skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>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).

Independent investment banks are not subject to the capital requirements of FDIC insured institutions. The big 5 were previously under no regulation as to their leverage ratios.

>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.

The financial markets are highly fragmented and competitive, or at least they were 18 months ago. The risk isn't so much that one big firm will go under, but that some firms going under will set off a panic that will force lots of firms to go under. There were hundreds of independent mortgage originators, and as far as I'm aware they are now all gone.
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> "Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, OpenSocial has been a dud."

Talk about one's perspective being waaaaay off.

Gmail, Reader, Maps, Chrome, Groups, News, Orkut - all of these products have clearly been duds when you consider how profitable Google's search + ads business has been.

Then again by that same yardstick you could say that 99.99% of online businesses are complete duds, even though there are a lot of them out there that are quite profitable.

Look at Orkut, when compared to a Myspace or a Facebook it is an absolute dud, however with some perspective it is among the largest social networks in some of the world's fastest growing economies (Brazil, India) - not a bad position to be in whatsoever.

> No, a revolution means that somebody gets beheaded.

Well, then if that's the case, Google's search was definitely not a revolution. Sure it was an innovative product, but I still see Yahoo running around with a search team and with a still sizeable chunk of the search business (~25% isn't anything to scoff at whatsoever)
You don't overestimate the average computer user. A computer user does not think in the same way you do. A user may know what copy and paste does in Microsoft WORD, but they do not see this as anything but a feature of Word. They don't think it is something that is generally applicable to all text fields. That concept is naturally unintuitive, it's something that has to be learned or discovered.

I'm technically very saavy, but open id is something I really don't want to use. It sounds complicated, it's difficult to use, it seems risky, and most importantly, it does not offer me any advantages.

It's a silly idea pushed by technologists who are out of touch with what the average person is doing with his computer.
Painful to read. I have spent years with my head buried in code and I clearly never understood what it was that I was doing. Go RTFA if you haven't already. tl;dr is not an excuse.
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Can anyone honestly say they're in the start up world simply to alturistically help other people? This article seems a bit twisted to me - yes I agree you make money by solving a business problem, or helping others make money, but if you don't ultimately make money yourself, surely that's considered failure! I know your investors would say so...
I disagree.

Raising $300k to $500k at a reasonable seed valuation makes a ton of sense for them -- if you get the right angels who can actually help you with connections and experience, the pie will get larger faster than the % of the pie you give up to get them.
You're right of course. I was also considering showing off the loop macro. That one actually wouldn't have been cheating, since it shows off macros (A pretty nifty and central feature of Lisp)

(loop for x from 1 to 10
as x-sqr = (* x x)
collect x-sqr)

Or something like that.
You should be thinking about who will have found your site pre-launch, why they will be there, and how to get them to come back again once you're done.
Well, I won't argue. I've never lived in an area where I had to deal with anything like hurricanes or other wierd weather, so I know very little about that market and how much can actually be made from it.
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Because it has failed (thus far) to make a substantial impact on the way people use web apps.

How many people have it installed? How many sites have it enabled? What apps/sites exist & are popular that wouldn't be useful/popular without gears? What apps/sites exist that are replacing installed apps thanks to gears? For an example to count it needs to include more people outside the top 5% of internet users.

Personally I wouldn't call it a dud yet. It's mostly for readers, online office apps & calendar. These are used mostly by the top 5% anyway, so it'd be hard to take a stab outside that segment with Gears. Mail is the online app that has penetrated, but those that need off-line mail generally have a client installed already. It'll take time to move them since 'you don't need to install a client' isn't an incentive if you already have one. But this is a pretty big change they're trying to pull off. A lot of people are going to have trouble even finding gmail without a Google search.

Like I said, I wouldn't call it a dud. I wouldn't call it a success either. Like the post says, Chrome might bring it all together.
>The big 5 were previously under no regulation as to their leverage ratios.

http://www.nysun.com/business/ex-sec-official-blames-agency-... That article suggests that the SEC enforced a 12:1 ratio for banks... or am I getting incorrect information?
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What an inspiring story! It really is the real life version of Good Will Hunting.
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Can't happen fast enough.

I'm unhappy about the weight SAT (and ACT) scores are given in the application process because I will be a (junior level) transfer student and I see even less relevance of the SAT in my position when it's already fairly useless for freshmen. I find it mindboggling and frustrating to think that half the colleges I am applying to are requiring such a useless thing while the others are doing the right thing by not even caring for such a score.

In college, I have taken math classes above second semester calculus. I have fulfilled basic general education requirements. I have fulfilled more than expected of a junior-level transfer student in classes related to my major. All of those credits should overwhelmingly trump what I can do in a few hours with a pencil and a calculator for something laughable in comparison. To the point that taking such a test would be unnecessary to point out what I am capable of doing: honestly, is how well I do on some trivial algebra (lazily done entirely with my ti-89) or writing going to tell you how appealing of a computer science major I will be? I'm pretty sure you can safely ignore the SAT and take a look at my classes, grades, experience and recommendations to make a better guess. And the same should apply to high school students as well.

Not to say I did not do well on the last SAT exam I took (on the contrary, because the material is so basic), but why I had to spend the money and waste the time to do so in the first place just stinks. I have taken prep classes way back in high school, and I've tutored people in turn. The article is spot on when it says that students are spending time gaming the SAT.

(On a slightly different sidenote, I don't think the SAT is the only cause for high school classes (at least in the US) being so focused on a small curricula, I believe that's more directly caused by NCLB and tying school performance on exams to funding. But that's a whole different rant/issue in itself.)
"Prospective members of Women's Park confirm their identity by sending a postcard to the company, and all messages sent to the site are checked before being posted."

I don't get it. How does sending a postcard to a site confirm your identity? I can understand the site sending out a postcard with a verification code on it but for the user to send in a postcard doesn't seem to make sense.

Besides that it looks like an interesting phenomenon. Simply increasing the latency of posts would probably improve the quality. With no instant gratification many trolls simply wouldn't bother posting.

This seemed flawed to me, "To post opinions in the Tsukurepo section, advance approval from those who introduced the recipes is necessary." I bet all the reviews are raving. Seems like a nice way to stifle differing opinions.
In my experience, SATs are one of the few good predictors of intelligence (in a necessary-but-not-sufficient sort of way).

Truth be told, the SATs aren't particularly hard so most bright people could walk in and take the test cold turkey and pull at least a 1500. Of course, there were a lot of false positives from people who took prep courses and worked their asses off (but, as a former princeton review tutor, I never saw more than a 100 point gain in any student no matter how hard they worked - and most were lucky to get 50 points). A kid whose parents had a few grand to burn on a princeton review course could boost his score from 1300 to 1350, but never to 1550.

The problem with GPA/extracurriculars were that a lot of not very bright people could pull 4.0s and have good 'leadership' experience by gaming the system. And, even worse, a lot of smart people couldn't. A lot of the smartest people I know barely graduated highschool (or didn't). They saw the bullshit for what it was, and often had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way (especially at 16 - most of them can 'play the game' as adults).

(Note: all my experience was with the old 1600 point SAT)
Other people like protected sites as well!
My feeling was, the world doesn't change as much as you'd think. If you take away the romanticism due to the black and white + noisiness, it's a lot like today. Awesome pics.
I read it just a few months ago; I consider it one of the best books I ever read. It felt like the confirmation of my geek identity or something like that. Awesome.
Near Field Communications is Amazing
Short version: they swap out the DETS back end for something called "Tokyo Cabinet".

Can anyone more knowledgeable about the details that that entails comment? How does it affect performance? "Distributability"? How solid is it?
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I guesse, the big 5 were not 'banks'.
OpenID requires copy and paste?

1. For classic OpenID with subdomains, you end up typing simonw.myopenid.com instead of just simonw

2. For OpenID 2, you click the "Sign in with Yahoo!" button (assuming the site you are signing in to is targeting the mainstream and has decided to show a big shiny button instead of / in addition to the scary OpenID input field)

Option 2 is the one you should get excited about if you're interested in "most people using computers". You don't even have to call it OpenID.
"Scholars agree that, in addition to being a teetotaler and a non-smoker, Adolf Hitler practiced some form of vegetarianism." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_of_Adolf_Hitler)

Just for historical curiousity. I do not want to start a debate about the Nazis.
In my experience, SATs are one of the few good predictors of intelligence

Published research agrees with this:

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2006%20Intell%2...

Although the SAT is widely believed to measure
mainly academic achievement, Frey and Detterman
(2004) have shown that it is an excellent measure of
general cognitive ability (g). For example, they found
that scores on the SAT correlated highly (0.82) with g
extracted from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude
Battery (ASVAB), as it also did with g loaded mental
ability tests such as the California Test of Mental
Maturity (0.82), the Otis–Lennon Mental Ability Test
(0.78), the Lorge–Thorndike Intelligence Test (0.79),
the Differential Aptitude Test (0.78), the Henmon–
Nelson Test of Mental Maturity (0.65), the Coop School
and College Ability Test (0.53), and the Raven's Ad-
vanced Progressive Matrices (0.48; 0.72 when corrected
for restricted range).
It makes sense to me - traditional media is highly controlled and edited, whilst most interactive forums are completely open. Nice to see people developing middle ground alternatives. There must be a better way than snail mail to confirm identity though!
On Competition and Ideas
How is Django different from Ruby on Rails, other than being written in Python rather than Ruby? (Also known as: how is everything on the Internet different from everything else, other than being different?)
Gears has huge potential. I have no idea why that's in there.
The sign-in with yahoo button is a lot more accessible, but on a personal level, I am strongly against it. The internet tends to coalesce around the most widely used method, leading to one site becoming disproportionately larger than all the others.

So if we have this "Sign-in with yahoo" button, soon everywhere will have 3-4 sign in methods, likely to be Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and maybe Facebook. So we basically hand over everyone on the internet to these 4 gigantic cooporations? What do you think they will use all those user accounts for? Safeguard them?

If a mum uses the internet to visit her sewing website, this person should not be forced to hand over their personal information to huge companies, who live off advertising!

OpenID is a boon for big companies, and a nightmare for the openness and freedom of the web. Your login information for all sites should be personal - it should be on your physical keychain, and not owned by Yahoo or Microsoft or anyone else.
Just launched Scholar spot.com free educational videos
I guess your investors are content if you make money for them.
Let me tell you why clickpass fails. After seeing your comment about clickpass, I decided to go try it. So I went there and the initial frontpage pitch was really nice. So I clicked on my google account. It showed me my different google accounts. Nice. I clicked next, and then it asked me if it should be allowed to access contacts. Hella NO! Why should I give clickpass access to my google contacts. So I figured I'd still be able to login without that. Umm, no, it tells me the process failed.

This is the fault of google, but what can clickpass do? Google gives, google takes.
I was in Kapadokya (http://images.google.de/images?q=kapadokya) earlier this year. Very strange place, too.
errr ... scholars' pot?
In college, I have taken math classes above second semester calculus. ... All of those [college] credits should overwhelmingly trump what I can do in a few hours with a pencil and a calculator for something laughable in comparison.

Generally, the SAT is administered to high-school students, not college students. It's purpose is to predict the performance of those high-school students, if and when they are in college. The point of any test is to improve predictiveness of outcome. The SAT is a type of social test, and its purpose is to predict a certain social outcome -- student performance in college.

Not to say I did not do well on the last SAT exam I took (on the contrary, because the material is so basic), but why I had to spend the money and waste the time to do so in the first place just stinks.

The SAT costs less and is faster than testing via college credits. Would you test the inflation-level of tires by driving a car around and measuring its performance (efficiency, road-handling, straight-line traction, smoothness over bumps, road noise, tire-temperature-rise, etc.) because it is cheaper and easier than to "spend the money and waste the time" using a tire-pressure meter instead?

The article is spot on when it says that students are spending time gaming the SAT.

One way around that might be to give them working-memory and reaction-time/decision-time tests, instead.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22reaction+time%22+jensen+%2...

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22working+memory%22+%22g+fac...

One of the purest tests of working memory is the Letter-Number Sequencing subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). It consists of simply reordering (in one's head) strings of random letters and numbers.

http://www.google.com/search?q=wais+letter+number
Orkut - login
Because it hasn't reached it.
On Becoming a Quant
Just launched this project a couple days ago, took me about 2weeks to develop. Tired of being brainwashed by television, I developed this as a solution.

The site is still very early phase, and will evolve over time. Your feedback is appreciated.
If the SAT was so easy (and I agree that it is), what's the big deal? It's 3 hours of your life and costs under 50 bucks (and they waive the fee if you can show need). You didn't have to spend a huge amount of time studying or money taking prep courses.

Your rant reminds me of professional programmers who get insulted when asked to do fizz-buzz during an interview. What's the big deal? It's the quickest and easiest way to weed out the riff-raff. In my experience, the ones who get insulted are usually the ones who can't do it.
Like tor?
"It's typically inappropriate photos—like holding up a can of beer at a party,"

If you're 18 sure. 21 year wold who took a few years off for whatever personal reason, not so much but I love the implied stigma there; in such does my entire general respect reside for anyone who uses Facebook/MySpace as a barometer for work ethics.

You're more than likely going to see some questionable things on Facebook, but lacking the foresight and good judgment to realize people sometimes like to separate their work lives from their personal lives is probably going to cause more office space headaches than a couple of beer laden photos. Mostly because the worry will constantly be there "when is he going to mess up and force me to fire him?" You're going to become the devil's advocate to your own environment.

All of this provided there's nothing just bombastically wrong and offensive.
Eric Schmidt uses Yahoo for emails
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Value the company at $3million, raise the capital through two or three angels, giving away 15% of equity in total. Involving VCs could mean problems exiting later down the line. You don't mention if you came through YC - even if this is not the case, the company sounds like a YC startup, and so its worth targetting angel investors who have had successful exits with YC companies in the past.
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Well, the page hasn't been updated since October of 2004, a few months after Gmail was opened into Beta (if Firefox's "Last Modified" details are accurate). I'm nearly certain more accurate email details are out there.
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Full-text link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/education/22admissions.htm...

Commission Report .pdf:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/20080922...

NYT article comments:

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/09/22/edu...

Excerpt from article:

Mr. Fitzsimmons’s group, which was convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, also expresses concerns “that test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.”
The best way to confirm the identity would properly be to check peoples passports/drivers license. That would prevent trolls.
Is Stupid Making Us Google?
I'll assume your point as proven.

So because the pattern up to now was flawed, we reject this instance, under the assumption that it must somehow be flawed as well?

That's not logical, in my opinion. Each case has to stand on its own.
"Good to be able to rant rant, nicer to somehow get links to even the silliest of them. His complaint about the buzz behind web development this days renders your use of "Web 2.0 engineers" an absolute absurdity (talk about having drunk the "Kool-Aid" you're complaining about). As for APIs, all developers use tools they find accessible and productive. Those they don't, they don't use. A string of social networking sites have brought in massive amounts of profits; it would be silly for the market to ignore that. However a particular Google product/service fares is always irrelevant, when considered against the bigger picture of their continuing growth and success as a business.

If he's asking why we should care about OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears, he's a little too late; I don't care, not enough to find any interest in his post beyond a fascination with it's complete separation from anything relevant or substantial. Perhaps he'd like to complain about Google Web Toolkit next? I suppose he may have already. In any case, good job riding the Google hype to get hits on content so completely pointless!

Congratulations to Aaron Holesgrove for his comment also. His amusement at watching a company, whose search and ad SOFTWARE has so utterly blown away the competition and dominated the market, do something as bizarre as act like the software company they've ALWAYS been, is a fantastic blend of lack of comprehension and emotional reaction to hype.

This response was a mandatory attempt to reclaim the time lost here with a rant of my own, only tailored to the specific absurdities at hand."

Seriously! Who keeps posting these silly little blog entries that don't say anything? They are listed as though they contain valid content, and then are so short and pointless that it's impossible to abort reading them before they are over (and the stupidity is experienced).

If these somehow keep making it to the front page, I'm certainly going to leave this site out of my routine entirely.
the FDIC is a joke.
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