skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The crux of the problem was the rating agencies. By law, regulated funds (insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds) can only invest in bonds that are rated "investment grade" by official rating agencies ( such as Moody's). The rating agencies had two problems: 1) because they were given official status by law, they became less vigilant about guarding their reputation 2) instead of using a mix of statistics and personal judgment to rate bonds, they relied solely on models. It's analogous to managing programmer performance by only counting lines of code written. The banks found a way to game the algorithm ( slicing securities into tranches) and thus were able to sell massive quantities of very risky loans to big, regulated funds.

So you're right, it is the banks job to make sure the customer can afford the loan, and ordinarily a bank would never have made these subprime loans. But in this situation, the banks were able to resell these super risky loans to regulated funds that were obligated by law to invest in them. The result was disaster.
How we built Dojo Learning - part 2
This is the second part of a six-part blog post I wrote talking about how we built our startup, Dojo Learning, from my perspective as co-founder/lead developer.
I usually leave my stupid comments for all to see. If I intend to take credit for my good posts I should be man enough to do the same to the stupid ones.

Probably makes me look like a fool every now and then, but oh well that's not so different from life in general :-)

I don't mind admitting I'm wrong either.
"New York in the late 1900's was unbelievably corrupt, yet ..."

New York in the 1900's may have been as corrupt as Cameroon today, also the development of New York at that time may be comparable as the development of Cameroon now days.
The Simpsons - Lisa finds heaven in Springfield's new Mapple Store
Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click
Sorry guys, I would've posted the original link if I had known. It's not my site that I linked to.
Or as the great Gordon Gekko once said, "A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place."
:-)
Target Credit Card
An informative and detailed review of the Target Credit Card
Pricing: Hourly or Fixed?
Songbird's open-source music player finally takes flight
Vacation Club
You can find the best vacation club that will not limit you at www.weeklyvacationsforless.com. You will be able to travel any time of year to over 5,000 different destinations.
And look what happened to those guys...
Perhaps a partial solution would be to require consumers to pass a simple certification exam before being allowed to use certain risky financial products and services, such as high-limit credit cards, adjustable-rate mortgages, equity options, etc. It could be a simplified version of the CFP exam. Anyone who passed would be considered a "financial adult" trusted to handle his own affairs with minimal government oversight. Those who hadn't passed would be protected from getting themselves into deep trouble.
or that the 2000 correction and this one should be viewed as one correction?
the minutes:
http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/hparchives/archiv...

By what criterion did they decide if a field looks "good" or not? It matters less what you see than how you see.

It looks like market assessment, probably based on likely growth in demand, existing competitors and the HP founders' capabilities to make a "[technical] contribution" (as they later came to call it).
If you feel that making money is a change in strategy from "getting real", that's a sign that you have misunderstood the concept at a fundamental level.
But isn't that the choice of the App developer. It just seems really arbitrary of Apple to pick a set number.
Make My Car into a Prius: Retrofit a Poulsen Hybrid Plug-inKit
Mercurial 1.1 DVCS Released
You can see a full list of the new features at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/WhatsNew. My favorites:

1. A real rebase command, rather than having to use quilt voodoo
2. bookmarks, git-style lightweight local branches (though git users beware, though bookmarks and local branches have the same functionality, their semantics are radically different (and speaking as a Mercurial user, I prefer git's, but whatever))
3. Much more Windows-friendly repository format (and improvements to case-folding systems in general)
4. Vastly improved web interface

There's lots more, but having used the development version for the last several weeks, the above features are my favorites.
there goes ning. not that it was ever "there"
What a crisis this is; I'm usually on the right of debates here and I have to disagree.

It is definitely the consumers fault, but the banks should know better. They have a responsibility beyond themselves, the entire economy relies on the money flows that they control. If every bank acts a bit irresponsibly just to make a few people rich now, they've screwed over a vast number of people outside of the bank.

The cost to the bankers for acting irresponsibly is less than the cost to society. Therefore, I feel they should be regulated (within reason, of course).
It's more likely to be "how to work four days a week at your decade-old profitable company while still having people insist on referring to you as a startup".
> Because it is the premiere environment for manipulating images.

.. which is already "incredibly convenient" for those who are using it.

The example in the article is a typical straw man argument. Photoshop cannot do something, not because it's weak on a technology side. It doesn't do it simply because Photoshop users aren't interested in it as they do a different kind of image processing.

> * "Allowing us to have an intuition .." *

You lost me there, buddy. I spent few years working in the image processing field and let me tell you that the clustering of image fragments by similarity is something that would interest a fraction of a percentage of a researchers in the field. And if his example allowed you to understand what kinds of analysis he is doing, I humbly take my hat off, that's really impressive.
The problem with building a virus on OSX is not obtaining root access, it is replication. How is a virus going to propagate from one mac to the next?

If you don't propagate you're just a trojan and will have limited penetration.
The Art of Bootstrapping
Everything you always wanted to know about Google…
SmartGWT 1.0: Huge open source widget set and more
Let's not run too far.

There is the empirical fact (unless you disagree with it) that if people are offered more credit then is good for them, they take it. Responding to that by saying: 'An adult can be trusted not to do this', is just silly. We are taking about a big chunk (possibly a majority) of adults here.
Really? I thought a beta of one means that if GDP goes up 10%, then Google's revenue goes up 10%.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_coefficient:

More specifically, a stock that has a beta of 2 follows the market in an overall decline or growth, but does so by a factor of 2; meaning when the market has an overall decline of 3% a stock with a beta of 2 will fall 6%.
also the development of New York at that time may be comparable as the development of Cameroon now days.

No way. I would much, much prefer to live in New York city circa 1900 than Cameroon today. Read the section of "The Land of the dollar" on New York. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=vsxEAAAAIAAJ&...

And it's not the level of development that's the issue, it's the rate of growth. 1900's New York was getting much richer every year. The African countries are almost all either stagnant or actually getting poorer.
Maybe reality is frequentist and maybe it is not, but I will never know. After all, there can be no observer but me. Just me and my prior beliefs.
Artima doesn't look to be a social news site.
Yeah sure. It's not strange that the lender should choose to do this given the facts. That isn't strange.

What is strange is that if the lenders choose not to do this, & lend (ie sell) as much as people will borrow (buy) like most other markets, there will be a massive default rate. Presumable a person should be able to work out if they can repay a loan before taking it. Presumably they don't want to have a loan they cannot afford to repay.

Common sense (& the assumptions underlying economic theory) would suggest that this should be enough to make sure people don't loan too much in all but end cases.

The reason I say it's strange is that the running assumption that doesn't even seem to need to be mentioned any more in these sorts of articles is that consumers are determined to take out loans they can't repay & the banks, governments or whoever else need to police this. Supposedly, a big chunk of this 'crisis' (the sub-prime) comes down to that: banks not policing enough.

It's strange that no one thinks it's strange to assume that everyone wants to bankrupt themselves.
Cool. The changelog lists lots of updates; I'd be interested to hear from those who have had more experience with Git as to whether this improves Mercurial's stance versus Git.
The problem is that the US Fed is the ultimate gold farming bot. And it has all the permission it needs from the GMs.
Would someone explain this in layman's terms?
20 Excellent Free (Web) Rich-Text Editors
A good marketing campaign is rarely deterred by facts.
With respect, you're an ass. Just because I've had a registered account does not mean at all that I've only been on the site for 2 months.
I don't disagree with you. Defaults on an individual level are consumers' fault. Magnifying that to the point where the worldwide economy is at risk is banks' fault. They leveraged to a point where everything breaks down at a point that isn't totally unlikely. I can understand that in light of that, seeing banks hound people to take credit makes people understandably cranky.

I think the fact that it's consumers' fault is the interesting point here. This article implies that on average consumers cannot be trusted to loan what they can afford and/or pick the correct credit card. Not because they are being tricked or because information is unavailable or any other market imperfection. Because the average decision making is bad. What does that do to economic models?
Diesel-electric locomotives work like this too. You can run your diesel engine at its most optimal rpm which makes it more efficient.

This is how I hope they'll build gas-electric or diesel-electric hybrids in the future.
So, disclaimer: I'm a Mercurial fan.

There are two big things git has traditionally done better than Mercurial: lightweight branching, and rebasing. Both were possible in Mercurial using mq (plus qguards, in the case of lightweight branching), but the experience was rather clumsy. I didn't mind putting up with it, since, at the time the two systems came out, Mercurial was markedly easier to use than git. But, over the last year, git closed a lot of the usability gap, while Mercurial has held almost completely still, and that's resulted in a lot of arguments that Mercurial's time had passed, and git was the way to go.

The good news is that this release fully eliminates git's first advantage, and either eliminates, eliminates and beats, or fails to address the second, depending on where you're coming from. The easy news to process: the rebase extension enables full git-style rebasing, end of story. You can do an automatic pull and rebase via `hg pull --rebase`, if that's what you want, or you can do more customized rebasing via `hg rebase`. So that's done, and, based on my use in production environments, works very well.

Now, Mercurial 1.1 introduces real lightweight branching--no mq hackery--via an extension called `bookmarks`, which ships with Mercurial. These provide identical capabilities and benefits as git's local branches. The complicated discussion we can have revolves around bookmark semantics. bookmarks, like git branches, are basically "floating tags"--tags that mark a head in the repo's DAG, and that move with that head as you issue additional commits. The difference comes from the fact that bookmarks very directly expose what's going on, whereas git's branch command hides what's going on behind what I personally feel is a more intuitive UI. So, the argument is: is exposing what's actually going on better, because it gives you more power; equivalent, since the functionality provided is identical; or worse, because too much implementation is exposed in interface. I personally need more time to sort out preconceived bias of what micorbranching should look like, from the bookmark extension in particular.
Higher Education May Soon Be Unaffordable for Most Americans, Report Says
Merb ♡ Rails
Coches Alemania
Import cars from Germany. How import Germany cars to Spain, Audi cars, Bmw cars, Mercedes Cars, Porsche cars.
I was referring to the "If the event is all guys nobody wants to go." comment.
Chocolate Gift Baskets
Chocolate Gift Baskets – AOGBaskets has the finest gift baskets that can be tailored for the occasion it’s needed for by simply customizing your order. Birthdays, holidays and any other occasion -- AOG has a basket for you.
Remember when the users of news.ycombinator rewrote editorialized headlines?
Link to Dr. Mark Roth's company website:

http://www.ikaria.com/science.html

It looks like they are trying to develop an on-demand reversible metabolic hibernation for critically ill patients.
Psoriasis-psoriasis treatment-psoriasis relief
Skin Psoriasis is a noncontagious normal skin cells that cause rapid breeding of the red thickened skin, which results in dry patches. Dry skin flakes and rapid scale production of skin cells results from the buildup.
Disclaiming that I'm more of a statistics enthusiast than a real statistician, here's how I understand the schism.

Bayesian (subjective) and Frequentist (objective) are two schools of thought about how statistics should operate. One of the best ways to think about the difference is to call Bayesians pragmatic and Frequentists rigorous.

In that face of trying to quantify something you don't know, Bayesians take the stance that if you just say something — even if it's incorrect — and then keep adjusting it as more data comes in then you'll eventually have a valid statement. The idea is that even if your model is only so correct, at least you have one. Unfortunately, no one can actually prove that sort of thing actually works all of the time. It just seems to.

Frequentists faced with this situation instead try to understand the reason why something is happening and then model it from the beginning. By considering these rigorous models and testing them against data they eventually build a resilient model for the unknown which validates. That is, unless they don't, in which case Frequentists are kind of out of luck.

So when you're talking about statistics, which is all about trying to model things you don't understand, Bayesians and Frequentists get up in arms all the time because they each have something to call foolish about one another.

The coolest part is that this sort of schism is being reflected in the world of physics as well where Frequentists are in the Newtonian/Einsteinian school but, bit by bit, that worldview is being shaken up by Quantum.
Windows Drops Below 90% Market Share--Firefox Above 20%
Fedora Project Taking Ideas For Next Release Name
Photo of the racks in the original Google datacenter
For your amusement :)
Save Vim syntax highlighting to HTML
What was/is facebook's distribution strategy?
New Google Map Utilities Enhance the User Experience
Twitter CEO: The revenue's coming soon, but I won't tell you how
Apple deletes Mac antivirus recommendation
His point - "[Lisp] depends on specific features of a specific editor" - is obviously wrong. Accordingly, no such features are cited.

Edit: I did think of one bit of tool support without which I would find Lisp unbearable: indentation and paren matching. Ok, maybe two bits. But that's a really low bar and, more to the point, has nothing to do with Emacs.
Looks like most of the midsized companies "data centers" I've been in recently. At least the cables aren't all over the floor for you to trip on as well.
I set up an email address that would automatically post to my blog. That way, I can edit posts in an editor I like rather than a horrible textarea. I've had this feature since, oh, 2001 I think.
Apple Legal: Reasonable People Do Not Believe the Claims of Apple Marketing
Zero Interest Credit Cards
An informative and detailed review of Zero Interest Credit Cards
heh, slot 1/a cpu connectors. ah, the 90s.
I worked at mines a few years back. These diesel electrics were stealthy. Don't make much noise at all, and the next thing you know they are charging at you at 60mph.
I've always been a advocate of Ramaze. Too bad it does not get the press it deserves.
Read the sentence again. It is a justification of their choice as being a practical one, not a statement about the quality of the book. They're saying that while "Getting Real" is the 4th best seller on Lulu, that's kinda like the old joke about "What's better than winning a gold medal at the Special Olympics?" To even have a hope of reaching "real" best seller status requires the resources of a traditional publisher, so that's what they did. Whether they actually achieve that status is another question, one which they make no claims about. That's why the next sentence reads "We want to sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies." not "We will sell hundreds of thousands or millions of copies."
TiVo Guilt
Mint.com, Financial Tracking And Planning The Web 2.0 Way
Ask YC: Best way to get an internship in SV, for internationals
Hello YC/HN:

I'm trying to find an internship with a startup (one I believe in)/tech company in SV but I need sponsorship since I'm from Canada. I got an employee to refer me to Apple, but I would like some contingency plans. Any suggestions other then just firing off resumes to startups (which I've done).

Notes: I'm a business person not a lovable code monkey
Who Protects The Internet?
I've felt similar stress from my inbox and feed reader... the GMail Labs "Hide Unread Counts" tweak helped with the inbox guilt a little :)
Amazon HD Video Rental Menu Shows Up On TiVo
We have billions to spend to fix problems greedy bankers caused, but teachers have to still dig into their own pockets to buy supplies. It's a truly sad and disappointing situation.
Now that's strange. Check out http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/12/juice-feasting-post...
and go down to "Incredibly Vivid Dreams and a New Ad Network Idea" or, to quote,

"In this particular dream, I was taking an exam about the computer gaming industry, so next to one of the essay questions, I saw an ad/logo for IGN Entertainment. I found it amusing at the time to see an ad on my exam, but I was happy that the school got money for it. At least it’s better than trying to raise funds by selling the students out to junk food and soda pushers."

Some Personal Development guy that claims his creativity increased while he was drinking only fruit juice for a month had this exact idea.

Weird.
In some ways this article highlights how fragile Google is. If you think about how quickly Google cleaned up in the search market and yet 97% of their revenues are web Ad based (according to the article).

While not all of those are going to be Ad Words a lot will be and if someone replaced them in search (not Cuil, obviously) then they would be in trouble, fast.
We get always get so worked up everytime we see someone playing with a new media to advertise in.

Teens are hammered with advertising left and right all their life from every direction, I hardly think a tiny ad for a local dentist is going to drive them to the edge.

When kids in school start coming home with tattoos advertising local businesses, I'll start to worry.
Competition is the solution for corruption. Privatization often helps in fostering competition. But a private monopoly does not seem better than a public one.
Got anymore? I'd love to see what kind of network gear was in there at the time, etc. Very cool. Thanks.
Russia was corrupt before godless communism was invented.
Maybe reddit has, but have you seen http://thecutelist.com ?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Sp...
Frequentist statistics interprets probabilities as frequency of a certain outcome among a large number of trials. (Actually the limit as the number of trials tend to infinity).

A Bayesian interpretation of probability is "degree of belief". What is the probability that tomorrow there will be rain ? Well, a priori I believe it is about 33%. However the sky is clouded today, which has 50% probability to cause rain the next day, etc. etc. So Bayes rule kicks in and I can make a decision whether or not to carry umbrella.

For a frequentist, probability of a single event is meaningless: 33% of all days in the past have been rainy. 50% of all days following cloudy days have been rainy, etc. . . If there were a large number of parallel worlds, in x % of them there would be rain, etc. etc.
Unfortunately I didn't get a digital camera until 2002, so I don't have many pictures from early Google.

Here's a closeup of a nic on one of the machines: http://friendfeed.com/e/e7bc8124-ee7f-4949-91d2-773e410613d3...
I took this picture two months ago at the Computer History Museum, where the jj rack is on display.
Here's what their datacenters look like a couple years ago (with Chris DiBona): http://flickr.com/photos/ttrueman/296867981/sizes/l/
What? ;)
Here's an upclose one on the first gen rack: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Google’s_...

My understanding is that they found the HP ProCurve switches were a better deal to buy two chassis and stuff all the blades into one box rather than buy the blades and add them to one. It was cheaper that way.
scala.Function1 lacking
Plausible deniability at least as strong as freenet provides it, could help somewhat.
Because it appears in a magazine whose readers clearly desire titillation more than insight.
I think Seth Godin got it right. Some of the comments here also prove how much Newton is a brand around which a perfect marketing campaign has been formed. I wrote a post about this:

http://science1.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/the-greatest-market...
What were those switches for? (not the network switches, the physical on/off switches with the green and white wires)

Fans?
you could, of course, just file some bug reports..
Health Halo Can Hide the Calories
They are the power LEDs/switches for each of the four motherboards on each piece of cork board. Yes, cork board. It's non-conductive.
Tycho is really good!
Crystal Castles. And Yelle, thanks to Garry Tan.
sorry, lkozma below got this right, you didn't.

Bayesians claim to be more rigorous than frequentists, living or dying by the theorems of probability theory, rather than using a toolbox of ad-hoc tools. For example. And quantumness has very little to do with it.
Power switches. There were 4 machines per layer, 80 per rack.

BTW, here's a video (taken by someone else): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z19-6tvGSq4
Ensure timely and safe delivery of your Canvas Prints
If you happen to be a person that knows some one special that is living or working overseas and you don’t often get a chance to see them, then what do you do when the time comes for that special occasion such as birthday or anniversary? Some people are unfortunate enough to have their loved ones overseas at those special times, when you should both be together with each other. If there is nothing that can be done about the situation and you have come to the point where you need to send something overseas or long distance, you would need to make sure that it gets there in time for that special day.
Listening to a lot of:

2562: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=107955
Martyn: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=144550
Burial: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=56124
Distance: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=64768
TRG: http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=140948

All of the above fall under the realm of Dubstep, although 2562 is very techno influenced.