skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, life must suck for all the many, many kids whose childhoods are completely erradicated for a remote shot at something that people only consider valuable because people have to dedicate their lives for even a remote shot at it. The icing on the cake is that those who don't dedicate their lives to getting in probably have a better chance of getting in.
My first thought as other people have already noted was that I would be terribly guilt tripped and pay slightly above what I thought would be the average to make myself look good.

I do wonder however if people also pay more as a form of social-compensation and not guilt as they figure they are weighting up the cheap people.

This phenomenon would make an interesting study to read.
The owner retains the right to refuse service.
I was under the impression that "bonuses" are discretionary, and not contractual.

Every company I've worked with has a baseline bonus based on how the company did and (sometimes) a spiff on top of that due to individual contributions and/or your team's contributions.

All discretionary.
I'm sure I would not find out from a moderator, but the math for detecting voting rings sounds really interesting.
Just do principal component analysis on past data. That'll give the best predictors (based on linear regression) based on the past.
Sure. But that's not what the report said. People have all sorts of crazy stories about what the NSA did or didn't say. I think this one is BS.
I'm a little surprised by the woman in West Sacramento. Sac is my hometown, and my parents still live there, so I visit pretty regularly. $1200 a month for a motel room is about twice the going rate for a studio apartment in that area; for that amount of money, they could rent a decent house in a much nicer location.
It really depends on the employment contract.
I think computers originating great art is synonymous with the search for general AI. (Not going to happen, IMO)
I don't get it http://divvyshot.com/photo/3ambV/
I think their determination is very commendable, but let's wait and see what happens.

The important thing to note here is that Google is not just competing with them now, they've commoditized the service altogether. This means that people are going to be less likely to ever want to pay for voicemail transcription.
There seems to be little debate over the facts, including that these were, in fact contractual. The debate is only over whether AIG is somehow not bound by those contracts, and if not, whether they should break them. See, for example, http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/when-bonus...

FWIW, I have a small contractual bonus in my own compensation (not from AIG)
And so is facebook too, donchaknow? Given that HN attracts all the smartest people who would probably figure this stuff out, I'd wager that pg is really a CIA operative. In fact, I suspect Microsoft is as well. I mean, if you are the NSA, what better way is there of looking at everyone's personal, electronic data?
Diebold admits voting machine flaw
There is firefox extension called IE NetRenderer to view pages in several versions of IE.
Interesting opinion. In regards to 4, I disagree, as I believe that possession promotes creation indirectly by creating demand & fueling an already unhealthy mind.
This was discussed on HN recently. Lots of good comments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490173
Landlords generally won't rent to someone without a job, or with a prior history of eviction, or bad credit.
Man, this guy really likes staying at the four seasons.
Heh. Got a side project that does exactly that (twitter-forum, NOT a chat room), and everyone that saw it first thought it was a (lousy) chat room.

I believe there is use in micro-forums (or group-twitters) different than chats; it's a group timeline, it's meant to be persistent, not real-time conversation (though faster than doing blog/forum posts) of group of people publishing related tidbits of information (or replying to / referencing it).

(Shameless plug, my project is http://speeka.net/ , one-tech-guy side project that's practically dormant atm because of lack of spare time and biz/marketing efforts).
> Being modeled as "very safe", my impression again, is that CDS were in fact often considered "off-balance-sheet-instruments". But that's again secondary...

That's wrong and the error is not "secondary". If something is "off-balance-sheet", it's useless to a bank. Banks need on-balance-sheet assets to match their liabilities. And assets are heavily regulated.

> Bank deposits are and have been rightfully regulated actively in terms of explicit

Deposits, the money that customers put in banks for "safe keeping" (and interest), aren't regulated and there's no reason to regulate them.

Deposits are liabilities, promises that the bank has made. Assets are what a bank keeps so that it can return deposits to customers, so it can satisfy its liabilities.

When you deposit $100, the bank books $100 in liabilities and $100 in assets. It can exchange the $100 cash that you gave it for assets of equivalent or greater value, but all that is regulated so that the bank can pay you $100 when you ask for it.

Yes, deposits are insured, but that's something entirely different. And, the way that deposits are insured is by regulating assets.

> The OTS might indeed have looked at the risk of failure which AIG's actions involved for its depositors, its stock holders and even for Uncle Sam in his role as deposit insurer.

AIG's problems had nothing to do with returning money to depositors.
Yeah, the financial secret to most financial secret books is to write financial secret books.
The comments say "sadness"...

I say opportunity.

No not for fat cats to get fatter, but simply: from death comes birth ...

HN certainly has some of the brightest minds around, lets do something about it!
Seriously, don't muck around with this...

Hands down the best solution is to load up a single Windows VM and install a bunch of these standalone, sandboxed browsers from Xenocode: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

You can test across IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari versions.
There is one nice way to boost Sun's survivability: to get the server room rid of Windows boxes - a segment where Sun can't compete. To deploy a solution that currently runs on Linux/x86 on a SPARC/Solaris or even SPARC/Linux is really easy and Sun makes some wicked fast machines for when you need throughput and not single-thread performance. To do it with Windows is a whole lot harder. The good thing: we would get performance and reliability, and in exchange, we would get rid of Windows (and, of course, Exchange and Outlook).

A second, interesting way, would be if Sun decided to make inexpensive SPARC desktops based on their T1 or T2 designs that encourage people to develop massively multi-threaded applications that run best in spaces where x86 boxes can't go just yet (and won't go until at least Larrabee). But they need to run and build something sexy like a Mac mini and they need it by last year or so. I doubt they could pull this one off.

As for me, I am going to stockpile Sun type 6 USB keyboards and matching mice, just to ensure my ability to have a keyboard with keys labeled Help, Stop, Again...
>>> My impression is Alan Greenspan specifically nixed regulation of CDOs around 1999.

>> Greenspan wasn't ever in a position to make that call.

> He was indeed not a regulator of that but his testimony to congress influenced

In other words, he didn't "nix" anything.

> the resulting lack-of-legislation on the issue of derivatives when the official who would have regulated them asked for the ability.

How about a cite...

I've already commented on Greenspan's successor's "knowledge" in this area.
VCs generally bring in entrepreneurs in residence (EIRs) for one of the following reasons:

1. To help source (i.e. find) great startups they can consider for investment.

2. To help provide advice/guidance to existing portfolio companies (EIRs are often successful entrepreneurs themselves).

3. To assist with due diligence and analysis of potential investments.

4. To possibly place the EIR at some future portfolio company (often, EIRs are looking for their next opportunity).
This is quite a poor article, for reasons others have already mentioned here. Ultimately, any government "solution" that involves the bailout of companies is flawed and immoral.
And it's so ironic that people who were not married to x86 architectures enjoyed 64-bit computing a full decade before it became mainstream (as in "you could order a box from Dell")...

And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).
I don't use "startup" generically to mean any small/new company that hopes to one day be big. That isn't to say that my definition is definitive (what?) or that a small company that doesn't fit into it is less worthy.

I've always used the term startup for a company whose potential earning is not constrained by its size. Who are developing something that will generate wealth that is disproportionate to the size of the company.

With a software startup the duplication cost for their product is practically nothing therefore they could fill up their target market overnight. With a web-app you can server tens of thousands of customers relatively easily.

The market is the only real constraint and this puts these small companies on almost equal footing with the big companies in the same market.

With every animation studio it seems that the potential to generate wealth is constrained by their size (and their skill but the scaling power of skill is finite).

The power of a successful IP to generate disproportionate wealth is the exception (and is often independent of the studio).

The Disney story to me re-inforces the idea that in this space, to compete you need more people and your ability to produce is directly proportionate to the number of people you employ.

The growth curve doesn't look like a startup to me, when they were small they did shorts, as they grew over years they did features.

If they had developed a way for 12 animators to make a feature of that could compete with the features being made by 100-200 animators then sure, they were a startup (by my entirely arbitrary definition).

Although where Disney (the company) innovated (IMO) was by producing a product that the other studios couldn't no matter how many employees they had unless they had the disney training and skills.

I've written way too much for how "compelling" my point is so I'm stopping here.
Ok, it's a serious photo spread, but come on: this is a bread-and-butter reddit post.
That's about all the good I could see coming from this marriage.

I hope Sun gets back to its feet by itself.
I don't understand #15: "The couple and their three children are living in a budget motel while they save enough money for deposit on a new rental home, but are finding it difficult as they pay nearly $1200 a month for the motel room."

$1200 a month is a budget hotel? That'd almost buy you a one-way plane ticket PLUS a month of rent in a decent apartment in small-town Iowa. (Where I live, there's "now hiring" signs all around town, too. Sure, most are not high-paying jobs, but they'd make enough to pay rent and eat.)

Sometimes I think a number of these hardship stories I see in the media are more a case of people not wanting to let go of their city or their old lives and so making it worse on themselves. I suppose that's natural to some extent, but wouldn't it be better to help these people understand their new reality and how they could address it than to indulge their feelings of entitlement to their old standard of living?
> too savvy to click on ads.

Why do you need to be dumb to click on ads? I see ads that are interesting quite often and I do click them if I'm curious.
Create 50 or 60 accounts and keep them ticking over (i.e. voting on random articles daily - maybe even comment from a few & submit the odd semi legit link).

Then submit what you want and upvote carefully. Voila.

Probably not that hard: though given the size of the community I'd hope we'd spot them.
A couple of points to consider here.

First, for all of the people who think that AIG should have gone bankrupt: go look at www.aig.com under "individuals and families" to see what lines of business AIG is in, then check out the "insurance holdings by state" section of the wikipedia page. AIG owns two dozen insurance companies in California and controls 4.7% of the life insurance and 2.7% of the property and casualty market in West Virginia, among other things. IANAL, but I have to assume that policy holders would revert to general creditors in the event that they had a loss and the insurer was bankrupt. Would you want to go to bankruptcy court and stand in line with Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, etc. to try to get your payout if your house had burned down or your spouse had died and you needed the money to pay your bills? It may be the case that state governments stand behind insurers that do business in their state (insurers are regulated at the state level so this may vary by state) but this converts the problem into one that is much more complicated and expensive to sort out than just giving money to the parent company. I expect that this is why the parent company was bailed out instead of going bankrupt.

As for bonuses paid to executives, these people are employed in units that basically trade derivatives, and they know what positions AIG has on its books. It is thus possible that the guy who earned $6.4 million in bonus could earn a lot more than that if he started a hedge fund and bet specifically against the positions that he knows AIG has. If this is the case, then AIG is actually saving money by paying this guy to stick around and help them unwind the book. Confidentiality provisions will not protect a company from a former employee betting against their positions, only from having them disclose information.
I hear that 'Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell' is kind of annoying to break the protection on :)
Really? Opposite response. Facing an existential threat to their business --- by his own admission, GV is practically 1:1 with them on features, free vs. paid, with his differentiator being "accuracy" --- what he's got is handwaving. "Other people have gone up against us with free" (paraphrase); yes, and those people didn't have the strongest brand on the Internet.
> You could argue that the OTS or other bodies already had the authority needed to place limits on issuance of derivatives.

The problem with this argument is that the issuance is irrelevant. My standing on a street corner selling billion dollar cats isn't a problem.

The problem was that regulators said "sure, buy as many of those cats as you can find and hold them as assets". The unregulated firms saw that for the crock that it was.

We got hit by two problems. One was subprime loans, which were pretty much a creation of regulation and govt action. The other is bogus assets accepted by regulated institutions. Again, regulators failed.

Yes, the unregulated institutions have also taken a hit, but only to the extent that they counted on the regulated ones.

There's another thread in HN about folks driving more dangerously because they think that their cars have some feature that reduce the risk more than it does. (Or, as a friend of mine puts it, the folks with a winch are the ones who get stuck.)
New Particle Throws Monkeywrench in Particle Physics
Cool idea but doesnt track my route (pittsburgh to boston).

As a side note, the official interface for trying to do this is quite annoying, and this 'beta' is promising.
Online IQ tests are never very indicative. It can be hard to concentrate on & parse the test. Scores are likely to be significantly lower.

Also most top out at 144 as anything higher would be tough to judge based on such a test. I would imagine a large segment of this cmmunity is above 144 IQ.

However if anyone wanted to post their IQ'ds it would be interesting (if not very conclusive). I would figure the average to be in excess of 120 though.

It might work here, I doubt Digg/Reddit would manage it (too biiiiig) :P
I think they are from Australia. I see a lot of different asia countries in the list too.
I agree, but my argument is based on semantics. I believe when one creates "Artificial" intelligence, it isn't really artificial. I don't think intelligence cares what medium caries out the function of being intelligent.

As for art - computers are just as able to create art as humans, but only because so many people define art from the observer's perspective. If a person is inspired by an image, it shouldn't matter that it was nothing more than some pixel shifting algorithm reshaping a random google image selection.
Wow. How very revolutionary! You have been able do that with any standard Sony Ericcson phone, for the last 2-3 years, and probably Nokia, HTC, Samsung too. My phone has a button that says "reply with voice-message" and then using some sort of black voodoo it gets sent over mms.

I like it when apple make a new product, strip it of most basic features and then when they finally add the long missing features... It's like the second coming of Jesus.
NBC Boss Explains Why Boxee Users Can't Have Hulu
$1200 a month is a budget hotel?

Yes. That works out to $40 per night. Even in small towns hotels generally cost more than that.

That'd almost buy you a one-way plane ticket PLUS a month of rent

$1200 would not cover a one-way plane ticket from Sac to Iowa for a woman and three children.

Moving a family is hard even when you have the finances. When the family is broke it is next to impossible.
California the Worst State in Which to Start a Business
FYI possesion of 10GB of actual execution porn would probably get you a significant jail sentence (I dont think it gets you on the sex offenders register though). Never come across a case though.

The end users though do contribute to creating the crime: they create a market and a community. For example an individual may have innappropriate thoughts related to abusing children and creating the imagery - by creating a community from which he/she can gain access to the material they could well be encouraged to put thoughts into action.

You cant pin any specific blame but removing them from society is always going to help :)

Plus of course you dont know what they may do in th future. Looking at images may develop into actual abuse. Leave that person free? Or put them in jail and attempt to rehabilitate? Not a choice IMO.

Whether the rehabilitiation process works is a seperate debate in my opinion (I would say it doesnt as it happens) but there isnt much I can do about that for now.
Netflix pays about a nickel to stream each movie online
Yeah, but it's tough to judge intelligence... I seem to recall people always saying that IQ tests aren't good indicators of intelligence, especially when taken online. Something like ACT/SAT might demonstrate academic ability, but then again not everyone copes so well with standardized testing.
I don't remember where I saw this, but someone said that it is the duty of the citizens to pay the legal minimum amount of taxes they are obligated to pay, and no more. You seem to represent this strategy now. I think it's important for more people to adopt this attitude.
There have been a few attempts to methodologize a more "consultative approach" to Sales, notably SPIN Selling, Strategic Selling and Solution Selling.

The last of these has been the most successful, and interestingly it was cooked up by a tech. support guy, Mike Bosworth, who was "persuaded" to try his hand at Sales.

I have tried to summarize the essence of Solutions Selling here: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/01/distillation-of-solu... and have just released a product, bSelling, intended to support this kind of approach: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-based-prod...
I'm using a 2nd-hand Omnibook 6100 which is from 2000-2001. It still works, and it's pretty powerful, so I use it.

The main reason is the CPU fan almost never comes on, so it's a quietbook.

Other than that, software development on it is a good idea, because if it runs adequately on this, it'll run blazingly faster on a new machine!
Didn't they get bought by Ebay? Aren't ebay US based?
From what I seen in the photos, wattvision seems interesting.

Live feed of watts used by Y Combinator:
http://www.wattvision.com/house/live?h=208803
Link to referenced study: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=16...
Well there's cheaper ways to go than by plane. (I admit I also forgot it was a larger family when I was writing that part, so yeah $1200 wouldn't cover that all at once.. at least not by air.)

The point is, they are in a bad spot. They need to fix it. This might involve selling everything they own, using the house down payment they've been saving up, and riding a greyhound bus to somewhere cheaper. Of course it's hard. Life is hard. I guess my point is, just because it sucks and it's hard doesn't mean they deserve to get a free pass from the truth of their situation.
None of them. Granted there is a distinction, but let's assume for the moment we've established that the sexual acts themselves cause no lasting damage. Where, then, does the damage come from? I think a large part of the damage from being exposed comes from the stigma attached to it. In which case I think it can be argued that the evil was committed not by the pornography, but by the people who have viewed and judged it.

As Elaine once said in an episode of Seinfeld (The Pick)

Because it is not me that is exposed but you. For I have seen the nipple on your soul!
I've never used either product, it does seem like an application where customers would be willing to pay to get better accuracy, especially business clients.

Obviously, Google might improve their solution and offer similar quality for free. It's definitely possible, but judging from their recent performance it's not as "game over" as it would seem in the days of Gmail and Google Maps.
My research has shown that, traditionally, an indie developer can get 40-50% of their sales on the Mac, and a 5% or lower share on Linux. There's a bit of a chicken-egg question over why Linux sales are so low - most game devs don't go for Linux because they hear they won't sell well, but low numbers of games for Linux may contribute to that trend.
Probably only plugs it in while copying files, so no Linux distro. Would also lose its novelty factor pretty quickly with me because my desk means I have to have my PC on the right side!
3D data visualizations in virtual worlds: A "wonderful advance" or fancy window-dressing?
So this uses 150 kilowatts of energy, or basically the equivalent of the gunpowder in 3 .50 cal bullets. Wouldn't the more practical solution be to invent an extremely accurate like .70 cal bullet controlled by the same targeting system.

A .50 cal rifle can target accurately at near 2km, and has a useful range of 7km. Heavy mortars (IE two-man military or truck towed, not the ones the terrorists are using) usually only reach 8km in range and the high trajectory and slow velocity probably make it exceptionally easy to target (compared to conventional supersonic artillery rounds).

So I ask, wouldn't the simplest solution have been a highly accurate heavy caliber rifle with explosive rounds that can hit a mortar shell at the peak of its arc when it's moving the slowest. The high refire rate already achieved with naval defensive weapons would mean you could take a few dozen shots and account for any inherent inaccuracy in an explosion propelled projectile.
As I understand it - anything that is hosted inside australia and would end up on the blacklist is illegal in the "throw you into jail" sense... So I understood (b) all right.. I know that the argument is: This 'X' is illegal in Australia - you can't buy it in a book / you can't host it / why should you be allowed to 'import' it as bits..

as for a) -- It's a long way to shout to PNG.. :) And I'm still not 100% comfortable with describing TCP Packets as "words'.
Hey, and Digg is run by the government!
One of the things I love about HN.. You ask a question like that - and out of nowhere - the author of the code responds.