skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am saying that it doesn't, but should to a larger degree.

Ok, fair enough. I agree that it should; but then again I don't think fractional reserve banking is as good an idea as most economists appear to think it is.

It's not germane to this discussion in any event

I think it is, because the fact that making loans causes money to be created on the spot means that loans are cheaper (in some cases, much cheaper) than they would otherwise be. That greatly reduces the incentive to increase one's financial responsibility. Also see below.

defaulted loans aren't good for the bank

They aren't if the bank still owns them and if the bank was booking them at an inflated value, yes.

Many banks/lenders actually service most of their non-real estate loans vs. selling them.

Yes, I should have drawn a distinction between real estate loans and other loans.

to the extent that they do sell loans, they care about credit-worthiness because higher quality loans fetch a higher price.

They care about creditworthiness in the sense of ratings, yes; but I thought we agreed that that's not the same as actual financial responsibility, i.e., as whether the borrower can actually pay back the loan. See below.

In some ways, the problem was that they "spread the risk" too much.

They thought they were spreading the risk by re-packaging loans in all these creative ways, when they actually weren't. (This may be what you were referring to by putting "spread the risk" in scare-quotes. Note that I did not do that in my previous post.) Spreading risk means the risk of any one loan defaulting is independent of the risk of other loans defaulting. That turned out not to be true, because real estate was in a bubble, created by low interest rates and consequent cheap mortgages (and the fact that the money for the loans was being created out of thin air), and when the bubble popped, lots of loan defaults happened that were correlated, not independent.

Had we simply seen a series of defaults, the systemic threat would have been greatly reduced. It was the leverage that created the real crisis.

I agree that leverage greatly exacerbated the problem; but note that the leverage doesn't just come from the derivatives. It comes from fractional-reserve banking in general, i.e., from giving out more loans (up to 10 times as many with the current reserve requirement of 10%) than the actual supply of real savings justifies. That's going to create a bubble in whatever the loan vehicle du jour is, even if no other leveraging is present.
so i guess it's passed the deadline now, was your assumption correct?
As they made some note of, Core Animation is very picky about the image format you provide via the contents property. For example, if you retain a reference to a CGImageRef that you also assign to a CALayer's contents property, you will end up with at least double the memory usage if it's not in CA's preferred format and it makes a copy of it. In my experience doing that alone can help performance immensely.

I've since lost track of the Apple documentation that said it, but CA prefers 16-byte alignment and (kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little) for the pixel format.
The existing, politically-controlled system of finance and corporations has numerous and powerful enemies, hellbent on bringing it down, in whatever way possible. Furthermore, even without enemies, it is patently clear that the fiat money system is happily busy destroying itself: raising debt ceilings, engaging in quantitative easing, and so on. The libertarian movement is probably one of their smallest enemies in terms of headcount but at the same time it really looks like the most powerful one. If you read the original paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, you can see that the entire purpose of bitcoin is exactly to bring the current system to its knees. I hope that BTC succeeds in doing that and save its supporters from being dragged along in the quagmire, before the current fiat system finally destroys itself.
Unfortunately I can't specifically answer which platforms are badly in need of an OS, but more diversity is always a good thing. If you could ask a genie to make a working operating system in 5 minutes, it would certainly be worth something to people. Operating systems haven't even been around that long. Would you tell a craftsman in 400 AD not to make his own type of sword, because swords have already been around for centuries?

The question is whether it's worth your time to make, as opposed to other projects.
I remember when Knight was in the news regarding this but never the technical details about what took place. It's scary stuff especially given the money on the line, and it makes a good case study for devops. I understand the temptation to re-use a field but normally I'm for using new values in those fields.
Before bitcoin, a corporation needed a person to open bank accounts, sign off on payroll, write checks to suppliers, etc. With bitcoin, a set of algorithms can do all of those things. A profit making system doesn't need any human contact anymore.
I updated it long ago to sort-of work with 2.6, but lost the code in a hard drive crash (right after getting commit access but before check-in, sigh), then lost interest on redoing it.
> [...] the current fiat system finally destroys itself.

You have high hopes.
New free expression tools from Google Ideas - uProxy
It's not using ARC. Is this legacy code, or couldn't they get equivalent performance with ARC enabled?
I just finished 'managing' the integration of a service API with a web front-end. It was not at all easy to manage and everyone working was in-house.

Healthcare.gov has 50(!) contractors supervised by HHS?

To fix it they are bringing in 'specialists?' Someone should send everyone in HHS a copy of the Mythical Man Month.

I believe the probability of this thing EVER working are pretty close to zero.
I'm pretty sure some of these [1] are still floating around - they were only discontinued two years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve
Subcultures are genes mixing and matching and exploring corners. Sentience burdens us with the ability to understand connotations of 'status', 'outcast' etc, but otherwise nature is on track with her research & development
I thought it might be something along those lines. Just didn't have much time to look around.

I would say, though, that it should be (and really is) up to the author where their work can or can't be displayed.

I think it would be good for the community either way, but if an author doesn't want their work in any way tied to a commercial interest, then it's their right to apply licensing in such a way to ensure that, and for others to respect that (though I'm not saying you're implying otherwise; just clarifying).

The monetization here would be brand exposure and site traffic to the domain/website, using the works of others (which I'm not inherently against).
Fiat system will end without help of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is here as a place where to run when things start falling apart (without it, some other regime's currency would prevail).

Gold is not a solution since it needs to be stored and moved by someone. We tried that in growing ecenomy of 19th century and it lead to a banking cartel and legalized fractional reserve lending. I think gold will collapse with fiat currencies for the exact same reasons: counter-party risk. No one wants to trade in gold/silver coins because they can't be moved and protected like bitcoin.
The former Soviet Union also has a lot of airports that are too close to the city centre to handle noisy passenger air traffic. So there is a huge market in countries like Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, all of which are spread out over great distances. In fact the ability to use a shorter than normal runway would make it possible for many of Siberia's towns to build an airport that could handle the Bombardier jets. And next door to Siberia is China which also has some considerable distances to deal with.
We normally call these _viruses_.
"understand the benefit of free market economics"

I think this a case where free market economics would not have produced the sort of improvements and innovations that we see with this new model. You need a lot of stability do pull this of over a long period of time. Stock market doesn't allow that.
"In all practical terms, it does not look like "laws" can take out crypto-currencies at all"

Perhaps, but the law can certainly stunt the growth of such currencies, to the point of keeping them small, niche, and irrelevant for the majority of transactions. I suspect that this is already the case, without any modifications to the law.
"Your work is great - top 10%. However going forward we will be keeping the top 9% of our performers."
Amazon will give you barcodes to put on them. Print them, sticker them. Doesn't take long. Costs more if you make Amazon do it. The barcodes uniquely identify the item as yours, and not someone else's or Amazon's.
I'm shocked they didn't have a killswitch or automated stop-loss of some kind. A script that says "We just lost $5M in a few minutes; maybe there's a problem." Or, a guy paid minimum wage to watch the balance, with a button on his desk. $172,222 is a lot of minimum-wage years.
It's a understandable analogy, but an autonomous profit making systems wouldn't need to act like a corporation. Depending on what it's decision making system is like, it could have behavior for which we don't a prior from which to make an analogy.
Televisions, but that's very hot right now.

I suppose if you had domain knowledge about specific industries it would be helpful. Ie. I'm sure there out antiquated hardware systems in transportation networks, etc.
The title reminds me of hosting clients, who would complain about losing thousands of dollars per minute when their $10/month website was experiencing downtime.
Aside from the bitcoin reason, was there anything wrong with Name.com?
I think there are enough legal structures in various jurisdictions that make creating an anonymous corporation somewhat easy. http://www.economist.com/node/21563286 is a pretty good article on it. The book "Treasure Islands" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OA6420/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...) is a pretty good read about offshore banking/tax havens and the price put on secrecy.
As PG mentioned, he is updating.

I only picked up the URL via his twitter post.
Powder Keg is a distinctly un-reassuring name for finance related functionality.
The Loudness Wars
Side project idea: community feedback on YC (or other) apps
I know a lot of people wouldn't submit there's, but I probably would. I think it'd be interesting to hear people's thoughts.
Remove Start button in Windows 8.1
If it can only profit by providing a service for which people are willing to pay, it might not be able to get out of hand.
To be fair, is there really another way to eat potatoes? ;)
> hikikomori phenomenon is, it's sort of a quiet rebellion against the complicated and restrictive social protocols that are part and parcel of being Japanese. It is the same with otaku: however trivial their interests may be, they are determined to follow their own interests and choose their own path, rather than simply do what is expected of them

I think that was his point.
You could also automate the backend – set it up so that the botnet could draw on the BTC account to purchase new VPS hosting for its command and control servers, migrate when the old ones get taken down, etc.

Of course, without the creativity to come up with new C&C mechanisms, the pattern of migration and purchases might eventually become predictable enough to stop the botnet.
This is beautiful!!.... Thanks for creating this. This will be good reading material whilst waiting for the videos.
Research into Bitcoin theory and applications.
The article's title is rather misleading as the article has nothing to do with Linux. The Playstation 4's operating system is in fact rumored to be based on FreeBSD, not Linux, and the article even says as much.

Beyond this, I don't think the article says anything new.
almost,

LXC starts as a general purpose Linux container with everything built in, and adds more isolation as development continues

ZeroVM starts with no general purpose Linux, and will add support as development continues

ie, LXC will work with what you have now, ZeroVM will eventually work with what you have now, but shims will have to be developed for everything, either in your code, or in ZeroVm's

IMO the future endpoint will have similar functionalty in both projects, but LXC will see more testing and use /now/
The Ineffable Swede
We agree. Both the bell curve and the exponential delay curve would mean the more time spent on the application, the less likely that team is to be accepted.
No more so than writing a kernel in C moves the interesting bits into the compiler. LISP OS's have been made before, and there is no reason one couldn't be written again that looks UNIX-like.

The networking stack, device drivers, bootloader, etc, all need to be written in much the same way they would in a C-written kernel.
There are a few big problems with that...

The first is that multiplication is...well, not always commutative in Python, but it has two operands and either of them can be the method receiver. For example:

type(5 * 3) => int
type(5 * 3.0) => float
type('foo' * 3) => string
type('foo' * 3.0) => TypeError

More generally, multiplication might be a method on either the right or the left type. If __mul__ is defined on the left operand, the interpreter executes the code in it. If not, and __rmul__ is defined on the right operand, the interpreter executes the code in it instead. If neither is defined, the interpreter throws a type error. So typing a * b requires knowing the types of both a and b and merging a set of rules for each of them.

The other problem is that you cannot in general determine the type of an expression by inspecting code, unless you apply some rules to the legal expressions in the language. For example, take this code fragment:

def foo(fn):
if typecheck.static_type(fn) == int:
return 'a string'
else:
return 0

Assuming typecheck.static_type is our hypothetical typechecker and it operates on function objects. What should the type of foo(foo) be?

I suspect that any working solution involves some sort of constraint solver that gathers up all the constraints, simplifies them, determines if they're compatible, and then outputs a list of possible types it could be, each subject to certain assumptions on the input types.
I drive a Toyota Corolla 2011. It's because I'm not rich enough to have an expensive car. It has standard transmission, which I like.
How many millions in orders do they normally process per minute?

Since there were no procedures in place, would you like to be the guy who pulled the plug on the (let's guess) $100 million/minute processing system? Do you think you could get another job after that? What would the costs be for violating contracts? You could single handedly sink the company (which, in the end, this issue basically did).

I don't blame the guy for not killing all operations. He never should have been put in that situation. Proper QA, regression testing, monitoring, running a shadow copy and verifying it's output, there are tons of things that could have prevented/mitigated this.
Nothing like this will be built again
how do the nonprofit applications compare to the for profit?
"The best part is the fine: $12m, despite the resulting audit also revealing that the system was systematically sending naked shorts."

Cool - all you have to do to get away with financial crimes is create a system with no protections against breaking the law.
Costco membership + sales-tax free states + anything on sale. People do this. Takes a lot of time I suspect, but there's money in arbitrage.

Just remember: the longer it's on the shelf, the more fees you pay. So yes, you may have found a great deal on something, but do you really expect to sell 500 in one year?
The week after this we had a trader in our office who had a meeting at Knight on the morning it happened.

He said he saw the whole dev team just power off and go home at 11am, followed quickly by the rest of the employees. At that point, there was nothing they could do.

The craziest thing is that it went on for so long. No one caught it until their own traders so it come across Bloomberg and CNBC. They actually thought it was a rival HFT and tried to play against it.

The only people that came out of this ahead were aggressive algos on the other side and a few smart individual traders. A lot of retail guys had stop losses blown through that normally would never have been hit. After trading was halted they set the cap at 20% loss for rolling back trades. So if you lost 19% of your position in that short period of craziness, tough luck.
I develop for both iOS and Android, but still use a dumb phone.

- 7 days battery life. seriously, I always get a surprise when it reminds me that it does actually run on power.

- I dont know whether it can do email, facebook or twitter. The screen is so small, why would I want to try?

- Can do internet via Opera Mini if needed (its fine for reading forums).

- Never upgrades

- Cannot use it as a distraction when I should be talking to people or working.

Life Is Good, When Your Phone Is Dumb.
Having code on your production servers that runs billions of dollars of business per day, which you haven't run for 8 years, is obviously bad.

Deploying in such a way that all your servers are not running the same codebase is obviously bad.

Deploying to production with no plan for how to roll it back if something goes wrong is obviously bad.

Not having anyone monitor things closely enough, including the hundreds of warning emails they got before the market opened, is obviously bad.

There is no hindsight necessary here. You could look at what they were doing and predict a catastrophe.
The currency of the Roman empire got debased (silver content of coins) until it became worthless. The combination of raising the debt ceiling and the practice of quantitative easing do exactly the same today. Eventually, even the imperial Roman treasury ("fiscus") began to refuse its own coins for payment of tax liabilities. They switched over to paying taxes in kind. So, yes, in my impression, history is indeed repeating itself.
Google's Project Shield Protects Sites From DDoS Attacks
LinkedIn Has a Signaling Problem
Just one of the risks of automation, and a good reminder why human monitoring is necessary.

Having said that, we deployed a system that was mostly automated, with the human operator to oversee investments and if any out-of-the-ordinary transactions (based on experience) were taking place, to shut it down. She happily sat there approving the recommendations even though the recommendations were absolutely outside of anything we'd ever generated in the past, and bled accounts dry in one evening, so sometimes even with a human observing you're still boned.
The Jetson Fallacy: Longer lifespans could explode the nuclear family
Out of interest, what would have been the outcome for Knight if their positions had caused them to be winners? $12m fine, keep the spoils and "carry on" ?
Horribly written. It is promoting sucrose, it says sucrose is fructose and glucose, then it says "if you're ... getting both fructose and glucose together ... then fructose gets converted to fat at a much higher rate, approximating 30%." which is a bad thing.
a little bird told me that the edit/submit links were still active as of 8:20..
I wonder how you can have code sit on a server unused and then 8 years later have it be called? What language was this written in?
I wouldn't have used the word "meh" to describe it, but I think that it's a valid point to consider: why would I consider switching from Guzzle?

My attention is caught now that I see a composer.json. Friction is limited. Now what?
I drive a 2009 Subaru Impreza Outback. We bought it used recently right before our first kid was born. It's a solid car with plenty of power but nothing all that fancy.

The reasons we went with a Subaru, besides it being well priced, were:

- AWD so we can drive to Tahoe without chains in the winter

- Extremely reliable engine

- Plenty of room and flexible storage for skis, bikes, roof rack, trailer etc.

Basically, it's a great car that we can get dirty and use to go play outside.
I didn't apply but this is my non-tech hack...

I went to a large University. GEN ED lecture sizes were ~500 students and the most skipped classes. At the start of each semester, I would stand outside these 101 lectures to hand out fliers so I could find the students who would: 1) attend and never miss a class and 2) take amazing notes. Before finals, I typed, printed and bound the notes and sold/hustled them at the student union. I did 4-5 courses per semester and sold a ridiculous number of them for ~$50 ea. Helped lots of students pass courses they would have otherwise failed.
How Apple’s Address Book app could allow the NSA to harvest your contacts
DigitalOcean is Down
Its just OS X now. Apple dropped the "Mac" part.
> Horribly written.
Indeed. FTA: "It's fructose, for goodness sake. It increases blood fructose, which is way worse. Fructose causes seven times as much cell damage as does glucose, because it binds to cellular proteins seven times faster; and it releases 100 times the number of oxygen radicals (such as hydrogen peroxide, which kills everything in sight)."

It at least got one thing right - fructose is terrible for you. Therefore, sucrose is also terrible for you.
It is peg, not keg. Peg refers to an order where the limit price is automatically adjusted to some benchmark. For instance, you always want to be 1 penny away from the best bid. I don't know specifically what "power peg" is, though.
Blake Master’s notes on Peter Thiel’s lectures.
To Open Source or Not To Open Source
Fast Image Cache on GitHub
Cool web app helps you decide where to live in the SF Bay Area
Thank you for these great suggestions, please keep making them! Later I'll publish them as a coherent list here: http://blog.glebm.com/2013/10/21/exploring-math-without-a-te...
I'm not sure I agree with "Deploying in such a way that all your servers are not running the same codebase is obviously bad." I have a lot of experience in large scale systems (although this incident with 8 machines does not qualify) and I would say there is _always_ a period of transition where versions X and Y are online in production simultaneously. How can it be otherwise? You'd need scheduled downtime to do it any other way.

I think the main problem here is nobody at this company pushed back on this stupid development plan of reusing a flag for a different purpose. There's no excuse for that (or maybe there is, they had run out of fields in some fixed-width message format or something dumb like that). Also apparently the use of the flag was not tied hermetically to the binary in production; when they rolled back the binary the flag was still there but it meant something different to the old software.

The correct way to roll this type of change out is for the new input (the "flag" in this case) to be totally inert for the old version of the software, and for the new version to have a config file or command line argument that disables it. So _first_ you start sending this new feature in the input, which is meaningless and ignored by the existing software, and then you roll out the new software to maybe 1% of your fleet, and see if it works. Then roll it out to maybe 10% and leave it that way for a week. Insist that your developers have created a a way to cross-check the correctness of the feature in the 10% test fleet (structured logging etc). If it looks good roll it to 100%. You now have three ways to disable it: turn it off in the input stream, turn it off in the new software with the config or argument, or roll back the software.

Doesn't look like these guys really knew what they were doing.
Government Dreams: Fill Up Air Force One With "Smart People" From Silicon Valley
Why would the language matter? Dormant code is the same in any language.
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