skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the next guy mentioned, I'm also not sure about BND - or bonds in particular - as a good safety net right now.

With the U.S. as heavilty-leveraged as it is now, if the past is any indicator, we're headed for inflation. For the same reasons that we got into this situation in the first place (people buying more home than they could actually afford). Look at the debt-to-income ratio of the country (deficit-to-GDP), and it's a parallel story to the housing boom.

That being said, at current valuations, are even precious metals safe? Who's to say?

I'd be interested in looking for an ETF that trades in TIPS - while the return is almost certainly less, the security offered by it is almost certainly more.

Otherwise, you and I see pretty much eye-to-eye, except I'm more heavily invested in stocks right now (mostly because lots of people over the past few years have been running the opposite way - another Buffett-ism). Nice post!
Framebox: HTML5 wireframing tool
Dropbox Founder on New Features and Global Expansion
>In the Web of 2011 and beyond if you search for bondage videos and you are logged into your Google account then Google will have a way to map it to you. If you don't log in, don't create an account, then they won't. It's that simple.

No it's not. They're likely going to track IP addresses and make assumptions there. And even if limited IPv4 addresses give some protection for a while, browsers can be fingerprinted.

I'm sorry, but people like you are way too complacent. People like us know a little history. Things can get nasty.
There is a very easy way to explain programming (in assembler, no less) by analogy to how children do basic mathematics -- addition and subtraction.

That's because mathematicians do use algorithms, and concepts like "position" (indexing to us programmers), though they don't have names for them. If you explain programming using the concrete things every educated person knows, it is much easier to teach.
Asynchronous, Event-Driven Web Servers for the JVM
Unfortunately, there's only so much that a great team can do with a really lousy idea. One of the things pets.com was supposed to have going for it was a CEO (Julie Wainwright) who had been successful at multiple previous ventures, who'd been specifically picked out for the post by one of the VCs (Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad). That wasn't enough to keep the business going.
three lines of not-equal signs != meaningful comment

downvote parent == thanks!
Investors hot for mobile apps - but few (financial) success stories so far
This strategy of splitting into extremely low and high risk investments makes little sense to me.

Knowing that some sector is high volatility doesn't help you "prepare for black swan events". Okay, some of these stocks may go off like a rocket. But you don't know which one/ones. So you're still just getting whatever the expected value is, so you may as well just be buying the index (unless you have a particular utility curve that over-values a critical mass of money, eg to start a business).

Let's say you're gambling on rolls of a die. You pay $1 per roll, and on 6 you get $6, on 1-5 you get $1.50. How often should you guess 6? I hope you'd answer "never". Okay. Now ignore the payoffs, and just try to pick correctly as many rolls as possible. How often should you pick 6 for this goal? People want to say 1/6th here, when the answer is, again, "never".

I think this investment strategy falls into a similar trap. You know that there are these stocks that have a low probability of massive success. This feels like information, so you want to throw some money on them. But all the probability of success can tell you is what their expected value is, since you dont know which one will succeed, just as you dont know which roll of the die to bet 6 on.
What happens when you answer wrong?
I'm sorry. Maybe the generation gap just clicked a little wider and I'm missing something.

Let me know when WHAT works for me???
Technically System.Array also implements IList, which is an interface behind which sit several implementations. The generic List type is probably worse than a plain old array, as it is really a mutable, resizable array implementation. Even the author states "one might reasonably point out that List<T> is a mass of mutable state too". Future-proofing yourself through the IList abstraction is a good practice, but I'm not sure off-hand what you would use to replace it that would be better, for now. I got the impression that the author was arguing for strictly immutable data structures, which you can achieve through diligent use of the readonly attribute and private setters, but which is not otherwise a native concept in C# or VB. I hope more of the F# immutable structures make it into the core framework in the future.
I ran this by a friend who is getting married soon. The following is a blend of her thoughts and mine. I don't mean to be harsh, but there were a lot of issue.

- The interface and layout is too cluttered/busy. It's difficult to see what's going on. Color pattern is atrocious, and contrast is poor. The fonts are too small.
- In the Example Registry, she couldn't figure out how to use it. I can't imagine that anyone in the older generations would be able to figure out how to use it, assuming that they would be able to read it with the tiny font. There is no call to action telling the viewer what they can do with each item.

- It's not at all stylish. A wedding registry in part reflects the bride's sense of style, and this would not make the cut for most of the brides-to-be that I know.

- What's the value proposition? (Why should someone use this site?) Similar sites already exist from established players, and those associated with stores usually add a discount to items purchased from that store or their partners. Many of the biggest players allow you to import lists from other registries. Furthermore, if you use a wedding planner, absolutely all of this is handled by the planner with minimal fuss.

- Why would someone care about automatic syncing, or a support community? What's the point of the mobile app? IOW, why are you making the tech features such a big selling point?

- Do you actually sync with the individual stores' registries? If the user has to add each list, then what's the point of using your site? How are you getting around the TOS that some of these registries have?

- When you say "Everything in one place" are you referring to the registry only, or to all the wedding stuff? A bride is likely to thing the latter, though you appear to mean the former. If you mean the former, see my first question.

- How you do plan on making money?

- Are you aware that most brides pick out their registry by going to a store, and using a special bar-code scanner to select the items they want? They do this because the items on their registry are usually carefully chosen, in person, after viewing and handling. How does your site work with this?
In my opinion, Fixed income investments like Bonds & CDs are incredibly risky in our current economic climate. If interest rates rise or inflation increases then these investments can loose a great deal of their value. Also there is always a risk of default.
I always try to put the user, I never knowingly put my own agenda ahead of the user's needs.

I'm using the Facebook Login button rather than the registration form (I have a non-facebook registration process too), for a couple of reasons:

1. It's faster for Facebook users.
2. Assuming they actually read it, Facebook Login makes it clear to the user what level of access I'm getting. The Registration Plugin provides no indication what permissions they're handing over - it's more than the default access. The site is given an oauth token, but no indication what this token can do.

I could be completely missing the point of the Registration Plugin of course, but I spent a little while implementing it, then realised that I didn't need any of what it provided and just used the Login button.
I'm running CM7. I mostly don't like the HD chrome, I feel tacky when I use it. Also, the Mini is really just a bit faster, even with CM7 and overclocking, it's just that tiny bit more responsive. It's the difference between me clicking on two links from TweetDeck, or all of the interesting ones.
I've had this discussion with many people. I enjoyed the movie for it's technical merits, not the plot.

I saw both versions.

I don't get hte "3d headache" - but I definitely enjoyed the 2d version more. THere was more detail to focus on, and in tha tmovie, detail was everything. With the 3d version, I found myself trying to look at things in the foreground/background, and I just couldn't - not becuuse of any defect in my ability to manipulate my eyes, but because (I think...) they actually used differnet depth of field settings when rendering the 2 versions.. there were things in the 3d version you literally COULDNT focus on - they wanted your eyes on the action only. That buged me.

- I remember playing 3d Quake (the original) on my crappy home monitor, with LCD shutter glasses - and it was AWESOME FUN. SCARY.

So I think all the points in the article are valid, 3d is hard, for more reasons than joe average might know, I certainly learned some stuff - but it's definitely a aprt of the future, if only because our current equipment makes it technically easy to play back.
As much as people hate the strong security we have in the US..we haven't had anything like this for many years.
So, what's Qwiki's technology that's so powerful here then? I think the sentiment is that their technology isn't anything special, and they don't have any other particularly distinguishing feature, so why such investment?

With Powerset, the value was supposed to be in the technology, even if the demo was on Wikipedia. With other companies, say, Twitter, the power is in the size of their network and potential for something, even if the technology isn't groundbreaking.
Despite some flaws, I like the overall investment thesis. Traditional portfolio theory would say that 70% "safe" stocks (say, blue chips) plus 30% bonds is about the same as 50% "risky" stocks (say, small caps or emerging markets) plus 50% bonds. Assume for the sake of argument that the math works out, and that the two portfolios have the same expected return.

But those portfolios are only equal if you believe the future will look a lot like the past. If you take black swans into account, the portfolio with the higher "safe" allocation is preferable. If Peak Oil or Nuke War or Famine drives stocks down by 90% for several decades, the 70/30 portfolio leaves you with 37% of your wealth, while the 50/50 portfolio leaves you with 55%.

My black swan portfolio would look like this:

* 25% bonds (US treasuries)

* 25% tips (inflation-protected bonds)

* 25% US small cap value stocks

* 25% international small cap value stocks

I'd consider adding in precious metals if they weren't so hot right now.
Minor correction: Beowolf was designed by Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland.

It was written in Postscript and was the first typeface to dynamically change every time it printed.
It was eery reading that article:the author has made very similar investment decisions that I have.
OT : Correct pronunciation of Knuth makes you nick less awesome.
It's not objective, it requires subjective values.

The argument is (generally) made that climate is changing; this will change various peoples' lives in various ways, and therefore must be avoided at all costs.

One rarely if ever sees a consideration of positive outcomes from climate change (and there certainly are some). We need to understand the pros AND cons. And then we need to use our own subjective values to consolidate them into a bottom line.

THEN, we need to understand what needs to be done to avert these eventualities, and what the costs of those efforts will be.

FINALLY, we can compare the costs with the benefits. But because the calculation necessarily included our subjective values of the different factors, it's not falsifiable.
Ask HN: Why not to bind cookie to IP-address of the user? (Facebook and Tunisia)
This thought came when I read comments about Facebook, passwords and Tunisia http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2135563

In this case stealing the cookie will not so reasonable. And it can be easily implemented - just store key of the cookie with IP-address of the user on the server-side.

What do you think?
>No it's not. They're likely going to track IP addresses and make assumptions there.

So? Unless Google is getting direct data from ISPs and requesting personal information about your identity from them then your IP address is just as useless to them as it is to me for linking your tastes to your human identity. Browser fingerprinting, in the Panopticlick sense, is just as useless to that end. At Google's scale the Panopticlick method doesn't even work because of how many people they come across. Once the number of browsers that match your "fingerprint" is > 1 it becomes useless to them.

>I'm sorry, but people like you are way too complacent.

I'm not complacent, I just know what I'm talking about. Take the tin-foil hat off.

>People like us know a little history. Things can get nasty.

You are so full yourself. You have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't understand the need for bench entrepreneurs to ridicule start ups from the side lines. All this effort to point fingers and make fun of start ups which are actually trying to build businesses might be better spent actually trying to build your own business.

All the posts about Qwiki and others recently (Facebook, Zynga, Groupon) all calling for the downfall of all these start ups really make me question the value of this community at times - and it's not like these posts have 10-12 points either, they have some of the highest point totals of any articles on HN.
Possibility spaces was a great suggestion.

It led me to look up and figure out for myself a scientifically important long-standing question I had not answered: Does the option to switch cases at the end of Deal or No Deal mirror the Monty Hall problem or not?

Short answer is that it does not; switching cases confers no advantage in Deal or No Deal. I've proven this to myself by mapping out the possible outcomes. But the idea that whether the opened cases are chosen at random or by a knowledgeable host making the difference between a 1/26 or a 1/2 chance of winning still baffles me. I'm going to have to thing about that one for a while.

Which is why you should do the math instead of trusting intuition.
As always, incredibly insightful remarks. The bit about developing core infrastructure rings especially true. The emergence and success of these web businesses has a lot to do with the absurdly low barriers to entry for creating software for the web. This is largely thanks to the development and proliferation of open source tools.

It's not surprising that so many successes should shake out the other end of the sieve when it's so easy for someone to launch a successful site from their bedroom or dorm.
"when" = "what time"

Thus: "Let me know what time works for you."
PowerSet had many key NLP people and a LFG grammar/parser.

Can you elaborate what QWiki has to offer, except a nicer user interface for Wikipedia?
This entire article is based on an extremely flawed assumption. Introduced in the second paragraph, the assumption is that people are confused by this foreign and complicated idea of "apps".

Never in my life have I met a person, young or old, who does not understand what an app does (since they have acheived mainstream popularity within the past few years, largely thanks to Apple). Sure, they may not realize that an app is just a few lines of code that pushes queries and pulls data from the cloud, but honestly - does it matter?
Qwiki seems like something that's easy to prototype but hard to do well. And it seems like a product that you have to do well to monetize.

Take the Qwiki entry on polyamory, for example: http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Polyamory

Qwiki pronounces it wrong, which means it actually decreases the value of the information it is regurgitating from Wikipedia.
If you separate the syntax from the semantics, you'll see that the GET request (syntax) is merely the mechanism of accessing the appropriate function (semantics). If you reread the short article after deleting all the junk about REST and CouchDB, and ignore the presumption that this is a RESTful API, then the article is clearer: Webdis is an HTTP interface to Redis.
I simply don't agree with Eric on this one. His main argument seems to be that this startup isn't adding anything of any value to the space.

The way I see it is this: Wikipedia is not very consumer friendly. It's dull looking and the entries are usually filled with a lot of text. The modern internet consumer is constantly facing more and more attention disorders and a lot of people don't simply like to read.

The search result in qwiki is auditory and visual and you can consume it completely without reading anything. I looked up a few countries I want to visit, a few programming languages and everything worked incredibly well.

One of his arguments is that the technology is something that could easily be duplicated. I think it's true up to a point, but honestly, what hacker couldn't duplicate the base functionality of a twitter of 4sq in an afternoon? I think the inherent value isn't actually with the technology itself but with the implementation, the data, the UI and, ultimately (so it seems), the company's dedication to packaging information in a more-easy-to-consume fashion.

This will work incredibly well on a internet connected TV screen. Who can picture themselves reading wikipedia articles with their spouse in the living room off the TV? Not me. But if I'm going to, say.. Oslo http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Oslo I could picture myself looking that up and listening/watching with my SO. Even if only to get the basic info.

Another usecase is with mobile operation. Since I got my HTC desire I constantly google stuff by doing a voice search. I have to use my best american accent, but none the less it's very useful. If my search result could be a visual/auditory search result like that, it would suite some cases much better.

I think this might actually mark a new era in the startup space. I'm coining the term:

Content 2.0

Somebody grab that domain name if it's not already taken?
Cool idea.. I really dig the site design, looks professional yet still light-hearted.

As far as suggestions, I was a little underwhelmed with the 'Example Registry' section. Really didn't show a lot of the features you have available. I would suggest more items in the registry, and maybe a screenshot of the mobile app in action.

Also, without delving into the FAQ there is no easy way to determine the cost of the service. I had no idea that it was free at first, and just assumed you took a cut of online sales, had a processing fee for each purchase, etc. I would definitely put some more info about the associated costs (or lack thereof) more prominently on the main page.

Otherwise, looks sweet! Hope it goes well for you! One cool moneymaking idea here might be using Amazon Associates to get referral $ from amazon items (or let the couple use their own amazon associates account). Not sure if that would work with their TOS but it would be more $ for you...
Download Homebrew Skype App For Windows Phone 7 WIP
Probably the best advice is to learn to write compelling titles like "Must Read articles for Starting Entrepreneurs" vs. "The links on HN I've upvoted in the last year"
Are Visionaries Born or Created?
Here's the transcript:

-----------------------

I went to my boss and said to him, “You know, I’m going to go do this crazy thing and I’m going to start this company selling books online.” This was something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, “Let’s go on a walk.” And, we went on a two hour walk in Central Park in New York City and the conclusion of that was this. He said, “You know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision.

So, I went away and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. I had already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, “Look, you know you can count me in 100 percent, whatever you want to do.” It’s true she had married this fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100 percent supportive. So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.”

So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that’s very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, “What will I think at that time?” it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That’s the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won’t regret later.
About the first point: why doesn't c# have const arrays of const values, like C++?
Yep, cleared cache and now working as expected. That's some timely customer support!
The US Reserve Bank currently has a target cash rate of 0-0.25%, whereas the RBA has it set to 4.25%. Correspondingly, the interest rates on bank bonds and savings accounts are much lower in the US than Australia.

This difference is also one of the reasons for the high value of the Australian dollar compared to the USD.

While it might seem obvious that the OP should just open a foreign savings account, the practical hassles associated with that and the risk of loss due to foreign exchange probably make it less worthwhile than investing in companies that have some aspect of their growth tied to the Australian economy.
Make Programming Fun Again [humor]
According to this paper http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf the greatest hurdles are usually:

assignment and sequence
recursion / iteration
concurrency
I think any industry that can show the kind of returns this industry does - "Two Guys in a Garage" Become "$200Bn Market Cap" in about a decade - is going to inspire mania. It's not necessarily a broken model - all farmville jokes aside, I'd wager the overall value of the enormous amount of social well-being that's been spawned by even the few companies that have made it out of the valley far exceeds the money lost to the busts - but the whole place is leverage incarnate.
3D at least needs to be shot in 48 FPS or more - the stuttering effect would be pretty much gone then.
Browsers to defend privacy where feds won't
It's not possible to do this as with certain ISPs that assign dynamic IPs or inside large buildings that have multiple outgoing IPs, one user can have a different IP for different requests made at the same time.
I think the complaint is that nothing (visible) has changed. Based on what I've seen, I really doubt the value of this company has anything to do with reading Wikipedia, but rather in making vast amounts of content and relationships between content more accessible.
Other then karma.
Except that by removing the "considered" word, you also removed the shoutout back to the goto article.