skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't work for me either. What do you guys think about the collage layout though? I'm interested, as it's very similar to what we are trying to achieve at bindle:
http://www.bindle.me/bindles/2
The original contention was "extremely close" to optimal. I'm merely contending that the markets fuck it up big occasionally here, pretty low hanging fruit for me. As for why I didn't exploit it? I don't know, I don't work on Wall Street, don't play that game? I could've told you that the mortgage thing was a problem long before the ratings agencies, apparently, but everyone knew in hindsight.

Anyways, 10 years is pretty darn not good in my opinion. I'd call it inefficient, as far as pricing is concerned.

Agree on "more or less" regulations being a not-useful mental model. It seems to follow from that contention that "regulations!" isn't a one-word answer to any question of who to blame for anything, or how to solve anything.

RE: Fannie and Freddie I have not looked at their balance sheets. I'm under the impression that whatever the problem is with them, it's dwarfed by the size of the financial crisis, ergo they're not primarily at fault for the crisis. Moreover, the program to lend to minorities had been in place for decades. Seems hard to blame it for the 2008 meltdown, why not sooner?

It does seem that any regulations putting institutional faith in the ratings agencies are wrong-headed.
i wonder if the company plans to pass along the staggering costs of a helicopter, private jets, and fleets of cars, to the end user. what would be the end users pricing plan for a helicopter from midtown to jfk? what other revenue sources does this company have? (maybe a marginal source from delivering food? delivering vital organs from hospitals?)

currently, to call a cab with uber in new york is more than 100% more expensive than it is to get a normal yellow cab. i can assume a small fraction of the general public would be willing to pay more for privacy and convenience (probably financial/legal elites). to keep a 'high liquidity' of cars will be expensive (particularly compared to new p2p car sharing models), especially when there is a high fixed cost and any unused cars would be eating away from margins.

i am just skeptical about this business model.
Ask HN: Does Google evaluate employees?
How do they measure?
Your life experiences make you unique. It might so happen your unique perspective is what is needed to make some breakthrough happen.

Spot on (see http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto).
Coupons from on High
More accurately, look at what's been happening over the last several decades. The population has been disarmed bit by bit, first various gun rights were taken away until ultimately all gun rights were taken away in a hysterical response to the Dunblane massacre. Then every weapon was targeted, knives, batons, everything. Even self-defense rights were taken away, if you use your own fists in your own home to defend yourself against an attacker you could potentially go to jail. Meanwhile, British police powers have been growing out of control, with little to keep them in check. While the world made much note of the PATRIOT act in the US few people, even in the UK, paid much attention to the far more sweeping expansion of British police powers undertaken as "anti-terrorism" measures. All the while moving closer and closer to the ideal of a completely disempowered populace utterly dependent on the police for any degree of protection.
Yeah, I don't believe for a second that this is a trait that belongs exclusively to engineers.

Here's a thought: anyone in a position of "power" is susceptible to this dynamic; if "social" relationships were described as an equation, then power (P) would be inversely proportional to the effort or energy (E) you need to expend to maintain any given social relationship (R),

P = R/E

The more power/authority you wield, the more of a jerk you can be (not should be or are), because the value of the relationship is lopsided - you don't need to spend as much energy on it.

The power an engineer holds is that they are often quite valuable within an organization, and tend to have an easily transferable skill set.
Ok I thought you were talking about a physical card that you could swipe in meat space. Narrowing scope to the internet makes your bank idea easier though it would still take a ton of work.

How familiar are you with the regulations guarding the banking industry?

How do you plan to solve the chicken-egg adoption problem? Most vendors offer 3 to 5 credit card brands, and they won't want to adulterate their payment forms with strange unproven options. I wonder if collaborating with companies that build shopping cart plugins is the way to go or if you would have to fly solo for awhile before the established shopping cart players would take you seriously.

How many people are clamoring for such a financial account? If my credit card account gets comprised, the most I'm liable for is $50 or something like that. I check my transaction log for unusual activity, which I do with any financial account. Even companies that have purchasing cards reconcile the transactions. Apart from not having to pay $50 if my card ever gets compromised, what benefit would your bank serve to me?
I use smileys in a professional setting, but not on first contact. You can relax the strict business tone when you are on a more personal level with somebody.

I would say that if your email was extremely concise and could have been seen as rude, a smiley can make it seem like you're not being an asshole.

Either way, you should always make sure your emails are friendly and to the point.
> Taking one example of an engineer who may have had a bad day [...]

Well wait a second.

Look, if I get moody and pissed off and start cursing to myself at my desk, hey, just another Tuesday.

But if I then decide to terminate paid accounts and backups? Engage in a flamewar in a public forum with paying customers? Wow, that's beyond "may have had a bad day" and into "destroying shareholder value" and "employment terminated immediately."
The Lifetime Benefits of Vinyl Stickers
One great and major tool for marketing is using labels. Custom labels are those which are used for branding a product, shipping and racking. Almost all the products that we buy, we first see the labels printing on them and read and then see whether we are interested in buying the brand’s product or not.
Paper and slides: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cryptanalysis/a...
Chris Hughes's Startup Jumo ‘Acquired’ for $0 and a Graceful Exit
I agree. That's like saying one shouldn't smile at work.
I guess Japan is the extreme version of a Guesser culture.
I feel they should create a single business brand and market the shit out of it, make it a well known name.

If I say "I have a thinkpad", people know what I mean. If I say "I have a latitude" or "a vostro", most people don't. And if I say "I have a Dell", it's such a wide range that it doesn't really say much about what laptop I have.

The other reason for this is confusion. When anyone asks me what Dell laptop I would recomend, I never have a clue. What's the difference between a Vostro and a Lattitude? Fuck knows, until you've actually looked at the different models. I'm a geek, I happen to own a Dell laptop, and I've worked on Dell marketing campaigns. If I can't get my head around their many ranges...

Then they need something destinctive, memorable. Hey, you know thinkpads? Oh you know, the ones with the red nipple. Yeah, those ones. And by something distinctive, I mean something small, and something that doesn't detract from the overall design. I don't mean "we can put a cool pattern on the lid".

Then they need product placement. Good product placement. In the UK, the millionairs on "Dragon's Den" and Alan Sugar on "The Apprentice" (two big TV shows) should use stylish dell laptops. Same in the US. I've been a Blackberry fan for years, and I'm familiar enough with most marketing ideas not to get sucked in by them, but I'll be honest, a small part of me loves the fact that Obama has the same phone as me. I hate myself for caring, but the fact of the matter is that people do care.

And the logic behind product placement works at lower levels too. People used to see a boss with a thinkpad and aspire to have it as a status symbol. (Just like used to be the case for blackberries, before they stopped being "just a phone for businessment".) That's what they need to bring back. It needs to become a status symbol in offices around the world.

I don't know how much the above ideas would help. I'm not sure what other things they should do. The one thing I'm completely sure of is that what they have been doing hasn't been working as well as it could have.
I think the parent post overstates it a bit. I wouldn't say that the Fed was a primary cause, although they were certainly complicit by keeping interest rates so low, artificially increasing the demand for mortgages.

If you're willing to generalize the comment to say that the crisis was primarily due to the heavy hand of the federal government, then I offer these two links. They're both op-ed pieces, so shouldn't be considered definitive research, but they're pretty solid evidence that some serious people do blame the government's regulation (as opposed to de-regulation).

1. A Government-Mandated Housing Bubble http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-opi...

2. How Government Stoked the Mania http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122298982558700341.html
What Startups Can Learn From Kanye West
Firefox 4 and 5 in the first graph are significantly lower than Chrome. Obviously it's a pretty dodgy comparison to make since Chrome isn't split by versions, but I agree with hammock that it seems statistically unsound to arbitrarily drop some versions of some browsers, especially when they can't do the same for the Chrome results.
In this light, http://mongodb-is-web-scale.com is maybe relevant.
It seems to me that passions flare when people are forced to make an expensive, difficult to reverse choice based on insufficient evidence between similar but highly incompatible products. E.g. which car is going to be better? I don't know, there's really no way to find out (history is at best a guide), so I do "research" and make a choice and now I am stuck with it. I'd like to believe I made a good choice, so any evidence that I clearly made a bad choice is hurtful.

Brands simply become shorthand for these choices.

You don't see Toshiba vs. Panasonic vs. Lenovo laptop wars because the choice there is not so hard to reverse and the deciding factors were fairly clear. But you do see it in Canon vs. Nikon DSLRs (because lens incompatibility forces you to double down on your choice).

Probably the worst example of this kind of thing is not Apple vs. (whoever) but religion.
You want 50 sets of slightly different standards for light bulbs? Surely that is a recipe for chaos and inefficiency.
I Want to be a Billionaire, Just for a Minute
- The Xoom and Droid commercials are nothing but derivative, dystopian futurist fluff, and the Verizon Android (read: non-Droid) commercials involving their retail outlets are seriously contrived crap speaking to easily-swayed lowest-common denominators in the crowd.

- The Touchpad's commercials are boring and tell me nothing about the device. Like others are saying, they tell me jack crap about the device, and the Russell Brand commercials that actually do? They might not be my tea, but at least they have some personality (comedic value debated). Haven't seen them on TV. Brilliant strategy there, HP!

- Apple's commercials are so well-received that rolling a commercial out based on a feature (see: Facetime) can generate sales because they know just who to market to and, by focusing on one device per form factor, have a history of trusted quality through said long-term focus on each of them. People actually know the models as opposed to the ton of "ManufacturerName Droidbot AspirationalPhraseHere" models being cranked out. They know the history. And, well, Apple's products "Just work" 99% of the time.

Disclosure: I own an Android tablet and an HP Touchpad. Fanboys amuse me.
The way that you're addressed can skew the tone though. For example, starting an email out with "Hi John, can you take a look at this?" sounds much more friendly than "John, can you take a look at this?"
Add-ons are core to the Firefox User Experience
Jumo Acquired for $0, Chris Hughes Saves Face with Graceful Exit
I believe DDG uses Yahoo! BOSS (http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/) as one of its primary indexes (check out DDG's FAQ). BOSS is a pay per use model (as due to Yahoo's deal with Microsoft, BOSS needs to charge to cover cost) - so it benefits Yahoo! directly. Also, now that Yahoo is out of search crawling/indexing business, it is not really concerned about DDG becoming a competitor - in fact it is a validation of the BOSS model which is something Yahoo will like to promote.
I wonder if it's simply that it will require volume and curation like a lot of other free/cheap content?

Book reviews are coming back, eh!
For me the style of writing as I become more familiar with somebody goes like this:

- Initial contact, "Dear ..", "Kind Regards,"

- Slightly looser, "Hi ...", "Many thanks," or "Yours,"

- Pretty friendly "Name," or "Hey name,", "Thanks" "Cheers" etc

- Very friendly, no mention of their name at the start, signing with just "Corin" or "C"

And it depends on who it is as to what stage it gets to. Generally the people I talk to either reciprocate following a similar structure, or they follow that structure before I do, leaving me to reciprocate.
Ask HN: GTD/Checklist apps for iOS or Android
Long story short: I tried a few simple (checklist) and advanced (GTD) apps and was underwhelmed. I considered writing my own app, but before doing so I should ask:

a) Do you use any gtd or checklist apps on iOS or android? If so, which? (looking for an iPhone/iPad app, but I'm curious about those for android as well)

b) Are there any features you would like to see in a GTD/checklist app?
Renting vs Buying, Foreclosures and Job Growth across 50 US Cities
As usual, Matt Blaze is amazing.
If I initiate contact I always keep my first email extremely formal and polite. You never really know how the other person interprets emails (they could be a total snob for all you know) so it's better to play it safe.

If they respond in a more "casual" way, then I write back in a tone that matches theirs.

If I am writing to apologize about something, I try to write it in a more personable manner so that I can connect with them on a personal level. This generally diffuses any tension and makes people more sympathetic (at the cost of making you look less professional.. but something that's just worth it)
InfiniteGraph Now Out Of Beta, Identifies Deep Relationships In Big Data
Perhaps we misunderstood one another. When I said "without loss of generality", I meant that for almost any conceivable objective function, free markets may not maximize that function. For a social objective like "the weighted average of the self-actualization of all people in their individual ways", a market may be non-optimal. I hesitate to construct an example for fear of getting bogged down in one particular case, but Jerf's efficient pricing of slavery comes to mind. Another might be the well-being of nonparticipants; for instance, habitat preservation for wildlife.

I argue that the only function that a free market can optimize for is the market itself; all other consequences such as happiness, fulfillment, distribution of experiences etc., are side effects which arise from coupling the market to the world via the decisions of participants, regulations, etc. Only if you assume perfect coupling of the market to the global objective is the system morally optimal.

In all cases, free trade will make all parties better off on the whole

This, however, makes it sound like you are assuming perfect coupling in the absence of any regulation, or that your objective function is the execution of the free market itself, and not, say, the well-being of the individuals and societies participating in it. I must not understand you correctly.
> Indeed, the Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin has been saying “This is the year of the Linux desktop” for the last four years!

I'm glad someone is keeping the faith
It's not a "remote possibility". It's foolish to predict the results of international quasi-legal panels and US judges and juries when it only takes one claim on one infringing patent. Even newcomer HTC has stockpiled hundreds of patents by now, some of which Apple has already been declared to be infringing.

If anyone had the patent position to keep Apple out of the market, rest assured that they would have regardless of Apple's lawsuits.

No, I don't agree with that at all. The vast majority of all patents are never litigated and it's very rare that any large-budget manufacturer is actually kept out of a market as general as mobile touch-screen phones.

Normally patents are ignored, occasionally they're pooled or cross-licensed. Usually only trolls end up going as far as actually obtaining a suspension of sales and imports, but even then their goal is payment.

This is what makes Apple's decision to start a "real" patent war with HTC (and all Android makers by extension) so exceptional. Apple has as much to lose as anyone.
Let me be very clear. Anger management problems do NOT correlate with sociopathic behavior. Sociopaths can be charming just as likely as they can be assholes. Equally, someone who is charming is just as likely to be a sociopath as a frustrated technical person with no social skills.

So thanks for your single data point of an angry person who was also a sociopath.

Your post is equivalent to writing: "We had a technical guy. Very polite. But he was black. When we asked him to do something he deleted all our work. Turns out he did this at the next five jobs. Be careful hiring black people".

Being black, or white, or martian, or having anger management issues, are not relevant. Being a sociopath is relevant.
While I liked the general message, the post felt insincere to me. Like, "I've got 30 domains and I've only done something awesome with 3 of them." or "I used to speak Spanish really well and I still study Zulu with my wife but I spoke to a native Spanish speaker today and realize I'm lucky if I can order a burrito. I've all but forgotten my years of Amharic. My Arabic, Hindi and Chinese have atrophied into catch phrases at this point. What a phony."

Seriously, does he think that others know this stuff better? Being a phony isn't Ted Williams saying, "I only hit over .400 one time, I'm a phony". Feeling like a phony is when there's something you really feel like you should know, but for some reason you don't. For example, there was a time I thought I was really proficient in C, and then someone showed me some C code and there was syntax that had me baffled. It was bitfields. Up until that point I had never seen bitfields. Must've skipped that section in K&R and went years w/o ever seeing it. And this was before Google search, so I just happened to go through K&R and find it, and read up on it, before the code review session. I was five minutes from showing up to a meeting and saying, "What's that?" and having everyone turn and say, "Who hired this guy!?" -- that's feeling like a phony.
Court Rules First Sale Doctrine Only Applies to Works Manufactured in U.S.
Virtualized = many VMs on 1 server (and oversubscribed in many cases) = less servers overall.
Face-to-face and email is very different in terms of behaviour - or at least it is for some people.

In my office swearing is fine, we all do it, and we have plenty of clients in front of whom I would be fine swearing, and they will swear too (obviously not at each other, just in general). Swearing in an email or a letter though, totally unacceptable.

Perhaps a better example of the differences is just that, if you meet with a client, even one you don't know well, you don't end with "kind regards" or "yours sincerely". The fact that you do (or at least, might well) in an email/letter doesn't really signify a difference in what you are trying to convey, purely a difference in convention.

I have no problem using humour in an email or a letter, that's fine. I guess maybe the reason smileys feel inappropriate is because they are so associated with children. Sure, adults use them, but they started among young people, and they will forever (I think, but at least still today) remain more popular among younger age groups. When chatting through IM software it feels fine to throw off adulthood, when talking to friends I might sometimes open with something I'd be far too embarassed to actually say in real life, such as "waddup bitch". Email, for me, is a high-tech version of the letter, not a high-tech version of face-to-face.
I get what you're saying, but you still removed data that you thought was wrong in order to give the results you were expecting. Who's to say that the results for Chrome in that period were not also wrong?
Turn their reputation around. I wouldn't buy a dell because their reputation for quality isn't that great. Their laptops could use some work in the usability design department, and not in the prettier design department. Figure out something like magsafe. Seriously I realize they have a patent on magnetic connectors, but something like the Xbox pull protectors or something please.
E.g., NTP vs RIMM.
Ask HN: Are there any good SMS payment providers?
A lot of potential customers have complained that they do not have access to a credit card, but they do have access to a mobile phone. What is the best way to receive payments from these people? I know there are companies providing SMS payment services, but which are trustworthy?
At my job, chat (via IM client) is urgent and email is (a little) less urgent. This makes a lot of sense to me. If I want to not bother someone, I'll send them an email. If I want to bother someone, I'll IM them.

Is there something special about Campfire that makes it non-urgent?
Nothing to read, just my blog post
Yep! And the "architect" is forced to strive for credit, because nobody is really in the position to evaluate their work results. At the best, it results in self-promotion like found in this article. At worst, it involves claiming credit for everything that goes well, while blaming "those developers" (and their failure to obey the architect's dictums) for any and all problems.
"All jobs run recently have lower error rates because our service continues to become more reliable as we fix bugs our users discover. "

This says to me that none of the results can really be trusted because the error count is not just errors in the browser - it's apparently significantly affected by errors in their system, and we don't really know by how much.

Plus it seems kind of anachronistic to come to some conclusion about how the browsers compare having removed FF4 and FF5. It's only of historical interest how FF3.6 compares since anyone that downloads it now is going to get FF6 now anyway.