skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author argues that AAA debt is dangerous because it breeds complacency because it is considered risk-free. It strikes me that this is begging the question of how all these debt instruments can carry the same grade and do so so consistently. Is it not the case that AAA debt is dangerous because most of it is probably not really AAA?

I thought we established a long time ago that the ratings system is broken, this is just another symptom of that illness that no one is willing to even try to cure.
France Launches €10 Billion Offshore Wind Project (1,200 Turbines & 10,000 Jobs)
Which fits in perfectly with his argument that "your brain doesn't buy your plan." Once you break it up, the plan is more concrete and workable.

However, this only works if you aren't suffering from Deep Procrastination. Like you mentioned, if you don't have the deep meaning already covered, small steps won't help.
Why do you say that? I'm not saying you're wrong I'm just genuinely curious since I don't know much about the subject.
http://appsumo.com/bess-ho-ios-evergreen/
4-D Cinema Explores Shake, Rattle and Sniff Options
That's one of the problems of multi-master replication. It's easy to introduce conflicts and requires lots of application logic or operation manual work to handle them.
I don't understand the logic behind this line of reasoning for predators sleeping a lot.

Predators hunt to obtain food which provides them with calories. More calories must be gained than spent from hunting, otherwise it would be pointless as they would make a net loss and, ultimately, starve.

It is more likely that they hunt less, and sleep more, because hunting has large payoffs, and therefore they don't need to continue hunting for a while.
That's his point. There is no conceivable way that even a large fraction of that debt is AAA. What instead appears to be happening is a vicious circle:

* The finance industry engineers new ways to massage riskier debt into AAA products

* The market eagerly devours all the new AAA debt, building new business models and expanding previous ones based on the increased availability of risk-free products, thus

* Sparking demand for more AAA debt.
I'm not surprised. Gmail for quite some time couldn't find emails like this when you searched for "bank":

Hey Steko,

I'm going to the bank.

Erik

Note the ending period. I know it takes time to sort out internal APIs so that you can re-use code effectively, but you think Google would have at least the basics of search split out into re-useable modules that they could snap into new applications. I guess not though.
Say “NO” to Spec Work
It isn't clear to me why AAA rated bonds represent such systemic risk, the article says the following:

"They breed complacency and regulatory arbitrage, and they are a key ingredient in the cause of all big crises, which is leverage."

Is the author arguing that these should all just be rated below AAA and as such be accompanied with higher interest rates? This would obviously depress the rate of issuance because companies would be less inclined to take the terms (at least in theory). This makes sense to me, but doesn't necessarily indicate that AAA rated bonds inherently have systemic risk as the author states.

Perhaps I'll read the article a second time through.
Jawbone introduces Up, A Wristband to Track Health & Fight Obesity
That's a little unfair. I think the eating-regularly aspect of the services world appeals to a lot of people. That's more hit-or-miss with products, and certainly more delayed in most cases. If you're good at what you do, you can pretty reliably make decent cash on a contract. If you're selling a product, you can make alarmingly close to zero dollars a month before it catches on (which might be forever).
Maybe, but BRK and the US Treasury are meaningfully AAA. There is clearly a class of AAA risk that means something, and a (far larger) lower tier of AAA risk that merely rides the coattails.
The local government is funded by taxpayers.

The ISP can charge whatever they want... unless we decide to break up their monopoly.
The new IPython is Awesome
As the article states and as we found in the recession, there can't possibly be this many AAA rated organizations. I'll give an example at the risk of my memory failing and there being a difference in which exact organization it was:
Days before they went bust, GMAC bonds were still AAA rated.
Yet another non logarithmic graph of money, sigh. When will people learn.
the tax payers did not pay for the infrastructure. The local government did

Face, meet palm
From the article:

Then look at the green line. Triple-A debt wasn’t a huge part of the bond market back in the early 90s, but for the past decade it has invariably accounted for somewhere between 50% and 60% of total global fixed income issuance. That’s possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk.

That seems like the nut. It's prima facie obvious that much of what is called AAA can't be AAA; it almost mathematically beggars the definition of AAA.

Meanwhile, all kinds of contracts, regulations, and instruments rely on AAA ratings to prevent money that can't reasonably be put at risk from going into e.g. mortgage bonds.
In what way do AAA-rated products "breed ... regulatory arbitrage." What does that mean?
Where do the non-sugar/HFCS calories go? Do we secrete them? Is our body temperature lower when eating sugar? Do we become more active if we eat non-sugar calories, but not when eating sugar calories?
Here's how I handled it. I went to my employeer and said, "I'm unhappy here and I'd like to move back home anyway" and he asked how I was unhappy, and I explained I didn't really like my job and I tried some different things inside the company and none of them really fit what I wanted to do.

The results were in and so we started looking for someone and I stayed on for a month after they were hired to train the person in. After that I left.

But, I would flip this around and say it had more to do with the employeer. I felt like I could do this. Do you make it so the employeer felt like they could do this? I'd avoid putting it in a contract in focus on creating a culture where this type of thing can be norm.
S&P: America Could Default Even if Debt Ceiling is Raised
US Consumer Sentiment Falls To Lowest Level in Two Years
8 banks flunk European stress test; 16 more barely pass
The image on the article is very creative!
wow I am lucky to get 25Mbs down (avg ~15). much less 105, and I have the highest available residential plan.

Is South Texas just that far behind the normal Internet speeds?
This might be applicable to people who work with marketers, and things like that... but, in my segment of my industry, everyone's in the stone age.
Who would use something like this? Whats the common use case? How does the app know what email to map to what linked, twitter profile etc?
Google making us "Dummer"
+1, downvotes should be used quite sparingly, but are given out copiously here. I often hesitate to write or reply when the risk of offending is so high. Makes for a lousy experience.

Re: your comment, I'd say a friendlier way to characterize it is that QA isn't free, and so we choose our battles accordingly.
In western U.S., new hires fall 10 percent in May 2011, layoffs rise
Holy crap: "routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day". How wasteful! No wonder ISPs want metered usage etc.
Their largest plan is 2000 faxes a month, I do that in a few days.
The burnt-out generation
nocipher, his analysis of women's creativity is wrong because we know women have created art throughout history. We don't actually know how much art, unfortunately, because historically, the bulk of women's creative expression was not considered "real art". It wasn't signed by its creator, and its recipients didn't treat it with that extra level of care to prevent it from being destroyed. That's a big issue when you're talking largely about decorative textiles and pottery. Then there are the women who posed as men to have their art be treated more seriously. Again, we don't actually know how many women have done this, we only know from some discovered examples that it's been done for quite a long time. So to say with confidence that women don't create art is wrong. We know there have been some, and many art historians suspect there have been much more than we give credit for because of the above factors. Like many 'innate' folks, he's made no effort to account for cultural factors before declaring things innate. My personal thought on this is that if women, like men, didn't have that creative drive, they would not have bothered to create in an environment where they were untrained in art, sometimes discouraged from doing it, and given no credit at all for their work. The only motivation I can see there is the pure joy of creating. Sure, you might need a pot, but there's no need to paint it with a scene from your local mythology. And I don't think anyone can come up with a materialistic reason that you might need a novel or a bit of poetry.

His discussion on relative sex drives (sorry, typo) is spurious because, again, he doesn't separate this from cultural factors like what actions we define as being "normal" sex, and how the sexes relate to each other. The Mosuo, for example, does things differently. Instead of monogamy or polygyny, they have two-way polyamory. Young women are given a private place to bring lovers back to. She can bring home as many lovers as she likes, and the men can go to as many women's homes as they are invited to. If she wants, she invites him back, and if he wants, he goes. I remember reading that at one time, it wasn't unusual for a woman to have fifty partners in her lifetime. Women are under no economic or social pressure to invite lots of men over, so to me, it's really odd that this would be common if women didn't enjoy sex. Mosuo women these days have fewer partners, because they have access to a lot of western media and culture. Some girls are now afraid that if they invite over too many boys, they will be considered "slutty", and this is an image problem that the Mosuo as a whole are having. To me, that looks like proof that women are being discouraged from having as much sex as they'd like to have, thanks to social pressures that are inherent in our own culture. Or at least better proof than saying, "it happens, so it's genetic".
Did you have to get a contract and pay the business installation fee?
Michael Arrington reportedly to launch “CrunchFund” to invest in startups
Where are you getting your information? Gold in 2000 was about $400 inflation-adjusted dollars. Gold in 2010 is a little over $1500. That's not even close to an order of magnitude.

However, if you know that there are about 140,000 tons of gold in existence and somewhere around $9(M2) trillion in US money supply in existence, you do the math on how much gold would be worth.

The main point of my post was that this is such an obvious point that is not addressed, meaning that even the idea of moving to a gold standard is not well-thought out. Poor analysis is enough for me to dismiss the idea without a second thought -- only idiots play roulette with a nation's entire money supply.
>As for doing good in India, even under the Mughal empire, India is estimated to have a share of 30% of world GDP until the 18th century.

Wiki doesn't agree:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Technological_and_e...

>India's per capita GDP decreased from $550 in 1700 to $520 by 1857, although it had increased to $618 by 1947

I'm not sure whose dollars those are... but it certainly doesn't sound like the Mughal empire ever controlled anything remotely approaching 30% of world GDP. Here's how the British won India, for reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plassey

750 European soldiers and 2100 sepoys defeating 53000 Indians speaks volumes about the latter's ability to organize.
This is slightly different since the company you rent the server from is paying an ISP for internet traffic. If you don't use that bandwidth, the server company isn't charged and they pass the savings to you.

With this issue, you're still using the network bandwidth you paid for, it's still going on the internet, but its end point is a server owned by the ISP. You are not accessing a special subnet IP - you're using internet DNS and internet infrustructure to pass this "free" data. I would even bet that if there was damage to the network and there was no direct route to the server, your packets may end up routing outside of the ISPs inrastructure.
Project followers might be a more relevant metric for impact than the number of repo's
That's not bad, thanks, I'll look into it. Our main issue is we've gone to a work from home model and there aren't any techs at the office to handle any potential issues with an in-house server and this has become a problem.
China urges US to be 'responsible' on debts
"Triple play" (Internet, phone, and TV) is dramatically more profitable than a dumb pipe and thus will out-compete any "nice" ISP.
World's No. 2 Retailer's Earnings to Fall 23%
Then I'm inclined to disagree at another portion of the post which seems somewhat contradictory to the point:

"it wasn’t an excess of greed and speculation which led to the financial crisis, but rather an excess of overcaution"

The greed then exists in alternate areas of the system. It isn't AAA bonds that are the issue, it is the fact that lesser bonds are being rated as AAA. Why are they being rated that way? The ratings companies have conflicts of interest and were... (wait for it) greedy.

In addition, calling this an "excess of overcaution" is laughable, if I can get decent returns from a "risk free" investment, that isn't cautious, it is logical.
Done!
http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=5569
Spotify vs the US Competition
There are plenty of homosexuals with sons and daughters.
Oh, competition, wouldn't it be nice to have you around.

Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize. What would be wonderful is if the government ran fiber to everyone's homes, and then let companies lease it from them. I wonder what the cost would be to last-mile a major city....
It uses magpie RSS lib, but it's probably a pretty old version by now. If it doesn't auto-discover the feed you can just enter the feed URL, it should work.
Also, if you hand-code these encoding routines, you're almost certain to miss something out. Please follow the OWASP reference implementations:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_P...
It's hard to predict; 10G prices have plateaued or increased in recent years, so maybe the answer is never or maybe there will be a dramatic price drop some day.
I've made at least 30% to 50% increases every time I jumped from job to job, and never stayed at a job more than a year.

You'll very rarely wind up getting as much in raises when you continue working for the same company year after year, unless you manage to get constantly promoted or are lucky enough to find yourself working for a startup that makes it big (and doesn't screw its shareholding employees over like Skype did).

Of course, eventually I might price myself out of the market. But I don't know when that "eventual" point will be for me, as I don't think I've yet reached the peak of my career.
the problem with vwp is you can only stay 90 days and you really need 180 days for yc + fund raising
This is exactly correct. Basically folks are lying about the AAA rating of this debt, it is not mathematically possible to have 65% of the bonds issued to be risk free. Therefore, there are bonds here which are not AAA, therefore we can expect that they will fail. Now the kicker ...

There are funds which can only invest in AAA type securities, think pension funds which have contractual obligations far in the future to provide money.

When these AAA instruments blow up, they will take down pension funds which will cash out their equities to rebalance their holdings which will cause a market crash that made 2009 look like a minor correction, which will, in all likelyhood throw us into a deep deep depression because rating agencies will have lost so much credibility that they won't be believed and governments won't have any way to raise funds to 'bail out' their economies.

Kind of a scary thing to think about.
Basically just code that parses the tumblr markup (more or less..) and then enters the various RSS data for the relevant vars. No XSLT involved, though perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea..
US military strategy: we'll halt hackers with "cyber hygiene"
Getty Images Says Google Plus Terms of Service is "OK"
It's possible perhaps that there are evolutionary paths that, although dead-ends, are easily mutated into and thus always present in a species...

The cornucopia of debilitating mental illnesses that we tend to suffer from implies that this is almost certainly the case, and there are a lot of things that go into this.

Regarding traits like homosexuality, it's likely that the genetic "cause" ends up so widespread because the possession of it (or of a close precursor) is not necessarily that devastating to reproductive success, and may even be beneficial when it's not expressed as homosexuality. For instance, it's pretty well established at this point that whatever predisposes people to homosexuality genetically is not the whole story, a lot of it has to do with the embryonic environment, upbringing, and possibly sheer chance, so if there are other beneficial things about that mutation (or set of mutations), then as long as they outweigh the probability that homosexuality is expressed and prevents procreation, the gene stays around.

There's a rule of thumb, "one mutation, one death", which implies that no matter how deleterious a mutation is, on average, it will cause one death (or more accurately in this case, one failure to reproduce) when it happens. Roughly speaking, this is because if it's a very mildly deleterious mutation, it will spread quite far through the population before there's enough evolutionary pressure to stamp it out, and if it's a really bad one, it will kill off the first person to have it before it spreads at all. This can be influenced by social factors, as well, i.e. eyesight problems are rectified by our building glasses, but that just reduces evolutionary pressure against bad eyesight, so we're letting it spread its (much lower) fitness penalty throughout the population.

There's an element there that I'm glossing over, which is that in a population, you have to consider the probability of recreating the deleterious mutation, too - for instance, if a trait depends on a combination of a few mutations to be present, then depending on the number and prevalence of those mutated alleles in the population, the stable percentage of people displaying that trait will change.

It may just be the case that for various social reasons, predisposition to homosexuality has not been responsible for enough of a decrease in reproduction to counterbalance the probability of randomly mixing genes in just the right way to recreate it "from scratch." This could be particularly likely if some of the involved genes are useful by themselves in other situations, and homosexuality is hitchhiking on the backs of those beneficial mutations.
We've had things like this in NZ for several years now
Author doesn't really understand the situation.

The problem, which started becoming visible in 2001, is that in the aftermath of the "dot-com boom", the ratings agencies starting rating a lot of things AAA that were not, in fact, AAA. That is not "an excess of overcaution". In fact it was an exploit of the banking/finance system, that went like this:

-- lots of places are required by law or regulation to only invest in AAA securities, because they/the public don't want to lose any money. They have a LOT of money to invest.
-- but they don't check the shit themselves
-- they depend on a rating agency
-- ratings agencies are paid by the issuers
-- they are exploitable
-- bribe the rating agency to give my shit a AAA rating, and now I can sell a ton of it
-- offer the investor a slightly greater than AAA return, and they love it
-- everyone is happy: rating agency is bribed, investor is getting better returns than expected, and I can sell all the shit I can package up
-- until it all falls apart.

And the far right side of the chart is just a continuance of the same thing: our shit fell apart, what should we do? Well, the easiest thing is to bribe the politicians to take our private debts and turn them into public debts. And so it happened. That big tall lavender bar in 2009 is the dark purple lines from a few years prior....

None of this has anything to do with an excess of caution or with AAA debt being more systemically dangerous than other types of debt. The blogger here almost grasps what is wrong:

> "That’s possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk."

but he skips past the correct answer, which is that the ratings agencies have been suborned.
See tptacek on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2768921

A lot of regulation tells big often state-based institutional investors like retirement plans and university funds that they have to invest X% in AAA rated investments.

Demand for AAA rated products creates not just financial wizardry that spawns more AAA products from riskier products, but the increasingly powerful finance industry/lobbyists pressure government officials (usually appointed representatives from the finance industry) to make this easier...if not transparent.
Getting Your Groove Back
The general doctrine sounds great. The specific solution outlined sucks. My hypothesis: easier to get in touch with primal survival instincts and twiddling that directly. The author is still answering those self-reflection questions with abstract thoughts that has nothing to do with survival instincts.

Meaning: Interrupt yourself every time you feel procrastination -- that heavy, draining, depressing, oppressing feeling -- that sudden drop in energy when thinking about taking the next step -- or even planning and deciding the course of action to take you to your goal. Catch yourself feeling this. Then directly manipulate that.