further attention.
An Open Letter to the Erlang Beginner (or Onlooker)
Beyond Optics: Why Board Diversity Really Matters
Decrypting GSM phone calls | srl
Did anyone record how many times the picture showed up in each side of the curtain? Was that 50/50 or not? That would be the first thing I would check.

On a similar note, how many times did a person choose the left or right curtain? Was that 50/50?

I can imagine the subject choosing the left or right more often based on the environment. For instance, the subject is sitting in an asymmetric position usually (mouse on right side). Was this considered when taking the test? Was the subject left or right handed?

You can look at numbers all you want but there are always biases to take into account and figuring out why we have those biases might be more important than this study.
I think the argument here is that the value of an investment ought to be the net present value of expected future returns on it (which in the case of a stock is theoretically equivalent to net present value of future dividend or stock buyback gains over the lifetime of the stock) If people are buying stock for more than that they're overpaying, whether due to misrepresentation of facts or bad predictions of the future. Unlike consumer goods, there is an objective measure of a "wrong" price[1], and that's one where you have no long term prospect of recovering the income from the share of the company itself, even if you can still profit from selling to other speculators willing to pay more.

[1]albeit not one that non-omniscient investors are ever likely to know
Their business model is showing ads that nobody clicks on.

And they still make a large chunk of $2 Billion off them?
Among other things Drupal 7 has better support for reverse proxies like Varnish. From the changelog:

"Improved support for HTTP proxies (including reverse proxies), allowing anonymous page views to be served entirely from the proxy."
I think the issue, though, is not if you (or other people on HN) use AppBrain: it's if your customers are going to be able to find your app. I doubt that a significant chunk of Android users actually use something like AppBrain, so a pre-installed Amazon Appstore might help those people.
It's a daunting amount to approach, but it rarely takes more than an hour or two per country. I've been doing something similar for my current project, because I want to take phone numbers in national form and show them in both international and national forms.
Your list price can't be more than anywhere else you sell it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071795
Canadian girl 'youngest to discover supernova'
Thanks! I will explore that opportunity definitely
The Bus Driver's perspective
Foto Profil
Well, my contention was that sarbox is a tiny piece of the puzzle, just to make it clear. Closing a few loopholes and adding a few new costs didn't radically change the game to my mind, compared to the already-huge distinction between public and private. Although you know more about this stuff than I do.

I'm certainly not saying that FB is under any obligation to go public if they don't want to. Just that in this particular case, Goldman is primarily trading on them not being public rather than trading on their value. I mean, good for them for exploiting a bug, I guess, but this is why I think the financial industry are, in the large, a bunch of charlatans :)
Fastest business ever created?
Pop-up start-ups?
If you are still looking, I am part of a startup in Connecticut who is hiring. We don't require 4+ years of Java experience, but we won't discriminate if you have it. We primarily work in Python but mobile app development requires us to branch out. We'd love to talk to you. Shoot me an email at jobs~at~raditaz~dot~com.
Good job pointing out the effect on your family. Bootstrapping is more than just a pay cut when your spouse and/or children will be affected as well. Discussing the potential risks with them is 100% necessary before taking a major leap.
Chrome/Chromium uses XMPP to synchronize between browsers:

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/desig...

[ricardo@Brynhildr ~]% /sbin/ss -p | grep chromium
ESTAB 0 0 192.168.66.67:50225 74.125.45.125:xmpp-client users:(("chromium-browse",2766,155))
CLOSE-WAIT 1 0 192.168.66.67:48406 174.143.235.145:www users:(("chromium-browse",2766,162))
ESTAB 0 0 192.168.66.67:34108 74.125.229.55:https users:(("chromium-browse",2766,148))

[ricardo@Brynhildr ~]% host 74.125.45.12
125.45.125.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer yx-in-f125.1e100.net.
That doesn't make sense. Is the African woman living in a straw hut starting her basked weaving business with a micro-financing loan for $50 in a position of great privilege? Is the unemployed construction worked who starts his own repair business in a position of great privilege? I mean I've tried to interpret your remark in several ways, but none of them make sense.

Anyway, listing the disadvantages of something isn't complaining, it's just being realistic.
Nice! One of my friends works with K and I've always wanted to play around with it but licenses are super expensive. I need a manual now though :)
Where's your app? It sounds interesting.
They have Android smartphones... I'm very much wondering how this service will ever be able to work between the plentiful applications, including third-browsers (plus Flash support on 2.2). I imagine that the power user, at least, will have no trouble getting around it; the block won't be total either way.
My local pizza shop bought their oven with a business loan. They bought it from the bank, who had repoed it from another bankrupt pizza shop.
Maybe one could say: "Goldman has increased Facebook's price" -- the word "value" has several definitions; the commenter was talking about fundamental value, not net present value...
Just give me hardware with an os I can update without rooting. I don't want something full of security holes, and I don't want to entrust my operating system and passwords to an anonymous someone who replaces their "ohs" with zeros.
Html5.com - A lucky guess?
Two things.

First, have you really done the math on how much money Facebook earns for each penny it extracts from end-users? Do you use Facebook today? I do, and I couldn't tell you what they're really making money on. They don't appear to have turned on the money spigot yet.

Second:

When you cry "bubble", you have to be talking about the market as a whole. It makes less (some, but less) sense to me to talk about there being a "Facebook bubble".

With that said: it's not just about how much money Facebook gets; it's also a question of what Facebook does with the money. During the Internet bubble, companies went public and spent the cash on Super Bowl ads with no revenue, or go-for-broke ship-free-hardware-to-all-of-America schemes. But Amazon was also a product of the Internet bubble. Were they a bad investment?
Alpha does not work (reverts) as soon as you hover over the color picker again.
Off topic, but to me personal, what has become an even bigger annoyance is floods of newbies (< 10 reputation points) that ask a question and never come back to tick off the correct answer. Some of them even write a comment to thank the poster of a particular answer, but still they won't give them the credit they deserve. I wonder if that's because they're so new that they don't know they're supposed to mark the correct answer, of if they just don't care.

It happened to me once or twice, but I've seen the pattern in other threads, too. Of course SO should be a platform that welcomes beginners, but if that problem persists, I fear that competent people will hesitate investing the time and effort to answer questions for which they may never be rewarded.
(via Christian Heilmann)
You all seem to be intentionally avoiding the fact that facebook has an intrinsic value independent from its market cap.

Goldman increased the value of facebook stock by 20%. Directly linking market cap to intrinsic value would require the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which I'm pretty sure no one believes anymore.
What plan is that? I'm on tmobile and just upgraded to a Nexus S and all the unlimited internet plans seem to hit 70/mo or above. $30 for unlimited internet, plus $39 minimum for the rest. Would love to grab your plan if possible.
I have long left the intern market, but I had a phone interview yesterday to scope out potential iphone app dev work. I sent a list of websites that I created and apps I have in the store, but the "interviewer" insisted that he quiz me on how I would detect a circular linked list and if I could describe the diamond problem. I took me a mere 20 seconds to recognize that the potential employer was just a programmer sweatshop. But, I was still struck by how out of touch with reality those kinds of technical tests have become in the past few years.

edit: formatting fix
Any reference to SCSH should make note of Olin Shiver's infamous acknowledgements page in the manual.

http://www.scsh.net/docu/html/man.html

The story goes: while Olin was working on his doctorate he had the idea to create an anti-acknowledgements page within his thesis. While the typical acknowledgements page covers those who gave lover and support during the author's effort. This page would be dedicated to everyone he got his degree despite of their efforts/encouragements. He, eventually, was talked out of this. Later, this idea re-emerged while at MIT's AI lab and ended up in the SCSH manual. It's definitely worth a read if you want a laugh.
"That they were selling MBS tranches to clients"

Did they tell their clients that these investments were sound? In 1999, I could have called my financial advisor and told him I wanted to buy Pets.com (or whatever) stock. He might advise me against it, but would have sold it to me. And, he might have had it shorted in his personal portfolio at that time without disclosing this to me. Does that make him a bad guy?
Zynga poker chip
Is this open source? How do we know it's encrypted?
All Hail the Failure Sector
I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or not, but the differences between the "pizza shop" and "ISP" scenarios are pretty huge even before you get into the credit and business histories of the business owners. Sorry to be a pedant.

By the way, curious: how did you find this out? When your pizza place gets a new oven, do you just go ask them about how they financed it? Do you ask these kinds of questions of business owners in general? How do they respond?
On the Internet, reading speed becomes less important than the level of skimming. Even a very fast reader, if they really read an article, are going to be "slower" than most who approach the article, I think.
Every couple of weeks something like this shows up: a map with HN users, a Linkedin or Facebook group, a website with various twists, ... Did any of them every get any traction? This fragmentation is hurting all attempts at facilitating more interaction between readers (in as far as it's necessary...)
Danger, Danger Will Robinson! UTF-8 strings can include overlong encodings (e.g. using 3 bytes to encode a code point that's normally encoded in 1 byte).

The Unicode standard disallows creation of these forms, but until recently (http://www.unicode.org/versions/corrigendum1.html), only "strongly discouraged" interpretation of them. I do not doubt that there is code in the wild which will interpret them as characters.
To answer myself, there's a lot of material here: https://anonymous:anonymous@code.kx.com/trac
The Game Mechanics Wiki
chip 1000000000
Show HN: PopVox helps you follow legislation
Your Thinkpad has an internal Wifi chip powered by Atheros? Is this an Intel-powered laptop? Or did you buy a 3rd party card and plug it in? Do you remember if you chose this as an extra-cost option when you bought the laptop? I vaguely remember that in the past one of the flavors of wifi used to available in built-in wifi only with Atheros (for extra cost).

I know Atheros own the (smallish) 3rd party card market. I thought Intel owned the (huge) built-in Wifi market for Intel-powered PCs.

[*] Sorry about barrage of questions. I'd just like to know understand what Atheros does better. Thanks.
I'm not blaming Goldman specifically for that, but I am blaming the whole financial industry. They spend huge amounts of resources pursuing zero-sum games like this, or obfuscatory games like the mortgage thing and, it seems to me, they haven't gotten any better at actually routing money to where it creates value (their purported raison d'etre) since the 1980s. Instead we just see more and more sophisticated games.

I mean, I guess that's where the money is, so shame on us.
I couldn't agree more. Too much namespacing. Also JSON would have been a much better encoding.

Recently wrote a bosh server in twisted/python and I find that even something that simple has scope for improvement. The specs for XMPP and BOSH are really badly written.

My bosh server - https://github.com/directi/chirkut
I don't think they will do a code review. They won't even have the source. I should think the'll just do basic testing as Apple does.
My theory is that the set of GS fans and the set of Ayn Rand fans is very similar. The appeal of GS to the randroid mindset seems obvious.

(Update: amused by the accusations of blasphemy.)
We're going to be the crotchety old men and women calling carrier tech support in just a few decades:

"Back in my day, you didn't need some big corporation's permission to look at pictures of naked folks on the internet…"
In what way is IRC for example proprietary?

Yes, to a certain extent GTalk and facebook chat have taken a little market share from other IM clients (Not sure how much, maybe 10%?).

But XMPP is nowhere when it comes to group chat.
> one sec, bro.

I have no idea what the heck that means ... The page appears broken.
It looks like you weren't paying attention to the last time Wall Street blew up and tax payers footed the bill to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Good Intentions: Whose volunteer experience is this anyway?
Sure. I can visit after work hours. When and where?
Git by a Bus
These used to be shareware-level games that (at best) would get bundled for $5 with 99 other games and the author hoped for some payment (or would unlock a feature for a small price). So think of it as a massive pricing increase, not a price decrease. As fun as, say, Angry Birds is, it doesn't compare to, say, Worms 2.

Seriously: I remember playing an Air Hockey line-drawn 3D game on my friend's Macintosh LC (I think it was). His dad had downloaded it free.

I'm not denigrating the work of these devs: let's just not pretend we're creating epic worlds and employing hundreds of designers for these releases. And as always: if your product is worth more, people will pay more for it. If you've been able to keep your price high solely because of some platform insulation, be happy the ride lasted as long as it did.
There's an easy solution here - don't answer newbie questions.

Their questions are typically less complex, which means some other newbie trying to amass points will take care of it.
users != volume of communication though

Do all gmail users use gtalk? Do they use it as their primary IM? I'd expect not.
Amazon is constantly changing prices on its books anyway. If you leave a bunch of books in your shopping cart for several weeks, then every time you go to your shopping cart they'll popup a notice showing what items have changed price, from X to Y.
Honestly, If I were recruiting developers/creative/technical people the least thing I'd be doing is write a job post.
See also: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/advisor-stmt-original.tx...
Here it is: http://hn-books.com

All the book recommendations are based off of common questions I see on HN. In addition, a user can go and pick their own books and order them to create their own list to answer a question (using this link http://hn-books.com/AnswerQuestion.htm )

The problem is that as the programmer I had to come up with an initial ranking for answers to the questions. I didn't like that, as I felt my own preferences weren't as good as some other readers. This is why I provided users the ability to select and rank book themselves. This is also why each book's detail page has automated searches where you can review what others have said about the book on various hacker sites. I even thought about a voting system, but I'm waiting to see if anybody much uses the site before I go running off with a bunch of features.

I thought about tags, but tags are simply not descriptive enough. Questions, as the article author mentions, can be interpreted various different ways. Voting turns into a popularity contest. (One of my pet peeves about SO and other sites is that you see answers upvoted which are wrong, misguided, or harmful, probably because the submitter is popular on the site) So there's no solution that I'm particularly fond of when it comes to dealing with common questions. I _do_ think, however, that questions are the place to start. Topics, tags, categories, or widgets don't seem like they work, at least to me.

EDIT: Another big factor is the experience level of the person asking the question. So if you wanted to know "How do I provide a search capability using JSONP?" I'd give you a completely different answer if you were a noob as opposed to somebody who has been around the block a time or two. Even through the concepts involved would be the same. It's a very slippery problem.
To quote from the blog post that page links to: "HSL is supported in almost all the major browsers: Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Chrome 5.0+, Opera 10+ and Explorer 9.0+."

Not being supported in IE before IE9 means this is pretty unusable for anything commercial, unfortunately. I mean, we only just got to drop support for IE6...

Which is a shame, since it's pretty neat.
Sure, it's potentially as tricky to find a twitter stream from a website, as to find an RSS feed. But that's not the primary use model. And where there is a twitter icon, the one-click-follow is a universal secondary use that requires no clients or third party services.

The primary use for Twitter is to find feeds directly on Twitter. Either by searching or by seeing who your friends follow. Which is what most people do. They sort through what their friends follow and pick and choose from that. Adding a few additional feeds here and there, but those being the minority.

That's what Google Reader's social widgets were trying to replicate. That's what Buzz was trying to replicate. Discovering feeds from friends. Because most users don't discover new sources for themselves.
I can't wait for the censorship-resistant, anonymous, redundant worldwide network that would be created. The internet is terrible on many levels, it works though, so the incentive for change is just not there.
I did this a few months ago and it's worked incredibly well. I went from full-time to two days per week, leaving me the other three to work on my own stuff. Had a lawyer go over the intellectual property agreements for me first to make sure I wouldn't be in questionable territory.

It all depends on your manager, the mood of the company, and how useful you are. For me the stars lined up perfectly. The CEO is an entrepreneur and wanted to help me out. I was also a critical member of a small engineering team, so they'd rather get two days of my time than none.

One key when you're having the conversation is to frame it more as part-time vs quitting, rather than full-time vs part-time. Having somebody that isn't in the office all the time makes planning more difficult, so it's in your manager's best interests to keep you full time. If that's removed from the options list and it's a choice between having you part-time vs not at all, part-time starts to look a lot more attractive.
Unfortunately, this can lead to a critical mass of really bad advice.
UK so no Netflix: I’m basing my previous comment on the TV catch-up services (iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD). Maybe pay-for services commit to better QoS?
Are you seriously making people code for you for free?
I just saw a job posting that said they were looking for a "young and energetic person". Isn't that illegal?
I like the idea. Having the data be encrypted would be cool too. A time-to-live would be nice so that it doesn't grow forever.

Although it sounds like an easy place for virus writers to store plans of attack. And hard to take down without taking down the whole system which by design would be very difficult.
Well, strictly speaking, my Thinkpad (a T30, got it used a year ago from a friend-of-a-friend) came with an Intel card. I changed it out for an Atheros card I pulled from a dead Thinkpad on a pallet a few years before. I have no idea if that was stock or not.
So what you are trying to tell me, is that the cup is half empty?
This showed up in my Facebook feed, and I thought it was interesting enough to share with Hacker News. It was recently founded by a friend-of-a-friend who's worked in DC for a while.

I've been looking for good sources for filtered political news lately. I have lots of sources to keep up on technology news, but I've been wanting to keep up on politics and world events more than I have been without trying to drink from the firehose. I think this website might help achieve that.

Btw, their website isn't very well organized (I think they just launched and have some issues to iron out). For example, you have to click the "Home" link before some more useful links are displayed, such as "Bills in Congress" (https://www.popvox.com/bills).
Flattr Now Supports Online And Offline Donations [Is Julius Assange Smiling?]