skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its possible that I am reading the paper incorrectly, but the conclusion clearly states that manager selection of Beta accounts for a large majority of over or under performance. Nowhere in the paper does it suggest that they do or do not under perform the market.

To anyone who is familiar with how money management works, the conclusion in the paper is obvious. Exposure to beta will increase returns in good periods and decrease returns in bad periods.

The research looking at "average hedge fund performance" is also misleading because while the analysis is technically correct, the conclusions in those papers are obvious as well. If you hedge out most of the beta, you will get zero return on average. Once you subtract expenses, you will by default perform negatively the market. (in reality, hedge funds do not hedge all beta to zero, they hedge it pretty close to 1 so they track the market, but they probably under track it. This also leads to negative alpha)

Where hedge funds play a role in investment management is when individuals can select hedge fund managers they believe will outperform. Professional investors, including fund of funds believe they can do this, and some will do this, some won't and the total will net to less than zero.

[[Added in response to additional point below]]

The paper cited is using an econometrics model which is using factor analysis to determine where the "biggest" source of performance comes from.

Because beta is a factor, it will overshadow alpha automatically if beta is large enough. Alpha between funds will be destroyed in the model so the model will output zero alpha with enough funds. While beta will be persistent since by definition beta is a performance magnifier (for lack of a better term.)

In other words, the conclusion in the paper is obvious, and not worthy of discussion.

[[Added in response to Jesse]]

Yes, if you are aggregate all money invested in hedge funds the average return will be lower than the benchmark that Beta is based off of. ETFs may or may not beat the benchmark depending on the ETF. Some have tracking error which causes them to not beat benchmarks.

Also, you may notice that I am not arguing whether the OP is correct, I am generally agreeing with them, but the point is that his assertion is obvious and the cited paper is obvious and provides no real value.
We are talking about positions on the scale of the Knight Capital Group or Rochdale Securities error (both concerning positions much larger than 1B USD), for which purchasing options could not solve the problem (the required options would be far more than options market makers would buy at a reasonable price).

Remember, just because the MM would buy or write one contract doesnt mean they'll buy or write tens or hundreds of thousands of contracts at the price.
Legal Immigrants Need to Engage in the Discussion
This is a really interesting point of view.
Great Idea - Focus on 1 to 3 products and go deep selling them locally and/or working with ups/fedex/dhl on overnight shipping and reach out to 1800flowers and letting them sell your product.
TextMate was suffering from a lack of development. Someone else took over development, in this case the community.

Had TM continued in its previous, active commercial mode, it may be ever more popular today, not having given alternatives a chance to in turn become popular.
I think that it comes down to people. To become a C level executive or board member at a S&P company, presumably you've undergone a reasonably level of public scrutiny and shown the courage that Ben Horowitz sometimes references when talking about start up leadership, it takes to make the right and difficult decisions that benefit the business. Not every board member or executive, but the majority.

The companies in the fund of funds, presumably don't have the same "blue chip" ratings of the S&P companies and their management may still be undergoing their personal tests of courage.

In the end, in the absence of a extremely hot market - which could be a good or bad thing given the experience level of senior leadership, it's probably a better bet to go with the tried and true.
The insanely confusing path to legal immigration, in one chart
If a 128GB tablet was released and it wasn't voted to the front page of HN, did it really happen?
OSM's map is definitely more detailed and has been online for several years now. And while they are both crowd-sourced, Google's version is closed data. It's a real shame. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Map_Maker
chinese firewall!
Here are the final projects for CS 229: Machine Learning at Stanford.

http://cs229.stanford.edu/projects2012.html

Take any of these studies, and try to replicate or extend it. They're all pretty interesting and come with the advantage that you get to see how someone else approached the problem as well.
Zencoder here. Amazon has done a good job of making their pricing look simpler/cheaper than ours, and for some customers, it is. Two quick comments.

1. Our larger customers don't pay more than this already.

2. Paying 33% less doesn't necessarily mean getting 33% more value.

We'll be writing up an analysis today. Off the record (ahem), we've known about this for a long time, and we aren't worried.
> banks can bet against their own clients

This is indeed true.

>in fact , that's how they make most of their money

This however requires some proof. They do make money this way but to say that this is how banks make "most" of their money is way off by my understanding and I work in the industry.
Grand Central probably? They might be enforcing its use and deprecating other API's.
> This problem is only an issue for those doing certain types of upgrades; it won’t occur with as-shipped Fusion setups. But it shows an inattention to detail with severe consequences— many users do modify their systems.

So if you go way out of your way to DIY a Fusion Drive and set up all of the pieces required, it becomes Apple's fault when Disk Utility fails to acknowledge your heavy modifications?

I wonder if the author gets mad that you can't move files out of /System and still expect the Mac to boot. After all, many users do move files.
It's called true socialism. It's a perfectly viable political system, provided it's correctly setup.
For some reason, on the 5th or so time I saw this headline, it struck me as somewhat flawed. Something is not necessarily worth doing just because it is hard.

Seems with writing, the real appeal is that it can be highly rewarding, and with pretty much no downside. Not unlike most every other creative endeaver. Programming included. (Now, I realize I'm predicating this on the fact that you do not necessarily have to release what you did for others to see.)
RIM's big day: Live blog of the BB10 launch
It has been slipping - to the point that I've been considering moving to a linux machine next instead of upgrading my Mac.
Ask HN: How do you reward yourself?
Indeed. My grandfather used to tell me tales of his day in the Civilian Conservation Corps, building roads in the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains in the 1930s.

They'd be going along clearing out land for a road and they'd come across a hollow with residents who had been isolated for decades, if not a century or more. He said they knew nothing about the world at all, though they would have basic tools from way back. Of course, that was 80 years ago now.
Induction does not work. At all. The UI flickers and moves around. Views snap out of existence and then back based on where you click. And it crashes constantly. I don't think I was able to view a single row from a single table.

It also appears to be abandonware.

PgAdmin III is currently the best (free) GUI for postgres. It's not without its own issues (mostly with missing keybindings and focus issues) and it's ugly but it is at least functional.
Explore Salaries and Equity at AngelList
I used Trello to organize my NYC apartment hunt. Worked like a charm, made the process so much easier.
Ask HN: Startups on EC2, what does your setup look like?
EC2 is every startup's favorite web host: pretty much the default place to go.

My question is what does your EC2 setup look like? Just one instance and an AMI to spin up new instances when required? Use RightScale or Scalaium? Use a PaaS (Heroku, Nodejisu?

How is your database set up? Mysql/Postgress on the instance or another instance? Is it replicated (and if so, how?) SimpleDB? DynamoDB? Other NoSQL store?

How do you deploy? Capistrano? Git style push deploy?

Do you use anything for devops (Chef/Puppet) or just set up and update the AMI when you need new things?

Have you had any pain points with your current setup? (reliability with Amazon EC2-East for example?)

How hard was it to setup? How did you learn all these things? Or would you like to jump from your current hosting options to Amazon EC2 but don't really know how?
Aqua Data Studio is what i've largely used in the past. It's expensive; however, I had to work on a lot of different databases and data warehouses and it was the best fit for most.
How to get speaking slot at great software/tech conferences & how to f#ck it up
When I was young OSX, was so much better. It used to read my mind and produce everything I needed even before I'd thought of it. Including coffee, and sweet blueberry muffins. Without even plugging it in or turning it on. It was so much better than Windows.

These days, it is merely an operating system.

I may switch to Arch Linux, which I hear has a voice-activated Cappuccino machine and dry cleans shirts.
This is how sales has changed drastically over the past 10-15 years. Before, high pressure sales and using hard closing techniques have been replaced by a more "consultative" approach. IT's a more humanistic approach to selling your company wares.

Because of this, listening, or the appearance of listening has become the new training tool for salespeople. As such, using an extroverted or introverted label doesn't really apply.
This made me laugh so much a little bit of wee came out.
Go RSS for Google Reader Hits 1.1
I've had a similar experience recently with trying to make sense of my life using spreadsheets.

For instance, while I was trying to sort out my enormous TODO list, I decided to prioritize projects by assigning them scores based on a few different features. This was straight in the OS X Stickies app, but after I had more than three features/attributes, I realized it would be better done on a spreadsheet. That has been enormously useful and has really taken the stress off. I wrote about it in this post: http://noisytyping.com/quantify-your-personal-values/

It turned out that this was an established method in Operations Research, btw.

Edit: I'll note the attributes I use in my real spreadsheet (as opposed to the example in the blog post):
- Time to completion
- Time to first results
- Expected earnings
- Possible windfall
- Intrinsic fun
- Outreach
- Special commitments
- Learning new skills "opportunity benefit"
- Execution risk (misc factors)
- Familiarity
- Novelty (not mutually exclusive with Familiarity)
- Competition
- Autonomy
- Reputation building

As noted in the post, some factors can have a weight of zero. I still give them a co-efficient per project because the factor weight could change in the future.
Get Shit Done... on a mug
Private social networks for groups and companies: https://www.metasocial.io

It failed. Already started working on a new thing.
To use a now-trite expression, "follow the money." Expressions of moral outrage (e.g. pity the poor gambling addicts) serve mostly as a smoke screen.
No trial? Guess I'm not going to give this a whirl since I can't see what the commotion is about.
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the educational philosophies espoused here. As a musician, I've learned firsthand the dangers of learning incorrect ways of doing things. I feel like it's a lot easier to learn something new than to unlearn a wrong way of doing things. Just my 0.02c.
There is a similar dilema in the creative writing field: "I don't know the right way to say this idea" or "I have writer's block." The general advice from the workshops and masters is to write something, even if you know it's terrible, so you have a place to start and revise (what we would call refactoring). The theory is that revising words is much easier and can be helped along by someone else moreso than a blank page.

However, I've only seen it work in practice when you do go back and refactor. Too often the smelly code gets left behind, and that is why I usually ask others to think through code before writing.
I agree collecting those precious emails will go a long way.
The headline "Writing is hard, so do it" is a good example of one way in which writing is hard. I believe the writer is trying to say "Writing is hard, but becomes easier with practice" but writes something closer to "Since writing is hard you should write".
Thinking about Big Data (Slides)
I thought the same thing and was especially shocked that the technique could ever be used in the Siberian taiga (both because of the cold and the dense vegetation). Compare this to a quote from the above wikipedia article "Scientists, posit that early tracking methods were developed in open, sparsely vegetated terrain such as the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa."

Between the barefoot hunting and the persistence hunting, this story seems like it's tailor made for Born to Run.
Antigua is obviously a haven for terrorists and trafficking in WMDs. US invasion imminent.
Great move from google, no doubt the move will birth some future employees! I take it at this point that the model A is effectively dead?
There is also at least one tribe in South America that has never been contacted by the outside world.

http://www.uncontactedtribes.org/brazilfootage
If you had a long position of 100 shares, you could reduce your risk exposure buy selling a call option or buying a put option. (each contract has a notional exposure of 100 shares)

Buying a put option requires an upfront payment but you will receive money if the price falls below a specified price (the "strike price"). On the other hand, you receive money when selling a call option but may have to pay later (or hand over your shares) if the stock price jumps above the strike.

The problem is that this mechanism only works because there's a counterparty willing to do the trade. You can see the option premium (cost) for a variety of strikes on most financial sites (e.g. https://www.google.com/finance/option_chain?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL)

As more people buy put options, the price of the put option goes up. As more people sell calls, the price of the call option goes down. If you have a small position (say, 1000 shares), your trade wont move the options market much, but if you have a large position your trades will affect the market makers (they also have a book and are looking to reduce their exposures profitably as well)
Kick?
Modern Concurrency: Erlang, Scala, Go, Clojure
A CRM for job searchers: http://www.jobsarium.com

Getting no traction...
Facebook's "public" events now require a login to see.
http://qiezi.me/projects/mruby-web-irb/mruby.html
This was posted previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4923530, along with some fairly extensive discussion and criticism.

The basic gist of the criticism seems to be the code is basically just directly translating a Python token list (not an AST) into Javascript, and as such is reasonably fragile and horrible code (the main translator function: https://code.google.com/p/brython/source/browse/trunk/py2js.... ).
Embedding other font formats in HTML != my SVG file can be rendered un-modified. If you put the raw SVG file in the browser it does not render. The SVG fonts would have to be extracted on the server side and converted to webfonts + CSS.

SVG rendered via an <img> tag has restrictions in browsers, for example Firefox will not allow the SVG to reference an external image file such as a jpg. Once again, you put the raw SVG file in the browser and it does not render...

Obviously I miss any SVG 1.2 feature which Inkscape lets me easily use. Compositing for example. User has "SVG" output from Inkscape, user puts it on an "SVG" hosting service, it does not render in the browser = unhappy user. Users don't care less about what version of SVG they are using.

Stripping browser-incompatible elements could be useful, for example, if I place my content inside an SVG 1.2 <page> then the browser will render nothing at all, where as if the server stripped out the <page> element first, I'd be able to see my content. Obviously this applies only to a single page tag. Once again, you put the raw SVG file in the browser and it does not render...

Bug-workarounds are the primary reason for wanting to manipulate the elements though, there is a Safari bug which can cause it to ignore <defs> but work if you switch out <defs> for <g>. Once again, you put the raw SVG file in the browser and it does not render...
Ouya's Create game jam yields more than 150 games in 10 days
I'm personally not into camping at all, but I think the point is to take some time to do something you love. I personally love to ski, but even a day alone playing video games can do the trick, it's more about getting away from work as completely as possible.
Granted his wife was distraught when she wrote that, but semantically speaking if you get hit by a bus you don't know what you won't be able to say goodbye.

It sounds like it was either a terminal illness of some sort or his own decision, but frankly the cause is irrelevant. I never heard of him until today but it sounds like he was a good man and it's a shame for his family, friends and the community.
Accusing everyone who avoids javascript that they can't be bothered to learn it is pretty extreme.

I personally would choose any other modern language over javascript.

ANY.

I've learnt it and used it 8 or 9 years now, to me it just sucks. And still no-one knows how to write it well, no-one agrees how to structure it and every 2 years there is a whole new way to write javascript that comes out. I'm beginning to suspect it's because there is no good way to write it.
Yo dawg I heard you like backups so I made a backup of your backup on your backup.

The idea here is that Time Machine is generally not useful on transient drives that come and go, thus for each time that you plug in the drive Time Machine would have to re-scan the entire drive looking for changes, to then back those changes up to yet another external drive. Time Machine is meant to protect the files on your computer, not those on external media.

Do I agree with that? No, I think I should be able to specify that Disk A should have a Time Machine backup on Disk B, and that Disk A and B are stationary to my desk, but most people don't need that. There is no requirement for that, people want to backup their main hard drive to an external so that in case something goes wrong their data is safe.

The authors complaint seems to stem from the fact that Time Machine can't find a drive to backup to (which BTW, Time Machine will warn you about every single day that it is unable to backup), probably because he spent an awful amount of time partitioning his drives in weird ways with weird names, and copying stuff back and forth thereby probably getting all drives tagged by Time Machine as not viable for a backup location.

--

Personally I haven't had any issues with Time Machine. I've got it setup over iSCSI to an OpenIndiana host and to a local 1TB external drive and all is well, haven't had any issues what so ever with it no backing up data, and restoring has been a breeze in the past.
Moqups: Introducing export to Dropbox and Google Drive, grids and more
In most of the code bases when 5+ people work on the same code, it's really hard to add some non-trivial functionality by writing it the proper way from the beginning. BTW I think sticking with the attitude "first specs, then code" is old school in most situations. Some very rough spec will be fine, but a lot of the things you haven't thought of, you encounter while actually playing with the app/widget, or stepping through the debugger (unless you've worked on a product for a very long time and know it inside out).

I find "write working code & then refactor" ridiculously easy when working with Git. Add some tiny new things one-by-one and commit early each time it is more or less stable (so you can revert quickly when you screw it later, instead of doing some crazy debugging). When it's done, squash the commits and refactor.
I had the pleasure of meeting Eben when he spoke at HN London last year. His passion is blatant and powerful and he's comfortably one of the most down to earth people you could wish to meet and has a brilliant sense of humour. The fact that he turned up wearing a HAL 9000 t-shirt cemented the fact that he's a true geek who is doing something he absolutely loves every single day.

If you ever get an opportunity to see him speak then I suggest you jump at the chance.

Eben's HN London talk: http://vimeo.com/43039279
The (Potential) Danger of Trivial Code Examples
It is interesting that Amazon never seem to go down the acquisition route- if they did, Heroku could be a target.

I really want someone to make an RDS-like service for Postgres. But I don't blame people for not trying right now, I'm sure Amazon will do it eventually.
Exactly...

>>Having been a professional software engineer (C++, Java, assembly code, drivers, compression, encryption, threading, server code) for 25 years, and having used Macs since they first appeared back in the early 1980’s, I have a long and deep perspective on the evolution of Mac OS X (now just “OS X”).

I expect A LOT more then that is that is really what he did.
> Outright removal of an API in a minor release. Deprecation with threat of removal of robust long-standing threading APIs with rewrite required.

Hasn't Apple always done this even before OSX? I could be wrong, but I vaguely remember Joel Spolsky writing about this as a core difference between MS and Apple.
Using Vim as an XCode alternative with auto completion
Read this and I think it will make more sense: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...

That article doesn't address my concerns at all - namely roadway changes caused by factors like construction, storm washouts, etc - that haven't been integrated into the geographical/geospatial data.
Clients can also bet against their banks. Everyone making million dollar trades is a grownup, and should know what they're betting on.
This essay starts strong and goes down fast. It would have been improved by fewer examples and a greater depth on each one. C-
Also, in a case where a piece of equipment needs to be replaced (like a range hood, or even a coffee maker)one can store digital copies of the user manuals in the repo and not worry about having to hunt the damn things down when the power goes out and you have to remember how to reset the clock.

Not that I've ever done that..
> When the code is working and you’re ready to move onto the next phase, then you can work on making the code pretty, readable, well-documented and tested. While this flies in the face of concepts like test-driven development...

I disagree that writing "shit code that still works" and TDD have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, if I'm going to go the "just get it done" route, I will almost (but not always) try to set up a few tests for it.

Because nothing sucks harder then going back to crap code and trying to decipher what it's doing. If it's crap code, then it's likely non-orthogonal code, which means changing it will likely break something...etc. etc. Tests help me do the refactoring later.

And, also, how do I know that my shit-code-just-works actually works? Sometimes, it's helpful to write a kind-of-shitty-test to at least verify that it kind of works, if not perfectly.
From the sounds of other developers, I think much of the development community is moving towards this paradigm. Developers have been so inundated with needing to use patterns, designs and other forms that has lead to inefficiencies in designs that were well thought out, but do not apply, instead of inefficiencies from bad code.
Top 5 Tips On How To Avoid Debt From Your Student Loans