skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
that the same company can both provide a loan and then insure that same loan

Give me a source, please. That isn't legal -- when Enron did it, after Glass-Steagal was ended, they got in a lot of trouble. In fact, Enron and the monolines are the only example I can think of where this applies. Which other companies were doing it?

But the problem is when they don't market the insurance to market (or when they mark different kinds of insurance to different market prices). Work it out with an example: let's say a bank owns a $100 loan. The borrower gets into trouble, and the loan must be written down to $90. So the bank reports a $10 loss. Whereas, if the bank insures the loan, and it gets written down to $90 -- their insurance liability gets written up to $10, leading to the same loss. The only thing that would make a difference would be fraud, which I don't believe has been legalized.

The article gave an example of a company at the time (Citigroup) that would have had to split their insurance underwriting by law, which arguably would've created a more accountable and less entangled situation than having it all under one roof.

Now you're just getting tautological: Glass-Steagal creates accountability and reduces entanglement because repealing Glass-Steagal reduces accountability and increases entangelemnt.

So what did the less ethical banks do with these troubled assets, since I'm sure somebody in the top ranks had to know what they were getting into?

So they, um, sold things? That is the super serious criminal accusation? That they bought stuff, and they sold it to people who overpaid? Pretty sure investment banks could already do that. And that's only possible if people are overpaying for assets.

Your argument appears to consist of 1) fallacies, 2) fabrications, and 3) statements that can only be true if you accept my argument from elsewhere in the thread -- that this bubble was made possible only by government regulations.
Ask HN: Slashdot rejected my story, what next?
What other places I could submit the story? It is about the future of 3D web and how big companies have started to support open source projects around it.
Even with your own merchant account, I would strongly advise against trying to run your own affiliate program (I've tried). There are just a host of legal and tax issues that will consume your time. Many of the largest sites (among them Netflix) still outsource their affiliate programs.
In terms of merchants, who can you say has been the best and easiest to do deal with?
Does that really go through a consumer's head at the point of purchase? Seems more likely that they'd think things like "ugh, not another site where I have to enter my credit card info - I wonder how trustworthy they are?" or if they're using a third party system like paypal, maybe they'd think "oh cool, I don't have to give out any personal info, I can just use my paypal account".

Just something to think about when setting up a payment system - you might want to grow into needing a merchant account system before you deal with the financial and logistical overhead.
I believe it's a combo of LGPL and BSD.
Ask HN: What is the best way to track where and why your visitors disappear?
How do you track your conversion funnels and visitor drop-off through your site?

Do the goals in Google Analytics work for you? Do you find them easy to set up?

Tracking where and why people drop-off through registration and ordering pages is critical but there don't seem to be great ways to do so.

Our company has just spend a huge amount of money on Omniture to track exactly this. Has anyone used anything simpler that does this well? Are you pleased with it?
I buy ammo at Walmart, nothing else. the store is a shithole.
umm... post it on here?
If you want thoughtful advice, it would be good to post a link to your story here.
We'll see about that. As of yesterday I have started writing performance-critical software in Python. It's a large application, and many components might go slow in Python. However, my suspicion is that one part of the code will be particularly slow. I will then optimize that part by writing it as a C module.

By using Python I can write the application quicker, test for correctness, and optimize the most important pieces without wasting time writing the entire thing in C.
Online Video Advertising Works - comScore Chairman Confirms
you don't have to get it down to perfect. any noise reduction technique that doesn't look completely goofy would have me as a buyer. for example, the only noise that really gets me is low-frequency foot-sounds from people walking around in the unit above me, and even then, only in my bedroom. I never hear my adjacent neighbors. I imagine each renter's situation would be different. also, it seems that most documentation on sound-proofing is written by the same audiophiles that can tell if you're using gold or copper connectors. I'm not that picky, I just want to sleep a little better.
Maybe you could turn your story into an iPhone app, publish it on Apple's App Store, and then submit a story about the app about your story to Slashdot.
Creative Commons is more about copyright than "art". Not sure why you would talk about tarnishing CC. In what way?
Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down
My openHosting account in Virginia returns (for xml) the lat/long (35.685,139.751) of the Japanese Imperial Palace. Not sure what that means.
I would suggest a grid-based CSS framework, such as http://www.blueprintcss.com/ . They eliminate most the headaches of cross-browser bugs in CSS for layout, at the (comparably minor) expense of including some non-semantic class names.

When I started learning presentation layer I went straight to HTML/CSS. Tables have always seemed ungainly and unmanageable in comparison, particularly if the project is going to be using significant DOM-modifying JavaScript, or if the layout is not set in stone.
then submit a blog post here about how well the app did and why.
Great minds think alike. I love the idea of course. The differences with fairsoftware:

- potentially, a smarter point system with anti-gaming features

- a truly open source code base, instead of using the Software Bill of Rights
Frustrated author/writer? Wantto get published?
Here is a new website for unpublished authors. It gives aspiring writers the chance to be published on the internet electronically in an e-book.For a small fee and if your work meets our guidelines, it will be published on our website.

Our first work on our web site is titled "off We Go...a retrospective by a cadet in the first graduating class from the Air Force Academy in 1959.
You're right I would, but it is not published anywhere yet. I will post a link here once I have submitted it and it gets published... but I need your advice first to submit it.
Who else does this?
Zuora expects to make $1k/mo off their customers, although I think we could have used them for $500/mo. That's roughly $50k/mo worth of revenue through Spreedly.
> Once we get funded we can hire a programmer/hacker to bring our dream to life

What makes you think that it's going to be easier to get a dedicated, driven hacker with cash (which you don't have yet), rather than with stock (which you could issue right now) ?

> would it be hard finding ourselves a hacker in return for the same percent or even more of the company stock as us?

As each of you individually (meaning the hacker gets 33%), or as each of you together (meaning the hacker gets 50%) ?

Besides the design, what are you and your brother going to contribute, going forward?

I ask, because 2 designers for 1 hacker sounds like a lopsided ratio.
So Wachovia, instead of being sold to Wells Fargo, should have just went bankrupt? And Merrill Lynch, instead of being bought by Bank of America, should have went bankrupt? That would have eased the crisis, how?

Glass Stegall would have blocked both of those transactions.

Would Glass-Stegall have reduced unprecedented capital flows into the US housing sector from overseas investors and the monetary and fiscal policies of our own government? Because if you still have those capital flows, you still have housing prices going up by 20% per year, you still have lenders lowering their standards, and you still have them getting caught holding the bag.

I'm sorry, I just don't see it.

Not all deregulation is equal. Each individual policy has its own incentives. There are not two undifferentiated piles called "regulation" and "deregulation" that we can add and subtract from. I have a hard time seeing how the repeal of Glass Steagall did anything but mitigate the current crisis.

And yes, during the Great Depression it was small banks that were made artificially small by anti-banking laws that failed. The repeal of anti-size regulation has sound historical reasoning on its side.

Meg McArdle had a good post on this. I need to find out about her background, because she is one of about 5 people on the internet that can write INFORMED analysis of issues like these:

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/clear_a...

" Even if you ignore the economic history indicating that Glass-Steagall didn't help the crisis it was meant to solve--even if you assume, arguendo, that the repeal was a bad idea--there's simply no logical reason to believe it had anything to do with the current mess.

Securitization was not introduced in the 1990s; it was invented in the 1970s and became popular in the 1980s, as chronicled in Liar's Poker. (As an aside, if you haven't read it, you really must. Especially now).

GLB had nothing to do with either lending standards at commercial banks, or leverage ratios at broker-dealers, the two most plausible candidates for regulatory failure here.

Most importantly, commercial banks are not the main problems. If Glass-Steagall's repeal had meaningfully contributed to this crisis, we should see the failures concentrated among megabanks where speculation put deposits at risk. Instead we see the exact opposite: the failures are among either commercial banks with no significant investment arm (Washington Mutual, Countrywide), or standalone investment banks. It is the diversified financial institutions that are riding to the rescue."

My own take on it:

http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2008/09/22/the-end-e...
While the strategy to commoditize your product's complements is clever, doing so can be dangerous if you use a license that allows your competitors to take your work and run against you. When doing so, one should be careful to use licenses that can't be turned against _you_.

All MIT/BSD licenses can. All *GPLs, MPLs can't. The choice is clear.

From the projects he mentioned:

IBM (Linux): GPL
Netscape/Mozilla (Mozilla/Gecko): MPL
Transmeta (Linux): GPL
Sun/HP (Gnome): GPL

There is a pattern to be seen: GPL licenses create vigorous diverse communities around them more easily than BSD-styled licenses.
And do you have plan for ppl who would like not only to push information but also receive information ?

* EDIT : I saw after posting that it was already possible. Maybe you should do a replace for send by send/receive and also, change the image to have two-way arrows. This way, it would be more obvious.
Here's a few places you could try:
* reddit
* digg
* Facebook
* MySpace
* del.icio.us
* StumbleUpon
* Buzz Up!
* Mixx
* Technorati
* Google Bookmarks
* Yahoo Bookmarks
* Yahoo! My Web
* Windows Live
* Propeller
* FriendFeed
* newsvine
* Xanga
* LinkedIn
* blinklist
* Furl
Watch GamesBeat 2009 Live
Exactly what do you mean by "published"?

If you mean "made public", just put it on your blog. (If you don't have one, make one-- there's a zillion free services.)

Or are you looking for a publisher to edit it and pay you for it? If so, you're pretty much out of luck-- the fact that you wrote it without a market in mind is a good indicator that it's not ready for that type of publication.
The agenda for the conference (in PST, GMT -8) http://venturebeat.com/gamesbeat-2009/agenda/
I remember pulling my hair out over PHP's type-system. The boolean comparisons early on were strange to me.

Explode is really useful for string manipulation, for some reason I had issues with certain ways of doing split.

As for frameworks, I know the two big ones are Code Igniter and CakePHP, but the discussions I've seen have boiled down to documentation, which Code Igniter really does well. I've used Code Igniter and only have a few complaints, but overall, it's not bad. It's hard to compare with Ruby on Rails, but overall, PHP is a fairly quick and dirty solution and it "just works."
disagree completely. ada???
Academic Earth Is The Hulu For Education
Internet March Mayhem e-Tournament
If this isn't your core business, it's not just about technical difficulty. It's also about time, maintenance, and ROI on the implementation.

Are you saying that DIY is a clear win in terms of those costs as well?
Try print computer magazines - especially ones with an online version too. They usually take freelance/unsolicited content and pay fairly well for it if it is good.

Some tips (I write on/off for such mags):

* Give them a deadline to reply by - otherwise they could take ages to get back to you. Set it for 2 weeks. After 7 days send a follow up email.

* Ensure you tell them you want "reprint content permission" which will let you publish it on your blog or elsewhere after they publish it (usually the grace period is a month afterwards).

* 5p per word is minimum price for articles under 5000 words - if they offer you less haggle :) (the most I get under 5000 is 7p a word, above 5000 words it will be done on fixed rates depending on the mag & the content)

* They will try to bully you gently - stand up strong. It will get you further :)

* Be bold in your initial email (but dont gush, I learnt the hard way the "I love your mag" doesnt work with editors because they dont love it, it is their job :D). Include anything that qualifies you as an expert.

* Link to previous work that has gone down well (if there is any) and also link to obviosuly respected industry experts with similar views (so they know your not just an upstart :)).

Good luck!
I send emails.

a) Way more reliable.

b) Also land on my phone [with vibration/sound alert]

c) I can put a lot more details in them since there is no 140 chars limit

d) Much easier to do: one line of code - old and simple tech from the 80s (sendmail) beats ugly kids of tomorrow (Twitter) any day of the week!

Mr. Schmidt was right. :-P
I could publish it first on my own blog. But isn't it possible to submit the story somewhere without first publishing it at own blog? At least that is possible at Slashdot.
I don't need to get paid.
There is generally a market for any kind of writing :) if nothing else it will easily sell as stock content on one of the stock websites.

EDIT: ok so it's clear now the intent isnt commerical :) so that is a moot point I just made!
Google Web Search gets a little more refined
Ask YC: Why are SSL certificates so expensive?
http://www.geotrust.com/ssl/wildcard-ssl-certificates/

This certificate costs $995 per year. If you think about it, there is very little that the issuer does, other than supposedly validate your ownership of the domain. They don't even need to maintain considerable server infrastructure.

So why isn't there no serious competition? Why isn't there a company that issues certificates for $10?
How about from a profitability perspective? I think we should suck it up, and realize large companies aren't going to subsidize what we want to do on the internet, forever.

If Last.fm isn't €3/month, don't pay it.
This is a hard problem, but I really would love an accounting service more like Mint for a business. I had dozens of accounts that Mint read and loaded fine. If you had the ability to get that sort of info and electronically handle the majority of the firm's accounting, that's the approach I'd like to see.

I don't like sending documents-- the vast majority of ours are digitally accessible now.
Leaving the Twitter feed public could actually be a nice way to make site status and maintenance transparent with your users.
Is this the same article as this?

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whitespace
Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python
I've seen a lot of certificate issuers for $15/year, so I have a different question: Why the price difference? Are the cheap ones just as useful as the expensive certs?
Yes, I was intrigued by this same question. Did a little research on Wikipedia - it tells an interesting story:

First Distribution Center: Target - 1969 in Fridley, Minnesota. $130M in sales on 11 units; Walmart - 1970 in Bentonville, Arkansas. $44.2M in sales on 38 units w/ 1500 employees.

Noted Acquisitions: Target - 1969 Lechmere Electronics in New England. 1982 Fedmart in Arizona, California and Texas; Walmart - 1991 The Wholesale Club (John F Geisse's company). 1994 Woolco's Canadian discount retail units.

Profitability: Target - 1965; Walmart - 1962

Founding: Target - 1962 with 4 stores in Minnesota. Founded by the John Geisse for Dayton family (also the founders of B. Dalton book stores). The Dayton family had had investments in department stores since 1902; Walmart - 1962 with 1 store in Rogers, Arkansas. Founder Sam Walton had experienced previous success with running a Ben Franklin discount retail franchise.

Technology Infrastructure Milestones: Target - 1969, Computerized distribution system; 2004 RFID inventory tracking trials; Walmart - 1987, Satellite network allowing inventory and sales communication between all stores.

Target was an investment from the get-go. The Dayton's were the investors, and Geisse was the visionary who understood and founded the discount retailing business model. The Company grew through acquisition and strategic investment - even booting the founder (Geisse) in 1968.

Walmart was a spin-off of an existing discount retailer franchise. Sam Walton understood his customers, and his business from a local level. He grew the company organically from town to town at first because its all he was familiar with. The company was built from the ground up to distribute and market discount retail products.
Reminds me of unboxing my first Lambda-dore 64!
Let's apply the same logic for Google. Wait, what?
You can post it here as a self post, or on reddit as a self post. Or maybe you'd like something more like kuro5hin.org.
What I took from his post was that he was pointing out that DIY is an option for most potential customers of this service. Explaining why this service is a win in the terms you mention such as time/maintenance/ROI for DIY is necessary to convince users to purchase.
In case anyone ever references this post here is the command I used:

rsync -avz --progress --exclude-from=exclude username@some.location.com:/files/to/copy/ /place/to/put/them/

The exclude file is a plain list of several items to be ignored and they are just listed by name 1 per line. If you want to do a "dry run" on what will happen add a -n to the arguments ( -navz instead of -avz).
imho, twitter (and others like it) will morph into a public messaging protocol. as more and more people use it the signal will get drowned by the noise. eventually the only worthwhile way of using twitter will be via enhanced filtering rules for meaningful information from people you know and follow.

twitter is really like a public pastebin with great api support which will allow you to command and control computers remotely. soon the posted messages will be encrypted nuggets taking the Public out of public.
We send emails too, but it's also nice to get a TXT on your phone for really urgent information such as a problem with the server.
It's a nice idea. When I play poker, some people prefer to be contacted by email and some by text message, so I can see a use for this.

Some suggestions I would make:

1. drop the charges for sending emails and other forms of communication that don't cost anything, at least for people who make a small number every month. This will help build your user base and encourage open-source applications/libraries around your product

2. include UK SMS and phone messaging; the service is useless to me without it

3. I note you also have sharememe, an "intelligent outbox"; this needs to be more tightly linked with messagepub. How about an "intelligent inbox" too?
Tcl doesn't have a reputation for being "New! Exciting!" but it has a very reliable runtime.
> If I'm able to set up a proxy that makes it appear to Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify, etc. that my IP is from the country they accept, I will still get free music.

I've considered creating EC2 instances and using ssh tunneling to get hulu and some other US-only sites from Canada. I'm not sure if the TOS allows it (of Amazon; I'm pretty sure the TOS of hulu doesn't allow it). I'll try it out when I get back to Canada.

And not to get too off-topic, but since you and the above poster are Canadian also, I feel I have to mention CBC's music podcasts which are pretty good if you find one that fits your musical taste: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/
Apple iPhone Makes Up Half Of U.S. Smart Phone Web Traffic
I really like your perspective. It's pretty much the same as mine. Pragmatism über-alles, right? ;-)

I have no problem with helping others, but I have a problem with being "pressured" to help others who may not be worthy of my time. If I am going to be forced to "help my community", the least I can do is profit from that.
Honest tip: If you're going to do the counter thing, tell the truth. Nothing makes me trust you less to see bullshit marketing prominently displayed on your front page.
LG KP500 Cookie Full touch screen
LG KP500 Cookie an affordable handset with touch screen technology that doesn’t skimp on great features. As with all the latest touch screen devices, the KP500 is part of a new generation of phones that dedicate themselves to interactivity.
Godaddy has one for $30
Rhomobile chasing after mobile software dream
Wait, I'm confused.

> "Over the last few years we have noticed worrisome trends in CS education. The following represents a summary of those trends:...the development of programming skills in several languages is giving way to cookbook approaches using large libraries and special-purpose packages."

I agree with the "several languages" part, but why is using a large library a worrisome trend? Is it really that bad?

Using a library doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. Programmers often advocate code reuse and using a library is an example of code reuse. If you need to sort data, use a provided sorting algorithm or one written by someone smarter rather than writing it yourself. If a problem is solved, don't solve it again, right?

Does it have to do with understanding the solution to the problem?
i guess it matters if you are writing a fighter jet OS.
The URL to which the original poster points is to a wildcard certificate. GoDaddy's cheapest wildcard offering is $199.99/yr. https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ssl/ssl.asp
I realize that, but at the same time, I realize that they've offered this service for free for a long, long time. Also, I wouldn't mind it so much, if they were to charge everyone.

However, charging everyone but the English, Americans and Germans is patently unfair. Also, the people from those countries already get services and features no one else does. So now we're talking about the rest of the world subsidizing what users from only three countries consume from Last.fm.

You cannot tell me that that's fair or that it even makes sense.
Can you identify some layouts that require display: table/table-row/table-cell? They solve some problems with CSS, but those problems (insofar as I've experienced) only come up when working with designs that specifically target the shortcomings of CSS' other display modes (e.g. your shorter secondary column has a background that needs to extend the length of the primary column); or that have layout idiosyncrasies so unconventional that a designer would either need to be familiar with how to implement them to even propose them, or be actively malicious (e.g. uh... like a variable height container that sits at the bottom of a secondary column alongside a longer primary column, I think?).

But "yes" to fast prototypes.