skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it may seem so, but in my opinion Harvard did the right thing. They created a new separate entity which handled the business side. They created a new venture whose sole responsibility was to manage the Universities endowment. That this organisation wasn't controlled enough and didn't know where to stop is another story. I think that maximising the profits (within a risk scope) is in the interest of the students as long as it doesn't distract Harvard from being an excellent University, and I believe that wasn't the case.
If someone -- or more interestingly, some speculative project -- offers you a 1% chance at $1 million, for only $9,000, as many times as you want to take it, then the issue becomes one of finance.

If your society has strong contracts, the corporate abstraction, norms of honesty and disclosure, and a pool of wealthy investors (or operational investment groups) which can weather a few bad runs, you'll likely raise the money, and everyone wins.

If your society fails in one or more of those dimensions, it may be impossible to raise the money. Too little respect for contracts/corporations (such as via ex post facto wealth redistribution), too much dishonesty/secrecy, or too few wealthy people/groups could make the costs of assembling the investment exceed the returns. Thus the valuable project is never undertaken, and society is poorer.
Brochures Printing
Printed brochures are normally single-sheet documents printed in color and then folded. They are in several sizes, shapes and styles depending on the requirement, and can be printed and designed to one's specifications. Such brochures can be useful handouts or good deal for sales professionals, may be included in marketing mailings and can employed in many other useful ways.
In theory, they already posses this.
Monetizing is one thing but profitability is another. I monetized my blog by including adsense but my blog only earned me $20/mth.

HootSuite is cool but how much does it earn from their so-called monetization of Twitter is another? I will be interested to see HootSuite release some actual revenue numbers from ads.
Another great part about Haskell's operators is that, like other functions, they can't be "overloaded". They are defined for a typeclass (Java users: read as "interface"), and trying to import different definitions for the same operator is a compile-time error.
How does one know that interviewer is smarter than the interviewee?
D/DoS Testing Network Applications
Deploying onto the JVM is hardly vendor lock-in; there are no shortage of Java servers around, from a variety of vendors. Obviously the specifics of deploying to App Engine are going to be vendor-specific, but the core of your code should be pretty portable.
Facebook Shares Tips and Case Studies for Brand Marketers
Lagrangians and Hamiltonians for High School Students
"To boldly go" was used in Star Trek because it sounds better than "to go boldly". Familiarity may have increased that effect, but it certainly didn't create it.
http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/#PHP-Users

Quercus claims to be able to run "MediaWiki, Drupal, Wordpress, Gallery2 and DocuWiki" on their site, and equivalent performance to a PHP deployment with APC. Which is pretty impressive, if true.
Twitter is peaking
I'm having a hard time believing you've tried to do the aforementioned (standards-based web programming). Having to include Microsoft browsers in that is like pulling teeth. Your OWN teeth. With no painkillers.
Meet Times, a Mac feed reader that puts some style back into RSS.
Ask HN: How should I secure my ebooks?
I'm about to publish an ebook and am looking for ways of securing it.

The target readers are high school students so it might have to be fairly robust. On the other hand, a light-touch approach and a friendly notice about paying if you think it's worth it might be enough.

So far, every solution I've looked at seems either insecure (eg. IP restricted / expiring download links) or annoying for users (custom readers, plugins). Also, much of it is limited to Windows.

Do you have any experience of this? Any advice? Recommendations?
why should an educational endowment act any different than a hedge fund? hedge funds are designed to maximize return for some level of risk. if you think the level of risk they pursued was too high, that's another issue, but hedge funds aren't necessarily high risk
Along these same lines, it's very surprising how many people who could easily afford a new car have collision insurance.
The first 5 pages of digg perhaps? I mean, they will find out about it eventually, might as well warn them up front right?

But seriously, I think an encyclopedia would be a good bet but the very first message we send should probably be one the reiterates peaceful intentions. With our history of warfare anything such as a dictionary or Encyclopedia given without context could be seen as a threat of further violence.
I agree it wasn't just "writing specs", but I think the parent meant that the surgeon could offload the lesser repetitive work. I think it was more about removing distractions.

IIRC I think there was a "tools specialist" on the surgeon team. I find writing tools to support my work very helpful; and they are interesting, challenging and rewarding to write, but they do take headspace away from the main task. I think this is the idea of the surgeon team. There was also a documenter; which is also very helpful but difficult to do well.

I'm not sure why this never took off (wrong ratios? people don't get along? communicating with the team is itself adds too much overhead? the surgeon's work is too raw for that support?), but I find it helpful to think in terms of these roles within myself.
That's entirely not true.

http://github.com/ice799/starling/tree/master
God != Religion
Music is probably a great analogy. I'm not musical, but I know people who are. Something about it aligns perfectly with who they are; it is inseparable from the person.
Got rejected by TechStars again, but we're getting better at it
Um, did anyone else need to confirm that they were an adult before viewing the post?

Rather funny no?
they just invested unwisely

From what I've read, it looks like the biggest problem was one of continuity: they fumbled transitions between managers.

To some extent, this is the fault of the next level of management -- they should have understood the risk of the insourcing and transitions. I think it also falls on the outgoing manager(s) (Jack R. Meyer and Mohamed El-Erian) somewhat -- if you've been paid that much you have a residual duty to protect your exotic, aggressive bets from exploding early on the next watch. (Perhaps they gave guidance that was ignored; it might take lawsuits to know for sure.)
You left out:

5. When the Ruby library for doing this is written and published, and you're trying to convince people to use it instead of rolling their own, you can refer them to this blog post.
There is no such thing as "printed cash," that's just another word for government debt. Sometimes with the additional meaning that the debt papers where directly sold to the central bank, instead of going through fixed-rate market. This direct selling of paper is the ultimate mark of unsound monetary policy, btw. Watch for it in the months to come.
It's not a no-brainer. Does "winning one million" means that you have to do absolutely no work, spend no time at all and the money is tax-free? The answer most likely will be no. Taxes alone make the expected value negative.

The more important problem is that many times it's hard to determine whether a "wager" has a positive or negative expectation, compounded by the fact that the positive value has to be utility to you rather than just money.
i have no idea why, but livejournal has banned my home ip address. also, google hasn't cached this page. does anybody want to summarize the article for me?
From my limited experince (you HN regulars correct me if I am wrong) VC does not behave like the article say.

It is true that the VC diversifies on different inversions, not to put all the eggs in the same basket and to invest on different markets/ideas

But VCs do not invest on a lot of startups. The companies I know have a very limited portfolio (sometimes less than ten). They do not have big inversions, I suppose because they can not handle the risk or the workload
This website: http://dostuffright.com/ does something similar with the drop shadow. Kinda neat.
The total PFE (potential future exposure) off of those 200T in derivatives is only about 8.5T (from the Q4 OCC website) (hence the need for the gov't to put out 9T in stimulus)

One thing to note, the total PFE was thought to be around 500 billion prior to the bubble collapsing, so even this analysis may end up being incorrect.

Most of those derivatives are the 'toxic assets' that everyone talks about, essentially houses that are built with no one to pay for them.
Consider the case where the blog post is not entirely correct. How do you tell everyone that cut-n-pasted the code from the blog to fix their apps?

You can't. At least with libraries, someone can report a bug or send a patch, and you can release a fixed version. Any reasonably competent developer will eventually notice the new version and upgrade the module. Problem fixed.

With a blog post, there is no reasonable way to push out new features, patches, bug fixes, security fixes, etc.
It's a predecessor hypothesizing what was confirmed in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560075

Basically one guy scripted the flagging of stories on Amazon in order to troll via moral outrage.
I disagree. The point of a non-profit is not to seek to increase its net worth by aggresive market speculation. In fact, that seems like the very definition of for-profit!

I am hardly an expert on such things but I would presume that the donors over the years to the Harvard Endowment might have had some expectation that their donations would be put to use futhering the university's academic aims, not as chips on a fund manager's gambling table. This is why people give to non-profits!

Some gain is necessary to counteract inflation, of course, but T-bills or straight banking would have sufficed for that. Otherwise they should stay out of aggresive wealth maximisation. It's not their money. And if it is their money, they should be taxed on their income like any other enterprise.
Drupal and Joomla to Lose Market Share to concrete5 Web CMS?
And you're basing that on watching how many episodes of Star Trek?
I'm going to do a live interview with the founder of this company and ask about him what you guys say here. (Esp your point, jonknee)
How about using Mobipocket Creator Publisher Edition to encrypt your ebooks? End users can then use the free mobipocket reader software.

http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/article.asp?BaseFolder=prcgen&...

BTW, this is pretty much the same format / drm the the Amazon Kindle uses.
The Most Used iPhone Apps (They're Not Games)
Nicely done. I like the name and the approach.

Is accuracy a problem? My understanding is that there are operators that configure devices to obscure the true user agent.
Do you guys think this is true?
Why Indie Games Should Cost More
Another image-based Captcha method
- The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, 1973 (Douglas North, Robert Thomas): Nobel Economic Historian North explains how institutions and property rights determine how human beings got along with each other through history; this is important, so they don't think we're mass murderers by design

- some school biology book on natural selection, evolution

- The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

- Goedel, Escher, Bach: introduction to the "weirdness" of the human brain

- the little prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry): human beings and their quirks

- Several editions of Popular Mechanics
"Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book"
I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.

I love that quote, but I love this one from the article, too:

She was just another person trying to make it in New York. The fact that she had this credential just gave her something different and I remember thinking, "How can we cash in on it?"

That's from the guy who suggested she use her IQ to make herself famous. To him it was just a way to sell books.
Most? I wouldn't go that far. Credit default swaps in general are as much at fault as collateralized mortgage obligations specifically.
The rule even got screen time in the movie Finding Forrester, when Sean Connery and Rob Brown have an entire conversation about it (and deliberately start their sentences with the offending words in order to make their points).

This was the first thing that came to mind when reading that particular section. It's so true, and the points they make in that scene are good points indeed.

I think that's an underrated movie.
one I saw is in Hpricot, where the "/" was overloaded to search.

(doc/"table td.country")

I guess this goes along with vim and gmail's convention to use / as the shortcut to search as well.
Ask HN: What do founders do for health insurance?
The health insurance issue has been plaguing me for a while and I wanted to see if maybe some other founders on HN have the solution.

Health insurance is one of the most important "benefits" that is included in having a corporate job.

So what do you do when you quit your job to start your own company?

Everything I've seen so far costs in the neighborhood of $1,500 a month for a family of four. That's a huge payment when you're just starting and have no income.

Is there a better solution? What do you use?
It costs that much just to hire a new person on average, I'd imagine it would be even higher for lawyers.

Basically, instead of laying people off and re-hiring them when the time is right, they're spending the capital up front to create a pool of "firm approved" candidates. (It's not a flat 80K, it's 1/3 of salary - so cheaper people actually cost less to rehire than it would to go through the process after a lay off.)

Smart business running, but not exactly a great career move if you want to do well there.
Until any information comes out otherwise, yes. Maybe it wasn't actually this guy, but the method makes a lot of sense.
Thousands of workers threatening to shut down your entire operation is pretty much the biggest gun you can find, in my mind.
If you're going to harass a group of people it's a lot more tasteful to target one that isn't already persecuted.
Well I think you're conflating the simple operator syntax with broader issues of static typing. There's no reason you couldn't have Haskell-style operators in a Python-like language, where the definition of each operator is given by a method of its first argument.

The 'no-overloading' rule of Haskell is kind of annoying. You can import different definitions of the same function, its just that you then have to disambiguate with a prefix. Like 'List.foldl (+) 0 xs' versus 'Map.foldl (+) 0 xs'. This is made more annoying by the fact that core functions such as foldl aren't typeclass methods. AFAICT the only reason you are forced to disambiguate is because otherwise the compiler would need to use Prolog-style backtracking to typecheck your code on account of type inference. It's perfectly possible, its just that the designers didn't want to force this huge requirement on implementors. Plus a lot of people such as yourself feel that having multiple functions with the same name is a bad thing. I personally don't, as long as they have different types and the compiler is able to disambiguate which one you are referring to based on that type.
It's be a mistake to say it has nothing to do with that, but the number of times you get to play is subsumed into the utility equation. It would be irrelevant if utility was linear.

The point is that $10,000 to me is worth more than 1% of the value to me of $1,000,000. Whereas I would probably pay $1.10 for a 1% chance of winning $100, though not on a regular basis.
Imo it's just not worth it, if somebody can read it he can make a copy of it and redistribute it "illegally". Only thing you'll accomplish is pissing of the ones who retrieve it legally and the "harder" (harder for the average Joe) you make it the more annoying it'll be.

Only reliable "secure" way of publishing an ebook is not publishing it as an ebook at all.
I would presume that the donors over the years to the Harvard Endowment might have had some expectation that their donations would be put to use futhering the university's academic aims

Naturally -- what else do you think the endowment is for? Like any big university, Harvard takes endowment money, and invests it in such a way as to maximize returns. Some of those returns are reinvested in the endowment, and the rest are used to support the university. A higher rate of return on the endowment fund is directly and obviously connected to higher spending on the university's academic aims.

Some gain is necessary to counteract inflation, of course, but T-bills or straight banking would have sufficed for that.

You don't seem to understand the basic idea behind an endowment. If Harvard didn't earn a reasonable rate of interest on their endowment, they would quickly exhaust it at their current rate of spending. Simply "counteracting inflation" but not seeking a competitive return on their endowment would be grossly irresponsible, not to mention wasting a vast amount of capital that could be put to better use.

As for the taxation question, I'm not sure how much tax Harvard has to pay. But they do have to comply with various legal requirements on how much money they pay out from their endowment each year vs. reinvesting it.
You said Atheism is a falsifiable hypothesis that fails if anyone presents repeatable, concrete evidence that a higher power exists

That sounds great, except it isn't.

How would somebody go about creating a repeatable falsifiable experiment that showed that there was a God? Try it out in your mind. It just doesn't work.

I point to a rock and say "This rock is God. Therefore you are wrong." How would you refute such a claim? Point to a rock and say "No it isn't?" We easily end up simply contradicting one another.

You can't refute a claim about the existence of God without getting into a discussion of the definition of God. Because without a common definition, there's nothing to falsify. You could say "There is no God according to this definition," which is a fair thing to say. If we all shared the same definition, it might even work. But we don't.

So I simply pick "God is some subset of that which cannot currently be proved"

We know that there are things in formal systems that are true yet cannot be proved, and we know that throughout history there are things that are true that could not be proved for a long time, so such things exist. Yet because we are unable to attach our grappling hooks of logic and reason to the concept it defies our Popperian paradigm that we would quite reasonably apply to all other things scientific.

God is simply a belief that we don't know everything. Under that rubric, of course there is a God.

Now is he a big guy in the sky with a beard, etc? Beats me. I think once you establish belief in the unknowable you have to acknowledge that anything past that point is going to be speculation, personal opinion, creative storytelling, etc. Nothing wrong with that, it's just not rational in the same way science is. Your "falsifiable" qualification ends where God begins.

And that's why atheism is faith-based. It presupposes the existence or access to all facts and methods regarding dealing with God. In that sense it's actually quite more irrational than other religions which continually twist and morph as understanding changes. Atheism will always be the same -- because at it's heart it's always about applying science to dreams: a ludicrous idea at best.
Oh, and I meant target="_top", doh.
An affordable Git repository hosting service
Hi eli,

concerning devices (and networks, too) you are very right: It's pretty wild out there and it takes a lot of detail to make sense out of it.

Most of our device detection goes beyond the user-agent string to accurately detect devices. At the moment, we are able to identify 99,8% of devices, even if the request was proxied (via Opera, for example) or transcoded (via Novarra for example).
You are thinking in terms of code. I'm thinking in terms of knowledge.

What you should take away from the blog post is not the code. It is the knowledge. It has given a good starting point, on doing your own research. Just using a lib usually never leads to that.
I don't know what part of the country you're in, but you should contact a broker. They can give you a bunch of options and tell you what all of the options mean.

Personally, I'd prefer an independent broker than someone who worked for a big firm like State Farm or the like.

As an additional note, you don't pay anything extra for using a broker; the carrier pays them additional money directly. All the carriers will have similar override agreements with a broker, so you don't have to worry about the broker being shady. They only get paid for as long as you have the policy, so it is in their interest to match you with a policy that you will actually keep.

If you're concerned about costs, ask about an HSA. Make sure you understand what an HSA actually is before you decide to go with one, though.

[Edit: I forgot to mention that I'm in the the brokerage portion of the health insurance industry; before I worked here though I used a broker and he saved me about 500 bucks a year.]
Charles Simonyi:

I have to really concentrate, and I might even get a headache just trying to imagine something clearly and distinctly with twenty or thirty components. When I was young, I could easily imagine a castle with twenty rooms with each room having ten different objects in it. I can't do that anymore.

I think he went on to say that his declining abilities forced him to become a better programmer, but unfortunately I can't check the original source. I found the part I quoted here: http://www.deadprogrammer.com/category/facility/famous-clam-...
Python, by necessity, is more Haskell-ish. I was primarily considering Haskell as opposed to C++, where multiple functions share a name and differ by parameter types. This sort of situation is a true nightmare to debug, and I believe is responsible for some of the backlash against user-defined operators in general.
he's not using any undocumented methods for finding the keyboard, but he is uncovering information that apple apparently doesn't want you to have, since they don't provide a documented method for locating the keyboard. i'd say that's a gray area. maybe they'd allow it, maybe not.

for finding the first responder, he's using an undocumented method. that's a big no-no. they'd probably keep you out of the app store if they noticed that one.
The link was probably copied from a tweet.
Amazon have had well documented CSRF holes for years: http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/mar/my-amazon-anniversary

If this story turns out to be true (seems perfectly likely) maybe they'll finally start taking them seriously and fixing them.
how many jobs do people at this caliber actually find by anything other than networking? i don't imagine most firms actually send out job notices for positions like CEO. seems life they are paying this job placement firms big money to tell them to call people in their professional networks... shouldn't there skills as CEOs help them realize that on their own?