skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is debatable if derivatives do more harm than good. Just look at the 2008 financial crisis...

From Jaredsohn's link further in the thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_(finance)#Economic_f....

In the context of a 2010 examination of the ICE Trust, an industry self-regulatory body, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission which regulates most derivatives, was quoted saying that the derivatives marketplace as it functions now "adds up to higher costs to all Americans."
You could also take the cheapskate's way out and open the link in incognito mode.

I don't know what the NYT was thinking when they developed such an easily circumventable paywall.
yeah but when I couldn't use my credit card anymore paypal was the only option.
I wish it was javascript!

It's a Google App Engine-based Java monster:

https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow
The paywall is based on cookies.

Open the link in a private window to circumvent it.
WebRTC is just a protocol for applications. So you'll need to have Hangouts or Skype or whatever client using WebRTC open, and then it should work when someone calls you through them, on the web.

Take Facebook Chat for example or whatever they are calling that integration with a Java Skype plugin. Instead of using that Java plugin, it could use WebRTC in the future, and it won't even need Skype. It could just work with Facebook users, which is something Facebook might want anyway, or at least until Skype uses WebRTC, too.
the same way I used linode for but at 4 times the less cost.
I'd recommend Play¹ instead of Lift.

If you want to explore working with larger datasets, try out Spark²!

¹ http://www.playframework.com/
² http://spark.incubator.apache.org/
It seems like the data in this is identical to the stuff that was leaked last time. My guess is that someone was able to gain (user level) access to one of the servers hosting the forums, and the best they were able to do is leak an old database that was around from the last breach. It smells like skiddies trying to stir up drama to me. The names of the people posting this crap on IRC are "SABU", "<ryan____", "robertlevin", and "illegal". Yeah they're fucking troll idiots.
YTFind - control + f for text in youtube videos (chrome extension)
Can’t code, & won’t—But thinking like a programmer can help you raise your game
I readily accept your first point. I guess I messed up my delivery of the first point. It wasn't meant so much as a rebuttal or counterpoint, but something of a "random aside". The point wasn't that they "militarized" the police, especially in the way militarized is often used today in the context of American law enforcement (with the implications of increased use of aggressive force), but rather that its kinda funny that their solution to trying to back off on the level of violence was to impose aspects of military like control.

Of course, in the long view it's pretty obvious why that happened. Consider why modern western militaries are structured and organized the way they are. The state has a monopoly on force, which requires not just the owning the army, but to be able to control the application of force down to the level of individual soldier. Obviously the control can never be perfect, but I think its pretty clear that it typically works well enough.

I guess my point is that especially in the context of the 19th century, militarization has two orthogonal aspects, the first being the nature and quantity of force to apply, and the second being control of force, and that when faced with the problem of overly aggressive police action, they sought to apply control by applying aspects of military organization - aspects which the military could claim to "own" first, just because they were only groups around with that type of organization at that time.
Tax laws in Europe sucks for VCs compared to silicon valley or anywhere in the US. As I understand it, a silicon valley VC can balance wins/losses over many years, perhaps even indefinitely. In most of Europe, the balance can only be made year 1, then the loss is a permanent loss and a win the next year will be taxed fully. This means any sane VC will base her operation in another tax zone.
Hence the problem with billions of euros in "tax havens" controlled by European "foundations". (EU is chipping away at that problem now but it will take many more decades to resolve.)
This looks like their forum server (phpbb). I'm not listed on here (been a customer of linode for a few years, and on the forums). I see no posts or anything with my info (or text from posts I've made).

Also, looking through the post data on there, it's all from 2003. And I can't find any of the posts listed in this sql dump on their active DB. I see nothing exciting here.
They're also running MySQL 3.
Says the bro with the name infosecslave. Nubs everywhere.
Kejia Zhu (http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html) helped me to get through the delusional obsession for quick success. I gave it to read to all my friends and it's definitely a must for all HN folks.

The good ol' Raymond's How to Become a Hacker (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) will teach you the Hacker attitude, which you can apply to anything. It doesn't matter whether you're a programmer or not, either way you'll benefit from it.

"1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.

2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.

4. Freedom is good.

5. Attitude is no substitute for competence."

A Handyman’s Toolbox (http://ninjasandrobots.com/a-handymans-toolbox) taught me not to always chase the hot new tech and be confident in my skills. It may be common sense, but it's also well written and straight to the point.

Lastly, the following posts are all about traveling and/or alternative lifestyles. They show different POVs, but are all equally inspirational.

- http://alexwarren.co.uk/2013/06/27/how-i-live-and-how-i-work...

- http://jake-jorgovan.com/blog/remote

- https://medium.com/better-humans/6620882dde89

- http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/how-to-travel-around-the-world-fo...
There are 0 real numbers in this dump. Shew fly.
They had running water and other complex infrastructure in ancient Rome well before derivatives were invented I really doubt we'd be living in a barren wasteland w/o them.

There would certainly be an impact if all that stuff went away but it wouldn't be because of it's absence it would be because of the pain of unwinding it all.
I don't particularly care for what links demonstrate, but I'm sure that people who are forced to work 80-hour schedule are very far from being twice as productive. However having worked under the 80-hour routine myself on my own project for two years I can assure you that it sure as hell helped to achieve a lot more and a lot faster. It's really a matter of motivation. Will I do it again? No ...but then I don't really need to now.
The account submitting this story was created six days ago, and this is their only activity on HN so far. The credentials mentioned are old and the data in the claimed dump is from 2009. So far this seem highly implausible.
That looks really simple and all, but isn't the concept with Stripe a litte unsecure? I really prefer to to use a third-party solution when I use my credit card online. Using this method I can't know for sure that the developer isn't saving my credit card info.

Wouldn't it be better to use Paypal or some well known third party for something as important as payment?
Last time I wore a suit was so long ago that I can't remember. The last job interview I had for a UK company was in 1982 and I didn't wear a suit then. Nor did I wear a suit to the interview with the Norwegian company I joined in 1985. I got both jobs. Not sure what this really means, except that I think 'almost always a good idea' at least ought to be an exaggeration. If not, well, I'm glad I left to join a company and country where expertise seems to be valued over presentation.
Good time to buy a house in SF?
Likewise, though my specific concerns were around a suspiciously large volume of inbound traffic that appeared to be maliciously probing for open services, and in particular a lack of any sort of upstream mitigation (to paraphrase their response, "can't help you, try Cloudflare".

Of course, Digital Ocean has had its own problems lately with not properly scrubbing decommissioned VPS containers... so to some degree, data security is not a Linode specific problem. And for that matter it is not just because someone is recycling passwords (bad), but because it is by nature one of the most fundamental and pervasive security challenges with any VPS hosting. Your AWS node might be perfectly secure, but it might be sharing a physical rack with a Russian botnet and you'd have no way to know.

Bottom line, if you are using a shared environment there is always some risk of having bad neighbors, experiencing disruption at the supervisory layer or of your data bleeding over into an untrusted location. Your application security design should be planned accordingly, and the choice of VPS host is only one part of that equation.
Congrats! I'm waiting for the day that they add an option to sign up by e-mail.
> I hadn't heard of cost-push inflation before, and I didn't specialize in macro-economics. Who discredited this theory?

Cost-push is described in Reisman's tome "Capitalism" and is shown why it is a false theory starting on pg. 907.

> perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.

I quoted his exact words, and he did not qualify them. In particular he did not say "more equal", he said "equal". I remember it to this day because I was astonished.
I can't know why people chose to upvote it, but I can say that reading this comment hurt just a little.

Also: it violates HN Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Are you a shill? Serious question.
Exactly

I am very sympathetic to anyone not wanting to use paypal for these reasons.

It is too big a risk, especially for something like a VPS provider that needs the recurring payments.
6% of California Households Have Net Worth of $1M+
Where the Road Ends: A Travel Video Shot With Google Street View
Aereo - Planting an Antenna on Network TV’s Turf
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/current-stable.html

> FreeBSD-STABLE is the development branch from which major releases are made. Changes go into this branch at a different pace, and with the general assumption that they have first gone into FreeBSD-CURRENT for testing. This is still a development branch, however, and this means that at any given time, the sources for FreeBSD-STABLE may or may not be suitable for any particular purpose. It is simply another engineering development track, not a resource for end-users.
I love this.

One issue: I seem to get the same behavior from "right angle" line mode and the "diagonal" line mode. I would have expected the latter to use the forward back slash characters.
Nitpickingly, sure, but mere hours since the release was cut, they're for all intents and purposes identical.
It almost seems like you have some sort of a vendetta against Linode. To be pissed about their security is one thing, to hate them is another.
Honestly, it's about time you guys talking your book start disclosing your total Bitcoin position. Some of the top voices have 100,000+ BTC to their name: cough evoorhees trace mayer. Dunno about vbuterin, but this is just something to think about.

I know bitcoin is a major innovation, but having a bunch of them is an insanely powerful motivator and it becomes virtually impossible not to mix fact with fiction when your entire net worth is riding on it.
I don't think this is really how things are going to work. In an ideal world, people would come up with a strong thesis that features of Bitcoin outweighs the cost, and only then would people take Bitcoin seriously. But the reality is that nobody really understands Bitcoin's role in the world economy well enough to evaluate such a thesis. There are tons of theses about how Bitcoin might be used. The only way to evaluate these theses is to implement them and see if they work.

So basically, we can't wait to see if the benefits outweigh the costs to start taking Bitcoin seriously. Bitcoin has to be taken seriously before we can weigh the benefits against the costs. There's just no way to evaluate whether decentralization is more beneficial than costly except to take the risk and try it.

In that sense, Bitcoin isn't really that different from any other new financial idea. Either you invest in a thesis or you don't, and if you invest, then either you make money or you lose money. You can make educated guesses on which theses are correct, but ultimately you can only prove or disprove a new financial idea by taking it seriously enough to try it.

People are already taking Bitcoiners seriously to the tune of billions of dollars, so I think we'll see results from this experiment. Whether the results of the experiment will be positive or negative, I don't know.
Lots of interesting points on Startups.
How I make the lifestyle of a digital nomad work
If you're looking to do WebRTC on those platforms check out Phono Mobile. It supports iOS and Android via Phonegap.

http://phono.com/
Maybe it's just a sign of something in the big picture - of America turning inward, like the falling Roman empire and isolationist China ?
Well, to be fair, the article says the two Republican congressmen actually just dangled some innuendo, but stopped short of providing evidence, naming names, or specifically citing what was gained by each party under the suggested arrangement.

For all the strain that computer automation puts on the common man, I am hotly anticipating the removal of humans from the machinery of governance.
I hate to be _that_ guy, but I found the grey on light-grey text to be difficult to read.
Observium is good for network monitoring: http://www.observium.org
This is the exact opposite of my experience. The more of an asshole I've turned into, the more successful I've become and noticed that people listen to me more.

I would write a pretty article about it but sadly I don't give a fuck.
Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want. Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority.

I've always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.
A friend of mine made this: http://mxey.net/content/images/2013/Dec/Screen_20Shot_202013...
If a teacher fails to impart understanding and they give the student a passing grade then that's a failure of the teacher. If a teacher is a hard ass but has open office hours and students don't take advantage of them and end up failing then that's a failure of the students as well.

The problem here is that it's so common for students to be able to glide through course after course using rote memorization and a willingness to do busywork without attaining understanding and in so doing not only passing courses but also getting high grades. And that's a failure of student and teacher alike, but it's a failure that the students have been trained for and guided to by the system.

Again, the problem is that schools do not reward or generally even bother assessing learning. And certainly part of the fault for that lies on the student, but given that they are being passed through the system and actively rewarded for not learning I think the bulk of the blame lies on teachers and institutions. If the value of an institutional education is to provide an opportunity for auto-didactism and whether one takes that opportunity or not is not reflected in grades or degrees granted then I have to question the value of such education.
I'm curious as to why so many people end up in the email hell, I can understand if you are a senior person at a large company or some sort of public figure/minor celebrity.

I just run a decent spam filter and ruthlessly unsubscribe from all commercial newsletters. Things from mailing lists are auto-filtered into folders and almost everything that's left is stuff that is pertinent to projects I am involved with so it's stuff I need to read. On a busy day when I'm working on 2 or 3 projects I might get 20 emails.
If you're an average person who was going to lose your home, derivatives enabled the bank to give you a loan. Therefore, derivatives have provided value to average people.

However, the 2008 financial crisis showed that when tested, derivatives don't provide much of the value that they were supposed to (shifting risk to those who want it and will quietly suffer the consequences of failure without having spillover effects on the rest of the economy) which essentially retcons away much of that value.
Confusing graph. No variances shown. No explanation of the axes. No explanation why the authors chose to use the mean rather than some other statistic. Overall, without the accompanying paper, a D-.
I've been using you guys exclusively for the last year or so. Great prices, great service, no spam, keep it up!
I've looked through this. It looks to be a sanitized version of their database with very old information. The reason I say sanitized because there look to be little or no credit cards there, and the only ones that look like CC numbers are '4111111111111111'.

My guess is that this is an old development DB that was left on a server that may have been forgotten about.
A Peek at Emacs 24.4: Auto-indentation by Default
Once the boss said "do I need start leaving the building open around the clock so things get done?"

If every one were not already running for the exits, that single question would have guaranteed it.
Why do you grant "academic freedom" some sort of special status, while decrying freedom of speech? Yes, Americans tend to confuse the legal principle with the ethical one, but both are equally valid.
You would need a way for me to whitelist or discount senders.

I don't want my wife to have to pay to send me an email.

I don't want personal contacts to have to pay.

I don't want people offering me (good) jobs to have to pay.

You have to figure out a way to solve these problems without me having to review each email to determine how much it should cost.
We don't need to define the benefits of privacy and decentralization at all. We need to only offer them. Those who value decentralization and privacy will use what we offer. Those who dislike the outcome of a uncontrollable, decentralized world will have to exert a great amount of force and control to stop us.
Ooops, honest typo :)
It's sorta up for debate.

My understanding, which is tiny and very limited, is that you can think of the role of finance operators as "liquidity providers". They're the grease in the wheels of capitalism; by either providing access to capital (via loans, or investment) or by matching buyers with sellers.

A classical example is you're a farmer that wants to hedge the risk that your crop will fail due to random weather events or that there will be such a glut in the market that you won't be able to sell your crop profitably. So, you enter a contract to sell your crop at a fixed rate long before harvest comes along. That's a future contract, and it's a kind of derivative.

So, derivatives can be really socially useful instruments. They can act like certain kinds of insurance, or allow you to capture different dimensions of value on assets that you already own.

However, and here's where the argument comes in, it's not clear that all kinds of derivatives provide socially useful forms of gambling. The prime example here is that of the collateralized debt obligation in which huge portions of the US mortgage market got sunk into.

Mortgage backed securities are probably not in of themselves terrible ideas but the way CDOs were structured made it impossible to objectively value the risk behind the instrument. It's just not clear how a dip in the market might affect the value of your CDO tranche. It's actually an np-complete problem - https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/appel/intractability-fina...

Another example is high frequency trading - where you're a day trader on steroids and have computers exchanging massive quantities of stocks based on fluctuations of fractions of cents. HFT people will argue that they provide more liquidity in the market - it's easier to sell your stocks because HF traders increase the overall volume, etc. However, it's in effect launched an arms race between different trading firms and some people say that they're literally making money by skimming off everyone else who trades stocks. There's a very reasonable argument that we don't want markets to operate faster than human perception. If you have to make a decision about selling something, placing a ground foor and minimum transaction time of say half a second isn't going to harm anyone who needs that liquidity for their business, or anything else that touches the "real economy".

To summarize: certain kinds of financial instruments seem to provide no value above and beyond letting well-connected actors to place (potentially ridiculous) bets. Using your money, one way or another - whether it's your farm, the mortgage on your house, or your pension fund.

--

If we accept the above as true, we can go further on a limb and ask questions about why is the wealth that passes through financial markets so liberally redistributed to people in the industry? Some people talk about it being a function of volume, but individuals are rarely if ever liable. When do they stop providing a service, and when do they start skimming off the top?
I switched a personal server over to freebsd (8 or so at the time) a while ago after battling with zfs on linux. (I was hitting some strange issues at the time which I can't really even remember at present)

After getting over the initial learning curve (files being in different places than I expect / named different things etc) I have really come to like freebsd. You get the sense that everything has been designed to fit together a bit more than the linux distros. I had been using ubutnu before and I got really tired of how much constantly changed between releases. With bsd I'm able to get very up to date software via the ports tree, but the overall 'system' design doesn't seem to change as much between releases as it did in linux land.

The freebsd handbook is great and makes it super easy to get up and running. I certainly don't think the differences for everyday use between freebsd / debian for example are enormous, but I plan on using freebsd for most of my boxes from now on, its just been really painless to work with.
Why is the Sky Dark at Night?
High Performance Bluebird Promise API for MongoDB Native NodeJS Driver
Best case, what is the societal function of derivatives?

As a relatively ignorant layperson, my guess is that derivatives allow productive businesses to hedge against uncontrollable risks.

A business with less risks requires less capital buffer, which encourages & allows for more capital investment and profit-taking.

In a nutshell, derivatives allow businesses to run and grow on less capital, by reducing the amount of capital-on-hand required to buffer against risk.

Is there some other way in which derivatives serve an ostensibly positive function in society? Am I missing something here?
People repeatedly assert, without ever citing anything, that 40 hours/week is some theoretical max on your productivity. Can anyone provide some actual citations on this?

Robin Hanson did some investigation and found little empirical support, and his data put 60 hours as the optimum (for construction, not knowledge work).

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.h...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hr...