skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but if this $85b prevents the markets from crashing

it won't. this loan doesn't unwind the terrible decisions aig (and others) made, nor the hedges they tied to those decisions, and the hedges they tied to those hedges, and the hedges they tied to those hedges.

the derivatives unwind cannot be stopped short of a repudiation of all global currencies. the amount of leveraged capital in hedge deals is still north of $100 trillion. no one has the money to pay that out. it would be easier just to erase the USD dollar than to circulate $100 trillion in new fiat wealth...the effect would be the same anyway...worthless dollar
agreed. and WAMU will not be saved. they are just another retail bank.
Yeah, it's called Quickbooks and any credit card that supports it (which is almost all of them).
Sure they are. For instance, your small business could just issue everyone an Amex card, and collect the statements. All you need is trust.
Wokay. That makes sense. Of all the things we had to do to start our company, incorporation was the least dramatic. Liability insurance is the real bitch.
because they are part of an integrated economy. where will google's advertizers find their ad budgets in a stagnant economy? boeing is no different. would these firms be as adversely impacted as wamu? no. but everyone suffers.
I'm actually working on something like this in my free time for Ubuntu flavors. I've been trying to figure out how to get some funding for it so I can focus on it, but I'm not sure if it's a service I should try to charge users for (automated customization of Ubuntu linux flavor live/installcds).

I figure that once I have a proof-of-concept I can show it to people who might be willing to invest in it so I could afford to host it somewhere and so on.

Right now I'm focusing on package installation / removal, but I plan on adding the ability to put some stuff in your home folder for first user creation, and upload specific configuration files.
the 3.3 - 1.9 = 1.4% difference is precisely reflected in the oil bubble. now that oil is backing down, this number will also fall
In 1991, when this was written, C was dominant and yes, Lisp was comparatively slow. Today Lisp is generally faster than Java, PHP, Python, Ruby and other popular languages.
I realize you're the CEO, and that the marketing language you're using is probably effective for your normal customers, but:

"Encrypted using AES" doesn't mean anything. Plenty of full-disk encryption products failed because of key management problems. More importantly, your literature doesn't document how you actually use AES --- for instance, is it ECB mode, which allows for random access but also for plaintext blocks to be copied and shuffled? How do you authenticate the data? If someone breaks into your servers and flips the right bit in my ciphertext, can she make binary integers decrypt to wildly large numbers that can break my software?

More importantly, how does your backup agent software work? What messages does it send back and forth to your servers? Do I need to worry that a program you've installed on my machine with access to all my files has bugs where an attacker who can corrupt the DNS can run code on my machine, or access my files? How do you update your software?

Nobody gets any of this stuff right anywhere in any setting, and backup is the most sensitive IT task you can perform.
Why Google sees cellphones as the 'ultimate ad vehicle'
isn't the distributor of open source software only required to give a copy to the source to those people which they sold the software too. since Bank of America is the only purchaser if they are the only ones who get the source and if they don't want to share that is their business...
The account identification routines were a big part of what sunk egold as well. If you can't positively identify the owner of an account, then you are on the hook for illegal scams and money laundering activities. It's ugly.
I wonder how useful this thing will be on AT&T. I'm not a big cell phone enthusiast, but I assume since T-Mobile is GSM, it'll actually work and be featureful, know?
Take a look at Don's reimplementation of some classic Unix tools as Haskell oneliners: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/data/Basics.html.

The mere fact that interact lets you make a pure function into a Unix-style string -> string utility should show that you are exaggerating a bit.

interact (unwords . something . words)

handles basically your whole simple example.

Another simple example: capitalize every word of the input:

main = interact (unwords . (map (\(x:xs) -> Char.toUpper x : xs )) . words)
This is all too depressing for Yahoo. How many more can they lose before Carl Icahn kicks in Yang's door and throws him out?
Yet Another Critique My Startup: Face Detection & Photo Organization
Hey guys,

We finally, sort of, got our app out the door and launched in the wee hours of the morning.

>>> http://ilovephotos.com

Sadly we sort of went the "Hollywood" launch and "released" at Demofall 2008 last week... when our stuff wasn't finished. I can't count on the hands in one elementary school the number of red bulls and cigarettes (non smoker) that I have consumed in the past week or two. Too many.

Anyway, we've put it out in the wild and I would love to hear any sort of feedback you guys might have on the website and our desktop app. SORRY! but our app is OS X only at the moment. We do have plans to go onto other platforms, but for now the rest of the world is stuck using our online lightweight version of the app, which is a flash app on our website.

It's an app created to make organizing and sharing photos easier. We use facial detection (not recognition, we just find faces, or try too =]) to make tagging your photos faster and more fun. Everything is a "visual tag" rather than just a bit of text. A tag doesn't even need to have text associated with it.

We hope to leverage the data on who is in each photo do do a lot of various things. Slideshows become smarter, the most obvious improvement being with a ken burns type of effect the faces in the photo are the focus rather than getting cut off. We can also observe relationships created by photos, etc... some pretty cool stuff. Sharing becomes easier too because you can simply, in a native drag-drop manner, select some photos and drag in some people to share those with, click a button, and the rest is history.

All you mac users out there, give it a shot! I hope you like it! It's certainly beta, it certainly has some problems, but we think it's in a pretty good place right now :)

Direct download for the lazy is -> http://static.ilovephotos.com/download/iLovePhotos.dmg

P.S. It's all Django on the back end :) Nginx servin' it up.
Reserve Primary Money Fund "breaks the buck"
EFi-X Allows Mac OS X to Boot on a PC
Opening up the mainframe
I agree. It's bad enough that there are articles about the economy, and adding politics to the mix isn't helping the SNR.
http://reddit.com/r/politics

I hate the OT police too, but this clearly does not belong here.
I think people are talking past each other at this point.

When you say "socialism" what exactly do you mean? I think it is one of those words that has lost its meaning since there are so many different definitions of it and we're not always on the same page.
I think there's a pretty good argument that spending money on products to impress women is perhaps the most effective thing to do.
distinct?
Socialbrowse is Dressing Up
Why don't we just stop breathing already? It'd solve a whole lot of problems.
$85billion!!!

where do the Reserve get the money? do they print it? gold reserves? next year's taxes? asia?
Its number 2 according to cnn
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/smallbusiness/0809/galle...
Seems very cool, but the 92% of us that aren't Mac users can't really try it yet. (ok, the Mac % is probably higher on HN, but still ...)
I disagree. Even the worst stuff on Edge is more intellectual than 95% of the stuff that gets posted here.
1933.
Yes, they do. That's why Buxfer could use Amazon FPS for enabling person-to-person transfers, but we couldn't use PayPal, or do it ourselves.
More directly related to Boeing, according to the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/business/17aig.html), AIG has an aircraft leasing division that was planning to buy 73 aircraft this year.
Befreiphone
Check out befreiphone and win a free iphone.
The problem is that AIG underwrote a lot of contracts that were then used to cover leveraged positions, etc. It's turtles all the way down and AIG is somewhere down at the bottom of the pile. In addition to the load of mortgage debt it dabbled in it played a role writing insurance for a massive shitpile of financial instruments; if the underwriter declares bankruptcy then a lot of things need to be unwound in a hurry. This is a huge problem, and would have a far greater impact than letting some retail bank fail. While other companies could fill the void, they could not do so quickly. The speed that is required here is the problem (e.g. when LTCM went tits-up it had the good grace to do so on a Friday so that deals could be struck over the weekend.)

As far as Sweden's banks go, I think you should check again. They have losses in US mortgages (it wasn't just US and Chinese banks buying those securities) to cover and are also feeling the heat on over-exposure to Baltic loans that are starting to go sour. The Swedish bank takeover was somewhat akin to the US S&L takeover in the 80s, except in the US case it did not eat 4-5% of GDP...
You're correct, I was glib. But I think those things will happen anyway - they'll just take longer than a week.
Even if that were true, you'd be better of buying a cheap laptop and spending the money on clothing or pickup artist seminars. Either would be more effective.
Slick website. Video is very well done, one of the best "intro videos" i've seen in awhile. Was that made with Screenflow? Curious. Product seems pretty cool, I wonder can I tag other images, not just faces?
So is this a reasonable system for insuring against the collapse of insurers (and the world's financial infrastructure)? Government rescues?

How about limiting the size of companies that are not allowed to die for damage control? Or limiting their ability to become companies not allowed to die?
Yes, you are only obligated to provide the source to those you have provided the binaries to.

This is a non-story.
The best business book I've ever read is The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler. I was turned onto Semler after Jason Fried recommended the book on one of 37signals live sessions.

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing-Work-Works/...
Has anyone else noticed the similarities in all these snaptalent interviews? I understand that snaptalent is trying to provide a quick, entertaining read, but from what I can see, every startup they have profiled is unique because of their entrepreneurial environment, their heated battles on Nintendo Wii, Guitar Hero, or ping-pong, and their love of a nice cold one at the village pub after work. It would be nice to see some more probing questions which would help differentiate each startup they interview.
I never claimed Edge wasn't intellectual. Just that my hacker side is not at all interested in reading about politics here, regardless of the source.
Sexual selection is generally about physical traits, i.e. being taller, having blue eyes. (As Wikipedia says: the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition.)

I'm not sure if purchased items would count, though they might have similar effects. And maybe sexual selection accounts for the gene that people who buy stuff because a U2 song was in the commercial possess that the rest of us don't. Nonetheless, it's still sort of a hack, an easy but very inefficient way to accomplish the goal.

Regardless, even if you wanted to go the hacky route, you'd be better off buying a normal laptop for $1,500 less and spending the money on other things. Get a better haircut (only $30-$40), buy some nicer clothes, get a gym membership (and actually go there), buy How To Win Friends and Influence People, take a photography class, etc. Basically better yourself. You'd be amazed how far even $1,000 can go.

Or spend $500 of it on a nice watch, go to Vegas, find a couple cute girls sitting at a blackjack table, and go start plunking down $200 bets. You've got at least 5 of them if you run bad, and I bet they start talking to you by the third. I'm still shocked at how well that works.
where does the treasury and fed get the money? THEY PRINT IT

a 1982 law lets treasury notes be redeemed with CREATED accounts, as in one of the partner banks of the reserve simply creates a new account by punching in the digits, and they assign it to you

once again, this is law since 1982

this is why US treasuries have 100% certainty inside the USA while the US dollar still exists
I was just checking out the site, but I downloaded it. So... it works too.
they just didn't have anything else to put on top of that column
Apologies. gnikides (-at-) yahoo DOT com
Wouldn't that increase inflation.
And for all we know, both would be twice as popular with good design.
Honestly, I haven't heard the rationality factor applied in the case of healthcare so I won't try to answer you question but I don't want to duck it entirely because it's an interesting point. I know that children and the mentally disabled are handled specially in other cases for that reason. However, could you not apply the same argument to food (hungry people), shelter (exposed people), etc?

I think those who want socialized medicine have to justify aggression (initiating force through taxation, regulation, etc.) They also have to convince us that the masses (in the case of a democracy) can make better decisions than the individuals directly involved in each particular situation. They have to explain how people would be motivated to innovate in a system lacking competition and guaranteeing equality of outcome (this, is what I'm assuming is meant by "socialism", by the way).

I think these questions are of interest to us and the "hackers" of other disciplines... we want an environment where people are free to try new things. Mitigating the risk of failure should can also be managed by the market through insurance, which, getting back to the original point is privilege not a right because one has no "right" to the goods/services of another.

So, sure, it would be a great idea for everyone to contribute to a large pool for health insurance... but on a voluntary basis. Those who decline to or cannot pay will have to rely on charity if something happens. I can feel bad for them but I would not feel justified in putting my gun (or a tax collector's) to someone else's head to make them pay for it.

This is all assuming that both insurance and healthcare costs will both decrease dramatically when America rids itself of the heavy regulation of and handouts to the respective industries by going to either a completely socialist or capitalist system.
This is not only offensive, but it's in violation of the HN guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
All three of those are about the network effect. People will choose the site that most people are at.

Facebook has made serious inroads largely due to better design (in terms of aesthetics and usability) than myspace.

Plentyoffish, craigslist, and Wikipedia are ugly ass sites that seem pretty much unassailable though.
Does anybody think that as successful startups reach the stages where they document and create the repeatable processes that make them attractive purchases, that they'll fall victim to the pitfalls Seth describes as competencies (resistance to change/improvement)?
Also, AT&T is one of many carriers around the world that they partner with. I don't hear anything about openness on any other.
I'm sorry, but what exactly do you mean by not entrepreneurs in the sense of the word as used on hn?
Nice product. Now, stop smoking and go off the Red Bull binge so you can get your thinking cap on for the next step. Good work. I think it'll gain some traction.
Citation, please? I think you're thinking of his opposition to the national bank, on constitutional grounds. I don't think Jefferson or his contemporaries ever dreamed of the existence of something like Lehman or AIG. Banking in his day was a simple concept: borrow money at a low interest rate, lend it at a high one. If we still stuck to that model, we wouldn't be in this mess.
show that you are exaggerating a bit

No, it merely shows that I don't know Haskell--I didn't claim Haskell couldn't be as concise as Perl for this kind of thing...just that I don't know how to make it as concise. The link helps very much, thanks. (And, just so no one is misled, the same example could be done as a Perl one-liner, as well, using the magic variables I mentioned in the prior comment. I just figured I'd make it readable, since there are some anti-Perl bigots around just waiting for the chance to say, "I knew it! It's nothing but line noise!".)

Also worth noting...I love that I can write code like the example you've shown in Perl (with some minor syntactic differences, but it does have first class functions and expressions as arguments), and the fact that Haskell seems to be entirely made up of code like that made it seem very appealing on first glance. That slurping a file can be written in Haskell in one line and some lib imports makes me...umm, I'm embarrassed to say...a little giddy. And it makes me wonder why I didn't start using Haskell sooner.
If you ignore the the actual reasons why the bailouts happened, how can you argue against them? Sure, the bailouts preserved weak companies, which is a bad thing, but you can't just ignore the benefits of the bailouts and say they shouldn't have happened. That in no way resembles an argument, though "meaningless platitudes" may have been an incorrect characterization.

"You don't have to address the other sides reasoning because it's hard to find every flaw in an opponent's argument."

But the other side has put out a public statement explaining their actions. This isn't about predicting how someone is going to make their case. The case has already been made. At the very least, you have to address their justifications.
It's not really about politics, it's about the cognitive basis behind people being gemeinschaft or gesellschaft. The title is really just a red herring to get people to read the essay.
Make the client in something cross platform - you might want to try Scala, which compiles to Java byte code but suck less - an OSX client is a big turnoff, at least for me.
> This really shouldn't be an error

And it isn't:

? (setf *READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* 'double-float)
DOUBLE-FLOAT
? (+ 1203981239.123d0 129381723987498237492138461293238947239847293848923)
1.2938172398749823E+50
?
"It's a limited market." Fantastic! That's the perfect reason to do something like this. Sadly I don't think anyone will be doing it in one night, I believe that this is a realistic request. The whole point of Linux (and Unix before it) is to have a group of tools, a toolbox if you will, that can be easily refactored, reorganized and redeployed to fit the problems you face. What he is asking for is a toolbox that comes with the tools he wants from the start, and he can't find a Sears that carries it. The only issue I have with the whole thing is I wish he would do it, not ask others to solve his problems for him.
Not building a facebook app / widget / twitter clone that you expect to flip to Microsoft/Google/Yahoo for $$$.

(Which admittedly is a bit harsh on the HN crowd)
that's the point of Ubuntu's tasksel. It still needs a lot of work, but it is very powerful.
Jesus, did you read it? It has little to do with politics...it's a discussion of some concepts in sociology. The article is about the differences between cultures and types of social systems that people choose. It doesn't bash anyone...the message is that understanding other people's values can make life better for all of us. God forbid, huh?

I should have changed the title to something less inflamatory, but I just used the original post tile because I didn't feel like coming up with something else. I figured that the people on hacker news would be sharp enough to read and analyze the content of the article, not just the title that I chose.
Nope. I haven't been doing it long enough to have gotten any good stories out of it yet. I did write this a while back, which was a big hit in its day:

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-geek-business-myt...
they get it FROM YOU.
Talibans abusing VoIP Skype client
Why? It's barely functional?
What about the example of Swedish banks that failed and were not bailed out? Surely that serves as a counter-example.
Fashion Weeks
Fashion Weeks are platform for the designers to showcase his designs and buyers to decide what
it is that which is salable enough for them to buy. Fine so far, but how are these fashion extravaganzas which are often all about celebrities and gala events, relevant to you and me.
I don't know the answers to our questions. What I do know is that developing effective treatments that are initially affordable only to a few is better for our species than accepting mediocrity across the board.

I would rather die form cancer at home with my family than in a hospital with people who are only pretending to treat me.
This moronic idea was floated in the 1960s, and William F Buckley even wrote an essay flattening their stupid arguments then.

That some 40 years later the same discredited pseudo-scientific psychobabble is floating around is an excellent example of people believing what they want to believe.
There's a dirty little secret that's extremely unfashionable to say but is completely and utterly true: Vista isn't that necessary.

As an Operating System, XP firmly falls into the 'good enough' category. At 7 years old, it's actually matured into a reasonably solid product that works. If you run Windows 2000 on modern hardware (providing you can get driver support) you'll find it runs like shit off a shovel. I'm not talking Office 2003 versus 2007 fast, I'm talking Windows 3.1 versus Windows Vista fast.

Therein lies the problem.

Microsoft have the unenviable task of pandering to a massively diverse range of users in order to retain market share, anything that they do to XP will piss off at least a minority. Anything that they fail to do to XP will piss off at least a minority.

Pretty much the only option for Microsoft in terms of releasing a new Operating System is to add features, but doing so without slowing the OS down is a massive challenge.

I don't believe that Vista will ever be considered a success by anyone outside of Redmond, but I do think that Windows 7 will do better simply because of the timescales involved and the fact that it's not Vista.
A slickdeals-inspired "oops"
I'm asking in case it ends up not being the best choice in the future :). Also, giving 40% of one's earnings to the government is _always_ unacceptable. So hopefully that never happens here.
Paper currencies are backed by legal tender laws, so the source of their value is apparent. Stocks, not so much.
All you; I've been a post whore this week. I don't want people to get sick of me :P.
In the short term the lack of credit availability could dent manufacturers, but those businesses that make real things that people want should be ok if they can survive until credit is again available to their customers.
Inflation is yet another form of taxation. A subtle, criminal one, that undermines your savings while you sleep.
I love the idea, but it didn't recognize that many of the faces in my photos.
You gotta love RetailMeNot. The code that was disabled was: TMO1.

http://www.retailmenot.com/view/nalgene-outdoor.com
Intel launches first 6-core x86 microprocessor