skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cause of the crisis was unexpected systemic risk. There are thousands of other systemic risks which would have an equal impact on our economy which we have no protection against. This is the nature of systemic risk.

In some cases it's just ignored (such as an asteroid landing on NYC) and in other cases it just turns out to be inaccurate (the probability of average housing prices dropping more than x% (edit, originally had 8 which may be low) in a single year was considered close enough to 0 to effectively not exist... effectively on par with an asteroid strike -- though we know both do not have a probability of zero.

In the context of complex financial products, the impact of the low probability event is magnified, since in each case the assumption that the event won't happen is repeated. When it does happen, the result is catastrophic.

It's naive to think that housing prices were somehow special.

Consider that our laws require only fractional underwriting of risk capital. The amount set by law effectively a threshold for how paranoid to be about various risks (including systemic ones). It is hardly a cautious approach.

The market prices in this risk to some extent, but there is one factor that significantly harms its ability to do so, especially in the case of housing prices -- government involvement.

Consider that Fannie and Freddie (government sponsored housing lenders) did not submit financials to wall street during much of the Bush administration. Normally, private firms would be delisted and shut down for such behavior. If anything, a proper accounting of their books might have led to greater caution on the part of investors. Instead, the government's decision to look the other way emboldened investors to bet on high housing prices and made investors confident that the government would step in to bail out these entities if housing prices fell.

Clearly, if the public had thought that housing prices were likely to fall in 2002 the US would not have gone into two expensive wars. Bush had a clear motive to hide this from the public. Even Greenspan urged the administration to make its stance on Fannie and Freddie clear, and was rebuked for his meddling in the buildup to the wars.

So the claim that these financial execs (who went along with the falsehoods crafted by government in order to sell a war) are obviously unworthy of compensation for their managerial skill is in my opinion absurd. Some may not deserve their salaries, but nor do many who are paid $100K+ as engineers and nor do many who sweep the floor at WalMart. There will be some bad apples.

But this does not mean that these individuals did anything wrong. They simply went along with government policy. If they bore any responsibility it was to back Greenspan in his remarks about Fannie and Freddie, to try to prevent subterfuge and malfeasance on the part of the executive branch and/or inaction by congress.

But frankly, everyone believed that the probability of housing prices falling more than 8% was effectively zero. To speak out in a contrarian way about this would have been viewed as a tinfoil hat endeavor.
If you use distance field based raytracing this "just falls out" by deforming the isosurface of the terrain appropriately (e.g. with noise). The downside of using noise to do this it that you get corresponding floating bits of terrain for the indentations - one solution is to start with some y = noise(x,z) then if y > 0 subtract a noise(x,y,z) from the value...

Using polygons to solve this is highly nontrivial - despite the naive suggestions made already.
Brett, curious without a cofounder and no employees, how much had you built before you raised your seed round?
Map of students in Stanford's ML class - is this the future of education?
That may be true right now, but it won't be going back up to rates like that until there's a severe cash shortage. Now that banks have accustomed us to receiving a pittance on our nest-eggs, they'll keep the spread as profit before increasing interest rates.
> My house is two miles away from the office. I still need a car: biking to work in the winter is just crazy.

I grew up in Minneapolis, you should check out the bicycle commuting scene where you live. It varies by location, but in Minneapolis I was able to bicycle commute at least 4 days a week all winter long thanks to good plowing of bike paths, studded tires (only occasionally) and substituting a bus ride in right after significant snowfalls.

Winter bike commuting is not for everyone, but with the proper gear it's not as bad as it looks (less uncomfortable than getting in a cold car and waiting for it to warm up IMHO).
A new way to beat Cancer:  Re-Direct the Funds.
Forcing amazon to donate per purchase... comments welcome.
Here's Why Apple Launched The iPhone 4S Instead Of The iPhone 5
I appreciate it, but I've used that before. I really would prefer not to spend $50 to rip DVDs I own if I can avoid it. I don't really understand why HandBrake has this capability on OSX but not Windows.
I wonder how this story would apply to the situation in many European countries; in the Netherlands, companies typically pay commuting costs. Of course this money has to come from somewhere, so effectively everyone's salary is lower, but my salary won't increase when I stop commuting.

This only leaves the cost of time, but IMHO that argument doesn't hold; most people consider their off time to be worth less, when expressed in dollars, than their on time. It's the same reason why many people with good incomes choose to paint their own house rather than work more and hire a painter.

Finally, I think the author forgets about love. If my dream job is 30 miles this way, and my partner's is 20 miles the other way, the total commuting will be the same no matter where we live along that line.
Is defragmentation still necessary in 2011?
I used Siri quite a bit when it was still just a free app, and I found it to be pretty useful. Real-world stuff I actually used it for include:

1. Checking the weather forecast for a particular day. Just ask something like, "What's the weather tomorrow?" You can give it a specific city, or it will just use your current location. This is generally faster than using a weather site or app for places you haven't already set up a shortcut for.

2. Checking on movie times and availability while on the go. Just ask something like "movies near here" and it shows you what's available.

3. Setting up reminders when I spontaneously think of something while out and about. It's much easier to just say "remind me to water the dog tonight at 7" than to type something up into an e-mail or reminder app.

Ultimately, it didn't get as much use as perhaps it should, for two reasons. One, it's inconvenient to use as a standalone app. You have to unlock the phone, find the app icon, run it, wait for it to get started, press the button to activate voice input, then say what you want. Having it built in to iOS5 on the 4S should eliminate that problem completely. It looks like it's just a single button to go straight to voice mode.

Two, being an app, it doesn't integrate well with the rest of the phone. You can't use it to call people or e-mail them or send them text messages or modify your calendar or.... This limits the functionality greatly. I sometimes find myself using Dragon Dictation to bang out a quick e-mail, but it too is fairly cumbersome. Again, the integration into the system should solve this.

From my previous use, the Siri app was great but ultimately not all that useful, but I think the integrated one could end up being great. Of course, we will have to see how it really works once it ships.
Isn't that the idea?
enable all protests to publish a live stream -- without commercials.
Apple to launch iMessage on Wednesday
fyi the reason for using a BSP is to get a "cell-portal graph" which allows visibility computations to be trivialised - the benefits of the BSP tree itself for, e.g. rendering with no overdraw are not very valuable. e.g. despite the hype otherwise this was never realised in Quake for zero-overdraw rendering, instead the PVS (based on the cell-portal graph) was used to result in "very little overdraw". This technique continues to be used today in every major game engine (id Tech 4 (maybe 5?), Source, UE3, CryEngine, numerous other proprietary engines).
I don't think anyone is saying banks shouldn't loan money to new and growing businesses, it'd just be nice if they didn't crash the entire economy at the same time.
SWSE - Most advanced Wi-Fi Hacking and Security Course online
Many congratulations! Well deserved :)
Tried it, but failed. Alas.

That said, it was very enlightening to me just how anxious I was! There is really no downside whatsoever to the challenge, and the possibility of a quick $100, yet I was still questioning whether I should do it.

So, I encourage you, do it! Failing is not that bad. :-p
Wow. After reading this I would downvote this article if I had downvotes.
Mongo Munich 2011
@porterhaney What's important is to show you can execute on what you're pitching. We also had solid metrics (retention etc...)
There's a great new movie about the design of cities called Urbanized and it has a section on New York, Jane Jacobs and her fight with Robert Moses:

http://urbanizedfilm.com
I really appreciated the slides, and they have a direct impact on my current C++ side project. I breezed through the bits that were not about C or C++, but here's what I took away:

1) Add "-Wall -Wextra -Weffc++" and fix the problems found
2) Have some insights into the various C/C99/C++ language contracts, including what sequence points are, how data is packed, and how expressions are evaluated.
3) Learn when to use delete or delete[], when to declare a destructor virtual.

If anything in this summary piques your interest, you may want to check out the full presentation.
Auomated link exchange, i' m afraid.
Yes. I would definitely pay Google for some features. (I'd really like an option to "de-bubble" me; I'd really like an option to go back to 2004 style searching; etc.)

Facebook's reach is pretty scary / annoying. I'd gladly pay them to have some of the functionality but with better privacy options.

I'd always consider paying a site to not show adverts. I'd much rather pay a news-site for quality reporting than have to put up with link-bait trolling and ads and [1][2][3] pages of chopped up articles.
Frama-C verification and transformation framework for C programs updated
It would be more accurate to say that OpenStack is powering HP's new cloud service. OpenStack has been adopted as the new UEC, and from my experience the development, documentation, and testing is almost completely geared towards Ubuntu hosts with KVM backends. So it should be no surprise that a commercial OpenStack deployment is going to based on the standard and best supported configuration.
Get a pair of Kahtoola microspikes and you won't have to worry much about falling on ice or snow. I run all winter in Montana with these. They handle streets or mountain trails without a problem.

http://www.kahtoola.com/microspikes.php
This looks so nice. Is there any upcoming support for HTTP caching? I know it is not the easiest thing to do because you will probably need to make several cache backends (file, db, memcached, redis, etc.) to keep everyone happy.

Also I couldn't tell if there is keep-alive support, is there?
What makes Hackathons Work
Validating parsers should not be downloading these, they should have local copies. And you should probably not validate against a dtd anyway.

No build should need network access.
To steal shamelessly from the George Will piece that Krugman pretends to respond to, "Paul Krugman is a pyromaniac in a field of straw men."
Yes! I feel the same way- there are a lot of good posts that never make it to the top 200. I think time really plays an issue here. If the post is submitted at non-peak hours, not enough people read it, causing the post to be forgotten about somewhere far in the HN archive.
That's great to know there is interest. I'll work that into a future post. If you need to know sooner for your startup, my email is above. Or coffee in mtn - my treat.
Android Market v3.2.0 Leaked
FlumeJava Port to Hadoop
Hi Kevin, good job on Raven so far. I agree with other commenters that it needs some more work before it'll replace my regular browsing but I think you have a really interesting idea here.

Being able to create an app on the fly would be nice though I can see the merits of the app submission process.

The amount of controversy generated here probably means your idea is worth exploring further. Best of luck.
This is about investment banking and arcane financial instruments. About the lack of regulation that allows gambling with taxpayer money. And about the lack of accountability around all of it.

If only all our plutocrats were actually making useful things.
Keep-alive is 100% supported in the upcoming v0.7.0 release, along with async i/o :)

Caching: I think that will be best be served by a hook/helper module, but we'll see.
Thank you. I was a little concerned when my MBP spewed out a list with this option. I tried a little look-up on why that is normal.

From the manpage:

When +L is followed by a number, only files having a link count less than that number will be listed. (No number may follow -L.) A specification of the form ``+L1'' will select open files that
have been unlinked. A specification of the form ``+aL1 <file_system>'' will select unlinked open files on the specified file system.

On my MBP (SL) at least, all the files listed with +L1 are from /private/var/folders/

A quick search seems to hint that this is the location to store secure caches and temp files for Snow Leopard.
New mobile management platform locks down Android for businesses
Here's something that bothered me for a while: lsof may incorrectly classify your IPv4 connections as IPv6.

$ sudo lsof -i 4:443
$ sudo lsof -i 6:443
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE NODE NAME
httpd 12345 apache 6u IPv6 987654321 TCP *:https (LISTEN)

If you see this, the fix is to disable IPv6 by setting "options ipv6 disable=1" via modprobe.
Effective security awareness programs - think differently
This challenge has almost nothing to do with Python. If you can't solve the video-featured challenge, it's because you don't know the quicksort algorithm well.
Apple likes to call their products by the same name worldwide. Are there any countries other than the US where HSPA+ networks are advertised as 4G? And on the other hand, are there countries where advertising HSPA+ as 4G is prohibited?
Interesting. Thoughts on upstart? BTW do you use anything along the lines of nagios, god, monit, etc.?
New Moore's Law: Electrical efficiency of computing doubles every 1.6 years
Just tried it.

Interestingly, I normally consider myself a good debugger, and about 15 seconds after the minute, I figured it out. I think I might have done so in a minute, if I hadn't been under a 1 minute time limit.

Overall, an interesting thing to try.

Note you can't get money if you aren't in the US (I was told), but you can still get a t-shirt and brief fame.
How tо Clеan Up Maс аnd Improve іtѕ Spееd and Pеrfоrmаnce
I agree with the look-away but smiling picture as total douchebaggery^. In real life you wouldn't spend much time in close proximity with someone not looking at you but also smiling or laughing when you're not. They're usually popular but with few friends, and quite shallow. Do they have (or are the key) to something you want?

^double points if the person is not genuinely popular, triple if it's a professional portrait like in the article
The same could be said of Go, but I don't think its true.

I think the lesson of channels is important. If you constrain your communication to a channel then your callbacks will be simpler, not more complicated, because the channel manages the communication for you.

It's like using Unix pipes instead of managing buffers yourself. It's a simple tool, and hides the tedious/ugly bits that nobody wants to see.
Physicists propose solution to constraint satisfaction problems
Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are 99% Tumblr
U.S. drones affected by Keylogger Virus
Plasma Active One: "KDE for tablets"
The most interesting thing is the way DoFn serialization serialization works, allowing you to escape MapReduceBase hell for every single tranformation in a MapReduce job chain.
Its nice to see OpenStack getting picked up by HP, I think that is the bigger story here....wonder why they would choose Ubuntu over HPUX....It should not be that difficult to port HPUX onto OpenStack. Also would like to see if HP's play here would be get enterprises on this new "Cloud" they are building.
How to Change the Boot Order in Ubuntu
After skimming through the wikipedia article on Adbusters I have to say I find them interesting. But I would classify them as a media organization. Regardless of their intentions, they do things that we consider operations of a media organization if it were another company or group.

I also consider PETA as a media organization as they are all about propaganda for their agenda, which is apparently killing animals to save them from us.
During my first month at Intuit as Product Manger who coded, I pitched some ideas to my leader at the time. His feedback was to try to come up with ideas that were more practical. That pretty much sums it up. To credit Intuit, that leader is no longer with the company. The problem imo is this type of thinking shapes the way people think. On the flip side, VCs/Investors/Angels are only interested in the big ideas that sounds crazy that big companies reject.
Hardware Hacking with Vim
API + JavaScript & PHP SDK for Building Travel Apps
We built a simple to use API for building social and geo-location travel apps of all sizes and sorts. Add to Trip https://addtotrip.co It's open(free) to use and build on for now. We also have a Hackathon going through the end of the month for those interested https://addtotrip.co/hackathon
Way back, in a far away land, I was working in a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun called 'FirstPerson' and we were the evolution of Project Green and had yet to become JavaSoft. I had come over from Sun proper after having been the creator, and with the help of several great engineers, implementor of a poorly named service, NIS+.

It came to pass that the FirstPerson group needed to put together a 'spec' and have it put into some form that wouldn't evolve quite so rapidly as it was impossible for partners (and even some engineers) to keep up. One of the components of that spec was creating a globally unique name space for classes if they were to exist in a global namespace. The 'natural' choice was to use DNS names, DNS was easy, it already existed, and as Bill Joy pointed out "If sun.com doesn't exist we've got bigger problems than where to find our class instances." The counter argument that 'protocols live forever' and another that we should not tie the core of the language to the corporate entity that birthed it, were not compelling. The tertiary argument that as name spaces went a 'layered system', one where a level of abstraction was added to allow for changing the underlying space, would be better than tying it to DNS names, was also unsuccessful. The choice stood.

Its always interesting to 'win' an argument over 15 years later. Doesn't change anything of course, one can either take pleasure in knowing they were right when others were wrong, or feel guilt at not having been more eloquent or convincing in their argument. Of course neither really does any good.

But if you are out there and you are thinking to 'copy' the Java scheme of naming things based on DNS names. Please reconsider, nothing is forever unless you can control all the moving parts.
I work in Seattle and have a one hour, one way commute. I live 15 miles away. Getting to the bus stop, waiting for the bus, and then walking from the bus stop to work really adds up.
German researchers crack RFID encryption
> When the original iPhone was released, it was not expensive, it was unsubsidized.

Which made it 'seem' expensive to an average consumer. Yes, they end up spending that money by being locked into a contract for 2 years, but they at least see it as a cheaper option.
What's with the "for human beings" phrase? Is that a way of saying the software is easy?
111 Arrested for biggest identity theft and credit card fraud Case
I think you over look the importance of serendipity. The best contacts I have aren't always ones I reached out to, but rather ones I met at parties, events or social connections.

Also it's worth noting that you don't have to stay in the US if you go through YC. SongKick and Lanyard are two notable companies who went through YC and then came back to the UK
When I heard about this, I canceled the DVD service and sent back the 5 dvds that had been on my bookshelf for 3 years. Then I started using the streaming service again, and got frustrated. Silverlight is pretty bad, especially with it's bizarre volume limitations. I realized that Netflix's streaming quality matches it's streaming catalogue, in other words, it sucks, and I canceled.

Had all of these shenanigans not happened I probably would have been too lazy to cancel Netflix for another year or two.

Dear Reed, Thanks for reminding me that Netflix sucks and I'd rather read or exercise than watch movies!
Live in a metro area where there are laws that sidewalks have to be clear. I live in Boston and have been walking to work for the last 15 years including during the winter. The only exception is that I take the metro (or 'T' as it's called here) when it rains. It's very rare to have an impassible sidewalk, and when you do you just walk around it in the street for a few meters.

There are plenty of tech companies here within walking distance, lots of job options and an OK startup scene.

Also, don't have a car. I use Zipcar or taxis when necessary (maybe 10 times a year). Not having to pay for a car, insurance and parking saves a lot of money. That savings makes living in more expensive city apartments more easy to afford.

Not having to drive to work is my number one job perk, and living in a city is much more enjoyable (to me at least) than not.
Well, I would say that a value change of $200 million to $125 million is a reduction.

Although I didn't assume that investors would automatically get shares in the new company to equal the value they lose in the original company. It's nice if it works out that way but I just don't assume that kind of thing.
The garage rocket revolution
And in some other discussion about this research, somewhere else, your friend is recounting the exact same conjecture... about you.
> I wasted a month searching. I learned that you don’t find a cofounder; it happens naturally or it doesn’t.

I agree.

I've spent 2yrs+ years looking for good co-founders (through people I meet, not a recruiting mission). I've been to tons of events and meetups, kept up with entrepreneurs/developers in my area.

Theres only a few few people that I'd want to start a company with and they are all usually busy doing their own companies.

After having a few cofounders who didn't work out, I've learned its much better to not have one that have a mediocre one dragging out down. But at the same time I've still learned it crucial to have a cofounder.
A very interesting approach for tablet's interface. Organizing activities seems to be easy and straight forward. The user experience seems to be very good.
Safari 5.1 on Snow Leopard. No crashes. Works without any issues.