skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is fraud to materially represent information to clients. That is why Goldie got nailed. The rest of the stuff you are pointing out is a bunch of noise that is pretending to be signal.

For those who don't know the details of the case, heres a quick read -

1) A hedge fund which believed that mortgages were going to go south worked with Goldie to buy a portfolio of stocks which they were short on. They would make money if the stocks tanked.
2) Goldman turned around and sold the Long end of the trade to their clients.
3) Goldman is asked specifically by clients if a neutral third party was making the portfolio. CRITICAL information to a decision maker.
4) Goldman LIES and states that it was a neutral third party.

Watch this video - its the SEC enforcement directory talking about why they were going after Goldman. Do note this was at a time people were making the same assertions that yummyfajitas is making - its wrong illegal to disclose the identity/motives of the counterparty.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/04/sec-khuzami-director-di...

I'm going to steal a comment from that page -
"In response to the typical question as to “weren’t the investors sophisticated enough to do their due diligence and see for themselves that bla bla bla” Khuzami ( at 3:12 min) revealed a critical detail: “One of the investors specifically requested an independent and objective 3rd party collateral manager to assist in the selection of the portfolio. It was a foreign institution that wanted someone here is the US. It was one of the condition of the deal, and Goldman represented that is was what they were getting, when in fact, it was not the case.”

The subsequent ruling makes it clear that this is material information that is necessary to disclose when dealing with derivatives and CDOs. Do also note that till date derivatives and CDOs are the least regulated part of the entire market and that is why they are also weapons of mass destruction. Getting a legal case which makes it clear that you have to disclose stuff like this is BIG.

Whats really irksome is that the matter at hand is far more complicated and important to understand, yet the coverage of this matter is handled badly.

Funnier still - after the water is muddied it is made to look as if the SEC is forcing "Virtuous Bulwarks of Society TM" to disclose information that a 2 year old should know.
WTF? People talk about the SEC going after Goldie like its a BAD THING. I just can not understand this.

There is a LOT of depth complexity to what is going on here. The porno scandal is a distraction. The Rolling Stones article, and the parents link, do not even begin to touch the surface of these issues.
That's because I'm writing this for programmers. FWIW, I'm not a programmer in my day job.
>Personally I have always envisioned living somewhere remote, like this, on a small island, up the mountains or in a lighthouse -

(Even at the risk of sounding childish, I say) Me too!!

And you know what? At 48, I think that day is fast approaching for me. :-)

In the past decade or so, I've pulled a few (short, days/weeks) stints at it and just loved it. Some of the remote locations from where I've conducted various business activities online:

* Various Himalayan retreats (in India and Nepal)

* Cruise ship sailing between Singapore and Malaysia

* A port town of Nigeria

* Beach resorts in Goa and Mauritius

* Cruise ship on Nile (Egypt)

Although I enjoyed working from all of those places thoroughly, my personal destination of choice is the Himalayas; waiting for the day.
Yeah, this isn't really what HN is for.
You make some decent points. But will you concede that prohibiting differential pricing, thereby preventing sellers from passing along the HUGE Apple tax, is anti-competitive wrt other lowest-cost payment services, and raises prices for consumers? I understand this is orthogonal to your initial post about your ecstasy.

E.g., what do you think about Amazon simple pay; they are as/more trustworthy than Apple and far cheaper. https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/business/asp/subscript...

Just to be clear, I think charging 30% for initial app download is outrageous for a glorified download.com.
oh yeah, why didn't I think of that. Man those slackers!
I hate excel for this reason. So many research colleagues do such horribly repetitive things when processing their data it makes me weep. The problem is they're not lazy enough to learn R, Stata, python etc...
They probably just do it under a fake name.
They have a history of this too. I remember trying to sign up for Palm Pilot development, and the form demanded a "DIRECT phone number", I think with the word "DIRECT" actually in caps. They need to understand that developers and customers are supposed to be sizing up Palm at this point in the process and not vice versa.
I used Boost Spirit in my dissertation project for the parsing: https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/cellgen_gr...

I would not choose it again. With what I wanted to do, the performance was poor. Spirit just had to deep-copy the parse tree it was generating way too much. I liked having all of my source in C++, which meant not having to embed C++ in ANTLR or yacc. But I'm not sure that was worth it. Perhaps the newer version fixes that problem, but I doubt I'll ever test it out for sure.

Luckily for me, the performance of the compiler itself was not really a priority. And it was a research project, so it didn't really matter.

Anyway, I know your point was broader than Spirit specifically, but I thought you may be interested in my experiences.
If you license your code under GPL, you're simply saying that you don't want to be a product in this particular "app store" business model. GPLv3 in particular seems to be hostile to this type of thing. If you're the author of the code there's nothing wrong with that.

But people are getting upset with Microsoft basically for respecting the intent of the license agreement.

Obviously MS doesn't want to fall into the trap of distributing GPL code and thus being infected at some level of their codebase.
Attachments.me Puts A Visual, Social Spin On Email Attachment Search
Palm let their original OS stagnate while pumping out iterations of their phone hardware. Moto mostly stuck with iterating hardware models. Samsung seems to have split their software and hardware people into competing groups.

There's a general lack of focus or apparent belief that their core competencies should only include one (1) of hardware or software among most consumer electronics brands, it seems. And a lot of timidity regarding innovating something new that cannibalizes your sales of some older thing.
Naval Ravikant & AngelList: The Match.com of Funding [Interview]
Moshi Monsters Aims To Become The Facebook for Kids (TCTV)
point taken, edit added
most of the business ideas during the bubble were bad ideas

Maybe not most, but a significant number of business ideas during the dot-com boom were ill-conceived. Profit and sustainability were things that would simply happen as if by magic; the idea was to get a company out there, spend a lot of VC money marketing and building, and the rest would fall into place (as immortalized on South Park by "Collect Underpants ... ... Profit!").

Certainly there are companies today that resemble that M.O. a bit -- Twitter is useful and interesting, but their business model is still a work in progress after years. Most companies today are more sensical, are smaller in size and need less cash.

it's much worse than the last one. Valuations are insane

You obviously don't remember the dot-com boom. It's not worse; today is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of that era. A scant few companies have valuations that are questionable or appear ridiculous. They may be. But most companies -- the vast majority -- are not operating on crazy valuations. Back then, every company that began with an "i" or an "e" was worth millions, automatically. Today, we have, what, about five that are overvalued? That's a "bubble"? No, that's just exaggeration -- and a wild misunderstanding of what "bubble" means.
That being said, PG is uber active here. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg
The scope, rather than the language is what you need to focus on when starting to learn web development. Choose 2 frameworks, a "big" and a "small" one, then develop similar applications on both of them. This way you'll have chance to see the big picture and how the low level gears work.

For ruby you can go with Rails + Sinatra, for python you can try out Django + Flask for example.
That's exactly what someone would say if there WAS a tech bubble! We're doomed!
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical
They did, and it worked great on your own machine after a few weeks. The problem was it made everyone else's machines basically unusable.
Sure, but basically every mobile processor "is just a customized version" of some ARM design. My point is that Apple goes out of their way to control the design/performance instead of taking an off the shelf TI/Qualcomm/NVIDIA etc chip
Yep, Chrome is far better on Windows than OS X. So long as I was using OS X on my MBP I couldn't use Chrome and kept going back to FF - but since switching the machine to Win 7 I can't not use Chrome.
Because its paid for by taxpayers doesn't make it automatically a bad idea either. Many things you use on a daily basis are thanks to government / taxpayers, including the internet you are using to read this.
Actually, the most interesting part of this post is in the first comment, that leads to this post: http://www.arktronic.com/cms/blog-entries/2011-02-17/relax-m...

TL;DR: Microsoft excludes only GPLv3 software because it forces them to open all their source code in Windows Phones. All other Open Source licenses are still valid.
Very inspiring! Thanks for sharing

I have one question. When you started working on Catch.com, did the knowledge that an app like Evernote or other similar ones existed bother you? What did you tell yourself when that question cropped up in your own head?

While talking to investors, how important was the question of competition and how did you handle it.

I am sorry but I talk in ignorance as I haven't used your application yet. (I don't use an Iphone)
The internet is really many superimposed communities. Expecting the internet, or pretty much anything else to be a certain way is setting yourself up for unfulfilled expectation.

The internet is a rapidly changing place and filled with enormous diversity of people, views and interests.
Does any python implementation have non-GIL threading?
I agree. In the 90's bubble the public got let in earlier. Now VCs and investment banks squeeze all the value out before the public finally can invest.
There has never been a guarantee of no repercussions from utilizing free speech, anon or not. Many pay a high price for speaking their mind. And not just from government. The first front that keeps people in line is their peers, community, and jobs. Its sad, but that's how things have always been, China and U.S.
Zawinski isn't trying to convince everyone that something important is happening. That's just how he writes (i.e., "well"). But when you write your own headline, you are actually making a statement about the importance of the event.

Two options:

(1) Just keep his headline, in which case anyone who clicks through can see it's headlined that way because that's how the original source headlined it.

(2) Write the headline in the simplest way possible.

It's not a big deal or anything. But you commented, and that's my response. Thanks for posting the story!
But California's counting on the tax revenue

Says who? California is counting on the tax revenue generated by Facebook and Zynga? Seriously?
Profit is a form of value. Big surprise that people are deriving value in different ways. Anyone that uses PirateBay without deriving some sort of value is either irrational or has blindly accepted the irrational premises of altruism.
It's super fast here on Ubuntu chrome 10.
How does using their servers mean they're doing inventory and shipping? I'm not understanding how it's possible to pay UPS to ship an app. Do you think anyone would have an issue if Apple just wanted to be compensated for that piece of hosting it on their servers?

You and I are not the average person. I can jailbreak, my parents cannot. Jailbreaking then voids the warranty, which is a part of the money I paid.

And when I do jailbreak, exactly how will that enable me to get Netflix, Kindle, Last.fm, Rhapsody back?
The alternative, that we have tried, is for standards bodies to dictate a standard and hope that browser implement it (which they often don't).

Waiting for the code to actually ship before calling it standardized lets you get actual results.
> If you license your code under GPL, you're simply saying that you don't want to be a product in this particular "app store" business model. GPLv3 in particular seems to be hostile to this type of thing.

Indeed. And even more so, GPLv3 is hostile to that kind of schemes on purpose.
I am in a similar position. recently quit my job and I am loving the uncertainty and the possibilities.

I am happy for you
I think WP7 has one big problem for apps, unlike iOS and Android, it doesn't do OpenGL ES. I think this is going to make it an issue to port.
How Goldman Killed A.I.G
There are few to no "wild-eyed optimists" right now, save for a handful of investors pumping money into Zynga and Facebook. If you think that compares to 1998, you really ought to go back and re-read history.
Isn't that a huge liability?
Crowdbooster (YC S10) in "How to Measure Your Brand's Online Influence"
I can attest to this. I had a page with four dropped shadows and one div that is animated via jQuery's slideDown/slideUp methods. Sliding up and down was painfully slow and ragged.
Whenever I think of things like your comment I'm reminded of the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi:

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Whether something looks like a step function or not depends on the time scale at which it's observed.

It seems to me that today there is a "new economy driven by the Internet" and productivity has greatly increased in the last decade (which is probably one of the reasons for the current unemployment problems).

I don't think we even understand the impact that having all of human knowledge just a Google query away has had on our activities.

My bet is that 100 years from now no one will think of the 90's as a bubble. They'll think of it as the beginning of the Singularity.
Both Jython and IronPython. PyPy probably will in the future, however its not a goal at the moment.
I assume you mean "natural" language processing.

For that trivia is the wrong test. It's better to just give it paragraphs and ask it questions about the paragraph. And of course have increasing levels of difficult. More like the SAT reading comprehension test.

This would extract how it stores data brought in from structured/unstructed sources and the actual task of processing natural language.

I suspect it will be a fair bit worse at processing natural language than even the average person.
I know everyone loves their high powered languages, but I'm afraid the author is right. The more developers, the more conformity you need. I'm doing a personal project in OCaml, and I absolutely love it. I like to think it keeps my medium size code base from ever turning into a large code base.

But Ocaml has so many features that two programmers can write in such different styles that it might as well be a different language. A team of maybe 5 people with a good attitude could probably work on the same code base. The same is true for lots of new languages like scala and clojure and even ruby.

Knowing what I know now, if there's a project that's going to have more than 10 people working on it, I'd hesitate to use anything except Java or C#.
If you're talking about the new subscription fee, that is false (or at least Apple has not given any indication that it will be true at any time in the near future). You still have to distribute the content yourself. The 30% cut is essentially a referral fee.
Apple's revenue and real growth justifies that valuation, easily.
China warns US over Clinton's web freedom call
Somebody did do a ten(?) year update to it with Stephenson's blessing, but from recollection I think they didn't really grok why OS X was so good. They also didn't write as well as Neal, but hey, that's not an especially exclusive group.

http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/commandline/index.html

It is good and original, but the bits that are good are not original, and the bits that are original are not good.

I recall reading it and thinking "he got that wrong, and that's wrong, and that's wrong, and all of that is wrong" all the way through. I think he was one of those pundits that fundamentally just doesn't understand why people like working with an OS like OS X, they think it is because of some superficial silly reason. Like "consumers like it because it is white and shiny" or "because the UI is pretty".

No no no. A thousand times no. I and everyone I have talked to who uses both, prefer the Mac because Windows is like the death of a thousand papercuts. There is in general no one thing you can point to that is especially horrible (obvious exceptions: Win ME and early Vista and Win CE), but there are a million different things that all add up to an unpleasant experience.

Disclaimer: I used Windows 7 on a decent spec machine recently and it was actually pretty good. But see the above quote about good and original. If Windows is going to end up just copying all the good bits from some other OS, why not switch to that OS now and get the benefits straight away rather than waiting 5-7 years?
Ask HN: Is what I'm about to do a bad idea?
Hi all. I'm posting this under a new account, because I have co-workers that also read HN and know my main alias.

Over the past week and a half, I have been interviewing with a company that I really want to work for. I'm currently working in TX, and the company I am interviewing for is a startup out in SF. It has been a dream / goal of mine to end up out there for the past 2 years, or so.

Well, things move fast at startups, and I have conducted 2 phone interviews and now they want to fly me out there on Monday to meet everyone (and, make a job offer I am assuming / hoping). The only problem is, at my current job I am supposed to demo some software we have been writing for the past few months to one of our clients who are flying in to see it. My current company consists of 7 people, and we do minor software development for auditors. Not exactly an enjoyable setup. The company I'm interviewing with is well established, so I'm not concerned about it being a potential job security risk. I guess it may technically no longer even be considered a startup.

All of this is happening very fast, and I feel like I'm just needing some advice because I'm not sure if what I'm about to do is the right decision.

I'm going to go through with the flight on Monday, and go out there. I'm just going to go for it. I don't want to do anything to delay this process and put any halt to the momentum that I have built up with them. I want this new job way too much.

Job offer or not, though, this would probably mean I'd have to resign from my current job, since I'd be shrugging off a meeting that has been schedule for a little more than a week.

I've got a phone call coming up in a few hours with the startup I'm interviewing with to discuss flight arrangements and schedule, etc.

Does this sound like a bad plan?
Bill Clinton: I Sent Two Emails As President
Advertising, insider/off the shelf deals, wining & dining "influential" bloggers, charging very low prices to outsell competitors.
Lots of good advice for scientists in there. The only new info for the typical CS grad is the utter lack of any programming training in most scientific disciplines.

This is pretty classic:

> "To all scientists out there, ask yourselves what you would do if, tomorrow, some Republican senator trains the spotlight on you and decides to turn you into a political football. Could your code stand up to attack?"
It does it across all the devices that run iBooks (i.e. anything that runs a recentish version of iOS).
If you read and understand the article, you see the Sony did nothing wrong in it's implementation. The hack involves installing custom firmware with bad root certificates, which is hardly Sony's problem or fault.
Damn those evil bastards at Apple for sending you the music in a high quality format.

/shakes fist at sky/

JJOOOOOOOOBBBBBSSSSSSSS!!!!!

(edit: for the kind souls burying me, see also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRnSnfiUI54
Because of Android's open nature, it would be trivial to open up an entire ecosystem of sensors and data loggers that would integrate

I think it would be easy for Apple to match this: they can just add a USB host port to the iPad and allow apps to talk to connected devices. Almost everything today is USB-based.

Apple just does a little step at a time instead of completely opening the barn door as the first step.
absurd valuations based purely on audience size with little revenue (Twitter and Facebook) sure as heck is a bubble.

That's not a bubble; that is just overvaluation of a couple of companies. "Bubble" implies that the whole of a sector is wildly overvalued. "Selective bubble" is an oxymoron.
It surprises me that this hasn't been done already. In fact, I would be willing to bet that somewhere, this type of software exists in some form. I'm fairly sure (although cannot prove, of course) that I watched this happen to a blog critical of a large publishing company here in the U.S.:

http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/trolls-inc-take-this...

Probably didn't use fancy software, but there certainly appeared to be a concerted attack effort against the blogger for an extended and sustained period of time.
> Sony is almost exactly 1/10th the size of Apple (in terms of Market Cap).

Sony is also 130% the size of Apple in terms of revenue, 180% the size of Apple in terms of assets and 340% the size of Apple in terms of employees headcount.

> Sonly also doesn't fab their own processors for mobile devices like Apple now does.

Apple does not fab their own processors (for mobile devices or otherwise), and — up to the A4 anyway — don't have that much input into them (the A4 is almost of-the-shelf, we'll have to see for the A5 but so far there's been no great works there)
Digital Age Is Slow to Arrive in Rural America
paid acquisition: could be search engine marketing, cost per action deals (leads), traditional marketing, any of that.
What are you waiting for?

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Seriously though, what is so compelling about the non-shipping tablets that makes them worth waiting for (or complaining about) than what Apple is already shipping?

Aside from the arguments that don't impact most consumers (jailbreaking, etc.) could it be that it's just not in the cards at the moment to come out with a device that competes with the iPad (price, performance, whatever, pick your metric)?
"It's different this time."
Do this now format it for another command and another and another, non-object pipes are good for one-offs and anything that doesn't require structure (which almost everything beyond interactive use does). Syntactic arguments are moot if the language was a property of the operating system itself (vm based) the syntax differences would mean nothing.
> People don't seem to really have a clue as to what is actually difficult or interesting from a CS perspective.

Pardon me, but I do have a clue as to what's actually interesting and/or difficult from a CS perspective. I work in NLP research, and I'm actually familiar with other research systems being developed IBM, as well as other organizations.

I wasn't particularly impressed or surprised.
But the context of this discussion is that getting to market with hardware is hard. "[C]ontrol[ing] the design/performance" is only going to make that more difficult, not easier, than going off-the-self.
The new rules forbid linking to alternative purchase processes without allowing an in-app option.