skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're arguing over semantics. Insurance is about making bets. Life insurance? You bet you're going to die, your insurer bets you won't die that soon.

From the link you provided: "Many swaps can be thought of as being like an insurance contract, should one be so inclined." Just because you call it insurance, doesn't mean that insurance commissioners should regulate it as such. Just as insurance commissioners shouldn't regulate financial options even though they can also be used conservatively as insurance against given financial risk as much as wild financial bets.
Hey, link spam title; there were no excuses I can use. :-)
synchronous, asynchronous & broadcast communication.
Looking at the analytics of all the websites I have build (50+) the most visited page is always the "team" or "about" page. So there seems to be a desire for getting to know the people behind the company name.
Yet this doesn't prove that it is a good idea ... just saying :-)
I haven't tried IDEA because I wasn't willing to pay for it. Also I wonder if the plugin scene for IDEA is as alive as it is for Eclipse? Proprietary software always seems like a dead end, so I prefer not to invest time in learning it.
Just sell it
I strongly believe it is time now to regulate market capitalization to twice their quarterly revenue. I have petitioned SEC which is actively considering it.
stop wishing, start doing.
What the hell? those are very good reasons if proven with data. The troublesome excuses are more like:

1) "This is how the framework/library/API we use does things."

2) "I have seen this done in another technology."

3) "This seems to work."

4) "I thought you wanted me to do it this way."

and the best one:

5) "There are other ways?"

People who know about alternatives are better than the one-track minds, just by virtue of having choice. If they're able to argue for their choice and compare the options even better.
When the government started making it clear that they would provide liquidity to large banks, they effectively extended their own credit rating to these institutions - for the same reason that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't fail because they were taken over by the government.

As noted, if there were more of a rapid bankruptcy structure where the government could have taken over a bank on a Friday to allow it to emerge Monday and restructure its assets, this could have provided greater confidence to the markets. The major issue of these institutions was that they weren't able to continue funding ongoing cash requirements.

Lehman went into bankruptcy because of liquidity - ie that their short term assets weren't able to cover their short term obligations. Much of this reason was because people didn't trust the valuations of their assets (e.g. subprime mortgages) and fears that proved to be overblown as to outstanding unstated liabilities - because it wasn't a transparent market. Barings, if you recall was brought down by a rogue trader so it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility and at that point the numbers being quoted as to the risk exposure of CDS's was in the tens if not hundreds of trillions of dollars (which again if netted out was only a couple trillion - and for that exposure to be realized would basically require every major company in the Fortune 1000 to go bankrupt at once).
"What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?"
As wikipedia says, with insurance there has to be a debt obligation. With CDS there is none. i.e I can't buy life insurance on you, but I could (potentially) buy a CDS that covers me if you declare bankruptcy.

Maybe CDS 'should' be regulated as insurance but thats for another day. :)

Anyway.. for those that are interested..

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_default_swap

CDS contracts have been compared with insurance, because the buyer pays a premium and, in return, receives a sum of money if one of the events specified in the contract occurs.

However, there are a number of differences between CDS and insurance, for example:

- The buyer of a CDS does not need to own the underlying security or other form of credit exposure; in fact the buyer does not even have to suffer a loss from the default event.[1][2][3][4] In contrast, to purchase insurance, the insured is generally expected to have an insurable interest such as owning a debt obligation;

-the seller need not be a regulated entity;

-the seller is not required to maintain any reserves to pay off buyers, although major CDS dealers are subject to bank capital requirements;

-insurers manage risk primarily by setting loss reserves based on the Law of large numbers, while dealers in CDS manage risk primarily by means of offsetting CDS (hedging) with other dealers and transactions in underlying bond markets;

-in the United States CDS contracts are generally subject to mark to market accounting, introducing income statement and balance sheet volatility that would not be present in an insurance contract;
Hedge Accounting may not be available under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) unless the requirements of FAS 133 are met. In practice this rarely happens.
Is it different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy
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Warning/stop using blackholes.us dnsbls
Wolfram is industry, not Academia. They're used to billing sectors like aeronautics and oil for gazzilions. To them "web startups" are nobodies, and the price is there to keep the vagrants at bay.
I don't mean to be an idiot, but at this point all life saving charity should aim to secure a reduction in population growth to offset the lives saved.

Being merely a humanitarian is a moral luxury with an environmental cost.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/1password

Brain cells should not be wasted on rote password generation and memorization.
Definitions in a regulatory context and simple definitions can be different as this shows. Look up insurance in any dictionary and you'll get some variation of this definition:
"A promise of compensation for specific potential future losses in exchange for a periodic payment."

Look up viaticals for instance. However, whether or not you call it insurance, is irrelevant given the underlying components still exist - the risk and the financial instrument that can either be used to offset that risk or essentially gamble. This applies as much to regulated insurance markets as it does to derivatives.
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How would they restructure their assets so quickly (over the weekend) and solve their liquidity problem without the Fed? (with the banks not lending to each other)

Even if a bank wanted to lend another bank money, it takes time to do a reevaluation (more than a weekend) of another banks assets and they would be more concerned of trying to calculate their own exposure.
Quoth the article:

“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James told the paper.
“There’s no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another person’s mind.
“The next experiments are to get that second person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them. For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”

This is Hacker News. It would behoove you to read what Slashdotters call "TFA" before commenting.
What are the causes for high population growth? Can they be countered?
Ask HN: What do you wish you had known before starting up ?
I'm thinking about founding a startup and I'm looking for first-hand advice.
Discover How to Avoid Losing Sales by Optimising Your Online Checkout.
One of the biggest differences between high street shoppers and those shopping online is in the level of involvement. While a number of people will walk around a town centre simply browsing stores
And "It's impossible", though for a different reason.

I'm always surprised to hear people complain that something is impossible to be done with a turing complete language.
Brain cells should be used to remember important things. Most important things are conveyed by i.e. poems. Although nobody learns literature citings by heart in the era of wikipedia, a straightforward way to have a strong password is to pick e.g. the first letters of each line of a poem (aka passphrase you should already know), as described in the man:

When choosing a new password, make sure it's unrelated to any previous password. Use long passwords (say 8 characters long). You might use a word pair with punctuation inserted, a passphrase (an understandable sequence of words), or the first letter of each word in a passphrase.

http://linux.die.net/man/1/passwd ...RTFM has also been subject of debate for ages...
Hello: http://timetric.com/

(and our API's got way friendlier terms.)
Those are excuses good programmers make, or at least decent programmers.

Bad programmers make excuses like:
- Copy and paste got it working.
- I'll worry about error handling after I get it working.
10 Blunders to Avoid on Business Websites
This is an awful quality article. Not worthy of Hacker News.
"good" and "big" are not mutually exclusive.
Especially with a hard to control textual query interface I suppose that a huge number of requests will be burned through for finding the correct wording to make Wolfram Alpha understand what you are trying to query.

They should really make a free dev account which either operates on a limited set of data, or deliberately delivers wrong numbers in their results.

A dev just needs a way to test his app without having to be careful about everyone of his tries costing real money.
Am I the only one here who doesn't want to take software-engineering advice from a UI company? When it comes to engineering, I want to hear from Yodlee and what they're doing to solve problems.
I appreciate the lofty sentiments, but password managers are doing a good job generating hard passwords and remembering them.
I give up..
Thanks for giving my passwords away.

:-)

Now I have to find a new strategy. Seriously, it's a pity we let such a poor (from an usability viewpoint) design stand.
But somethings could be impossible to do with a turing-complete language :-)

Anybody can use heuristics to solve a problem. Great programmers know when heuristics are the only feasible options given the current requirements ;-)
The duality is an illusion. Free your mind.
100% tangible or 100% worthless.
This is utterly fascinating. I use TrueCrypt and never dreamt that such a simple attack even existed.

Sigh - privacy in the age of information seems to be an impossible dream.
Start selling things as quickly as possible.
It reminds me of what I told my sons many times, who have said since they were children that they wanted to make video games for a living:

I don't think you can do it. I think that's just a childhood dream that you will outgrow. But don't let my lack of vision stop you. Feel free to prove me wrong.
You can use html 5's <canvas> tag on most new browsers today. It's not quite as fast as some of the plugin approaches, but it's getting there.

You need the Google plugin for it to work on IE, but otherwise the newest versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera & every browser that uses the rendering engine of one of these (i.e. practically every graphical browser) supports <canvas>.
"The first person generated a series of zeros and ones, where they imagined moving their left arm for zero and right arm for one."

The first time I heard that people could operate robotic limbs with their thoughts, I thought: Two people could communicate almost telepathically, if they'd just hook up this brain reader to a Morse code transmitter/receiver.

Ultimately, this could lead to a little device that sits behind your ear, allowing communication from person to person, completely clandestinely. On the sending end, perhaps you just have to think about moving your fingers to type, and it picks up the letters from your brain waves. On the receiving end, it uses text-to-speech to read the message back into your ear.
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I was living in Canada last year and thinking the same idea in the freaking cold winter. I guess for North America it might be a better idea to put servers in the cold areas (e.g. Northwest Territories) in the same continent instead of running optic fibers under the ocean to Iceland and worried about earthquakes and volcanos ...
Here's the startup equivalent:
1) The creation of Federal Startup

2) Federal Startup's job is to ensure we have a stable, vibrant startup culture

3) Federal Startup loans money to startups using money it prints

4) Goldman Cloud company, a successful startup, places key people in high levels of government, including Federal Startup

5) Goldman Cloud company takes many risks with the knowledge that Federal Startup will help them if things get very bad

6) Things get bad, loans dry up. Goldman Cloud has a former CEO which now runs Federal Startup. They work together to 'fix' the system.

7) At the end of the day, after the turmoil is over, Goldman Cloud is one of the last startups standing

Personally, I don't blame Goldman Sachs, but I do blame the Federal Reserve and US Treasury. End the Fed.
If you have a partner, make sure you setup a vesting schedule. I didn't, and now wish I did.
"There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government." -- Bruce Schneier.

Addendum: "Provided it's implemented well".
Well, the only (+) way we know to lower population increase is urbanization and increased living standard. So democracy and industrialization are the ways forward on the population bomb.

Arguably, Gates' grants works towards that. It will result in better agriculture, in the future leading to mechanization -- which means people moving to cities.

(+) Let us leave discussions of e.g. reintroducing the plague to Al Qaeda. 1/2 :-)

Edit: I might add that I think human lives are worth the environment, inside sane limits. Pollution go down with increased wealth, anyway.
Putting a Price on Uptime
World financial crisis 'not over'
I think that advert is probably the most blatant example of externalisation I've ever seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
This is like countless other social engineering attacks, getting people to unwittingly enter their passwords (e.g. phishing) has a high ROI and physical access just makes this very easy (e.g. ATM skimming).
learn more about debit/cerdit cards and micro-payments
How hard is it to support a new language, compared to writing an Emacs mode?
Should Microsoft Fear Google Chrome OS?
Great collection, I'm gonna port a bunch of those to PHP, in case anyone cares.
In any large scale (ie, too large for social sanctions to work) cost or risk sharing system, the careful and competent get screwed over to benefit the sloppy and stupid. Large scale insurance schemes were where I first noticed this. And during one of the French Republics, Bastiat wrote in his classic "The State"; "Government is that great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
Why I wish Transact-SQL was more like Latin
Windows 7 Vs Mac – Apple Has Plans To Spoil Windows 7 Party?
Just a week left before the official launch of Windows 7 on October 22nd, but it seems like Apple is not going to sit quietly and watch the launch party of Windows 7.
That is what topping up tier 1 capital is about.

I'm sorry, but your strategy makes no sense to me. You're proposing a plan basically equivalent to the gov. standing ready to pump more (taxpayer) money into GM in case they get into trouble?

I suspect you would then have 100 bankrupt companies instead of one.

You suspect we would have 100 grossly mismanaged companies - that all fail at the same time - instead of one? I don't think so.
How long everything takes.

Also, how to listen to advice (my co-founder and I wrote this up for the SSE blog): http://blogs.sun.com/startups/entry/how_to_listen_to_advice
Dyson's overpriced fan and the Coandă Effect
My laptop's BIOS settings are password protected. Good luck with booting from CD/USB/Network without hardware tampering.
?Transported only over land?

Apparently Seimans plans to overcome the wetness of the Mediterranean:

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091015-714009.html
The idea of "flying under the radar" should be thrown out.

Most importantly, ideas are worthless without action.
Some more info on the One Acre Fund.

The One Acre Fund a group operating in Africa doing incredible work: doubled food production, halved (or better) infant mortality, as shown below. Sample size was 4000 farms, now they are involved with 12000 farms.
Push notifications for mobile apps
It's the Complexity, Stupid
See Panda for another example of this http://pandastream.com/
Increased wealth has always led to reduced population growth and sometimes to a declining population.
Apple is feeling the discomfort regarding the windows 7 launch... nothing more..!
Your ignorance is not the poster's problem. I have a very general idea of what most of them are about. If you want to learn a bit ABOUT math it really isn't that hard, there are lots of good books, I suggest Davis and Hersh's "The Mathematical Experience" and Eric T Bell's "Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science" to start. The problem with the Web is that most pieces are too short (for good reason, given the constraints) or too technical for basic learning.
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Computers to crack down on card counters
As the article points out, this is easy to circumvent by removing the hard drive from your laptop. It adds a few minutes to the attack, and requires that the attacker bring a laptop, but you're still hosed.
well.... may be yeah... if windows 7 is a success then share of mac might take a hit. let v how good is win 7. i just hope it is not as bad as vista.
Physical access can almost always be leveraged to full system access.
ISP in file-sharing wi-fi hack
...then you upgrade to snowy, and later realize that a given lib is not compatible with your favourite password manager and shut yourself out until you manage to restore your access. For generating hard passwords, you might as well go for ssh keys and manage those. But tastes and customs differ...
How is this a social engineering attack in any way? The point of interest here is how rapidly an encrypted laptop can be compromised by an untrained person, in a way that evades easy detection.
Finding weird corner cases may indeed be very hacker-ish, but blindly labeling them as good is not, in my opinion.

Did Thomas do that? I don't see anywhere where he "blindly label(s) them as good". Right there in the title he calls them Quirks, and he says you have to love them. Then, in the text he explains, quite clearly, that you should almost never use these in actual code.

I think you've missed the point that the examples presented (especially the function definition in a default argument) merely show how Ruby works; specifically that all code is executed as expressions during runtime. To me these "quirks" are similar to showing somebody that dereferencing an offset to an array pointer in C is the same as using an array index. You're not going to do it in production code, but knowing that it's possible helps in better understanding what's going on with all that code you write.
Interesting - I've been using the method for a while now and I thought I'm the only one who does it :-)
What is of interest here is the small window of time required. You pretty much have to be in constant possession of your laptop (or a USB key that you religiously use to verify your boot record) in order to have any confidence that it has not been compromised.
You get/let someone to trust the physical situation of their machine. In this case of the "maid" getting to play the maid is the engineering part. Once you have physical access to a machine, cracking is usually guaranteed (this is not new or of much interest). This is no different than a complicated "Sneakers" movie style social engineering attack to get physical access to something... it's just easier in a hotel.
Great question. Off the top of my head...

1. if (ethics != 100%) return(DontBother);
2. Regardless of paperwork, you're *married* to your co-founder.
3. if (CofounderMarriage == wrong) return(StopNow);
4. Customer first, technology second
5. Make your customers love you, everything else gets easier.
6. Evangelize, evangelize, evangelize. People love passion.
7. When in doubt, release. If you did #5, they'll understand.
8. Get constant feedback. You don't know your requirements.
9. Run out of cash and you're dead.
10. Have fun!

[EDIT 11. Accept feedback willingly and implement as appropriate. Thanks, idlewords.]
I don't understand your argument. There are farmers trying to grow food on dry, possibly salty, soil without infrastructure, without fertilizer, without much irrigation, without knowledge of modern agricultural methods, without access to good seeds, and you're saying better methods and better infrastructure, more knowledge, etc would not help them? Why not?
...and you've never run into a case where your particular hardware isn't capable of running latest great game XYZ? The point is that people don't think of their phones the same way they think of their computers. If I want to play Crysis, I'll go out and buy a new graphics card. If I've got 15 min standing in line at the store and my phone can't play your game, I'll go buy a different game.
I saw those Dixons ads when I was last in London. It amused me (as an ex-employee, of all things!) - I have gone to shops to see things in the flesh, then ordered from Amazon. But I've never had a nice chap talk me through the options, spend half an hour finding me the right TV, then walked out and bought it online. I'd feel too guilty to do that. Either I do my own homework or I buy instore and let him get his commission. It's the same with shoes; if I've been a pain to the sales assistant, I'll buy them in store even if they're a wee bit cheaper online.

(On the other hand, while it was still around, I'd have been quite happy to abuse Dixons' sales staff to talk me through options, then walk out and buy from Amazon/Ebuyer/etc. Their staff were terrible and I was patronized by my manager, and customers, every single day. One phoned up, after the usual "Hello, Dixons, how can I help you?" they said "Oh hello love, can I speak to a man who knows about computers?" - I was the most knowledgeable technical member of staff and they had put me on checkouts.)
mises.org ...

If you start posting those, others will start posting Krugman or whoever on the left.

Both will attract people not interested in hacker news.
Not my hard drive, the disk itself is fully encrypted and won't work in other laptops without that bios password (I also use a truecrypt-like thing at the filesystem level). The main attack I need to worry about is someone replacing the keyboard, etc.
Radio waves may be dangerous, says French government
Taming multidim Arrays in Clojure
What's the point of Apple spitting on Windows 7? It's not as if that huge market of existing PC owners just wanting to upgrade their machines can go out and (legally) put OSX on there.
Did I imagine it, or was there a website posted here a while ago that tracked these kind of predictions against reality? I had a quick google for it but couldn't find it.