skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
short an IPO

Buy put options on the underlying stock. This gives you the right, but not the obligation, to force a sale of stock at the strike price.

Say you have a hot Internet IPO which debuts at $10. People assume it will follow the Google trajectory and be worth hundreds within a few years. You can buy puts at $10 for a year from now -- this would entitle you to sell any shares you held at $10, regardless of what the price is. If a hypothetical counterparty believes that the price is going to increase, writing this option (promising to buy X shares from you at the price of $10 from you a year from now if you ask for it, in return for cash money today) is like printing free money: you'll probably let the option expire without acting on it, and otherwise they get the stock they want anyhow.

Now examine what happens if the stock tanks to, say, $2 over the year: your options entitled you to sell X shares at $10 apiece, regardless of the market price of the stock. You can thus buy the stock on the open market ($2 per share) and exercise the option (selling at $10 per share), netting $8 a share minus commissions minus the premium you paid for the option in the first place. (In actual practice, since you can SELL the put option and it has high "intrinsic value" near expiration in that scenario, you don't actually have to ever become an owner of the underlying stock.)

But what if the price balloons to $20? Clearly, you don't want to buy at $20 and then sell the same day at $10. That's the beauty of puts, though: you don't have to. You just walk away from your options, which expire worthless. You are never at risk, in this strategy, of losing more money than you spent on acquiring the puts in the first place. This contrasts favorably to the standard short sale, which has unlimited downside risk.
Who will mentor them?
Does framing annoy anyone else? I never use these bars, they're just like popups that I have to squash before I read the actual site.
Facebook's CFO Exits: Enter, the Questions
Without moralizing...if you're linking to TPB rather than Amazon, I don't really think you absorbed Rand's message.

(Yes, I know Danneskjold was a pirate, but he was (effectively) stealing tax money and returning it to those who were taxed.)
Late april fools.
Read The Fountainhead first. It's a good primer for Atlas Shrugged, and it's a bit shorter, so if you hate it you'll save some time.
No, it's not worth it, unless you specifically like reading very dry passages. I slogged through it but only out of a sense of commitment to reading the book in its entirety.
This is called referred pain. There is an amazing book called "The trigger point therapy workbook" that talks about these and how to treat them. It's helped me tremendously.
Facebook Fallout: Is it time for Zuckerberg to go?
Feng Shui Consultant
www.KJFengShui.com offers results-oriented Feng Shui consultations for homes, offices and businesses. Kelly S. Jones advises on site selection, and layout and decor for both interior and exterior environments.
I like to use it for the simple fact that it automatically overrides all of the default styles. So no more Times New Roman, and all of the header tags look decent without much modification.

That way, I can usually use most of their defaults and can spend more time coding.

So it is really nice for me on small projects where I just want it to look decent without much effort.
What gets on my nerves isn't whether people like capitalism, it's whether they go around saying that the system we have now is laissez-faire capitalism, and then huge bonuses to failed executives are testament to that. I have full respect for someone who has a very clear idea of what capitalism is and argues against it nonetheless.
It's the Too Big to Fail principle in military terms. The projection of force is greatly reduced when the fear of losing an asset determines its domain.

A carrier that has to stay 2000 km from the action puts a tremendous strain every aspect of operations.
Caroline Hoxby, who wrote that, voluntarily left her position at Harvard to gain her current position at Stanford. If you haven't heard of her before, you should read more National Bureau of Economic Research working papers.

But what specifically are you disagreeing with in the paragraph you kindly quoted?
They were hardly the only ones. I remember a lot of companies at the time pushing cheap low end machines designed around internet access, but none really took off that I can recall.

I imagine that the idea might work better now. For one thing, high speed internet has made web access much more integral to the average user than it was even in 1999. And of course, even a low end computer is actually powerful enough to provide a good user experience for most people. In my experience, that wasn't really true of the offerings in the late 90s.
Surface ships are just floating targets anyway. Nations like the U.S. and China will go to war with nuclear submarines shooting thermonuclear tipped ICBMs at each other's cities or not at all.
I've read a fair amount of the eye-tracking literature, and it's true that people read letters or (small) groups of letters if they are reading.
Well, it seems everyone else sees racism in all things, so I figured I'd better not throw myself under a truck in case I am misinterpreted.
Can you link to an article by the Ayn Rand Institute, or similar, saying why piracy is wrong and a fan of Rand must oppose it?

I didn't find anything either way in a few seconds on Google.
It was a little more nuanced than that. The point was that young people were willing to take risks because they had little to lose and no responsibilities. He mentioned that (at the time) he slept on a mattress on the floor, so he wouldn't be trapped by possessions and paralyzed by fear of losing everything. People with mortgages and retirement plans are (rationally) conservative, and they won't take big gambles with the company. You have to admire his commitment.
This kind of stuff fills my head will fanciful dreams of ubiquitous environment interaction. Like X10 but a thousand times better.

And I could get back at my grumpy neighbor by telling his toaster to burn his toast every morning. Mmmm....I can't wait for the future.
because less than 1% of schools adopted whole language instruction

How does he back up that claim? I encountered quite a few school districts that claimed to be providing "whole language" reading instruction (including my alma mater school district, then, where I had been taught to read with phonics three decades earlier) in the 1990s. I'm going to check what the current vogue is here, but I know it's not working well.
How far does this extend, though? It's all well and great to say that they can monitor any one third party support site, but Get Satisfaction isn't the only one out there. Should companies really be expected to go monitor every third party support site that decides that they're going to post a page?
So, you're saying 37signals should expend their own energy to help GetSatisfaction's business model succeed, simply because their competitors don't have good support? Sounds asinine to me.
Vimperator 2.0 Released
The single reason why I will likely never switch away from Firefox.
You respect him because he ignored you?
Not the ideal reason to respect a person, imho.
You don't have to be great to be an asshole.
I just noticed that Digg now has all their outbound links aimed at these awful new frame-URLs. I didn't realize they were doing that as well.

This is very disappointing.

I run a niche social news site, so I've spent hours and hours comparing and studying what's out there.

Most social news sites are, spammy SERP factories. They lift other people's content in the hope of getting enough Google mojo that their site will outrank the original source of the content in SERPS. That's the business model.

For a long time, the easiest way to tell the difference between a legit aggregator and a crummy one was to see where their headlines pointed.

If you go to a crummy aggregator like Mixx.com, the headlines on the front page don't point you to the site whose content they're lifting, they point you to a Mixx summary page where there's just a single blue link that will lead you to the source of the information.

Obviously this is done to boost pageviews and to keep the user on the site, rather than letting them get to the information they're looking for.

This always seemed like the obvious way to do things. Lame, too.

And yet Digg and Reddit's headlines have always sent you to the actual sites. And I really, really respected them for this. Whenever I'd see a new social news site doing something sketchy, I'd take comfort in the fact that the two biggest players were also the ones taking the most generous, "good" approaches.

I guess it was only a matter of time before one of them gave in and did something that's actually worse in some respects than directing to a summary page: hijacking the brand, URL, and advertising of the sites that it links to.

Digg is a very influential site. As disappointed as I am in the company for doing this, I'm even more worried about other sites looking at this and saying "fuck it, we're doing it too, now."

Imagine if every link on CNN, NYTimes, MSNBC, WashingtonPost.com led to framed pages.

We all complain about mainstream news never linking to the sites it covers. Well as soon as they figure out how to frame all outbound links and run ads around them, you can bet they'll be linking out all the time.

The bar has been lowered.
The Palm Pre Will Be an iPhone Killer
Wow, what an incredibly poor way to choose a password.
A carrier that has to stay 2000 km away from the action is completely useless. Carriers are designed for one thing: tactical air support. Can't do that from 2000km.
Wouldn't that be a bit too dramatic?!?

Once you've played the "nuclear card", you have committed suicide, basically. Given that a nuclear war would ensure mutual destruction, wouldn't China and the U.S. be better off fighting with conventional weapons only?
I agree that a better patent system is the solution, but as a Canadian company, Desire2Learn isn't in much of a position to fix the US patent system.

> After all, if Blackboard didn't get the patent first, some other company would, and Blackboard would be the one infringing.

Owning the patent is one forgiveable - If I were them I would want the patent too for self-defence. What is indefensible is aggressive litigating over that patent to scare competitors.
Reason #5 That You Need File Virtualization
Not a bad company for owning the patents? Agreed. Not a bad company for litigating on them? No. No one, not even a bad system, forced them to litigate. Just because a what a company does is legal doesn't mean it shouldn't cost them in public image.

I do agree with your main point, which is that the patent system needs to be changed. But startups like Desire2Learn are too busy to spend time fighting the US Patent system, especially when (like D2L) they aren't even based in the US.
Would You Buy a Used Dotcom from this Man?
March 2009 Web Server Survey
I don't remember offhand, but it comes from a chapter in his book The Schools Our Children Deserve. There is a whole chapter devoted to whole language, so the cite would be pretty easy to find.

I haven't done much research on teaching literacy, so I'm really just relaying his argument.
Ask HN: Real costs associated with a startup?
Particularly web stuff, but I'd be interested in hearing about hardware/desktop software, etc.

Were there any unexpected costs?
Simple and Impressive Design Techniques
5 years of Gmail
This sounds really smart, but I don't know if it is. Let's say you want to be a great basketball player. If you're short and fat, you won't be one, no matter how much you practice. Michael Jordan was an incredible natural athlete. It's true that he's more than that: there are lots of incredible natural athletes who end up working at gas stations, and maybe some of them would have made the NBA if they had been as willing to fail as MJ. But if you're not naturally athletic (or extremely tall), you will never be a great basketball player. Period.

The second problem is that the fear of failure is, in the right context, fantastic motivation. You will never do anything well if you don't care about it, and if you genuinely care about something, you will come to hate failing at it. I've never met a good chess player who took losses well.

My suspicion is that it's important to do a lot of practice where failure is cheap and a lot of practice where failure hurts. But I'm not a very successful person, so I have no idea.
Interesting game. The only winning move is not to play.
Wordle - http://wordle.net
Old news.

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=6779&...
Working on a Web-Hosted Project? Here are 10 Dependable Hosts
What do you mean? Where will this traffic be coming from?

Counting these framed pageviews as Digg pageviews is at least dishonest to advertisers and at most plain wrong.

According to Center Networks, the Digg toolbar is running Digg's Quantcast code. So it looks like they're going to try to do just that.

http://www.centernetworks.com/diggbar-analytics-ads-pageview...
I had a wonderful physics teacher who brought in a bunch of different inventions made by Tesla and I always thought they were interesting but the theory of wireless electricity is so different to people it always blows my mind that it works ,despite all the physics attributed to it, if this becomes popular soon we will have to find a phrase to replace "plugged in."
"Collapse will not be televised... you will only know that it has happened to you."
"Real" as in dollar, or "real" as in economic?

By far the biggest cost is opportunity cost, but that's also the least "real" in dollar terms. Two years that you spend working on your startup is two years of lost income (~$200K+ for decent software devs), or two years that could've been spent getting an MBA or grad degree, or two years when you're not partying and getting laid.

As for actual monetary costs - paying people to do things is the main one. Legal fees can rack up quickly if you want an actual corporation - easily a couple K for a barebones S-corp if you do it with decent lawyers. If you have employees - well, you know how much you could get paid, then increase that by 50-100% for overhead.

Software and hosting costs were essentially zero - for basically any web stuff, you want to be using free software anyway, and you can get cheap hosting for like $10/month ($80/month if you're doing something weird and need a dedicated server) that's perfectly adequate for trying ideas out. S3/EC2 also can result in really cheap hosting if you're not using much capacity. If you need to scale it'll cost you, but if you get that far you're doing so much better than 99% of startups that you'll welcome it.

Biggest unexpected costs for us, by far, were founder buyouts. My remaining cofounder and I each dropped a grand to buy out cofounders that weren't pulling their weight - and while it was totally the right choice from the POV of preserving the relationships (one of those bought out later led to 2 job leads for me when the startup folded), it would've been even better to not bring them on board to begin with. Be very careful who you start a company with, and make sure you each have the same level of commitment and goals for the company. Buyouts can be as expensive as divorce, and usually lead to the death of the company.
I'm balking at the idea that the mean combined SAT of the college a teacher attended is predictive of their teaching quality, both currently and longitudinally.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, but basing an entire paper on this premise without any supporting evidence is completely ridiculous. So far as I've seen there is zero evidence that this is true.

After some Googling, it seems that this measure of teacher quality is attributed to:

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ilr/articl/v55y2002i4p686-699.html

I don't have access to the paper, but from the summary I see no evidence that this measure has any empirical support.
I've used OpenID to access StackOverflow, and it's a somewhat disconcerting process, involving visiting another web-site, which I do NOT want to think about, since I want to access the visited site.

On this evidence, as Joe User, OpenID simply has too many moving parts and will fail.

I'd be interested in what the SO experience is. Is it even possible to get on that website without OpenID?
I don't see how they can patent battery per motherboard design. Isn't that how laptops work?

OTOH, this design makes a lot of sense. One of the biggest failure mode for rack-wise failure I've seen is human error from maintenance crews: trip over or unplug the wrong a power cord (I've seen this happen twice already from different companies.) This design completely shields this type of errors.

But, it should not be patentable!
Interesting article, but I don't see anything in there about a specific Chinese ASBM that can travel at Mach 10.

The OP article suggests that the missile can do 2000 km in 12 minutes. To my mind that counts as bluewater as opposed to being off someone's coast.

On the flip side, we haven't seen a naval war where low-tech threats have been leveraged to their highest effect.
An Alternative Approach to Archiving Blog Posts
Most likely not a perfect solution, but thought I'd share it anyway :)
Well, better of as in what?

From my amateur perspective I just can't see a war scenario that would make sense either way. - Then again, does war ever make sense?

In a conventional conflict China would basically put their 4:1 headcount up against the modern US war machinery. And however that turns out, the losing side would probably pull the "tactical" nuclear card at some point...
Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter
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You might have wanted this article from Exiled Online which includes details wrt to the new Chinese ASBM:
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...
I was scanning and did a double take on this part:

"A high net-worth individual with whom the Baldwins have partnered"

For a moment I thought they were talking about Alec Baldwin and his brothers as producers. My Imp of the Perverse is sadly disappointed that it isn't so.
this is actually better commentary (somewhat reminds me of raganwald though): http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carrier...
Whenever I see one these surveys then I'm baffled at how many people still put Microsoft on their servers, in 2009 no less. I understand the appeal of windows as a desktop OS. But this parallel universe of "windows servers" will forever remain a mystery to me...
Arab Israeli conflict
The Israeli Defense Force wins wars; the Israeli government is generally first-class at the conflict negotiations with Arabs. Only the absence of an Israeli grand approach lets the conflict drag on for almost six decades of Israeli-Arab history. There is no end to the Arab Israeli conflict. Jews may choose to shrink their borders, or Israel may choose to expand at Arabs expense.
The Sam IM
Techcrunch gossip.

Arrignton adds in a comment:

> its well sourced, but who knows. Usually simply posting the rumor shakes a lot more information out of the tree. We’ll be updating.

Yeah. Sure.
And when/if he's proven wrong? What real consequences will he face?

None.
I actually think that Asian hackerspace have more to offer than the western counterparts. For one the manufacturing facilities are nearby, that means not only are tools available, but industrial machinery and more importantly assembly workers are totally accessible.

If anyone interested to start a hackerspace in Macau, let me know I have space and workers. www.goldentime.com.mo
My biggest cost, by far, is AdWords, but I always planned on that. Its a "pay $1, get $2" situation, so I'll do that all night long.

The big unanticipated cost for me is freelancers. When I started, I did everything myself, by hand. Turns out that most things are not worth my time. Freelancers are also a "spend money to make money" option for me these days, but I got a shock when I did my taxes last year and realized I had paid out the equivalent of about a month's salary on them.

[edit for context: one-man software business, 2.5 years old, produces roughly dayjob salary.]
Bingo. Once we start losing massive numbers of soldiers, launching nuclear weapons starts to seem much more justifiable. Particularly if anyone is convinced that launching first gives us an advantage in the ensuing fallout.
Meh. Start a site, like longbets, where you retroactively compare pundits' predictions with what actually happened.
> An additional complication is that we cannot make such a huge reduction because the current human population of the Earth far exceeds its carrying capacity: a lot of people would have to die.

This is a persistent myth that really needs to die. Right now, per capita world food production is roughly 3000 calories/day/person. This means that with present food production, even assuming we never get another ounce of efficiency, we could feed a world population up to 9-10 billion. At present growth trends, demographers expect world population to top out at about 10-12 billion and then start declining just because of lower birthrates in industrialized countries. We only need a slight increase to support that, and we're home free.

So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure. In the south of a country, they'll be famine and war, while in the north food rots in the fields.

The impediments to good nutrition for all are all social, not scientific. If we weren't such assholes, nobody would be dying of hunger.
One of those just started:

http://wrongtomorrow.com/

I should start adding Mike Arrington quotes, he's almost as bad as Scoble.
My suspicion is that it's important to do a lot of practice where failure is cheap and a lot of practice where failure hurts.

I'll concur on that. I consider it much preferable to have tried when failure hurts (and failed) than to have a nagging regret later on ("what if I'd tried"). That's advice I take from my love life and not from chess or startups, but I hold that the (emotional) cost of failure is still very real...
Piracy is a concept that relies on the concept Intellectual Property.

From: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patentsandcopyrights.html

Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.

...

But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’s value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.

...

The government does not _grant_ a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely _secures it_ i.e., the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive right of use and disposal.

Piracy constitutes "unauthorized reproduction" and such falls under the above passage. Thus, it is with great irony that one would advocate pirating the works of Ayn Rand.
I find it funny how Arrington links to previous posts where he cites himself having some profound knowledge about the importance of a company or product.

Hey mike, you're a journalist, not a CEO.
When it comes to business, you really don't know your head from your ass.
I loved Atlas Shrugged (though it did take me a while to complete the speech), and coincidentally, I'm working on Dune right now, but I'm honestly struggling, and I haven't even reached page 100 yet.

It's just a little slow for me. Though having seen the movie and the miniseries, and knowing a fair bit of the Dune lore may be taking some of the "discovery" out of it.

Except for the speech, I didn't think Atlas Shrugged was slow at all, just LONG