skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"banks in collapse, citizens teetering on the edge of bankruptcy" - have you not been reading the news from Europe? Have you not noticed the way the word "global" is prepended to the word "recession"?

Europeans had about four days of gloating while we stumbled. Then the gloating stopped because it turned out that many of their banks were even more leveraged than ours, despite their supposedly-superior regulation regime, and their bill came due too. For all that you hear people bitching about the US, in relative terms it's actually not doing so bad. (I'd prefer that we'd all be growing in absolute terms, but the whole "Europe is better than the US argument" is intrinsically relative, so I'm just agreeing to your terms and following through.)

You want to talk about how much better the European system is, then explain why this is happening there and not here: http://www.oxfordpress.com/hp/content/shared/news/world/stor... And notice the scale! This is not an isolated riot in one block of Paris. Nor is this the first time.

The European-style social system is unsustainable, and to their credit they are beginning to recognize this and beginning the hard task of scaling back their promises, but they face challenges from all those who were promised and do not want to give it up. I have found it highly ironic (and very sad) that as Europe wakes up to the failures of, for instance, socialized healthcare, the US seems primed to go charging into that pit of despair more than ever.
We use MailChimp at NewsCred and love it. Awesome service, easy to use website and they definately do have an API.

In fact, they have an API for transactional e-mails (i.e. ad-hoc ones to welcome a user for example). So you're not just restricted to using them for bulk emails.
I'm not only talking about France -- that was just the immediate target, as the country that Arrington visited.

Even in Germany they have very different attitudes toward work and social services than we do, yet still support an industrial and entrepreneurial culture (and still make fun of the French for being lazy). Framing this as a choice between US capitalism and French socialism (or Soviet communism) is a false dichotomy.
If you're going to say something or accuse someone, just say it!
Not all of them where signed off as fighting fit. The assumption was that less than 10% would fail so you could break the risk out so someone who want's zero risk and is willing to only make 4% is safe as long as 80% of them live. The math would have been fine if each morgage was independent but because the economy as a whole tanked the default rate went way up and people who where not willing to take much risk still got a beating.
"the probability of one cow dying wasn't independent of the next cow dying"

Like if you put them in a pen together ...

Explanation fail maybe, but joke succeed!
An Address in Mayfair - Donald MacKenzie on Hedge Funds
Guess this explains it. Sigh. Now I've admitted to using Facebook. But you see, it was this girl, and she wanted to "friend" me...

Shoulda known better.

http://lifehacker.com/5109085/log-into-lifehacker-using-face...
[video] Richard Branson on leading in challenging times
It's reporting. We can go down the list of whatever moral values you have: freedom of religion, speech, the ability to assemble with other people who feel like you, your ability to have your own property, your ability to be responsible for your soul -- all of these come from armed conflict between one side who was against it and one side who was for it. And all armed conflict involved atrocities.

That's just history.

the uncertainties of a complex world are so vast that I could never be so convinced of the righteousness of my cause

This we agree upon. What I'm saying is that you are forced to make a decision. If you default to self-destruction by virtue of an inability to decide, or if you decide self-destruction is preferable to victory, then in fact you are still making a decision -- that decision is to let the other side have their way. You're on the hook either way. And in fact, I would argue that if the other side is committing atrocities as well, you're even more on the hook for inaction to prevent their atrocities from occurring.

In practice this isn't extremely complex, it's just unpleasant as heck. Let's use the European theater in the last war. Hitler was trying to exterminate the Jews and others. In addition, both sides committed atrocities (although history will show the allies committed much less than the Germans) In addition, both sides tortured.

Now you can argue to to participate on either side would be immoral. You can argue this from a variety of viewpoints. But at the end of the day one side was fighting in order for longer-term peace to happen where nations and people would be free. The other side was fighting to dominate large portions of Europe and the purify the Aryan race. Any reasonable observer would conclude that the greater good for mankind was more free people, not more dead subjected people.

Extremists may use these arguments. I don't know. If so, they would be obliged to point out how their viewpoint would lead to more free alive people and less dead subjected ones. Since extremism most of the times seeks to subject people and to destroy those who do not agree with them, I believe that rules out 99% of those groups.

You mention extremism. I must point out the other end of the spectrum: it has become fashionable to promote "peace at any cost" and high values in the abstract as long as doing so means I don't have to make moral decisions or participate. In other words, you can ride the high horse of self righteousness to keep out of the muck of actually participating in the world. But then, when a 9-11 rolls around, suddenly you're a rifle-carrying militia member again. Done in this way, and not out of deep moral conviction, it's a form of laziness and self-absorption. In other words, you can use good words and good morals to do very immoral things (like sitting on your ass and not stopping horrors where they occur for the real reason that it might involve some pain or self-sacrifice) And I am definitely not accusing you of this, simply pointing out that both extremes here have problems.
I don't know how much you should read into that list, given that Zimbabwe, Iran, Armenia and Uzbekistan are listed as having significantly lower suicide rates than most industrialized nations. It's pretty clear that the statistics are less than reliable.
That's really not much different than the situation a typical very old person lives in now. My grandmother is 95 and has found the world bewildering for decades now. She's a widow, and all of her formerly numerous friends are dead or senile. Her old neighborhood is gone, modern entertainment reflects attitudes that are alien to her, etc. She has descendants she sees sometimes, but some other people her age don't even have that. Yet we don't see them hurling themselves off of cliffs very often.
Am I missing something, or does Lessig's move to Harvard come with a free jacket?
I hoped this was a clever title for the fine line between resending an email that was ignored and getting resented for spamming. But... no :)
"Ira Roth, from New Jersey, said that his family had $1 million invested, and that he was in a state of panic."

Ira Roth? Wow, somebody has an interesting name or just got a good one past the journalist.
I might have misremembered the advice. Maybe they were talking about not using it on web sites intended to be in other languages (I mean, Cyrillic, etc).
Madoff reminds me of Ivar Kreuger, the infamous "Swedish Match King" (http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...).
Bloggingheads.tv: Frontiers of Biogerontology (Eliezer Yudkowsky & Aubrey de Grey)
I just did a quick search on LinkedIn and found the woman who appears to be the current GM of Flickr. She may be able to point you in the right direction:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kakul
Eventually Consistent by Werner Vogels
(1) Who cares what fellow workers would say? Do work to make them happy, or yourself/your family?

(2) What kills morale for me is idiot work-a-holics who think they will get ahead in the company by parking their butt in a seat more hours then anyone else. I worked on a team once with mostly contractors (paid hourly) and a couple of moron permis who were like that. They were averaging 12 hour days across the year. The contractors did it because they were well compensated for it. But the permis did it because they thought they could stand out this way. Get promotions, raises and bonuses. The problem was that working 12 hours would only make you average. I continued doing 42 hours. My boss told me I was not up to the standards of the team and needed to work more. I told him that wasn't going to happen, so they transferred me to a development team where I became a stand out (not hard to do given the kind of developers in IT), getting raises and good bonuses every time.

Our salaries were comparable and bonuses have a cap, so basically they were throwing away 3-4 hours away every day to keep up with the little rat race they had created for themselves.
Where exactly did I say anything about evil? The goal of business is to fleece its customers of their money. Some do it in nicer ways than others but they all do it, poor money management skills on the customers part is always good for business. Our entire consumer economy is based on that fact; we spend all of our excess money rather than saving it like we should.
I would imagine that someone could also sign up for PayPal's merchant processing account and just use the virtual terminal in the iPhone browser.

PayPal also typically approves small merchants for much higher limits than authorize.net resellers.

What would be cool is if you could capture the buyer's signature via the touch screen and snap a digital photo of the back of the card and have it store that stuff somewhere along with the transaction ID.
It's always useful to look at other people's code.

Check out this site where the authors created an iPhone application each day for 31 days, complete with source code.

http://appsamuck.com/
Yep, some of them can be done much better with sed and tr.

The goal of this article, however, was not to illustrate the best practices but to document all Awk one-liners in awk1line.txt file.
The French are famous for extensive consumption of medicine in general.
Dropbox is awesome, miles ahead of the competition. My one complaint is that it doesn't seem to sync files unless they are closed. So when if I'm working on a manuscript for several hours, just pressing "save" doesn't back it up. I'd have to close and re-open for it to back up.

This wouldn't be an issue, but my laptop is wheezing the wheeze of imminent death.
I was really inspired after the video and decided to go help out in some IRC channels and mailing lists.

And then I was reminded why I stopped doing that a long time ago: there is so much snarkiness. None of these lists or IRC channels ever seem to take a stance against this behaviour and it seems to me as if there are often self-selecting groups of snarky "locals" who drive a list or IRC channel.

On the contrary, I do think that HN is fairly close to what he was describing and is the main reason why I've stopped frequenting other similar sites, but remained here.
Build a Web 2.0-like application in haskell, with HAppS.
I am announcing happstutorial 5 on hackage and in darcs.

There are new chapters on various macid topics, utf8 gotchas, cookies, and various improvements all over.

Please continue to report errors and inconsistencies as they come up.

This version is "close to final". At least for my purposes, it has boilerplate that covers nearly all the important important use cases for a web 2.0 app. OK I missed a few -- eg, there's still no email confirmation with registration -- but there's a hell of a lot.

So... don't use ruby for your next web 2.0 app -- use haskell!

thomas.
More cash for Facebook?
"You want to talk about how much better the European system is, then explain why [the French immigrant riots are] happening there and not here....and notice the scale! This is not an isolated riot in one block of Paris. Nor is this the first time."

1) It's early. If we keep up with the immigrant-baiting in this country, we'll get there. Just last year, we had huge protests in the major cities because of the way that we treat immigrants. Did you not notice?

2) We've been doing the violent social protest thing for quite a while: the Watts riots in 65, the LA riots in 1992, looting after Hurricane Katrina, the Benton Harbor riots in 2003...and many, many others. Here's a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots#1990s_-_2000 (for fun, count how many times France appears in the list, relative to the US!) We have a long, illustrious history of making minority groups so angry that they erupt into violence, so if anything, France is late to the party.

3) For the most part, the European banks were not more leveraged than US banks, with certain critical exceptions. That said, most of the world's banks make significant investments in US debt-backed assets, so it's pretty hard for an economic downturn in this country to avoid affecting other industrialized nations. The bank argument is a straw man.
Japanese researchers created a human cerebral cortex tissue from stem cells
> why this is happening there and not here: http://www.oxfordpress.com/hp/content/shared/news/world/stor.... And notice the scale! This is not an isolated riot in one block of Paris.

These are discontended immigrant groups. The riots in L.A. in '92 were regular American citizens. The Parisian suburbs have got nothing on the ghettos of L.A., New York, and Washington. Murders are actually rare in European cities.
Here is the original article:

http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909%2808%...
Both Skype and MySQL originated from Scandinavia which is completely different from southern Europe.

Can someone please define the common European properties that form the basis of this discussion?
You said: Capitalism is a system of decentralised decision making on resource allocation, ultimately leading to increased productivity and innovation.

You cannot insert a result into a definition. P may or may not imply Q.
There is this idea that the current approach to parallel programming is wrong. When spawning a thread, there is instantly a huge space of possible paths for the program to go through. The coder then proceeds to prune off all paths that will lead to bad results, with the usual arsenal of mutex, semaphores, locks etc. etc. It's intellectually unbearable.

The alternative would be to explicitly specify which paths are allowable, rather than allow them all and then forbid which isn't.

I don't know how that would work, I don't remember who said it. Still, it feels good.
The math would have been fine if each morgage was independent but because the economy as a whole tanked the default rate went way up and people who where not willing to take much risk still got a beating.

Close, but I'm going to disagree with you on one detail. The subprime debacle began in the spring of 2007, and really began to spiral out of control on July 26 with various calamities in the CDO markets. By August 6-10 (the week of quant turmoil) it was starting to have an effect on equity markets-- which were strong at the time, and didn't start taking a real beating until Jan. 2008.

The economy was strong in 2007, with 4.9% (annualized) growth in Q3. Subprime didn't blow up because the economy tanked, because the mess began during a great economy, and turned it into a bad one. Of course, the tanking of the economy has made the credit situation even worse and will lead to even more defaults.

The default rate goes up during a bad economy, and everyone knew that this risk was there, and that a cyclical recession would occur sooner or later. What caused the rate to be "unexpectedly" high was the prevalence of speculation. In a bad economy with falling house prices, a resident homeowner is still going to make his best efforts to avoid the embarrassment and hassle of foreclosure, even if he has negative equity. Negative equity is irrelevant if he's going to live there for 10 years. On the other hand, a greedy and unscrupulous speculator has no reason not to default.
Unless, of course, the company you've entrusted your savings to loses it all 2 weeks before you retire (e.g.gets heavily involved in opaque that end up being worthless)....
So if the outcome of the slot machine is determined by the outcomes of other slot machines in the casino, then the slot machine ceases to be a game of chance?

It seems to me that if you define randomness in any way besides "involves no skill, or almost no skill", but instead by explicitly describing the mechanism of "randomness", then all sorts of loopholes open up.

In any case, big kudos to these guys for coming up with it. My day was completely ruined by envy.
Now Flickr is hit by Yahoo layoffs
I don't understand the motivation to take big risks when you already have enough money to retire comfortably. I think after the point of material comfort has been reached it becomes all about status and the actual purchasing power of additional dollars is completely lost on them.
There is at least one app on the PalmOS (Treo, etc) that captures a user's signature on the touch screen via the stylus, so I was surprised the author of the article believes this is a new concept. However, actually creating and submitting an app is always a good concept.
the same psychology that's the downfall of some VC investments.
It's a $45 app that saves time. You guys are thinking like developers; instead think like someone a craft fair selling jewelry. Instead of surfing to a web page and going through the steps while you have a bunch of prospective customers to deal with, you just enter the CC info (I think getting the buyer to sign via touch screen is excellent and may be used to lower your fees) and the software does the rest.

The $45 buys you the difference between a 2 minute operation and a 20 second operation and for the target market it's probably worth it.
Google Cranks Up the Consensus Engine
Wow - I never noticed this, but you're absolutely right. It never even occurred to me that this would be possible, but now I wants it.
The way he wrote it, he indeed said he resented it.

I recommend everyone starts such sentences with, I've instead of I. Any time you start a written sentence with I've, it's clear you're describing something you just did, versus something you believe.

And finally, he also wrote the word "just" in the wrong spot. The best line would have been "I've re-sent the e-mail," instead of "I just resent it either way :)."
"successfully locked down the satellite TV systems"?
Great stuff. You mentioned rails, django, catalyst, and php; I think you want a framework like CakePHP or CodeIgniter in place of php in that list. Also, just for kicks, you could mention that Smalltalk has a framework as well: Seaside.
Why I think it rox:

1) You can use it on Mac or PC (I have both, and transfer files between both)
2) You can instantly share folders with anyone else, all you need is their e-mail address
3) You see files that change or get added in real-time (Growl on a Mac makes this really slick)
This is interesting, but I strongly recommend reading Alan Kay's commentary on the study:

http://secretgeek.net/camel_kay.asp

In addition to his work on Smalltalk and OOP, Kay spent a major portion of his career on the problem of how to teach students to program.
Win A New Apple I Pod By Playing Funtasy Football This Week - 100% FREE To Play
What a difference a year makes.

Now the "newcomer entrepreneurs" have had the chance to lay employees off and are encouraged by the VC's on their boards to focus on survival instead of bold growth.
I feel zero sympathy for the family that invested $1 million (or anyone else in this story). You should know exactly why the returns are so high before you go and dump millions into a single investment. Nothing in life comes easy or free.

Another example of irresponsible decision-making. Maybe we should bail them out, because they need help.
I think that it's often also a great way to realize that Things Back Home are nowhere near as bad as you thought they were, and that The Other Place isn't necessarily paradise, no matter how much you may like their culture/food/women/men.
Even this doesn't capture all of the problem.

As I understand it[1], there were people that made their living by taking the BBB tranches based on sick cows and re-securitizing them (dividing them into yet more tranches, some of which would be upgraded again). The more you did this, the closer you could get to having all of the original subprime loans be AAA rated.

For an example, say you had 100 subprime loans. You divide them up into tranches, and the top 86 become AAA, and the other 14 become something else. Then you combine this left-over 14 with the left-overs from other funds, and end up with, say, 100 of these lower rated securities. You then divide this set of 100 up into yet more tranches, 86 of which become AAA and the remaining 14 become something lower. Combine this 14 with left-overs from yet other funds, repeat many times, and eventually you can get nearly everything to be highly rated.

There are claims that some groups of sick cows had dozens of levels of securities built up upon them, allowing ridiculously unsafe stuff to eventually become AAA.

[1] Described here: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli...
How to forecast recessions
Startups and Work: Europe vs the US
Bailouts larger, in inflation adjusted Dollars, than the combined total outlays for ...
It's not that simple. If Da vinci would have been forced to sit in a pod all day every day, having meetings every morning about how much progress he thought he would make on some painting that he knew he would just be redoing again in 6 months after a management change, he probably would have grown to hate what he loved.

The thing I've personally found is that if you love coding it's probably best to get a job that doesn't involve coding. Coding (like most art I would imagine) is something you can really poor yourself into, take great pride in success and really be crushed by failure. As a consequence, doing this 40+ hours per week takes out of you any desire to do it outside of work. And of course that is problematic when you hope to use coding to become financially independent.
Forget the entrepreneurial culture. It's there in Europe. The problem when it comes to the Web is the culture of the consumers. Europeans are generally, in relation to their American counterparts, technophobic and less experimental with new technologies.

Broadband wasn't even popular in the UK until 2002-2003, after a whole growth and boom cycle had gone round in the US. Internet usage in France was incredibly low until a couple of years ago, and progressive tech-friendly countries like Denmark, Finland and Estonia had too small populations to have a significant effect.
i heartily recommend Mischa McLachlan, http://www.zyotism.com/
I'm probably horribly naïve, and quite possibly stupid, but I think the solution is actually pretty simple. Welfare, and all other aid programs, should be available to absolutely anyone, regardless of income. But none of these aid programs should result in the aid-ee receiving any form of currency.

For example, welfare should provide spartan clothing, housing, nutritious food, and that's it. No food stamps, no cash disbursal, but a safe and humane environment that can help people to get back on their feet. For those who don't want to get up and work, that's fine too, but comforts like being able to get coffee at Starbucks, or a big-screen TV, or a nice bottle of wine, aren't going to be provided by the government. If you want luxury, work for it.