skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is completely wrong. Credit standards not only dropped dramatically at Freddie/Fannie, but they drove the decline elsewhere. Causality is clear: Private banks issued loans that they knew that Freddie/Fannie would securitized; as the government agencies decided they'd buy crap, the private banks provided it. (For crying out loud, the government agencies CREATED the subprime market.)

In actuality, about half the bubble has been directly traced to the lowering of underwriting standards by Fannie/Freddie, which in turn was directly caused by....a desire to provide home ownership for the poor.
GNOME3 vs Unity on Ubuntu 11.10: my score is 6 – 9
freddie and fannie started issuing "subprime" loans in the 90s, to lower income and minority borrowers with reasonable default rates. by the time the boom came around their marketshare in this market plummeted because everybody else dropped their standards (the garbage was to be somebody elses problem anyways) and their marketshare dropped. the growth in subprime during the bubble period had little to do with them.

they are currently the garbage bilge where junk loans are deposited, but that is by design to protect housing prices.

they were not a huge area of growth when housing overheated, subprime or otherwise.
Just to be clear. I think you're arguing that it was failures in both policies (government backed loan programs that made money cheap) and oversight (no one was properly overseeing the whole mess).

If that's what your saying.. I would completely agree. There were so many moving parts in this and we needed ALL of them to fail for catastrophe.

All of them did.
Also fun: http://www.spielzeugz.de/html5/liquid-chars.html
Exactly right, in C++03 this kind of stuff was really horrible.

In general people (the STL, and all Maths code I've ever read), will just assume that the type is T. For things like iterators, you have to do things like:

typename std::vector<T>::const_iterator it = v.begin();

(That typename has to be there, for stupid C++ reasons). Being able to reduce that to:

auto it = v.begin();

Is probably the most visible advantages to C++11 is one of the most obvious improvements for many programers.
The post-doc is now effectively mandatory in computer science academia like other fields. I don't know where this figure of 75k for an astrophysics post-doc comes from. The only 70k+ post-docs I've ever heard of are at government labs like Los Alamos. At Harvard, for example, post-docs make less than 50k per year (I'm a grad student there and have post-doc friends). If Harvard's Smithsonian center for astrophysics cannot pay market demanded prices for post-docs, then I just don't buy this claim that Santa Cruz could.

I second the sentiments mentioned above that the years and low-pay of a post-doc are depressing now that it is overwhelmingly likely that it won't lead to a tenured position.
Intimate Moments: Real Girls, Real Orgasms
Actually, it is true.

I'm not sure the exact history of it all, but I know that at a State of the Word presentation at a WordCamp many years ago, Matt M said that they were serving ads to Internet Explorer users to try to convince them to switch.
Samsung’s new phones will have flexible screens
because private label mortgage issuance shut down. over 90 pct of mortgage origination are now agency. this includes all refis which rolls crap out of private label onto the govt sheets. we went from investors loaning money to the taxpayer and this is a subtle method of bailing out the fin industry. no way fin instutions would have paid back any govt loans without this help and its a convenient place to sweep away the losses.

also prime mortgages from the bubble years got hammered and of course that hurt them.
Smarty 3 and the new features
I imagine in future there will be working groups of people that will spontaneously emerge from nowhere. and disappear the same way.
Like one driver leaving as he wish and another is taking role.
Webinar- $10 - Microsoft Excel
>"Nokia maps has free turn-by-turn directions"

So does WP7.
>The market for beer bonds doesn't exist if there isn't an ever increasing ceiling on the price of the asset that bond is backing

That's not correct. The market expands as new bonds are issued. The key factor is that further credit is given, regardless of the size of each individual loan.
What is this guy talking about? TARP funds wound up costing only $19B and no new taxes were levied on the middle class.
How to make a computer that doesn't lock out GNU/Linux
They forgot the part of the story where the government used public money to keep Heidi’s bar in business.
Your article had a lot more credibility before you came up with this comment : The vast majority of RMBS and CDO-of-RMBS losses have nothing to do with the government.

Your story would have been even better if you included the necessary element of how the repayment characteristics of selling beer to unemployed people on credit were better than the interest rate they would pay. Because, as a foundation to these securities, the banks (based on flawed rating agency analysis) believed that the subprime mortgages would pay back.

If the banks had had a better understanding of how past performance (subprime mortgage payers in the 1990s) was no indicator of the future (people in 2005 buying investment properties to flip, based on the theory that property prices would increase at 4% p.a. forever), then they would have lost so much money that they required bailing out.

The major post-crash failure of government (IMHO) is that they didn't take large equity stakes in the banks, and prevent them from making obnoxious bonus announcements.
> "Computers and other products" are simply things in and of themselves. However, it is the individual that applies an interpretation to these things, such that the individual can allow these things to define him or her.

It is also an individual who devotes his life towards working on ever more desirable consumer products, and also individuals who devise and support ad & PR campaigns based on the idea of defining oneself with a brand and associating with it and all the insidious consumerism ideology that comes with 'lifestyle' brands.

> In essence, there is nothing "defying that philosophy", as the question asks.

The philosophy in question was not Buddhism's ontology, which varies drastically from Madhyamika-style emptiness to older karma entities; nothing can defy that philosophy because they are consistent with all possible actions and observations. The reference was to the moralizing; for all you wrote, I still see tension between a stance based on eliminating cravings and a life spent stoking and satisfying for cash cravings.
> "Show me an attack that's happened in the last 10 years."

"I have a rock here that keeps tigers away."

"What? That's crazy talk."

"Well, you don't see any tigers around do ya?"

Not to mention, based on what we know of terrorists caught plotting against the Western world in the past decade, nearly all were discovered by intelligence networks (i.e. the CIA/NSA), not checkpoint searches. In fact, at least one incident passed security just fine but relied on quick-thinking passengers to subdue to the terrorist.

Useless indeed.
Both factors help increase the total size of the bubble.
Or the part where the people that said they would pay back their bar tabs were thrown in jail.
I don't think, after a very cursory review of some of the reports on this E-cat stuff, that yours is a fair summary.

He didn't just do a good job "hyping" it, it seems, but a good job selling it too. I don't mean selling in the exchange of goods/services sense but he appears to have won some high profile support.

For example:

"Rossi has licensed the technology to a start-up called Ampenergo. Though new, the company has credentials; one of its founders is Robert Gentile, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Fossil Energy at the US Department of Energy (DOE) in the 90's." (Wired, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-10/06/e-cat-cold-fu...)

"Together with Sergio Focardi, professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, and Giuseppe Levi, a professor in the university’s Department of Physics, the trio claimed a low-energy nuclear reaction device that produced extraordinarily large amounts of excess heat." (from a New Energy Times article strongly criticising Rossi, http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/08/07/rossis-scientific-...).

And again:
"On March 29, two Swedish professors went to Bologna, expenses paid by Rossi, to see Rossi's device in action. Sven Kullander is professor emeritus at Uppsala University and chairman of the Swedish National Academy of Sciences Energy Committee. Hanno Essén is associate professor of theoretical physics and a lecturer at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and was the chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Association until April, when he declined to run again. On April 3, they wrote a report endorsing Rossi's claim." (New Energy Times again, http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2011/37/3705report3.shtml)

Clearly there's a bit more to this than just a convict hyping some vapourware.

I'm not saying you can't fool professors of physics however.

From the little I've read it seems that there is an assumption being made (see http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2011/37/3705report3.shtml, "Steam quality ...") that all of the water is being ejected as dry steam when it is probably wet steam, steam mixed with a fog of droplets of water. This error leads to vastly inflated calculations for the emitted energy.

However, that wouldn't explain the current ½MW demonstration ...

It's going to be interesting to see how this one breaks down.
perhaps not, but it is generally rude and disrespectful. YMMV.
As others' mentioned, LFS is a great way to learn about Linux. After building LFS, I migrated to Gentoo. LFS shows you how everything is done manually, where Gentoo takes care of all that grunt-work via Portage. LFS is an excellent stepping-stone towards Gentoo (or any other package-managed distro), showing you how things are working under the hood.
LOL...true
LiveReload should works on every browser that supports WebSockets. It should work on modern WebKit-based mobile browsers.

Live.js uses polling. It sends XHR HEAD request every second.

LiveReload monitors file changes using FSEvents (on Mac OS X) and inotify (on Linux). When the file modified, it pushes its path to the browser and reloads immediately.
Shooting for the Stars
Self Confidence Creator Review
In which case he publishes a lot of dissenting matter, http://newenergytimes.com/v2/news/2011/37/3705report3.shtml. Wouldn't that suggest that he believes the process works too?

Or is it your contention that this is all part of a huge fraud and that publicly annihilating his own claims is part of Rossi's method?
I wouldn't say I was a hater, but I was definitely wary. However I kept hearing about smart people who accepts him and works with him, so I started thinking there's probably something there.
If you seriously think that this whole debacle hasn't taxed our economy and the value of our currency more than $19B...then you're smoking something really good. :)

I know we have -3% unemployment in tech. Not quite so elsewhere, my friend.
That all looks great, but the level of thinking required when staring at the Public Portals page is quite offputting. I will persist, but having to think is going to put 95%[1] of people off.

[1] Statistic may be fictitious

Edit: Why is Friendika sometimes spelt with a K and sometimes with a C?
Thanks for this manifesto patio11! I read it a couple of times and thought how I could apply it to my career.

There are 2 parts in it that I have difficulties with, and I'd appreciate clarifications:

-----------------------------

"In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career."

How can you say that? Sure, an experienced and intelligent programmer can learn to program in Language X in a few weeks, but do you think that after a year he will reach the same level of efficiency of a similarly experienced and intelligent programmer who has 8 years of experience programming?

Sure, you'd know most of the important things that the 8-year guy knows, but I was taught that the worth of programmers is exponential to their talents. Say that if you're at the 99% percentile of Language X developers, there are (say) about 1,000 people like you in the world. If you're in the 99.99% percentlie, there are now only 10 people like you worldwide. Wouldn't that result in a much bigger price that you could put on your services?

-----------------------------

"Profit Centers are the part of an organization that bring in the bacon [...] Cost Centers are, well, everybody else. You really want to be attached to Profit Centers."

I don't understand this.

Let me see if I got the terms right: Profit Centers are "where the money comes in from", and Cost Center are "where the money comes out of". But of course, Cost Centers do not exist because CEOs are looking for ways to flush money down the tubes-- it's just that Cost Centers bring in money in indirect ways. For example, let's say that you're a CEO, and you have hired an expensive programmer to write a script that periodically checks that your backups are valid. That would qualify for a "Cost Center", right? And everyone would agree that this is a wise investment.

So what am I supposed to do if I'm hired to do this kind of job? Decline it because it's a Cost Cetner?

You also suggest to "engineer your transfer [from Cost Center to Profit Center] after joining the company". Wouldn't that be kinda douche-y? I mean, I'd be pretty pissed if I hired a guy to do Job X and then he was trying to engineer his way into Job Y because that's where the money is.

-----------------------------

Thanks again for the post!
This is exactly why authoritarians like you prefer less freedom for the people. Because otherwise you can't make them listen to you.

And of course you're just as blind to the consequences here as with airline security. You'd sell out everyone else's right to have a say, for the flawed representative democracy we have, without even ensuring it'd even listen to you.

If you suddenly noticed a real flaw and wanted it addressed you'd find yourself just as ignored by the system as we are by you.
House Painting Contractor - Interior Painting Levittown, NY 11756
Winning Features vs Keeping Features
Winning vs. Keeping is how I'm starting to look at features that we develop. It's something might help to balance expectations and demands from other groups within the company.
FAA Enlists the Web For Reporting Laser Shenanigans
because private label mortgage issuance shut down. over 90 pct of mortgage origination are now agency.

Interesting - it's as if the private sector has figured out that maybe fewer mortgages should be issued until we come up with better underwriting standards.

Fannie/Freddie are now taking taxpayer dollars to continue issuing mortgages that the private sector considers too risky.

Clearly, Fannie/Freddie are paragons of underwriting and would never issue bad loans.

also prime mortgages from the bubble years got hammered and of course that hurt them.

Wait, Fannie/Freddie made bad loans and assigned them the label "prime"? They clearly had nothing to do with the mortgage mess whatsoever.
I've given codecademy a try and must say while it's fun to get through the task as a non-programmer who's trying to learn it's confusing. Often I can complete a task but then not really understand what I just did.

I'm trying to teach myself how to program for Android and find that pretty difficult. I do know HTML and CSS but when it comes to finding current, good information on Android I'm having trouble. I've ended up having to resort to purchasing books.

With HTML and CSS I learned at the P2PU http://p2pu.org/en/groups/all/?school=school-of-webcraft which I think is terrific if you get a good group and instructor.
The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
How does converting energy into mass make it "colder"? If you have 1 protons worth of energy in a volume, and you have 1 nonmoving proton in another area with the same volume, isn't there the same amount of energy in both regions? Or is it "colder" because you can't have a region with energy and nothing else, it must be something like kinetic energy, which gives heat?
Hey all, Winning vs. Keeping is how I'm starting to look at features that we develop. It's something might help to balance expectations and demands from other groups within the company.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, would this be helpful to you, or do you think this would just complicate your life...
I'm certain that there are similar legal questions surrounding children doing manual labor. I guarantee you someone would have a fit if they caught an 11 year old cleaning windows.

The only difference is that someone in a chair with a sign is a really easy target.
Is Proper English Dying? And Should Us Care?
I'm hesitant to wade into this debate, but this is a pretty sophistic argument, for a few reasons:

* He largely ignores the potential for a catastrophic financial collapse in 2008-2009. At the time, pretty much everyone agreed that stopping the bleeding was a good idea. Among economists, that some sort of vigorous action was necessary is close to a consensus view. To completely dismiss this is ridiculous. Further, he doesn't address how expensive TARP actually ended up being, or that the majority of the money has been paid back.

* The funds weren't obtained from "new taxes levied on employed, middle class, non-drinkers who have never set foot in Heidi’s bar." There has been no increase in federal income taxes since Obama took office. The only meaningful tax increases that I can recall come as part of the Affordable Care Act.

* The author makes no concrete arguments for why no changes to financial regulations are unnecessary. Instead, there's a glib aside that the 'government also announces a series of regulations to “fix” the problem'. Really? This is important. Tell us why. If the government had stopped banks from selling Heidi's bonds as AAA-rated securities, wouldn't this crisis have not happened?

Overall, this is a simple, facile metaphor with many implicit assumptions, designed to bolster the author's libertarian worldview. To the author's credit, he does a good job explaining the fundamentals of the housing crisis.
It really is funny though. I don't know a single person (and most of my friends are quite happy iPhone users) with an iPhone that has a turn-by-turn app.

The ones that do use a GPS drag around a Garmin, the rest just try and work with Google maps as best they can.

A couple did switch to Android recently, but assumed it too didn't have turn-by-turn and kept muddling through with Google Maps until I showed them how to do it.

I don't know why that is exactly, but it's weird and gives me a strange impression that this is a seriously omission from the platform. This acquisition is no doubt part of a larger strategy to bring this capability (probably in a wonderfully Apple-y way) to their mobile platforms.
It sounds like an effective way to force users to update/upgrade their software.
Blog Marketing Tips To Live By
Yes, but this is about what causes the bubble. Sloppy credit is necessary and sufficient for that. Price increases are at worst an aggravating factor once the bubble is already under way.
HP's Todd Bradley refutes webOS shutdown rumors
@SamLM
Good question, but on this thread I want people to only share first impressions, and I'm afraid to give too much away and influence their feedback.

If you want to ask me directly, feel free to email me: elad@swifto.com
Don't Kid Yourself: You're Not Steve Jobs
"Boot" = "trunk", depending on your dialect of English.
The funny thing is that if there's a permit requirement in place, you don't bother to get one, and later somebody sues you, your failure to obtain the required permit is often sufficient to establish negligence without having to prove any other facts. It's economically efficient to impose strict liability on you if you don't have one rather than placing the burden of proof on the plaintiff. Since most of your home improvement projects won't create any danger or result in any liability, nobody's going to hunt you down for your failure to obtain a permit. But if it does involve risk, having a permit shields you from frivolous claims.

None of that in any way justifies the need for inane government regulations that do nothing but inhibit your freedom because of hypothetical scenarios.

You realize that these regulations are usually put in place as the result of litigation, yes? You know, dreadful injury happens, litigation ensues, party at fault demurs, plaintiffs campaign for better regulation to prevent similar injuries to others. All other things being equal, the cost of regulation or litigation ends up being the same, but it's a lot more predictable if you cover that cost up front.
Why does this have "post mortem" in the title? It is so misleading. Whenever I read "post mortem" in a title I immediately think somebody or something has died (possibly metaphorically). In this case I expected the article to be about an abandoned (dead) project. It was a very confusing read.

Maybe it's because English isn't my native language and the Latin meaning just makes a lot more sense to me.
What is this? I went there and they try to sell me some iPad app?
Not any more mythicized than any particular iOS feature. Mapquest is available for free on Android as well. It is a nice app, but it can't match the integration of native Google Navigation.
Dave Winer: Occupy Silicon Valley?
And don't forget there are big, serious players out there who wouldn't think twice of using dirty tricks (and the know them all) to quash you like a bug. She's lucky she's under the radar. Somebody dropping a couple hundred thousand for a few dozen high-end machines would not go unnoticed

So yes! Kinda. If you could retire on 400-1200 bucks a month, I think it would work. Past that point, though, it gets ugly. Small scale? It rocks. Large scale? It looks much better on TV than it actually is.

Fair enough. I guess I'll just stick to selling meth.
Microsoft don't ship a C compiler

Adding C99 features to their C++ compiler would be nice be probably not cost effective for them
There is a difference between setting up shop on a public sidewalk and conducting business on private property.
> Since apple isn't claiming a law violation

They were. Steve Jobs and everyone who still works at Apple would have been okay with it if you were in prison for tinkering with your iPad.
Live In the TacFit Warrior World
True for the present time. Was not true in the past.
There's a video of tech discussion at Stanford with Vivek Wadhwa recalling how hard it was for the first set of Indian entrepreneurs to raise money in the Valley. This was back in the 80's, I think, when you didn't have as many (or any) Indian CEOs, VCs, members of boards etc. The problem was that VCs had no history of funding companies run by Indian CEOs, and there was a reluctance to be the first to conduct an experiment.
"The possibility that elephants could have some sort of rudimentary religious thoughts would be a great breakthrough"

the possibility that religion is a man made precept and burial is nothing more than the instinctive animal brain reacting to a member of it's herd no longer responding would be an even greater breakthrough.
I suggest you take a look at http://VentureBonsai.com. It's an equity-crowdfunding platform, but you can also get some traction with angels/vc's.