skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the history of commodity-backed money was one of major problems with restricted money supply, of industrial use of said commodities becoming prohibitive and itself becoming an economic limit, of significant periodic deflation and currency fluctuation based on mining returns.

Fiat money isn't ideal, but neither was the gold standard.
what you say is probably true, but setting the tone of a company starts at the top. If a certain culture has filtered its way through the company then of course that will not change overnight with a new boss, but that's where it would start.
As seabee said, "'What do you have to hide' is the most naive and/or disingenuous rebuttal ever seen in a privacy discussion."

But to respond to your first point, I consider reasonable privacy to mean, very simply, that I understand the consequences of whatever action I take (because they are made up front and clear) and that I have choices in controlling the flow of my personal information (because options are available).

Whether I choose to be in the "small paranoid minority" is my own decision and I should have the freedom to make it.
That's how Microsoft won the browser wars few years ago.
I heard recently that market naysayers had 'predicted twenty of the last two recessions'. I think that about sums up this activity whether or not the predictions are made by interested (read: untrustworthy) men.
Apple Announces Event on October 4th: Let's Talk iPhone
People entering the workforce forty years ago could reasonably guess when they'd retire and what they'd be doing at the time. I know very few people who think they'll have the same job five years from now. It seems very likely that the argument that the economy is getting more stable is false.

Here's why: underlying predictability probably increases volatily. People love to lever up when they're certain; "Private Equity" as an asset class refers to both VC deals and leveraged buyouts because in both cases, they fine-tune their leverage to get the same (high) volatility. Increased certainty makes bankers more willing to lend, and speculative buyers are always willing to borrow.

In my experience, speculative borrowers and the marginal banker overestimate decreases in volatility. Thus, a more superficially predictable economy will lever up fast enough to more than counteract that (sort of like the theory that airbags increase traffic fatalities because drivers overestimate how safe they are and thus take extra risks).

For economic volatility to actually dampen, you'd need economists to come up with better predictions that sound really stupid, so bankers and speculators would disregard them.
I don't understand from all these uefi-gate articles what exactly prevents "secure UEFI" from being just a boot option.
At such a huge company, can one man really turn things around? Sure. When it's the right man. They just need a leader like Steve Jobs.
You'd be surprised how difficult "giving it away" can be, even for Google. Google succeeded big on giving away email, search, and androids. Do I need to list up all the acquisitions and products that even with a mortal lock on navigation on the Internet Google couldn't convince people was worth at least $0?
Apple Announces Oct. 4 iPhone Event
Droid 2 Wallpapers
While I do understand the security argument, surely the manufacturers of hardware wouldn't do this only to be allowed to use the Windows 8 logo? I have never heard of a person who cares if there's a Windows-logo on their laptop or not. In fact, the people I asked earlier today (both nerds and "normals") consider it an ugly annoyance.
Not a Yes Man. Twitter feed has 1772 Tweets and contains technical-analysis-based-predictions (like Sept 16 prediction of gold crashing: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=284602891566784).
I think the major difference between this attempt at species destruction and other previous attempts is the massive amount of human disease and death already perpetrated by the clumsy little biters.

It comes down to determining whats better: not messing with the environment and continuing to allow hundreds of thousands of human deaths a year. or trying to kill off mosquitoes.

Wikipedia claims that malaria alone causes 2.23% of yearly human death world wide.

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

Thats a pretty ridiculous number if you think about it.
A great passage from Matthew's post:

Microsoft claim that the customer is in control of their PC. That's true, if by "customer" they mean "hardware manufacturer". The end user is not guaranteed the ability to install extra signing keys in order to securely boot the operating system of their choice. The end user is not guaranteed the ability to disable this functionality. The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor, or replace their network card and still be able to netboot, or install a newer SATA controller and have it recognise their hard drive in the firmware. The end user is no longer in control of their PC.
Okay, Now I'm ready to admit that it's October 4th..
Wonder what they're going to announce in the iPhone 5. Better battery life and perhaps a better GPS is all I really want over my iPhone 4.
The site looks good but I'd like to read that on my kindle. Is it available in ebook format, or similar ?
I remembered another book from my survey of western civ:

Tuchman A Distant Mirror
SlideShare ditches Flash for HTML5
That is exactly what the MS supplied Windows 8 developer machine from Samsung does. http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-bl...

The Red Hat blogger mentions an unnamed OEM that he claims won't have this option. However, instead of naming that OEM so that we can shame and/or avoid them, he instead wants to shift the blame on to Microsoft. (And then in the same breath, will call Windows insecure coz of the rootkits that load before the anti-malware can).
Best New TV Shows of 2011
A great list of the new prime time TV shows for Fall 2011. Vote on your early favs or most anticipated.
Wonder if the 1 notification on the phone is a hint that they are only announcing one phone not two as rumoured..
Safe CSS defaults
Apple Officially Announce iPhone 5 Event on OCt 4
How to write better unit tests
um, no, that's not proof
I'm a little confused here. Wouldn't client DNS resolution performance really depend on your local DNS cache (e.g. the DNS server at your ISP)? Nobody going to your site will hit Route 53 or MediaTemple's DNS servers directly. These only serve as the source of truth for the thousands of DNS caches out there that clients actually hit.
Wouldn't that completely undermine the benefits of UEFI? An attacker could just enable BIOS and there'd be no benefit from UEFI at all.
Yippie :D
After I submitted I realized I should have kept the title the same. We were discussing it in the office in terms of an appstore, so the title made sense at that moment.
Facebook "PLEASE DO ME A FAVOR" request is rubbish, a good explanation why...
The difference is that we generally only get rich if we help people. Financial types often get rich (much more reliably than us) by screwing over people, luring them into indebtedness, and profiting from (and, I would argue, causing) the losses of others.
Good PR in the sense of brand awareness, but I can't imagine this is garnering good will for Bethesda.

It's hard to say whether good will really matters, though, as capricious as gamers can be.
While people love ES games, they don't particularly have love for Bethesda (hell, they're the people who made the horse armor which is the standard example of stupid DLC).

On the other hand, people love Notch and Mojang...

I could see this pushing people on the fence away from buying skyrim (as it is for me; I'd probably not have time to play anyhow, but it's also supporting a bit too much in the way of crazy here).
In a good interview, the interviewer cleans it up by dropping the awkward bits: take a one hour conversation, remove the "Ahhs," "Ummms," the "Unfortunately I can't discuss that"s, and the stuff parroted from press releases. You're left with a whole lot less material, but it's usually pretty good.

You can do the opposite, too.
Paul Thurrot is reporting that comment is misleading:http://www.winsupersite.com/article/paul-thurrotts-wininfo/m...

The summary is that according to 2 individuals who claim to be employees who were actually at the meeting, the meeting ran as usual, and the people who left early did so to traffic. I wonder when the tech reporting industry will tire of reporting Microsoft's death?
Seems that most (all?) of the start-up developer job openings posted on HN are based in SV. I wonder if there is another site like HN for NYC start-ups to advertise positions.
Unfortunately it isn't just a thought experiment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
Until yesterday, many of us were paying €10 each month for the privelege of being the customer instead of being the product or service. With this move they make it clear that they want us to be the product or service anyway.
I think there was a time when MSFT employees did not consider “traffic” more important than hearing the CEO lay out the company’s future.
Improved camera would be nice.
So many puns. "Let's talk iPhone" -> "Let's talk, iPhone" (new speech functionality). It's a phone, you talk to people, you also talk to it, etc.

I would expect this to be a very speech technology-heavy event.
It's probably an indication of the announcement. I wouldn't read much more into it.
SlideShare faster, lighter!
Borders'customers need to opt-out after Barnes & Noble gets database
Who Cares about O(n) Complexity Except Interviews?
HN comments more than a day old cannot be downvoted
Looks like this is a recent change. I'd be curious what bad behavior it prevents. I first saw it in the context of the massive spotify thread, and it seemed very surprising that some comments could be up/downvoted, and others only upvoted.

Screenshot: http://kitenet.net/~joey/tmp/only_upvote_some.png
I like "human interest" pieces and I like Steve Jobs. Ergo ...I liked this article. I don't have a problem with someone who is so famous and big that he doesn't have to pander and sell himself or his company, and that's the realm Jobs is in. He's not political -- end of story, next question. Apple's products are no less green than the competitors' -- what part of that answer didn't you understand, reporter? How does it feel to beat cancer and be back in control? Are you kidding me, impudent m'fer? You didn't get the memo about me and my personal life. Next question. One of the comments (at the posting site) said the reporter imposed his own psychobabble slant on the article. I don't have a problem with that. It was a good portrait photograph of Jobs done by a professional.
There are several comments here along these lines. I don't disagree that the latter is a better framing of the question, but...

No one wants to hear that they're ignorant. No one wants to listen to a condescending speech about how they don't understand your area of expertise. Take a moment, be patient, educate them a little, try a couple concrete examples, and keep calm. If you can't arrive at an understanding after a few tries you can always walk away. I will assure you, however, that you will secure a lot more clients and referrals if you treat everyone with respect and try to help them find the right solution for themselves.
This is great news. After Scribd's terrible move to lock my content away behind their paywall, I can now start uploading my slides to Slideshare and get the same HTML5 loveliness.

Bye, bye, Scribd!
This submission should be flagged. Its source are random blog comments on a random blog.

But I'll take this opportunity for an Ballmer rant. I don't like Ballmer, but I can't tell if his leadership style is hands-off or impotent?

The company is raking in money. Certain product groups are doing fantastic, but others are floundering (and sometimes climb back from the grave, eg. Windows Phone). The various groups inside Microsoft are notorious for lack of communication and cooperation.

Maybe I have my answer. I'd certainly like to see a new leadership that killed the "embrace and extend" mentality and forced an emphasis on adopting open standards (which currently attempts to come up from the bottom (engineers)). If the shenanigans stopped, things could really take off. They have solid products, it just seems like the mentality and corporate/marketing actions of Microsoft sabotage it all.

Note: I'm not a MS basher by any means, take a look at my comment history.
IMO everything is top down. If Sr. Execs and Managers are the problem then it is the CEOs job to notice the problem and ensure it gets fixed.
Exclusive Limousines in Connecticut
>I think a judge could rule that Microsoft still has too much market power to let a free market optimize things for the good of the consumer

How is the good of the consumer going to be served by allowing rootkits to load even before the antivirus can?

>(totally unrelated questions that I am curious about: how will this signing stuff work when running Windows in a VM? Would MS dare charge companies that want to include a MS key in their hardware? What if that company is called Apple?)

You have got it backwards. Windows 8 will boot on any machine or VM regardless of secure boot, UEFI, BIOS or what have you.
Being part of the Windows logo program means getting access to some Microsoft marketing budget. The incentive is the financial benefit, not the sticker itself.
Firefox 7 is Here
I do use browser sync, but to be honest, most of what I have there is just some work-related, frequently used items and bookmarlets, i.e. mostly stuff in the bookmark bar.

Pinboard/delicious has some vital advantages for me – first, it works across browsers, so whether I'm using Chrome or Firefox, I can still access them. Never mind bookmarking something from an iOS or Android device…

Also, the UI for doing that is a lot better, tagging, search etc. Some stuff you bookmark is a simple "read later" or "read on another device" list, but I do it for lot of articles and sites that might come in convenient some vague time in the future.
Copy a GitHub compare URL to your clipboard when you push
Oh, thanks. I thought maybe there was some reason why this was posted today (esp given that I just read your meta-joke blog post) other than the inherent interestingness of meta-humour. Fair enough; although the comment did look like it, it really wasn't a whingy "this isn't news for nerds" sort of comment.
Thanks for the information.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Warren+Buffet+letters
Firefox 7 Officially now Available for Download
Woah! It was only a few hours back i came to know about speakerdeck claiming to be the non flash (& non sucky) alternative to slideshare. And now this. Giant move!

Now if only slideshare cleans up its UI/X a bit, I might never leave.
Read carefully. I'm not saying Dropbox should have a monopoly, but that the competition should be more evenly matched.
I have a good friend that worked at Microsoft in the R&D labs for years (he was one of the leads on Synth and all that photo-rendering fanciness that eventually found its way into mobile Win and had a extremely popular iOS app for a while) and he gave us the low-down of how Microsoft works from the inside recently.

* Balmer doesn't lead, he believes in "survival of the fittest" in the more jungle sense of the word. While he doesn't actively pit the product teams against one another, he encourages them to battle with each other and only come to him with the result, never with the conflict or questions about who should do what.

* As a result of this, the teams HATE each other. The Dev Tools team hates the Windows team. The Windows team hates the Xbox team. The Xbox team hates the MSN team and so on. There is a particularly odd level of animosity between the devtools and windows teams.

The Xbox doesn't even run a special version of Windows, it is a custom OS built with some of the core kernel, but very little else. This created a lot of conflict between those two teams as well.

Every team feels like they are 6 months away from being cut and as a result try and block any effort any other team makes at impeding on their turf.

* The company has shed most of the strong/independent/curious lead devs by now a many found it impossibly pointless to work there.

Discovered a new way to make NTFS faster? Too bad, it's not going in the mainline. Found a new way to make DX render faster on modern hardware in low-powered systems? Great, now go sit at your desk and shut up.

There was no nurturing of new ideas because of this "protect your turf at all costs!" culture that Balmer created.

My buddy talked for about an hour... it was fascinatingly horrible to listen to, but it seems while BillG was the benevolent dictator type much like Jobs was, Balmer is the polar opposite in every wrong way.

More like a absentee father that loves watch you fight with your brothers, but otherwise doesn't really care what you do.
This is inaccurate, or misleading at best. "It has nothing on the recessions of the past" is only true if you're looking at the pre-WW2 period. Compared to recessions since then, this is the most severe and long-lasting. There has been no recession since the Great Depression where unemployment has stayed as high as it is for so long.

Economists spoke of a Great Moderation that had occurred thanks to their ideological theorizing, but that is just an unfunny punchline to a joke now.
Facebook's iPad app developer quits, joins Google
Yeah, it's not that recent. I think it's to prevent people who, seeing a person make one bad comment, go and vote down a bunch of that person's old posts, just out of spite.
That's pretty cool. Is that related to this? http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0408040
Curious - why would you want to downvote a comment? Was it offensive or wildly off topic?

Most likely the comment had reached it's floor (-10 is it)?

<edit>I took a look. I see that the comment was in fact informative - even if the message is very worrying for anyone who might want to use spotify</edit>
I am moderately amused that my post of a counter article, summary, and musings got down-voted. With that in mind, in my experiences, a good chuck of the information at company meetings is information the employees already know through their communications with each other. It's more than feasible that an employee would stay for the 1% that is new and/or truly interests him, and then leave for the stuff he or she was already aware of.
> how much can one person really control a company?

If he isn't in control, then who is?
It sure is.

We are currently using Postmark to send notifications to our users. Postmark does not allow bulk emails like newsletters, and our user count is way beyond the ceiling of Newsberry (Postmark's bulk sending service). Yes, we could negotiate a deal with them, but it's just not as transparent as we want it to be. Frankly, having to worry about the number of subscribers is kinda painful for a fast-growing startup---we cannot predict how many more users we will get next month!

Not to mention the price of Postmark is 15x that of Amazon SES. It's not a big deal for a small amount of emails, but it accumulates pretty quickly when we need to send frequent updates, weekly newsletters, and occasionally campaign messages. We have our own analytic systems and template designers, which make Postmark's value added services useless for us (keep in mind that's not to say it's useless to you).

What we need is a reliable and affordable mailing service with a flat, per use fee. Amazon SES fits the bill nicely. We rolled out a new delivery system using SES and just finished sending a testing batch of newsletters. Simple put, SES is amazing: bounce rate is well below 0.2%, almost no complaints, and zero rejects for a 100k batch! We will test a few more times later, and if everything goes well like this, we will completely switch over to SES.
The dangers of performance-related pay
FWIW, one of the reasons I like having a non Google service to hold some important files is in case I hit the Google black swan and get locked out of my gmail account. (I also backup my email regularly.) While integration would probably be convenient, I need to be able to keep working if I do get locked out.
A picture of a smiley face in a folder does not relate to photography. But that's only one of the ways this is ill thought out.
I decided I needed to hunt bubbles. I knew housing was in a bubble but I didn't make any money off of it. When I realized what I could have made, I realized I needed to keep my eyes open for the next one.

There is a large bubble right now, in treasuries. The yields are low due to risk off, panic, deflation, and low because the Fed is unnaturally intervening. And low because they are at the tail end of a 30 year continuous bull market Shorting treasuries is not risk free, it may take some time for them to rise - but I believe with near certainty that they will, from here. Yields can double from here and still be at roughly 30 year lows.

Short treasuries, with patience. It might take 3 or 4 years, but I believe nice gains are in store with very little risk. There are many options for doing this, all of them appear to be sub-optimal, but I found a few that should work with few negatives.

The other upside is that shorting treasuries essentially and fundamentally hedges you against higher interest rates, which is a natural hedge, for anyone. With rates at historic lows, now seems a good time to lock it in.
Icons have a big impact for people who search through appstore listings. I'm curious of some of the best icons that other hacker news readers have seen?
It wasn't good for users when Microsoft put Netscape out of business, and It wont be good for users if Google puts Dropbox out of business.
What are bennies?
Better Ideas Through Failure
Apple Issues Invitations for October 4th iPhone Media Event
"...how much can one person really control a company?"

Swap "control" with "lead", and you've got a valid question. Leadership is job #1 for a CEO. You must have the confidence of your employees if you want to lead. I can't understand how anyone could have confidence in Ballmer at this point. He's called it so incredibly wrong in so many cases.

I'm not saying that Microsoft should adjust their business strategy to match that of their competitors, but Ballmer just so completely misunderstands his competitor's successes that I can't see how he can be expected to formulate a counter-strategy. Not only was he wrong, but he was utterly confident in his assessment. How does a guy like that lead anyone who has a clue?
google docs already does this with cloud connect
Air coming out of social media IPOs
SlideShare 30% faster and flash free! Do they get carbon credits for this?
Huh? What previous attempts at species destruction are you referring to?
Can you elaborate a bit more? What is wrong or problematic with the article?
It is not at all obvious how compressive sensing works! Even if you have a background in signal processing or linear algebra. Most people approach linear algebra to solve over-determined systems of equations, not under-determined systems. But it turns out you can validly pose the problem if you have some a priori knowledge of the structure of your signal.

Actually, the camera uses a single pixel, not a single bit. The measurements from pixel are from a 16-bit ADC so we get pretty good grayscale information. There are some single bit compressive sensing implementations, often used for radar where the SNR is low.

There's even a startup that is building commercial implementations of single pixel cameras. We work with the Rice researchers you linked to. http://www.inviewcorp.com/
Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.