skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This affected a ton of people, so I figured it's at least partially relevant.

Who here was multiple-billed?
That is nice, but it should push to the ultra-mobile, not pull from the desktop. Configuration and code versioning is something that should be automated, and a pull through miscellaneous wireless networks while mobile is a bad way to go.
People, when they write technical articles, commonly want to author the examples in the language they're most familiar with at the moment. If I'd been working primarily in Python for the last 6 months, I'd tend to write any coding examples in Python because it would allow me to focus on the article's content rather spending a couple hours refreshing myself in C to make sure I didn't make any embarrassing mistakes that might shoot through my credibility when read by somebody who spent the last 6 months writing C or C++. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, I usually think of it as an opportunity to rehone my skills on the langage in the examples (or take a look at the language for the first time in some examples).
Grrr. I've been waiting to replace my 12" PowerBook. I mean, waiting and waiting. I bought a black MacBook, but it has no soul. Oh well... looks like I'm going to have to buy one
I know who the author of Market Wizards is. The comment I quoted is Seykota's. The distinction is rather significant since one of the two is among the greatest traders of all time while the other is not.

Most successful traders emphasize that adding to a position that is showing you a loss, because you believe you are right and the market is wrong, is a losing strategy in the long run. That suggests that Paulson won with a losing strategy, which suggests that timr has a point.

Perhaps you are correct that there is something other than "trading" in which people routinely add to losing positions and end up making money when the market changes to confirm their judgments. It would certainly be something other than winning trading.
Do they have some new gigabit wireless protocol I didn't know about? If not, it will take about 20 times as long to transfer a large amount of data.
I looked at the Eee, and the keyboard is undersized as is the screen. I'm not sure if you could really be fully productive with it.
Disassemble and replace the cells, of course! This is hacker news, not shiny consumer product review.
Totally overhyped language! Why isn't anyone paying attention to Lintel, my new dialect of COBOL?
Don't abstractions usually induce more layers, not fewer layers?
Twitter is Paying My Rent
I have to agree with you... Apple, I feel, did not take the "this is the next step in mobile computing and we're leading the way" approach here. It's just a thin, albeit gorgeous, computer.

I'm not saying I don't want one, of course.
Of particular interest to me was the article on MapReduce, written by the Google engineers who developed it.
Was There Ever a Year Zero?
Why Apple's new laptop is basically useless
How cool is that? A cross-organization abstraction for the greater good.
Raises hand...
Donald Knuth: Using Indentation to Represent Program Structure
The R Word: Are you prepared for a recession?
Feature Request: Why not have the "new" comments in a thread visually distinct from the "old" ones?

When there's a big thread like that I'd like to check the new comments but I can't be bothered to read again the 64 comments I read earlier to find the 8 new ones.
I believe that ideal monitor count goes up in a Fibbonaci sequence. e.g. When I had two monitors, I wanted three - now that I have three, I reckon five would be brilliant.
Just as long as it doesn't replace the mouse with holding down the caps lock key and typing commands...
Popularize or Perish
I have an iMac. Things I plug into it include my keyboard, and, uh... my mous-- no, wait, that plugs into the keyboard... uh... headphones. Power cord. I use a USB drive once in a while. Since I don't need to plug in a keyboard on the Air, it seems to have all the ports I actually use. I have used my DVD drive to burn backup DVDs (though now I just back up over the network), and I have used it to watch movies, but in an ultraportable, I don't foresee the need.

What Devin Coldewey is announcing here is that he is not in the target market for an ultraportable laptop. And that's fine. Other people are.
Letting people rent movies on USB sticks may work. They could rent out several movies at a time, and you wouldn't need to keep track of them separately. They could also throw in a few random free movies, too. And since the sticks are ordered en masse, they'd probably pay for themselves within a short amount of time. It's something Blockbuster could try to stay in the game, at least.
True in general, but when he bought them, they were priced very low. Even after he bought millions (presumably) of the swaps, other investors thought he was an idiot and didn't follow suit, so the price of the swaps probably didn't go up much. It was only after the sub-prime fiasco got into third gear that other investors began clamouring for the swaps.

By all rights, his initial foray into buying the swaps most likely had minimal effect on the price. Ultimately he felt they were incorrectly priced by the market and made a bet on them.
Double points if the license is written in Arc itself.
I'm not certain that Paulson could have afforded the losses if the market kept booming, so you're likely right about the six months earlier or later.

However in principle, this is exactly how Nassim Taleb (the Black Swan author) made his money during the 1987 wall street crash (iirc). At the time, people were selling options that hedged against large falls in price very cheaply. Taleb bought loads of them and profited hugely as a result of the crash.

Paulson's scheme was a little more complicated, but the formula was essentially the same - underpriced hedging instruments + crash = massive profit.

This quote from the article sums it up perfectly:
Mr. Paulson became convinced investors were far underestimating the risk in the mortgage market. In betting on it to crumble, "I've never been involved in a trade that had such unlimited upside with a very limited downside," he says.
Lisp is not purely functional (few languages are). Purely functional languages do not let you modify variables.

Edit: Also, programmers in non-pure functional languages will often still minimize their use of mutation (changing variables) for a number of reasons.
What about having an open source friendly license as well as one for enterprises IT and software vendors ala MySql?
You'll have a new Apple machine in 5 years. Why not buy one now that works with the media we have now?
Monkey Think, Robot Do
Yup... but I don't have automatic payments set up so I wasn't charged.

"This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #XXXXXX has a balance of $119.40 (including any charges not
due until 2009-01-23), with $119.40 due (since 2008-12-23).

You also have $109.45 past due (owed since 2008-11-23), and if
by 2009-01-23 you do not pay at least the $109.45 part, your
account will be automatically suspended until payment is received."

The good news is I have until 2009-01-23 to pay it :)
He better not believe he can do it again, like this guy did: http://hedgefund.blogspot.com/2006/09/amaranth-and-brian-hun...
I used Dreamhost at one point and regretted it the month after. They're just plain awful. Not even their shared hosting plan is what they claim it is... they shut down mine after ONE blog post became popular and started receiving a lot of hits.

Just stay away.
So is it safe to assume their annual billings are abuot 7.5 Million?
Release as early as possible, but not too early to have something usable.It's okay to trim features, but it's not okay to release something buggy or unusable.
Dreamhost Overbills Customers $7.5 Million; Uses Homer Simpson To Deliver Apology
I like the significant separation between monitor and keyboard and mouse.. it feels more comfortable and ergonomic to me. I do enjoy hacking on a laptop on a sofa.. but not for more than 2-3 hours.
I'm for a BSD type of license.
i get along fine in xubuntu with 512.. ducks
Warren Buffett would beg to differ with this strategy.

If you trade on value, you shouldn't really care what the market is doing. If risk is mispriced, buy more, even if the price is going down and you are losing money in the short term.
Yes, but this still doesn't actually hurt the people that hold mortgages (the homeowners). Whether or not my bank can handle the fact that I'm about to foreclose has nothing to do with my ability to (not) pay.
I know this is supposed to be a startup echo chamber, but come on...

I feel silly even contemplating spelling out the many reasons (beyond loss aversion) why not everyone starts their own company.
It only billed people who have automatic billing enabled. So from month-to-month autobill people, 7.5 million is probably right. Total income? Probably much, much more.
I reckon its more appropriate for mobility (onsite presentations etc). Its not a desktop-replacement as such.
Speculation provides liquidity to the market. That generally lowers the cost of financial transactions ceteris paribus.
And this guy is translating to Common Lisp:

[1] http://i-need-closures.blogspot.com/2007/09/programming-coll...

[2] http://i-need-closures.blogspot.com/2007/09/programming-coll...

[3] http://i-need-closures.blogspot.com/2007/10/programming-coll...
If the article is correct, and Paulson was actually short on ABX and mortgage-backed securities, the downside of his strategy was unlimited. Taleb's strategy (option trading) had a bounded loss.

It's unclear how balanced Paulson's fund was/is, but the article makes it sounds like he was playing with fire.
at my work we have a micro site hosted there and we got double charged
I got a nice email from them telling me they are very sorry and they will be refunding the money.
reminds me of swivel.com, a cool startup that allows you to "upload & explore" data. I talked to someone there and they mentioned comparing weather data to stock prices as an example.
Fair enough. Credit where credit's due.
Haha. Either way I think you're right.
Classes are a physical grouping of logical unit. Namespace is a logical grouping of classes.
He was talking about the downside loss strategically - not in the pedantic sense you are using.
I certainly wouldn't blame this on anyone but twitter. Twitter has probably the highest popularity/uptime ratio in the web 2.0 industry.

The site is routinely down during regular hours -- it was just a matter of time until they went down during a high profile event.
"... When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don't add anything... you only take away. Dignity is deadly. ..."

This is the crux of the article. If you have to get dressed up and wear a "suit", it doesn't make your software better. If you subscribe to the latest theory of "foo" because the "bar" association thinks it's good, it wont help you get more customers. The ideals of Professionalism and Profession are a mismatch for the Startup world.

The creation process in Startups is new markets, products and services. Not old ones. In fact, the best are trying to displace the old entirely. Put them out of business and make them extinct. It's messy, full of unexpected stops and starts. Not the calm, orderly and mastered process with known results as the ideals of Professionalism enshrine.

Professionalism has its place where the benefit of improvement has to be weighed with the risk of damage to the old and existing. An insurance policy against risk but a barrier to innovation.

"... Living only on take-out and caffeine. Working in a [small] living room. Crazy, stupid, unprofessional behavior. Wearing nothing but shorts and ripped t-shirts ..."

I love this quote. It neatly sums up the informality of the startup process and something people from more structured backgrounds have trouble grokking. At least it's another excuse get around in shorts + t-shirt, think and code up ideas rather than waste money on clothes.
I know - I actually meant that a popular consumer app probably has way worse scaling issues than a white-label enterprise system would have.
Seed Conference, The Schedule
I misunderstood you. My apologies. I was under the impression from other interviews in the book that Schwager followed the same strategy.

The thing is, trading can't be the only successful way to make money, or even more successful than other traders on average -- because trading implies buying more as the market confirms your views, and if that's profitable, it implies that traders will own all the world's assets, and every asset will either rise infinitely or collapse to zero.

If it helps, you could think of him as an arbitrageur betting that the mortgage market would converge with reality. That thesis relies on believing that the market misprices assets, so it seems that further mispricing would confirm it rather than belie it.
Faster, Cheaper, Direct - 3 Ways to Run a Mediocre Design Business
OK

I'll delete mine, too.

But if you flame ("neither truth nor logic"), don't get upset when you get a response.
Sitepoint Contests, An Update
Which raises the future cost of lending to deadbeats, because the only banks with capital will be the ones who were conservative.
Filters Coming to Colleges and ISPs?
How NOT to handle promo codes in your web application
Your own web based SSH terminal
World record for consecutive deleted replies?
Do you people not work in an enterprise environment?

1) Treo
2) External HD
3) Ethernet (I'd forgive just about everything if it had built-in ethernet...at least then it's a decent thin client)
4) Mouse
5) Keyboard (Yes, keyboard. Who types on their laptop keyboard for most of the day? I don't envy your wrists, even on Colemak/Dvorak).
6) DVD (in this case)

And that's assuming I never have to transfer files from one external drive to another. I'm often sending out a loaner external for massive video files (or Logic 8 ISOs).

I like having an ultraportable. I like being able to use it as a desktop, too. Because unlike one Apple rep tried to convince me, the 'solution' isn't to have one laptop and one desktop for everyone. We're not made of money.
Did any one notice that he hired Greenspan? The guy who fueled the housing bubble by lowering interest rates down to 1% the foolishness that made it possible for Paulson to make his billions.
I made quite a few assumptions - namely that mortgage banks are huge players in the various mortgage markets, and because Paulson extracted billions of dollars from these markets, the banks lost money as well. And the money that they would invest in these markets comes from their earnings, which is derived from interest rates.
Yeah that was half his scheme, which is unbounded as you say.

The other half of the strategy, which the quote was about, was related to purchasing credit-default swaps, which are derivatives like options. The losses on CDS contracts are bounded.

But you're right... without knowing the balance between CDS contracts and short selling, it's hard to gauge how exposed he was.
On to this topic:

Am I the only one who thinks that this field still seems so incredibly privative? Online recommendation systems particularly... they suck!

But more importantly, even if someone developed a "perfect" recommendation system, what would that be worth? For example, it has been said that symmetric encryption is good enough today that even if the perfect (could only be beaten via bruit force) algorithm was created , nothing would change.

Are we facing the same problem in this field? Or are those implementing these systems today just neglecting to take the field to the next level?
Outlook's drm claims to do this I think. Of course, no software can do it.
Agreed. Although the author's work is still appreciated.
Ohh Humanized! That's one small company I admire for quite some time. I guess I'm a sucker for their Human centered interfaces and designs.
> Do you people not work in an enterprise environment?

I sure don't. My office is my living room (and also my wife's office). I'm also my only employee, so getting purchases approved is rarely a problem. :)
In Zen, it is said that "aggregates" (things) have no "self nature", that all things arise in "codependent origination" -- you can't get a driver in a universe without cars, nor a car without drivers. One seeks not the "car-ness" in cars, but their context. The "seeing as" notion amounts to the same rejection of Platonic ideals.
It may be a misunderstanding from reporter. But can it be pgp? If he encrypted his emails and only receiver with the key can decrypt it. It basically prevent forwarded messages to be read.
AppleTV Take 2 the real revolutionary/evolutionary product of MWSF 2008
The objection that, in the midst of a long document, telling what level of indentation one is at would be difficult is easily addressed by having the editor show space marks or using 'fold lines' in print -- neither of which is difficult.

In practice, though, I never have any problem with indentation based syntax, because change in indentation is easy enough to detect, and that's good enough for anything I've ever had to read.
I just watched the entire keynote and I think the skinny supermodel sexy MacBook isn't the standout product. Having been an early adopter of Windows Media Center PC, I can say that the PC part got in the way of the entertainment hub experience many a time. And we're not talking BSOD here - just the Penn-and-Teller combination of a PC and Entertainment Hub. Apple TV Take 2 doesn't require a PC. I think it would make a perfect Mother's Day gift (let your in-laws rent movies, see Flickr slideshow of their grandchildren's daily lives, YouTube party tricks). As someone who does tech support for relatives and family members (unwillingly sometimes), I welcome cool new digital devices that might actually not require a manual and tech support. What do you guys think of the Apple TV Take 2.
Why? The internet is a much better and cheaper alternative, and it offers the enormous upside of instant gratification.

Software might come on USB sticks for a while in the future, I think, but eventually even that will be delivered digitally. Valve has done this insanely well with Steam.
Monkey Controls Robot Using Brain Signals
The the more something costs, the more people enjoy it -- regardless of quality
Save for the copy and paste hack
I think you meant to say "not too early to have something unusable", yes?
Well a lot of the money earned any which way goes to people like him. That is why they are rich.
I was. They billed me twice, for a total of around $240. I shot off an email to them when I found out and they replied, apologized, and said it would all be sorted out in a couple of days. No big deal for me since it was on a credit card, but I'm sure others were more adversely affected than me.
I think any keyboards made later couldn't help but suck less than those abominations.
Melinda Gates goes public
A great story of how Malinda is changing the world, and Bill Gates for the better. Thank you Malinda.
Does anyone have a good guess as to where we are in the Macbook Pro upgrade cycle?
Pardon my naivete, but are masquerading languages a common problem?

Choosing a license to fight imagined evils seems like the short route to a DRM'd license.
In general he makes good points. I just didn't agree with one of them: "Let's start with the obvious: no optical drive"

It could be just me, but I've only installed software by DVD/CD rom - two times in two years for my macbook pro. I think a lot of people can get away with not having an optical drive.
Ask Hackers: Are you planning to do your startup in Arc?
What are your Arc related plans?

Please share your thoughts.
Cool. When we created Fantasy Congress we scraped the government in Java and then only afterwards did we find out that a friend of ours had scraped it in Perl years before and the Washington Post did it a year ago.

It would have saved us a lot of heartburn.
This has more in common with the Power Mac Cube than any Mac since that one.

Its biggest feature is flashiness. Its not really an ultraportable, because its width and length are too big.
I'm glad I prepaid until 2009.
The article really just shows that business is creating artificial barriers to determine competence. Because not everyone can determine who is competent, we use proxies like a suit or one's manner of speech.

Unfortunately, it creates a group of people who benefit from that barrier and distracts from product and creative thinking.
250x Faster Ultrabroadband Thrills Australian and US Researchers
Doing a startup in something that's not even public yet?
> he was playing with fire.

You only make $15 billion with a shit-ton of leverage.
The MacBook Air is a $1800+ wireless movie player for rich people. Media is where Apple is heading, and this product supports that direction.

There was nothing new for MacBook Pros or MacBooks, and the Mac Pro upgrade was made a couple of weeks before MacWorld. That makes me think that Apple dropping "Computer" from their company name was a telling sign.
Best Buy still sells 3.5 floppy disks. I'm just sayin'.
3 Tips for Turning Lack of Resources into Strength
Another site (run by a friend) may be CSS Beauty.
The crafts store still sells sundials.
First Messenger Image of Mercury
How are temperatures close to absolute zero achieved and measured?
Touch the Invisible Sky: Exploring the Cosmos in Braille
Releasing too early is a good way to get the press to ignore you when you actually have something good...
Apple's new iMac
This is a pretty sterling example of Paul Graham's "dignity is deadly" quote:

> When you evolve out of start-up mode and start

> worrying about being professional and dignified,

> you only lose capabilities. You don't add

> anything... you only take away. Dignity is deadly."

I'm a Dreamhost client, and I've been pretty happy with their overall service. This isn't the first time they've admitted doing something stupid.

Before Dreamhost, I was a client of Westhost. They were fine too, until they instituted a major migration to virtual servers.

It was a disaster.

Site response time slowed to a crawl, and their forums were saturated with angry customers. Trouble ticket response time went from hours to days.

Westhost handled the situation "professionally". By this, I mean they did not acknowledge the problem for several days. They eventually posted apologies and explanations that contained no information about the root cause - just empty words.

"Professional" can mean a lot of things. It usually means "Cover your ass".

The problems persisted for weeks. I'm sure Westhost has since resolved the technical problems with the virtual domains (since they are still in business). But their "professional" communication with customers made me leave.

The deal with Dreamhost is:

1) When they do something stupid, they admit it immediately and take their lumps.

2) They come across as a bunch of clowns sometimes.

I don't think you can have (1) without (2). Maybe it can be done, but Dreamhost won't be the company to do it. Their company DNA is pretty well fixed.
I don't like the font Aaron Swartz always use.
How To Control Your Computer With A Wii Remote
That presupposes you're right. But there's no way to know this for sure in advance, besides which nobody's right all the time. To do as you advocate guarantees that your losses, when they do come, will be maximal.
as of august, 2007....
Heh. I didn't say it was the best way, just that it was a way. And I was only referring to movie rentals. (It doesn't make sense to deliver software via USB, since it seems like CDs and DVDs will always remain cheaper than USB sticks. The dynamic USB drive isn't an advantage for software.)
Wozzzz Noooo!!!

Ha. That's the first I'd heard of that. To each their own, I suppose. Maybe she'll feel rich enough to not do comedy.

Oh horrid thought. What if she uses the Woz's cash to make more reality tv?!