skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its amazing that someone as intelligent as Morten Lund would invest every single penny into a single venture.

But I think he'll live through this...just watch his Le Web presentation...he seems really upbeat.
Left unexamined is the uncomfortable moral dimension of Paulson’s achievement. If he saw all of this coming, was it right for him to keep his own counsel, quietly trading while the financial system melted down?

Give me a break. He should have gone on Faux News to be shouted down and laughed at? Who would have listened to this guy?

This line is so indicative of bad journalism (practically a tautology, that phrase) that even though I want to read the rest of the article and am interested in the topic, I think I'll pass.
I don't know if the downvoting does work well enough for that; this guy clearly made a new username just to be a douche.

If the minimum time was set to something like 12 or 24 hours, I can't see that causing too many people to be scared away. If they are, then they probably didn't have much good to say anyways.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why it took iSteam barely a week ... to briefly become #1 entertainment application in the App Store."

I'm not so sure it's so obvious. Why is playing with steam so popular? I downloaded it and liked it, but I still don't know what was so compelling about it.
Cheat Sheets: Networking, Hacking, Security, Administration, Tools
They forgot to mention that YouTube has a tool that lets you replace the copyrighted music with music that YouTube has actually licensed.
If you are not failing, you are not innovating
Typical mathematician knee-jerk reaction (including, often for me). Just because money management is not perfect does not mean that it does not have a high positive return. In fact, the largest money managers, the banks, are absolutely critical to a productive economy.
Interestingly, substituting gas for food, this very scenario is playing out while we speak. http://news.google.com/news?q=ukraine+gas+crisis
I'm not a big fan of capitalism, but if it's OK to borrow money¹ and buy stocks with the hope of profiting on their sale, then it's just as OK to borrow stock and sell it with the hope of profiting when you buy it back again. If there's a problem with short-sellers trash-talking perfectly sound companies, there's at least as much of a problem with investors overhyping unsound companies.

Remember the valentine's episode of Futurama? Bender is selling roses and when he knows that Fry is over a barrel he hikes the price incredibly saying that demand just skyrocketed.

I haven't seen the episode but from your summary it sounds like Bender is doing what economists call "rent-seeking", profiting from his monopoly power (if Bender didn't enjoy any monopoly power then Fry could have just bought roses from someone else). I don't see where Paulson was rent-seeking; he was buying and selling in a market where there were lots of other people going after the same securities.

¹...and of course with our fractional-reserve currency system, in a sense, the vast majority of money is borrowed money.
2% seems to me laughably low. I would think it is something like 50%. It might take up 2% of the space of a paper, but the reasons we will miss it is because no one else appears ready to do it. Why not? Expense.
Talking mac mini in real life, streamed to the internet:
http://coworkthailand.com/say/

unfortunately 4chan already picked it up.
"If he saw all of this coming, was it right for him to keep his own counsel, quietly trading while the financial system melted down?"

If he was trading with real money, he was giving quite enough of a signal to the market. Plenty of people were writing about the possibility of the housing bubble popping, and about derivatives being "financial weapons of mass destruction." The people trading as if those warnings weren't important threw caution to the winds, and have no one but themselves to blame if they didn't learn from the behavior of the counterparties to their trades.

From farther down in the linked article: "By 2005, the amount of money he could make on the riskiest securities was not enough to justify the risk he was taking. Pricing, in his view, made no sense. Paulson concluded that he could do better on the short side--wagering that prices of risky securities would fall."
What great publicity for qik: http://qik.com/
You don't go to college to expand your mind...you go to college to get a good job after you graduate.

Or at least you are supposed to. The problem is that in our society, the college degree has become a commodity. You are supposed to have one, even if you really don't need it.

Someone getting a CS degree, paying $80K is an investment. Someone getting a Communications degree, paying $80K is borderline retarded, why? because they'll wind up working at the Gap after they graduate making the same 25K/yr that they made before going to college, except they lose 4 years worth of promotions and raises.

Yes college is not vocational training...but if your degree won't help you get a better job...then you are just pissing a ton of money away. Someone working at the Gap should not be $80K in debt.

Actually, vocational training now a days is probably a better investment than a college degree. A plumber won't get outsourced, and will still make as much money as a programmer.
The purpose of college isn't vocational training.

I agree. But our society has completely bought into the idea that it is. Even the so-called educators have. And as we know from Gatto and others, this is not a recent distortion, but one that goes back to the origin of public education.
You put this beautifully.

It's called candy for chrissakes. Who doesn't like candy?
Foreign Universities (esp. in English speaking countries: Canada, UK, Australia,...) would be the most likely to provide arbitrage and offer the same service at lower costs. It is just fear of living overseas that is stopping this from happening on a large scale now.
It is oversimplistic to say that papers add nothing of value. Surely you admit that the NYT, Wash. Post, and WSJ do original investigative research? Others papers sometimes do this also, although this seems to be decreasing. Everytime I visit my hometown in flyover country, I am frightened by how worthless the local paper has become. But there was a time, not long ago, when that paper had a staff in most major cities around the world. I assume that we are simply missing stories that would otherwise have gotten broken with more feet on the ground. (We don't realize we're missing them since we are missing them...)

Maybe the economist et al. are adding staff, but I suspect there are simply many fewer total investigative journalists, and so less investigative journalism. Maybe if the Chicago tribune hadn't cut so much, they would have broken the Blagojevich story instead of the FBI?
It's Geek to You, but Not to Them: Meet the Early Adopters
From Wellesley to Personal Secretary to Obama
I really don't think Seymon has a real solution. Money managers who think they have a foolproof scheme will willingly bet their own money. Sure limiting compensation is a good thing, but not a cure. The best suggestion that I have seen is a requirement for the issuers of derivatives to maintain a reserve. Regular insurance is a kind of derivative and insurance companies are required to maintain a reserve to pay off policies. The same should be true of other kinds of derivatives. A reserve requirement slows down the explosion of derivatives, because eventually the total reserves are greater than the value of the underlying instrument. We might still have failures of individual firms, but total collapse of the financial system would be less likely.

There is still a need to put realism back into lending, because we are getting these crises every few years: loans to South American dictatorships, the savings and loan crisis, the Asian financial meltdown and the current mortgage and derivatives failure, all in the past 40 years.
A simple find feature -- which is what this article talks about -- isn't enough to crow about.
Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss
If they hadn't paid out that dividend, LTCM would have had enough in reserves to survive, but no one seems to have learned from that, least of all Alan Greenspan.
does it replace the livequery plugin?
Successful Stock Speculation
"Dont worry honey. The reason we fight like this is your are an ISFP which means you are very emotional, and I am an INTJ, which means I've very analytical."

Heh, I'm sure that goes over great. Meta-analysis in the middle of a "feelings vs analysis" argument.
Well college can expose you to good communication practices...
For example: remembering to spellcheck or even to proofread -- the latter helping with the impression you make by adopting conventional presentations (like "business") rather than idiosyncratic ones (like "businness") -- with possible benefits for coding as well? ;)
Mostly. The livequery plugin lets you watch for new elements and do something when they appear. It's a little resource intensive, since it polls the DOM repeatedly. The jQuery version doesn't have that, and probably for good reason.
Creating Python bindings to Qt is a lot of work, to be sure, but it's not rocket science. Either Riverbank will LGPL PyQt, or someone else will no doubt come along and write their own LGPL bindings.

Either way, this is big news. In general, there has been a lot of hang-wringing about "which GUI toolkit to use", and the main (and pretty much only) reason for not using Qt (its licensing) has just evaporated into thin air.
>He didn't create value.

???

He created $15 billion of value for his shareholders.

>The banks had created value

The banks have destroyed their shareholders' and depositors' money by investing in junk and failing to prepare for a downturn.

Your 'moral' arguments are upside down.
We can't solve hubris, but perhaps we can highlight it to investors.

Funds that too hard to value or are highly leveraged should switch from regulation by the SEC to regulation by state gambling commissions. It would be tricky to find the right cutoff, though, but if an investor would have to travel to a Native American reservation to buy credit default swaps, they might start thinking about whether they really understand what they're investing in.
The financial crisis has little to do with probabilities or risk analysis. It's not like blackjack. It was more like seeing that a ball was falling and would eventually hit the ground. Everyone has latched onto discussions of risk analysis and reward structures because it conveniently excuses widespread idiocy and greed.

"Why did I just lose a fortune? Oh it's not my fault, it was a Black Swan! And my fund manager's incentives were not properly regulated." No acknowledgment is ever given to the notion that the financial markets have worked exactly as they should: fools have been separated from their money.
A lot of strange things happen when the players have diffrent amounts of information.

EX: Would you bet 1 billion dollars with slightly less than even odds?

Well if you don't have a billion dollars then your real risk could be much lower vs. your potential gain. The real question is who would trust you to actually have a billion dollars? That's the real sucker, unless he also lacks a billion dollars.
I was surprised to realize recently that DNA isn't really self replicating. It requires the infrastructure of a cell, RNA, proteins, etc in order to be replicated.
I don't think that's an example of humor in comments -- it's just saying, "I'm not sure this is right, you should test it." That's pretty important, actually.

I think the question is more about comments that are just puns or something, like:

p = point(w, 0, 0); /* woo hoo! */
Joel Spolsky: Thanks or No Thanks
Seems like you really want a macbook so you should get it. I've found that academic stores usually have very good prices. My alum is currently clearing out the old MBP for ~1200.
"This article was published on May 28, 1992."
/* WTF IS THIS */ can actually speak volumes about code, though.
There are some memories :D Turbo Pascal was the compiler I used when I took my first computer programming course in High School.
Pure ignorance. Not all communications majors work at the Gap. Many work in communications, marketing, etc. These high end jobs project higher salaries than a high end computer science degree.

You can find lots of people with non-vocational degrees that have had extremely successful careers, don't work at the gap, and have more fulfilling works lives than code slaves who "invested" in a CS degree.
With all this talk of vocational training versus a real degree, I assert that a college degree without some form of Liberal Arts grounding is no degree at all.

Nobody plans on having a worthless degree after school, and no educator wishes to leave their student ill-equipped. No one wants to work at the Gap in the first place, and whether they have a degree in Communications or not is irrelevant.

Education, like a trip to the hospital, is a practice in fighting for yourself and getting what you came for.
That's quite some maneuver. Do you have a tail?
Cloudcenters are Datacenters in the Sky
Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) is not the only way to build scalable Cloud Infrastructures. There are two emerging methodologies for constructing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) AKA “Cloud Infrastructure Services”. The first is what we call “cloudcenters”, which are essentially datacenters in the sky. The second is what we call an “Infrastructure Web Service”. GoGrid was one of the pioneers for cloudcenters, while AWS largely created the second model.
How to get an internship in a startup if you are not from America?
I am currently in my final year of a computer science degree in Ireland. I will be finishing college at the end of May. I would love to join a startup on an internship for the summer.

The problem is most web startups are based in America.
Would it be to much trouble to hire someone from Ireland?
How should I go about it?
Are sockpuppeteers computer criminals?
Well, according to WaPo, 40% of all the "profits" in 2007 came from Wall Street. Did those profits actually exist? Were they short-term book-cooking so that they got their bonuses?

By 2007, when Wall Street's profits amounted to an astonishing 40 percent of all American profits, the business of American finance was no longer American business -- providing loans for domestic production, technological innovation, that sort of thing -- but swapping bets and hedges on bets and hedges, all for hefty commissions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...

Apparently $70 Billion of the bailout package has gone out as bonuses to the same idiots on Wall Street who got us into this mess.
Once again, a serious discussion of this topic would mention Coase's 'Theory of the Firm':

http://journal.dedasys.com/2009/01/14/the-gig-economy

Actually, my article isn't very serious either, but it does talk about one of the underlying reasons for the balance between contractors and others external to the firm, and employees.
I learn by imitation, sometimes I've felt like adding a great punchline to a discussion, then I question myself if itll add value.
Most times it doesnt, so I dont post it.

EDIT
I also like that theres not a lot of meta-discussion, it would make feel a little commite-like. This community its a great example of self-regulation without making too much fuss about it.
You're right -- the part quoted is not whiny in tone, but it is whiny when taken into the larger context of the article. I find the blame game that has come with the financial collapse to largely be "whiny". I hear the following complaints repeatedly:

* The greedy banks were giving out loans to people they knew couldn't afford them.

* The greedy people were taking loans on homes they couldn't afford.

* (Now) Paulson was greedy to profit on the system collapsing.

Of course everybody was acting greedy! That is the idea behind capitalism. Complaining about greed in a system based on greed is unproductive and whiny.
Thanks or No Thanks - Joel on Software
Holy -- what the hell HN? Let's get this guy's comment up to a score of -3 or so. His comment is not a troll, it's just unpopular.
is he really bankrupt if he has stock in 88 companies?
Why Haskell is beyond ready for Prime Time
visa and legal requirements might not be worthwhile for an american company to hire someone who doesn't already have a visa. its not free, and it takes time to happen
I think the flaw in the argument is the author's generalization of anedoctal evidence as if everyone was the same. Medical schools is not pointless. Getting a degree because many employers require it (as opposed to being stuck in customer service roles) is not pointless.

There are many ways that people can make the most out of their degree, and many ways to waste it as well.

It's very easy to dismiss something as being useless, but ironically, entrepreneurship is about doing the exact opposite: finding and exploring value where others see it.
My roommate for the past two years is a philosophy major, and he's gotten me hooked on analytic philosophy as opposed to continental. The former actually does attempt to pursue truth through logic and reason.

You would also be surprised how many great contemporary philosophers are out there. Philosophy, after all, evolves over time much like every other field. Aristotle and his buds are great, but people who don't follow contemporary philosophers are like those that are stuck listening to The Beatles when they could be giving new bands like Fleet Foxes a chance. Sure, life's questions don't really change, but contemporary philosophers build off the foundation the early philosophers laid out.
Practical and creative uses of jQuery
That doesn't work.

If I'm paid a flat fee to manage money, the people handing me money to manage are still going to look for the manager with the highest returns (that's human nature).

So, I still have an incentive to chase riskier short-term gains; I see less of the upside than if I were also getting a cut of the gains, but the incentives that arise from competition with other money managers remains in place.
> There are plenty of low-risk, low reward options out there if all you want to do is preserve your value.

No there aren't. To preserve real purchasing power monetary inflation FORCES you to speculate. Straightforward saving has been a loser's game for many decades now. This was not always true and there were long periods of price deflation and good interest rates before the establishment of the fed.
This article is an absolute piece of crap.

You can read John Walker's own rebuttal here:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/section2_99_4.html
I know that article was over 15 years old, but there I'm sure there's still remnants of the Hackocracy. The scripting language for AutoCAD program remains a dialect of Lisp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP
Wow, thanks :)
Yes, I can't resist saying that maybe with a college education you could spell rudimentary words like "business".
Interesting backstory: Back in 2002/03 myself and a couple of other regular visitors to JoS forums used to post jobs due to the fact that there were many interesting people that we would have liked to work with.

Joel sent out an email mentioning that posting jobs reduces the signal-to-noise on the forums -- he was right.

So, Simon Lucy (http://www.linkedin.com/in/simonlucy), another regular visitor to JoS sets up ijustheard.com for the forum visitors to post jobs. Here's the archive.org page for it (http://web.archive.org/web/20030219230747/http://www.ijusthe...); I think Simon shut it down in 2005 since it never did end up getting any traction, and interestingly Fog Creek makes a million $ out of it -- good for FC!
Bonuses/rewards are so hard to do "fairly" it seems like someone will always feel shafted (deserved or not).

One place I worked at handed out bonuses on a curve. Come bonus time the curve was thrown off because every manager was "grading" at the same time, and the bonuses that people were expecting (and could watch on the intranet) changed rapidly, usually for the worse. There was a pretty huge uproar over the process, but the system is still in place today. It was so messed up that people were complaining about getting free money.

In the past Joel had mentioned a profit sharing scheme for every employee, which seems like a good idea, but still has downsides for the big-idea guys, like Noah in the article.

Has anyone worked for a company that had a really good bonus plan?
Meh, you're just jealous nobody is forcing you to verbalize their incoherent ramblings from halfway around the world.
The interview he did with Colbert last week was really good.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/21545...
Well... as far as my college is concerned, yeah it does eat up a big chunk (8am to 4:30 pm, on 3 days a week) of my 24 hrs, plus till 3 years of 4 year course I need to study chemistry and physics along with core subjects, and surprisingly environmental science too is pushed into CS here, 4 credits (highest) for env. science... and chemistry shares same 3 credits with other topics like OS and Algorithms. I wonder why my education system fails to see the importance of less load on students and giving us free time to experiment, self-learn and spend more time in understanding what is important for us.

Plus a semester in my college has 5 tests, so every month we are really busy... its really hard managing time like this !

Imagine a student whose parents can't provide funds due to some reasons, how can he ever self finance or add some independence/comfort to his life!

While my friends in foreign universities do find great part time opportunities and free time to work some side-projects, this kind of scenario is majorly lacking in India :( most of my classmates just concentrate on getting 9+ gpa,don't even care to look at whats going on in the world outside... since grading is competitive, this creates a pressure on one and all to be at a nice position compared to those who give 24x7 to mugging based syllabus and never ever dream to achieve any self earned practical experience which I believe to be the best form of learning.

The case is not the same in premier institutes in India such as IITs, NITs and BITS. Getting to those colleges is achievable only after beating a huge crowd of super high IQ people. This can't be possible for everyone, anyways my point is the private institutes are really messing up with our lives as in case of my college due to outdated ideas and thoughts of people who run it. Major issues for my college are discipline which translates to -

1. no use of laptops in the hostel for first 2 years of college....

2. Uniforms on 2 days a week.

3. ban on jeans and tshirt

4. no cellphones

5. no girls and guys hanging out

6. not getting treated like adults even when we are 20 years old...

7. many more like hostlers standing till 3am as punishment for making some noise on the last day of 2008

Now that really makes me think, my college is stopping me from getting rich and advancing in my own views!
I could've learnt so much more if I was in a college that is run by people who are more broadminded and understand how education and knowledge are different and respect what Einstein said in "On Education" and aim for a better advanced society for future rather than creating huge crowd of people with zero creativity, experience and almost ditto common skills.

The best some screwd up colleges can do for people like me is relax the timings and test, syllabus load and let me have some college/life/fun ratio.

BUT COLLEGE EDUCATION IS NO WASTE OF TIME EVEN IF THESE STUPID ADD-ONS ARE ATTACHED TO THE ONE WHICH I GET :)