skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The background here is that the SEC is currently seeking the power[0] to impose fines without judicial review:

Even as Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in
Manhattan rejected the Securities and Exchange
Commission‘s proposed settlement with Citigroup because he
did not find it in the public interest, the agency’s
chairwoman, Mary S. Schapiro, sought to enhance the
S.E.C.’s authority to impose higher financial penalties to
deter securities violations. An important part of her
proposal would allow the S.E.C. to seek the increased
penalties in administrative proceedings, a move that may
allow the commission to avoid having to pursue its cases
in federal courts in the future, skirting the kind of
scrutiny Judge Rakoff applied.

This article is a press hit[1] by the SEC's PR folk[2] which encourages people to call for stiffer penalties against those evil firms. Bingo, SEC gets a powerup. The "grassroots" outcry means they can now just ticket & fine companies without the meddling checks and balances of the federal courts system.

The SEC's fines have about as much to do with preventing a financial meltdown as local police traffic fines have to do with preventing a murder. It's just safety theater.

That is, everyone is familiar with the local/state government phenomenon of cops who ticket to make quota at the end of the month. Whether you are "breaking the law" today depends in large part on whether state/local government needs to make money off you. Tickets for expired registration are profit centers, robbery investigations are cost centers.

The federal government is subject to many of the same dynamics, except that it isn't called on the carpet in the same way because federal agencies can intimidate those with knowledge of the situation into silence. Once in a while data comes out on the corruption and malfeasance of (e.g.) FDA[3] or EPA[4] or SEC[5] bureaucrats, but for the most part they have the guns so they are dishing out the punishment.

The NYT's role in all this is to act as stenographer. There is no summary of how much the SEC sought to earn in fines from pursuing these prosecutions, nor how many of them were overturned or thrown out of court.

[0] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/s-e-c-seeks-more-powe...

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[2] http://www.sec.gov/news/press.shtml

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/fda-chemist-p...

[4] http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.B...

[5] http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/sec-pornography-employees-spent-ho...
Can We Stop The Copycat Apps?
One man’s superficial parallel is another’s thought-provoking analogy. I think a lot of what Venkat says loses substance – or even falls apart – under scrutiny, but I keep reading, because another lot of it hits on some key insights.

This is a style of writing that should be valued more for the questions it raises than for the ones it answers. As another example, take Marshall McLuhan; much if not most of what McLuhan says in e.g. Understanding Media is somewhere between flimflam and complete bullshit... but the mode of thought starts the wheels turning, and some otherwise solid seeming cultural assumptions are questioned at their core... and at the end I’m really glad I spent the time reading it.
It's good to keep in mind that the debt level for US states is typically more in the 10-20% range. Since Euro member nations are - as far as money is concerned - basically in the same situation as US states, it's no wonder they're in trouble.
Well they have very different business models, neither company's licensing here seems unreasonable.
I haven't had a great experience with Moneybookers. I asked a question about their business account, and in response they shut down personal account without notice. They eventually changed their mind when I pointed out they'd violated their own terms of service, but it wasn't handled very well.
If that doesn't prove that FB's developers aren't thinking about security, I don't know what would. Nobody who is in a culture of protecting security would even consider building this.
SWFUpload with a progresss bar
What’s wrong with the world is that they are so focussed [sic] on Apple, Google and Facebook – with their over inflated [sic] IPOs and everything that comes with that. The world was not built on technology bubbles – it was built on hard work and honest money.

Even if I agree with the author's sentiment, that last line made me laugh.

Also: Apple, with their over inflated IPO? (their IPO having been long ago) destroys SAP's revenue and profit.

Edit: The world was built on hard work, but I'm not sure how SAP is necessarily the embodiment of that.
It would seem based on the screenshot ("Message x to ask them to remove the photo...") that they must have specific permissions set to cause this to work as I can't replicate on people that I can't message.
You can get a trial version of SAP here > http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/webcon...

But the problem is that its not meant to be run at home. I'm guessing most contracts for SAP run into the 10s of millions and I don't think they intend to give that up quite easily. Though there are a few companies (for example: Secude) that pretty much sit around and build hacks on SAP applications, but that too involves a lot of paperwork with SAP and almost always ends up with SAP buying out those companies.
Beta Users Now a scam?
A couple thoughts here:
1) As the article states, Facebook has fiduciary duty to Facebook and nobody else.
2) Same with the VCs.
3) This isn't unique to high tech. Sometimes a CEO will accept a bad merger price to become the CEO of a larger firm. This is called the principal-agent problem and is why boards should be involved in all M and A.
4) Unless there are competing bids it is hard to prove a failure of fiduciary duty. In the end it's reputation. If the Angel and VC feel screwed then the execs won't get money again. If not it is ok. It is lie Prisoners Dilemna - you play nice in a repeated game.
Sorry, couldn't resist. :)
Profit margin as the metric for measuring "interesting"? There are lots of reasons fb could be considered interesting, and profit margin is only one and waaay down on the list. How about the fact that fb revolutionized the way people communicate and connect?

On the flip side, SAP revolutionized business software and as a consequence, business organization. That's pretty interesting too. I know which side I would come down on, but simplifying the debate to profit margin misses the point by a wide margin.
Quoting Sir Humphrey: "Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?"
I think it's safe to say that for most businesses, while PayPal may only get you access to 80% of potential customers, Bitcoin gets you less than 1%.

Until Bitcoin is an established process, offering it means that you have to evangelize it. That means you are suddenly in the position of trying to sell both a service and a currency to a customer. That's more risk than most merchants want to take.

I did consider using it, I have a business with a fairly technical audience, but for now, I have to wait until the legal issues (whether only perceived or actually true) are worked out.
Google fails after a few zoom outs for me, screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Kss1x.png

One way is to set a threshold for whether or not to join the dots, if it's above the threshold perform a search between those points to see if they are between the dots or if they diverge, this search can be complicated or simple, google seems to use a fair bit of cpu power when zooming out on tan(x) so I'm guessing they're using a search here rather than some alternative 'clever' induction from the nature of the curve itself.
Some of this is paypal's own fault. They've created the expectation that transferring money from anyone in the world to anyone else in the world should be painless and frictionless. For many cases paypal lives up to that (really quite amazing if you think about it) level of service. But the world is not a perfect place (nor is paypal of course) and a lot of people run into problems and their instinct is to blame paypal for both of those imperfections.

More so, people can use paypal without having any amount of experience with alternate payment processing methods, so they have no yard stick of comparison. They just don't know that any payment processor in the world would stomp all over them to the same or greater degree, so they merely level a harangue at paypal for not living up perfection.
Your use of pronouns reveals your personality
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SAP passes an image of a predictable company where innovation doesn't really happen (whether that's true or not is irrelevant - perception is what counts).

Money and size is irrelevant. Concrete supports all of our homes, but calling is cool compared to e.g. "ultralight metallic microlattice" [1] is ridiculous by most people's definition of cool.

[1]: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/lightest-...
Understanding Java Garbage Collection
The USA has tons of debt too. Per person it's unmanageable. The only reason this is okay (and we keep talking about Europe) is that the USA can print more money and Europe can't. Is this right?

Yes. The picture is even more stark when you look at Japan, where the government has more than 200% debt/GDP, but pays record low interest on bonds. Monetary sovereignty matters.

However, I wouldn't use the term "print money", simply because it clouds the issue. After all, you can also look at it this way: all the US government debt is money that has already been "printed". That view is essentially equivalent, because "paying back" a bond simply means transforming one government liability (the bond) into another government liability (reserves at the central bank). Whether that money is held in the form of paper, reserves at the central bank, or longer maturity bonds is unimportant.

What is important is that the private sector has already made it very clear that it does not intend to spend that huge amount of money any time soon, so for the purpose of analyzing what is actually happening in the economy the debt is irrelevant. After all, the debt is a stock, and what we're mostly interested in - things like GDP, or the payments that go towards employment - are flows.

Yes, there are interest payments. It is sobering to learn that a monetarily sovereign government chooses the interest rate that it pays on its liabilities. If the political will was there, the US government could just stop issuing interest-bearing bonds, and otherwise continue as usual.

Inflation, you worry? Well, the only first-order effect of such a move would be that the interest rate falls to zero. In theory, that could have a (very small) inflationary effect, but since the interest rate is already essentially zero, even that is unlikely to happen.
Make portable applications online for free ~ Abtevrythng
I've used your documentation before, and it's amazingly useful. It's let me solve keyboard mapping issues in the least hacky way possible, especially when combined with KeyRemap4MacBook.
New Planet Is It True?
Yep, if you do anything except put things in boxes and ship them via FedEx directly to billing addresses, you're not really part of their core business.
As with all economics, anyone suggesting they know with any certainty at all how something is going to turn out is trying to separate you from your money ;-)

The Economist has a pretty good article this week looking at just this: http://www.economist.com/node/21541021 - I'm not sure if the full text is available to non-subscribers. Their opinion seems to be that the austerity plan was basically right, but it could now be loosened a little to encourage growth.
Therefore, I am not intelligent because I can't get my logic correct. :-)

Actually, I was hoping to slip that one by you guys, because I knew there was something wrong with it.

The point I should have made was that the species that understands less language (us) is considered more intelligent by humans than the one that understands more language (dog). This seems screwed up.

Taken to an extreme, there could be a theoretical species that can communicate among its own kind and understand every other species' communication, and we'd consider it unintelligent because WE can't understand them. That sort of logic makes US seem pretty unintelligent.
There's something gone very wrong with download sites in the last few years. Aside from this nonsense I've noticed a predominance of very misleading advertisements on download sites (attempting to misdirect you into thinking an ad is your download link). The site owners have to know about this but it seems they don't care enough to do anything about it.

Given the cheapness of s3 storage and such-like I'd say it's smart to avoid hosting on download sites in general.
"to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down"

No wait, that was NATO...
There's a few of them: http://www.sitepoint.com/backup-social-media-profiles/
Ask HN: how do you deal with RSS overload
AskHN: how do you deal with RSS overload

I'm sure everyone here has at least a few RSS/Atom feeds they watch, so do I. The more feeds I watch the happier I am but the less time I have.

Does anyone have a solution to this already?

My idea is to create a system that lets you merge feeds intelligently based on the feeds importance(you define) and the actual votes the link has. It would target HN and reddit initially.

Would you guys find this useful?
would you pay for such a service?
what form would you want it to take (web app, browser extension, open project so you could host).

if anyone is going to take/steal the idea just let me know so we aren't both working on it.

thanks
Just because they don't make a profit doesn't mean they don't have to collect sales tax. When Walmart sells AA batteries as a loss leader, they don't get to not collect sales tax for it just because they used "all the money gained [(and then some, out of their own pockets!)] for either shipping or purchasing the batteries".

It gets really complex, in fact: the warranty replacement is only tax free if the warranty was a taxed line item during the original sale. If you make repairs to something, and you pass through the costs of the object to the person hiring you, you are generally considered to be a "retailer" and are responsible for collecting sales tax (which explains why you see wholesale discounts being given to large classes of professionals, from plumbers and carpenters to interior decorators).

That said, I am not claiming that the sales tax is the issue here: I'm claiming that this is a complex situation with a lot of intermingled laws and service terms, and that it is not at all clear that these people are running something that was entirely kosher and should de facto be supported.

People seem to have a thirst for PayPal's blood, and are totally ignoring (or, more favorably, simply not realizing due to lack of knowledge) that this was a somewhat sketchy, certainly risky (from a credit fraud perspective), and probably even illegal operation; and it makes no matter whether it involved feeding children or sick cats, or whether this is a computerized algorithm that flagged it or a person: the reason for the flagging, and for the blocks, actually makes a lot more sense when you examine the whole issue.
Germany has 80% debt/gdp ratio.
This is the first time i hear about such in Uganda
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I don't think you've read the comment you replied to.
At the end of the day, Paypal is a slave to the credit card associations. To that end, whenever they find something out-of-the-ordinary, they have no choice but to act. The sad reality is, they really don't have any latitude in cases like this, if they want to prove to their credit card overlords that they are tough on fraud.

For whatever reason, it seems that they'd rather be known for having terrible customer service than own up to the fact that they are hog-tied as to their policies on what kinds of transactions they can process.
All what you want. But Italy has a tax to gdp ratio close to 50%. Germany has it probably higher than 40%.

You want to increase taxes? Fine. Then say you want to nationalize the economy, because that is the end result.
>> Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern?
>Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it.

That's a bit like saying "I had to get a pay day loan at 27% per week interest, I had no alternative and they fucking know it".

It probably means you're doing it wrong.

If the business you're trusting to Paypal can't get a Big Bank Merchant Account, maybe you need to work out why (and whether it's a very good reason... it might be that your great idea is exactly the sort of thing Paypal _needs_ to shut down quickly before lots of people lose their money.)

Etsy merchants (and eBay sellers) all happily use Paypal, because for the "put it in a box, ship it by FedEx" businesses have _way_ less "trouble" with Paypal than everybody else.
I'd love to know more about the legalities of a company (that isn't a bank) withholding funds for months. PayPal must be making a pretty profit on the interest accrueing on those accounts.
I would add the the SEC is a notoriously corrupt organization in that they need the banks help in order to understand what is going on AND people who work for the SEC tend to find their way into cushie bank jobs. The idea of giving them more power doesn't seem to me like any kind of solution at all.

The real problem is that people just don't care enough about white collar crime. When someone mugs you for $5 you want vigilante justice, but when billions (trillions?) of dollars are on the line, we are happy to just shrug our shoulders.
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> Wait, what? According to his figures [...], yet SAP is somehow claimed /more/ interesting?

I also like that by his own metrics Facebook has ~800m users, SAP has ~500m users, therefore Facebook is insignificant?

But of course, TFA is (apparently) a SAP consultant and his tagline is "Tangential Musings about Enterprise IT". It's not like he's going to say otherwise.
Acquiring a mutex on Linux involves reading an integer from memory.

Also, the way a queue prevents two consumers from popping off the same element is the same way a mutex is implemented.
Apple & publishers in EU ebook market anti-trust probe
The official policy is actually that the "fixed fee" ($0.30) is kept, and the "variable fee" (2.9%) is returned to you, but in practice in many situations the fees are fully refunded. The situation is somewhat different for micropayment transactions (which are 5% + $0.05), but this vendor was probably not using them for this account (in most situations, unfortunately, this is an "all or nothing" account flag).

(I actually spent a half hour talking to my PayPal account manager today about this very subject, presenting different charges and asking why fees were or were not kept in various situations; however, I do use micropayments, so my results are not going to be terribly relevant, and we are actually continuing the conversation tomorrow. ;P)
I disagree. You can message people that you aren't friends with. See the first screen shot ("add her as a friend or send her a message").

I think the reason it only works on some profiles it that perhaps the profile pictures are the only ones that it will show you. And some people only have one profile photo. (This is an untested theory / guess.)
This is a lot - Healthtap receives $11 million
Crisis in south Europe is due to public overspending (Where do you live? Do you understand how the money is spent down there?)

Anyway, of course if you produce more money, you still have a spending problem. Only way to solve this in the long term is either increasing taxes or lowering the expenses. You choose.
A Service in Need, A Service Indeed 
Earlier taxi cab were mean of transportation from one place to another, and mainly consisted of black color in general but that is past now. Though taxis are still used for transportation but what changed over few years is the change in car physical appearance which could be used on occasions for status symbol by using luxury cars in wide range of different colors.
> I remember the first time I found Sun bundling the Yahoo! toolbar along with the Java runtime.

Rest assured that they have now ceased this insane pratice.

Now the JRE installer force install the Ask Toolbar instead.
First off, I love math. It's awesome. I've always loved it, and it was always my best subject.

But let's be honest: It is BORING. I don't sit around doing math things in my head when I could be doing anything else.

Okay, occasionally I'll find some interesting math thing and play with it, or find a (real life) word problem and decide to solve it. But other than that, it's so amazingly boring. Learning math is even more boring.

So why don't kids like math? Because it's boring! I don't blame them.

Some people are blaming the teachers, or the education system, or blah blah blah. Okay, maybe they -could- be doing things better, but has anyone ever done their job perfectly? I've yet to meet that person. Instead, they're doing their best, just like everyone else.

I started learning Japanese a few years ago. What I didn't expect to learn was how many different ways there are to learn a new language. And the best way isn't any single one of them... It's to combine a bunch of them together. And not a particular set, either. You should combine all the ones that work best -for you-.

Having learned just exactly how complicated it is to make the perfect set of lessons for a single person, I looked around and saw how differently everyone learned. It's not only impossible to create a perfect set for 1 person, it's impossible to create a good set that matches everyone. The best you can do is catch the people who don't learn well on their own and hope the rest will teach themselves.

So then I look at our system, and I'm not surprised that I see that's exactly what they're doing. They're trying to catch the stragglers and leaving the brightest to fend for themselves. And they can. I did. But had I -known- that was happening, I'd have forced my education to go differently.

My girlfriend is homeschooling her son for various reasons, but chief among them was that he hated school. He was bored and picked on, and yet still getting bad grades. She made him a promise that if he brought his grades up to a certain level, she'd homeschool him the next year. Unsurprisingly, he easily hit that level.

It's been going great for them. She has accelerated everything to the point that he is constantly learning, and he gets top marks on everything. Then, because there's free time, he gets a little vacation to have fun for a while, then back to work the next semester.

They also go beyond the required instruction and do projects based on the material. I can't think of anything better to create lasting memories than that.

tl;dr - Our system is fundamentally flawed.