skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is pure bullshit.

> In one moment, an invisible trader placed a single trade that moved the most liquid debt market in the world

So what? Most trades move the market, even in super-liquid ones. You hit the bid or offer in "market" size, the bid-offer will prob move a tick or two.

> The value of the trade was about $850 million dollars.

No it's not. A futures trade is "on-market", that is it has ZERO value. If yields don't move, his P&L will be zero. What he's done is take the equivalent risk of shorting $850m 10y.

> In simple terms, if that was a direct bond buy, no one would be talking about it.

Yes exactly. And taking the same position in futures is no different. The risk profile is almost exactly the same. 1bn 10y is large-ish, but by no means uncommon.

> However, with the use of futures, you have to have margin capacity behind the trade.

Yes, and so what? I don't know what the margin requirements are for 10y futures, probably about 1% of notional, ie $8.5m . Ie the guy has taken a $850m exposure for an initial outlay of 8.5. That is a heck of a lot easier on the bank account than buying them outright. (Edit: of course he's not buying them, he's selling them. But to sell (short) the physical bonds he'd have to borrow them in the repo market, where you loan cash and take the bond as collateral. Either way you need $850m in cash)

> That means with a single push of a button someone was willing to commit more than $1 billion of real capital

No they weren't. His initial outlay is the margin. That is it. Given there is an upper limit on a bond price (the 0% yield price) his possible losses are capped at something way, way, way less than a $1bn. Let's say the 0% yield price is $105 per 100 notional (i've no idea if this is right, but is approximate enough for this example), then his possible losses are capped at ~5% of notional.

> You only do this if you see an edge

Huh, what? This trade could be for any number of reasons. It could be closing out an existing position, hedging a long physical position (thus taking a position on the spread) or yes maybe an outright punt. But it's hardly earth-shattering. Any mid-sized bank could do a trade like this, and often do.

Edit: re-reading I've just noticed that the article implies this trade could pay-off 10-1 netting the guy 10bn. This is so wrong as to be laughable. The most this guy could make is $850m, and only if the price of treasuries goes to zero! Completely impossible. If the US loses it's AAA rating prices will prob move a dollar or two, e.g go from $98 -> $96 for example, ie he'll make a couple of % of notional.

In short, total nonsense.
Show HN: PIN-Based online debit card payments
How is it, that this can be done anonymously? Are trades protected by the first amendment? I have to admit, someone is expressing a very strong opinion here.

Personally I think this is a mistake. Wasn't the financial meltdown caused by the general lack of transparancy?
Only if it had happened after 2001. Hard to imagine any American politician having the balls to say that today.
Pandora of those you listed, but mostly Subsonic on my own server. With an Android client and acceptable quality over 3G, works the best for me.
Add turtable.fm on there! I've spent more time on there then any other music service as of recent (and I pay for pandora).
There we go again. Market share. Author did not even bother to consider, at whose expense Samsung and HTC are gaining said share. Apple did grow too. Now 47% of their revenue comes from the product which was launched into the market where Apple had zero marked share and was laughed at for even trying. Another 21% comes from product which did not even exist 1.5 years ago.

Author did forget to include these graphs:
http://www.intomobile.com/2011/05/02/apple-has-50-profit-sha...

Yep, Apple should be afraid very afraid.
Jamendo.com and many netlabels.

4 years ago I decided not to support the music industry anymore.
How I Hacked a Bank and Made 40 Bucks
I know this point has been beaten to death, but in that case you only need to know/grok vi, a significantly smaller subset of vim.
Here's something I did a while back. It seems that many languages are developed because of a perceived shortcoming in another language. For fun, I mapped some of these:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/images/LanguageFix.png

ADDED IN EDIT: I've now realised this was in response to a PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html

FURTHER EDIT: Now a separate submission:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2816526
CSS Prism
Same here, although I am a subscriber of Last.fm

I have been rebuilding my deck all summer. Fire up the xbox, blast it through the stereo speakers and I get hours of music chosen for me with no interruptions. While last.fm seems to go deeper than Pandora, it still repeats music too much for my liking. Putting on an artist station does get good variety, but if you listen to the same station the next day, you just about get the same playlist.
I thought last.fm would be on the top! They are great, no adds, even in the free desktop version, skip as you wish, what else do you need?
Read more about Edison then: http://www.atomicacreative.com/images/ACG_EdisonAsIKnowHim.p...
Ask HN: Tools for site Optimization
I work at a big organization. Some of the web development is leaded by me and some is outsourced to another big organization.

They built our official site and it's awful. Sometimes, and I'm not kidding, it can take up to 20 seconds to load!

The people who are responsible for our official site are non techie. When they tell the company that built the site that it is slow the company blames the server company, and when they go to the server company they blame the dev company.

I need proofs and hard numbers that I can give the people in charge about what things slow down the site. E.g. the background image is 500kb and I have smush.it to prove that it's slow. The JavaScript isn't compressed and is at the top of the page, etc.

Any ideas?
Decorative Columns
Amazing events require gold-standard, event supplies. Stumps Party is your online store for thousands of event supply items. Shop for proms, weddings, parties, school functions, formals, and other grand events.
I think he's talking about this

http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/How_Perl_saved_human_genome
Grooveshark, since it's completely free and it works in Argentina.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

http://www.webpagetest.org/
I use Grooveshark when I know what I want to listen to, otherwise there is a great service called The Hype Machine at hypem.com which is an excellent source of new and upcoming electronic/rap/dance/indie music
Didn't make sense to me either. Now I realized it optimizes static content: css, javascrips and images on the firs run, then it serves optimized version until you update them. There is some latency to fetching dynamic content and that's the reason optimized sites are slower on this test.
The conclusion here has an unfounded moral lesson:

"The model suggests why competitors always seem to locate so close to each other and compete on real estate. Think about big burger chains, supermarkets, and video stores. You will almost always see them clustered even though it would be nicer if they spread out."

How do you know it would be nicer if they spread out? You'd waste money (and carbon emissions) shipping resources to remote businesses that aren't profitable, or at least not as profitable as they could be if they were closer and easier to ship to. As a reductio ad absurdum, you can't build and maintain a gas station in Antarctica just so that it would "nicer" if someone happened to be there on vacation with their snowmobile. The reason there's no gas stations in Antarctica is the same reason there's so few in Wyoming. It's also the reason they're all clustered around high-traffic areas immediately outside of major cities.

If you can't calculate from empirically established methods a "socially optimal equilibrium" that doesn't directly imply that we should be building gas stations in Antarctica, you don't know that the current distribution is suboptimal. More generally, there's a lesson for policymakers here: you shouldn't endeavor to destroy established equilibria that you don't understand.

Otherwise, kudos to the author for a pretty neat example and visualization. People who do stuff like this are awesome.
</h1></LI><BR><BR><LI><a href="http://www.spreety.com/><strong>free tv online</strong></a><br/><br/></div>The television guide for free tv online, free movies online, news, sports, music and more.<br />
Why would they have to decrease profit margin?
The author is arguing potential revenue and not relative revenue. From that point of view a 30% or 40% market share for apple would indeed be more revenue than a 19% market share. If these other companies are growing much faster than Apple, even if they are making less, that's revenue Apple isn't gaining.
Just curious about that first sentence there... are you saying that Symfony and Yii are both in the same league, different from everything else, or that Symfony is in a league different from the one that Yii is in?

I haven't looked at Symfony, but I was really impressed by the event driven nature of Yii, and I couldn't wipe the smile off my face when I started looking into the active page elements.

I think 2.0 is as good an excuse as any to check out Symfony though, so goodbye to the weekend :)
Apple cares a lot about market share. Why do you think they keep bragging with statistics every chance they get? Being a leader in market share is very important for developers and it's important for customers, too. Also more market share means more sales - so more money and profit. Why wouldn't they want that? You don't think they cared about their market share with iPods, or their market share in the tablet market?

They may not care about market share at any cost, but they do care about it quite a lot. They may have said they don't care about market share in the old Mac days, but it's not like they could do much about it, so what else could they have said?
Or the people that deliberately organised purchasing things in a convoluted manner that channels taxpayer's money to a few preferred companies, in a manner that while increasing our actual debt, puts it on different books, so we don't look quite as in debt as we are.
Researchers at Caltech Create an Artificial Neural Network Made from DNA
The original press release is here (http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13434) although it appears to be down right now.
Um, no. He pointed out that as the smartphone market grows (at the expense of feature phones, probably), HTC and Samsung are riding that wave much better. It's not horribly surprising, since Apple's product is not likely to be immediately affordable to many of those switching from feature phones, but as the smartphone (and eventually tablet) market becomes commoditized it is not a given that Apple will be able to successfully uphold their profit margin by charging relatively high premiums for their value proposition. Of course they might do just that, but that is not something we can take for granted.
PowerInbox Sees the Future of Social Platforms, and Its Name Is... E-mail
We read here that they can make PFC neurons more excitable (they show firing rates in the figures) by basically blocking potassium channels, which is like saying the sun is bright. We see the rescued firing rates but we don't see any behavioral memory performance results. I wonder how nature justified "working memory" in the title, given that we don't even know if delay activity is a network or cell-intrinsic mechanism yet.
"In its report, the public administration committee recommends that departments across Whitehall use more small and medium-sized IT suppliers to increase competition and bring down prices."

This is exactly what already happens, not that I think MPs know about it. I've personally worked on and even in some cases BUILT government websites, yet you won't find my name or my employer's (at the time) name on their books. They contract stuff out to the same companies again and again, ostensibly because they trust them / rely on them / any number of obviously not true reasons, and I don't think they realise that when they pay a big company £300,000 to make a website, they just turn around and sell it on to a small company who does it for £40,000.

I won't name websites or companies for obvious reasons, but those are quite close to actual numbers.
Here's the thing, even if you grant the premise: Samsung copied the iPhone and iPad from top to bottom and Apple will win their lawsuit, I still think it looks fearful.

First, by suing, Apple has vouched for the quality of Samsung's products. It is the Windows look-and-feel lawsuit all over again. Right or wrong, Apple has just stood up and admitted that Android (or at least Samsung's take on Android) is "good enough". That's just a mistake and you only make it out of fear.

Now think about what a lawsuit says about what is going on inside Apple. Suppose Apple truly believes they have a kick-ass portfolio of next-generation products that will blow Samsung and the rest out of the water this fall. Would they really waste their time and attention on the complex, multi-theater, drawn-out, unpredictable war that suing Samsung is going to be? They aren't HTC, there is no hope of squashing them quickly (not to mention the huge supplier relationship). Or would they just say "eat our dust" and move onto the next thing (transitioning to new suppliers if necessary)?

Even beyond the lawsuit, there just seem to be so many recent examples of Apple signaling that they don't believe that they can win in the marketplace (e.g. the in-app purchase fiasco). To me, that smells like fear and a lot of it.
Anyone notice all the testing locations are AWS Regions?

I was assuming webpagetest was a Google property and figured they would use their own data centers.
That's quite interesting. Could you elaborate the process more? How did you incorporate? Are you Chinese? Was it difficult to do? Where should I be careful? etc.
Apple has consistently claimed the highest share of the mobile phone market's profit without selling the most phones.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-smarphone-profits-2011-...

And the quarter before that: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/31/apple-is-still-suckin...

And the quarter before that: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/09/21/pie-chart-apples-outr...
If you do research it, I'd appreciate it if you'd write up a guide to finding good local blogs and submit it to HN. I don't know of any in my area, and aside from googling my city name, I can't think of many ways to find them.
I think they are merely trying to intimidate a competitor...
thesixtyone to listen and eMusic to buy. I have a last.fm account but hardly ever use it, and tried spotify a couple of times but see no value to it.
I don't think the OP was saying that they'd definitely have to do so, but it's typically something companies do to increase market share generally speaking. Reduce price point means reducing profit margin, but often increasing market share because the lower price means more people can buy.

Apple typically hasn't done this (or certainly not to the extent other mfgs do) but certainly still like talking about their increasing market share.
This sort of perception is what makes one think that train services in other countries are always better than in your own backyard. The truth is that, in Europe, the average level of railway service is more or less the same everywhere these days; the exception is recent high-speed technology, which is only available in a handful of countries ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe ).
I was just about to type this. Yes it is exactly the premise of the new movie.
Insurance companies are immoral?

My employer and I pay $7,500 a year for my health insurance. I developed a debilitating back condition which required over $150,000 in surgery and therapy. My cost? Less than $1,000.

A friend of the family was killed in a tragic accident. He left behind a wife with a long-term debilitating illness and 3 children. Several life insurance policies paid sufficient monies that they have the financial resources to live their lives.
Market is not fixed in place, when one factor changes, other numbers vary accordingly.

For example 30% of a total 100M units sold is roughly the same of 19% of a total 150M units sold. IF APU stay the same, it makes no difference financial wise to Apple. But to achieve 30% of 150M units sold, Apple may have to branch out another line of more affordable phones, it may have to give more control to the carriers, it may have to iterate on a faster pace than it is comfortable with, all of these would hit Apple's margin and equal things out.

With Nokia LG SE and Motorola in the red, Apple is now siphoning about 50% of industry profit at a market share of, what, 5% of all phones sold?

Which is not to say market share is not important, but it is not the utimate goal.

For now Apple's more urgent problem remains to be manufacturing capability, its fancy process or unique components always causes shortage upon new iOS devices launch and well into the second quarter, it almost forms a pattern (iPhone 3G/iPhone 4/iPad 2 etc). If the murmurs from Foxconn et al is to be believed the same backlog will happen to iPhone 5/iPad 3 again.
Shahid Nama 28 July 2011
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Anywhere in the US, it's possible, and most likely other countries too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_verification_service "Account current status verification"
TouchStudio: Program Your Phone with Your Phone
That's not very peculiar though, is it? A short walk and a single direct bus.

On the weekend I prefer to catch buses over the underground (no pun intended) even if it takes a bit longer.

I'm not in a rush and I enjoy the scenery (the front top seat of a double deck bus is a very cheap VIP way to tour London).

I'd probably use that route.
Link to paper on which TouchStudio is based:

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/147663/TouchStudio-MSR-TR...
Interview with Hakim El Hattab, a HTML5/canvas guru
If you follow HTML5 / canvas related things, you will most likely know of Hakim. He won 10k apart, and has made many other really awesome canvas related things. He gives some very interesting insight into how he has developed in the area and how he maintains a good work life balance.
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em: The Case for Social Media in Education
Are their profit margins growing disproportionate to their market share?
Newzbin isn't an NNTP provider. They just provide the .torrent equivalent of Usenet.

So yeah, they will most likely still allow access to NNTP.
You can already install XCode through the App Store. Soon, that will be compulsory.
I think that if apple were concerned about market share, iPhones would be on every carrier, there would be more iOS phones available and the pricing would be more competitive. I think that they are more happy to be a 20-30% market share with a semi premium product than a commoditized less capable product. The reality is that apple will never be able to compete with hardware vendors that crank out good-enough phones with a cheap yet very capable OS on them. I don't think they want commodity products in their line up. I also think that they may feel similarly to what steve jobs said about Microsoft in the 90s. For apple to win, google/android doesn't necessarily have to lose.

As for the litigation, I don't know that it is necessarily tied to the fact that android has taken off so well. Like it or not, most hardware vendors use apple as a hardware benchmark, so copying their products is inevitable. I would not want to sit idly while other people make knockoffs of my products either.
Random fact - if your breaks fail, try the handbrake. It isn't powerful enough to beat the engine (but that can be solved by pressing the clutch which will disconnect the engine from the gears) but it is required (at least by Danish law, I assume it is the same in the rest of Europe) to be directly attached to two wheels on the same axle and to work exclusively mechanically (no electronics can get in the way).

If you do at high speeds your car will twist but that can be countered by steering in the direction you want to go.
Android the platform might be nothing like iOS, but Ir does appear that Samsung went out of its way to make their phones look like iPhones[1].

[1]: http://thisismynext.com/2011/04/19/apple-sues-samsung-analys...
I'm using Google Music Beta, primarily because it's free (for now), but also because they sent me a Cr48 and my first question when I got a Google Support Ninja on the phone (had to deal with a 3G problem) was about the best music app. They didn't have one at the time (he suggested lots of Google Ninjas use Grooveshark), but now they do, so I'm beta testing that as well.

My biggest problems with it:

- Frequently loses the 'play' button - the bottom control bar disappears after a while of leaving the tab open.

- No play counts in several of the views (album, for instance).

- No scrobbling - but there's a great Chrome extension called Better Music Beta which does it for you.

- No nested playlists or smart playlists.

- Uploading needs a lot of work - after uploading my entire library, I realized that a lot of the genre metadata was wrong, so I changed it in iTunes. The music uploader then started re-uploading a few thousand songs...

Things I like:

- It has all of my music!

- It's currently free...

- It sync'd my iTunes playlists (the non-smart ones anyway).

- It's good quality playback, and I've never had a display or playback problem that a page refresh didn't fix.
> What is the negative business impact on with entire Windows platform associated with making a key member of the server product family available on nix?

I suspect this is close to the heart of the matter. Building a flagship application for a competing OS hurts Microsoft's interest as an OS vendor. Without a really compelling business reason to take on the technical hassle of porting, this danger becomes a deal-breaker.
But you can just as easily update settings stored in other formats.
Really? The Newton was pretty darn bad!
Raise the debt ceiling [video]
The Transit Navigation android app is a welcome addition, but I wish these types of android apps would work without constant need for data connection (i.e. would cache results and work offline once route downloaded) as nothing is worse than taking an underground train and losing all route information due to loss of signal. On a side-note "Pubtran London" is another good (and free) android app for London travel which also takes into account route/line closures and can also find National Rail train times/route info (for entire UK) from within same tool.
For streaming music, YouTube playlists and http://www.di.fm/ are my favorites for convenience. It's nice to have the tracks sequenced by actual DJs in mixes if I want to hear a lot of new stuff. Di.fm is the only streaming service I have actually payed for before, they have a good iPhone app as well.

I also use Last.fm, but only for passive scrobbling and not listening.

Youtube should definitely be on this list, it has an insane amount of material compared to every other catalog, there are even plenty of out of print Vinyl rips being uploaded.
Other: The Hype Machine (hypem.com)
'IPv6 brokenness' problem appears fixed