skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are definitely a lot of perverse incentives that lead up to this, but they seem to be largely the fault of private enterprise.

If an executive's compensation is largely based on options, then every share price at the time they come due that is below the strike price is the same to him. So if he's given the option to purchase shares for $50 each in a year, then he makes the same if his company is trading at $49 as he would if it were trading at $2.

Add in a golden parachute and he's in a situation where his incentive is to gamble. If things go well (for instance, if people with bad credit somehow paid their mortgages consistently) share prices might be at $100. And if they tank, well, he gets his $12 million and floor seats at the Knicks games for the next 5 years, which is the same thing he'd get if things only went a little down hill.
That's sort of cheating, since you dropped out of CL into the format mini-language.
From the article:

"Dorstenia gigas - apparently does not require any soil and sinks roots straight into the bare rock"

It seems that this is some form of fig tree.
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Shakespeare can hardly be classified as entertainment anymore. The english is just too old and too difficult for most people to read to be anymore than a chore.

Harry Potter is REAL present-day entertainment, and anyone who wants to get into the industry has to understand that.
StumbleUpon has updated its algorithms - Aims to reduce manipulation
Emmy Winners List 2008 | Daily News Blog
The sacks are fishing nets... Degraded plastic would probably slip through. Popped bottles should be contained though.
Python: The WSGI era is here
Slight tangent - In my view, forward/next wizard style forms are used much too much.

Quite often it's a metaphor that suits the developer more than the user - to ease validation, data manipulation, etc.

Generally a user just wants to do some "stuff" (usually data entry) and then trigger a primary action "submit, commit, buy, sell, order". I've found a lot of sites lock the user into the "next/back" for all the "stuff" pieces when another metaphor would work a lot better.
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I'll flag next time. The title and source aren't anything to be proud of. Sentences such as "Their research raised the disturbing possibility that much of what we think and do is thought and done by an unconscious part of the brain — an inner zombie." sound asinine and misinforming. Really its disturbing huh? Shit im be controlled by an inner zombie like in the movies!

He would be better off just using the term subconcious or maybe working off the verbiage the researchers actually used. Maybe something along the lines of hidden levels of awareness and automatism. This way you wouldnt be trying to hook the reader as if they were a moron. Then again this is MSN. And if you read anything off the front page of MSN you realize that articles like this are dwarfed by tabloids and sensationalist crap.

Let him take on the difficult task of defining subconscious to a layman without the zombies.

Also don't forget to read some of the related articles such as "Eight organisms that make you go 'eww'" .

Give me a fucking break.
Interesting in various fronts

* Economic
That banks with the 'deal power' of Goldman and Morgan would set themselves up to the scrutiny of the Fed (adopting a commercial bank) is just amazing. These banks made the money they made and had the salaries/bonuses to go with it because they had little regulation with respect to commercial banks.

* Power Jobs / Career Tracks
I don't know what the bulk of MBA's will aspire to now -- or Hollywood for the matter. Investment banking was regarded as a golden standard for 'making it'. So no more, now that investment banking has gone down the toilet.

* Regulation / Legislation
Ironic, but the Glass-Steagall Act which was enacted in 1933 after the great depression was precisely the OPPOSITE: To separate commercial banking from investment banking!
REF: http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/important/index.html (So it looks like the cycle has started once again)
The fight of ideas is a perilous war. We try not to be Pyrrhic in our victories. We strive for justice and valor... but in the end, what could be honorable about destroying another?
The Register slams OpenSocial, OpenID and Google Gears - "destined for the dustbin"
Jeff Attwood and co that built it are used to .Net/MS/Visual Studio development, so for them the cost was probably small compared to the cost of switching stacks + tools.
Shock Doctrine.
Checked it out. Not quite enough functionality yet

Would probably be better to extend:
http://github.com/drnic/rails-footnotes
If nothing else, the reading material is interesting and a large portion of it is available online and linked to on their readings page ( http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/History/21H-001Fall-2007/Readings/... ).
Am I missing something with the whole "OpenID is hard" thing? As far as I've used it, OpenID has pretty much consisted of going through a fairly normal registration with the open ID provider, getting a login name url, and then just using that at sites that support openID.

At most, it's been marginally more complicated than a normal ID, but it saves me the trouble of creating yet another new account at every little site that seems like it might be interesting to check out for a few minutes.
Yes, you're missing it because you are unable to move out of your personal perspective into the perspective of less computer capable people.

OpenID is hard and pointless. It deserves to die.
If you followed digg as close as I did from 05-07 and saw what happened you would feel the same way. Current HN was digg in early 05/06. Now look at it. It went from articles on computer science/tech at UW/google research/stanford/MSR to MSN/college humor in what seems like a flash because people flocked towards what was popularized instead of technical. I took solace in the fact there was a tech section but all those articles lost any sort of insight because the community fell apart. I recall reading explanations and watching videos about the internals of Map Reduce/GFS/Big Table soon after they were released for publication. Videos from the core kernel development team at MSR (check channel9). Understanding how Microsoft managed their software development teams from people at MS. How to ace alot of algorithm questions at interviews (mapping mazes,sorting,etc). All from digg. I recall having a brief discussion with a person at slashdot about this. I asked them if they were concerned about what digg was doing and if he thought it was the new paradigm. He didnt flinch one bit. Since slashdot was old it had been through this before. It knew that topics would quickly swerve towards "popsugar" type articles real quick. They knew need they needed editorial control and thats why slashdot is still around and kicking. I dont want to be a control freak, I just love HN and try and keep on top of the sources used!
I wasn't trying to be an ass :) I just see "Breaking" all over the place these days on Reddit and I don't want HN going down the same road.
This is precisely the exact kind of trend and evolution entrepreneurs need. Rather than hands-off dumb money at crazy valuations and major dilution, young web firms need smart VC's who act more like angels than ever before.
Personally, I would not go for capital on your site. I'd put some ads on there, expand the service somewhat, and in a while you'll be making a bit of money.
This is the thing: the "yet another new account" thing isn't a problem for real users. Real users use the same damn user/pass on every site. This is terrible for their security, but it just works.
In all seriousness, though, what's the part that's such a stumbling block here (at least for anyone who is already computer literate enough to go through a normal user account creation)? I really fail to see why "now create an account you can use at any OpenID site" is so much of a problem compared to "create an account for this site". In my experience, the account creation is nearly the same, and the login procedure is nearly the same, so I have a hard time seeing where a problem would occur.
No more investment banks on Wall St
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley last night abandoned their status as investment banks in a move marking the end of an era on Wall Street.
This is about the winiest thing I've ever read with no real content.

"Unfortunately, excitement died off quickly as people remembered that they don't really give a shit about social networks."

Really? So, those 100 million or so for facebook myspace and orkut don't count?
This reminds me of the method of the three yes. A classic among sellers. In short, lead the client into agreeing at least three time in a row with you before asking what you really want.

I saw it applied in a street by people trying to sell time sharing holidays. 1rst question: "may I ask you a question ?" 2nd question: "Do you like going on holiday in sunny places ?" or if it's on the spot "Are you enjoying your holidays ?" etc. Once the third question is answered, the client is in a positive and confident mood. The more yes you get, the better it is.
SD: the new CD?
I don't know because I never created an open id account. The reason I never created one is because when I want to sign up, I just want to select a user name and password, not try to locate an open id.

Are you aware that most people using computers don't know how to copy and paste? OpenID requires copy and paste, and that kills it on arrival.
This is the last time I read anything on Tom's Hardware. There are five different kinds of intrusive advertising on the site and the article is split into 4 paragraph chunks. It's pathetic.
It's been that way for a long time... and unfortunately the trend is spreading.

The substance of the article has some omissions too - in particular, it never really goes into the multi-platform angle.
I couldnt have said it better. Get past the whining and hyperbole... but try and prove anything he said wrong.

OpenID- pipe dream. Clickpass is the only shot of making it work.

OpenSocial- Anyone actually make real live open social apps? Anyone making a real business or gain with them? At least facebook apps were able to do that for a good while.

Gears- Not sure why this is lobbed in there, except for the fact it isn't too widely implemented.
OSGi "Whole Book" Release - the prevalent solution to "Jar Hell"
Gears will win out of the sheer will of force -- a.k.a Google's war chest. Considering that it's only been in development for about a year makes calling a pipe dream premature.

OpenSocial and Android both plays the heel to the the bigger and better counterparts. But like all things in life, it's much better to have decent alternative than none at all. They may not ever achieve dominant positioning but they don't have to, no one will outright give up on them.

OpenID is just weird but god bless those folks that keep wanting to get a crack with this.
I think whether or not you're in it for the money ultimately doesn't matter very much.

What matters is how much value you create -- and it so happens that you create the most REAL value when you focus on other people's problems and solve them.

Solve other people's problems, create value, get paid, and as a result, solve your own problems.

Being in it for the money means you have to be in it for other people, ultimately. Well, at least the good kind of value creation. You could also just sell subprime mortgages and make a bucket load of money too, but we know where that ends up...
Ask YC: What to have on site while under construction?
A friend and I are working on developing a website but we aren't finished yet.

We want something to put on the domain until it is ready.

We are thinking of having a blurb of what we are making, contact info and an email sign up list.

Anything else sites under construction should have?
Google cache, for convenience (site appears to be down):

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:3OZg4hYVaVYJ:www.orient...
I wonder if anyone's patented "A method for achieving a high score by hitting a toggle or combination of toggles on one machine when a scrolling icon reaches a specified point on a second machine."
My first reaction was "no - gears has been out for ages"... but no, you're totally right.

Gears + Android might be an interesting play for Google as well.
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-up-you...
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Tilera is targeting the chips at high-end networking equipment that would otherwise use digital signal processing chips from Texas Instruments.

DSP is a special case, where scaling is easier. Anyone have more details on how general their approach is?

EDIT http://www.tilera.com/technology/technology.php

They address the multi-core hardware bus problem (iMesh/Tile packet switching), but not the multi-core software problem. Previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295530 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295152
Stonehenge - The Debate Continues
I believe that is the grand plan.

GOOG is in an enviable position in that they experienced extreme rapid growth, amassed legions of brilliant people, and had a high margins to have billions in cash. I'm not in a rush to bet against this juggernaut and their singularity plans.
Social-networking sites viewed by admissions officers
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There are a few varieties of convertible debt -- one is with a discount, and another is with a pre-money cap.

Lots of investors will insist on pre-money cap at a reasonable seed valuation. This basically means later when you do a series A or change of control, the investor's money converts with the Series A, and they get reimbursed typically with additional common stock that would simulate that valuation as if they did equity.

Straight up convertible debt with only a discount actually does NOT align the entrepreneur's goals with the investor... the investor gets a fixed percentage discount off the Series A price, but what if they put in $100k at year 0 and the company is now worth $10 million later at year 1 (rare but not unrealistic example)? That $20k profit with the 20% discount is starting to look like an awful move.

History lesson: Back in the day, notes were common just to really "bridge" startups from seed to Series A. They were issued to startups by the same VC that was already planning to do a Series A with them -- so the discount was fine because the VC would set the valuation as well. It's different now because your note investor (angel, friends or family) probably won't be the pricing your next round -- more likely, the market will.

Now it just doesn't make sense for most investors since they can take a chance on a team, do a note with a discount, and then see no significant return if the team is successful and raises the next round at a much higher valuation.

This article is actually kind of messed up because it assumes that you priced your round poorly, and then uses that as an explanation for why debt is good. If everyone is doing their job, and you're planning for success, then do a cap... or heck, do equity with YC's Series AA.
Bank holding companies are subject to risk-based capital requirements which prohibit them from operating with high leverage or purchasing large amounts of risky assets. Basically, these companies are reorganizing to adopt a lower risk and lower return model.

>This means that there is a need for new restrictions placed on the hybrid banks. If the regulation is too low, then we run the risk of putting deposits in danger.

Regulators are way ahead of you. As bank holding companies they will be subject to a TON of regulation. Few firms are more regulated. Both the FDIC and the Federal Reserve will have authority over them.

It's good that Glass-Steagal was repealed since it allows them to take these risk-reducing moves. It also broadens the supply of capital that is capable of supporting the financial industry in hard times (see J.P. Morgan/Bear Stearns and BOA/Merrill Lynch). With Glass-Steagal, the default reorganization move would be failure rather than merger. More federal government money would be at risk in bail-outs rather than private money put at risk in mergers.

Also, diversified financial companies have weathered the storm far better than their more focused peers. Being big and diversified has its advantages in tough times, as one would expect.

It's weird that the Glass-Steagal Act keeps popping up as much as it is. As far as I know its repeal had nothing to do with the current crisis, and probably helped alleviate it. I thought this link had a good summary of the Glass-Steagal act as it pertains to the current crisis:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/clear_a...
I must admit I always do a check for profiles when I'm recruiting someone... And google them... but taken with a grain of salt. Certainly wouldn't stop me interviewing someone.

All that said, I must admit... I can't help but find the fact that someone has a public profile a bit disturbing.
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There are definitely all sorts of problematic incentive structures all over the place. And they're definitely a problem. I think that just goes to show they're inevitable to a degree, that they're survivable & that free markets are not a silver bullet. These bailouts are certainly a push in the wrong direction, but unless I'm missing something, they're a very minor push. As you say, options as incentive are worse.

Compared to the other effects, that doesn't even show up on any kind of radar. For one thing, these companies are now essentially nationalised. Just the implications in terms of international politics & rhetoric are pretty big.

What did nationalisation do to the incentives of shareholders of other too-big-to-fail companies? What did it do the the execs. From the 1 year ago perspective this is still failure. 'This stock might lose 100% of it's worth' & 'this stock might lose 93%' look very similar when you are sitting on 100%. If any kind of serious distortion happens it probably happens near the bottom when things are pretty chaotic anyway. Executive compensation might be causing distortions, but the US' new found nationalisation policy has nothing to do with that.
investments banks will come back.

I wonder if they can reverse this status change in a few years.
Pelosi Rejects 'blank Check To Wall Street'
The answer to that thought would be to demand better carriers, more wifi, etc if they are not present in your country.
Some more info at Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/MIT-startup-raise...

and a paper published at the ISSCC conference: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6151332/TILE64-Processor-A-64Core-...
Don't underestimate the average computer user. Go around random internet cafes, public libraries, etc. Talk to the "average computer user" and you'll be surprised.
Oh no. Some guy at The Register was able to point out 3 new technologies that haven't seen wide adoption. The world is ending. Google is a one hit wonder. San Fransisco is just a bunch of dumb hippies. OMG.
Gears seems a very strange choice to put in here, especially now Chrome is out.
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Financial crisis: Default by the US government is no longer unthinkable
>* Power Jobs / Career Tracks I don't know what the bulk of MBA's will aspire to now -- or Hollywood for the matter. Investment banking was regarded as a golden standard for 'making it'. So no more, now that investment banking has gone down the toilet.

These companies will still be conducting Investment Banking activities. There are other bank holding companies who also own investment banks (Citigroup, and I believe JP Morgan, in addition to a host of foreign banks like UBS). What this means is that they will be forced to adopt capital requirements and other regulation in their portfolio business and take on two new regulators in exchange for more financial stability from deposits and access to Federal Reserve funds.

>* Regulation / Legislation Ironic, but the Glass-Steagall Act which was enacted in 1933 after the great depression was precisely the OPPOSITE: To separate commercial banking from investment banking! REF: http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/important/index.html (So it looks like the cycle has started once again)

Preventing deposit-taking institutions from taking risky activities is of much less importance now that there is an FDIC. Also, having diversified business lines should make these firms less likely to fail. Glass-Steagal made firms more fragile. You don't see JP Morgan, Citigroup, Wachovia, or B of A getting bought out, yet.
Does seem a bit paranoid! No doubt threading adds a (potentially significant) level of complexity that shouldn’t be added unless required, but with the world moving further and further into the realms of cloud computing and multi-cores, it seems to me it’s a complexity we’re going to need to embrace.
No video lectures on ths one?
>Bank holding companies are subject to risk-based capital requirements which prohibit them from operating with high leverage or purchasing large amounts of risky assets.

I figured the capital requirements would indeed get stricter (I believe the article also mentions this), but I'm still skeptical as to how long the banks can rein in their greed. Capital requirements should technically force them to be more careful, but IIRC the big 5 had already managed to get their requirements increased before (from 12:1 to 40:1).

As for mergers alleviating risk, would it not also expose the system to a different risk: market consolidation? The reason given for the current bailouts is that if these handful of investment banks (or even just AIG for that matter) failed it would set off a catastrophe. If there were more consolidation wouldn't it just aggravate this risk of one failure causing a significant impact?

Like I said before, I'm not an economist, but it seems better to keep the WaMu's and Goldman Sachs' separate, in more or less mutually exclusive risk pools so that if GS fails, the deposits in WaMu don't go with it.

Anyway, good points! I'm sure if handled correctly the situation will work since it does seem to work elsewhere.
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"Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, OpenSocial has been a dud."

This is just plain wrong. Although maybe some of the issue comes when you compare things to search+ads. When compared against those, perhaps things look 'dud'. But taken alone they are successes.