skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Umm, I think you mean CDOs. CDS are credit default swaps. These are what brought AIG down.

Frankly I think you are the one being glib. A huge problem with CDOs was that many carried AAA ratings. In this past, buying a security with this rating was doing your homework. Unfortunately, Moody's and S&P were not purveyors of accurate information on these securities. This became a huge problem since AAA ratings allowed banks to hold these securities and call them capital.
Flash (AS3) to iPhone (ipa) explained
I tried it, and got the exact same I'd get running wget against my site?

Are they advocating specializing pages for the Google bot?
Really not too helpful, pretty much a "view source" of your page as far as I can see.
Eradicate Spam from Unix Service Accounts
Just don't go there in winter. The lack of sun can be depressing.
Yeah, what exactly does this provide above "View Source"?
Good catch. I'm using "paradox" very loosely here. What I was trying to say is that we ignore the shortcomings of ZFC: undecidable statements, unnecessarily strong axioms added (regularity and replacement). In some ways avoiding Russell's paradox have made ZFC a weaker theory.
Our local town has about 6 Mobile phone shops all in a row, in the same street - something that's quite common to towns.

I guess the other point is that it encourages customers to shop around. If they can see 6 shops in a row, they'll likely go into a few of them and see if they're getting the deal they want.

If those 6 shops were all over town, each one would get far less custom, since a visitor would likely only go in one of them.
I think the great thing about netflix is that it's recommendations try to predict what you would rate a movie.

So, if you consistently use three stars to indicate "liked it, reasonably good" and I use it to indicate "waste of time" then our respective recommendations from netflix will be different.

The movies it predicts as 3 stars for me, will be movies I think are a waste of time, and for you would be movies you might find reasonably enjoyable.
A derivatives contract has two sides. You have to pick which side you're talking about when you say it's dumb -- if one side of the trade was exceedingly stupid, the other side must be extremely smart.

And your argument doesn't make sense in light of how much money the Euro-banks lost. If lack of regulation was the problem, why did the most regulated entities, buying the most regulated securities, according to the strictest rules -- lose the most money?

Why did regulated hedge funds beat the S&P by about 20% in 2008? If regulation keeps us safe, why is it always so dangerous?
Marketing people aren't dumb. They just know that consumers are. "No blades you can stick your fingers in" is accurate, but buyers want catchy and memorable, even at the cost of slight factual inaccuracy.
Oh - I saw what I guess was a prototype of this about a year ago on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA. The rider was stopped and fiddling with something. Didn't look as slick as the one in the pic, but it did have some big Google stickers on it.

I should have taken pics of it, because people I told about it didn't really believe me.
Calculus is very useful in CS. Many CS papers use it, for explaining algorithms that have a discrete implementation, for example (some algorithms for finding edges in images for example), or for probability stuff.
Wow, there sure were plenty of facts in that one. If even a substantial fraction of what's in that article is true, Goldman Sachs is purely, objectively evil. And there's probably nothing we can do about it.

We tend to think of Obama as the anti-thesis of the Bush years and policies, but he is in lock step with the Bush and Clinton administrations in his deferral of all financial decisions to Goldman Sachs and their alums.
They'd get fewer customers through their doors but not necessarily less customers buying.
You may have to pay taxes on income from US customers. It is best to consult an attorney.
eru is right, banks decide to lend at their own peril. The problem was moving from a model where the mortgage stayed with the bank, to a model of sending mortgages upstream to Wall Street where greedy, er.. I mean clever managers packaged them into complicated financial instruments (CDOs), and then buying triple A ratings from agencies like Moody's.
Map Love
"Shouldn't the buyer of an insurance make sure that they are getting their money's worth?"

That's similar to placing the responsibility on the buyer of a gallon of milk to make sure it has not been poisoned.
i think OP might be thinking along the lines of, "how many working programmers need to know or use calculus in their day jobs?" sure, CS researchers working with physical medium like robotics or computer vision need to use calculus, but the millions of people writing code to shuffle data back-and-forth between sources (which is lots of programming jobs) don't need to know a single bit of calculus
Free license is not enough to make the project open
Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format
Does Google do something like this for their servers for the chat service inside gmail?

I've noticed it can keep http connections open for extremely long times.
Sure, so I guess there's 2 alternatives:

1. Be all over the town, and rely on marketing to get people to come to your shop and not the others.

2. Be all in the same street, get more walk in customers, and rely on good salespeople and good deals to get the sales.

I'm guessing that they've found 2 to work better than 1. Also means they can take advantage of each others marketing.

Also I expect once a street becomes 'known' for something, it'd be silly to set up a shop anywhere else for that thing. For example Tottenham Court Road is where you go for Computing/tech shops in London, so that's where most people go if they want tech.
So they've created a Web front-end for the existing Q+A service? I seem to remember this already existing, but I could be mistaken. Perhaps this is more of a marketing move.
'but the anger is a bit misplaced insofar as Goldman Sachs goes given that the "us" here was complicit.'

It was Goldman alum deciding that Lehman should fail and Goldman should get bailed out.
Well, I am not sure if I should listen to you as CDS is clearly not what you are making it out to be. CDS is Credit Default Swap, which one can buy to protect themselves again credit default of another party.
I don't think holding the camera steady it that big a deal. In the video, he's biking a non-paved hill-path, and the outcome is fine. A bit of shock-absorption and a fast shutter is all that's needed.
Silly newspapers. They want to charge for content but can't bear the thought of losing traffic. So they keep the door open to non-subscribers through Google, and hope subscribers (or potential subscribers) won't find out.
From the Search for a Co-Founder to the Design Trends of iPhone Apps
Al Gore advised Google on search quality?
If your business has no presence in the United States you should not need to pay any taxes to that government. This topic comes up frequently on the BoS board: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz and a quick search there should provide a ton of resources.

If in doubt, consult an accountant.
The Segway was his shot at a mass market in order to get mass-market profits and propel his work to the next level of public significance and relevance.

It's a frequently-criticized but expected pattern that you obscured by failing to use the term of art, "sell out."
This is why your decryption boostrap should never be on the hard drive. It should be on a usb stick along with your encrypted keys. This is elementary "something you have + something you know" security. The evil maid can't patch a bootloader that isn't there. And if he installs a keylogger, he's still out of luck because he only has your passphrase, not your decryption keys. He would also have to install a device that copies your key file somehow.

Sure, there are plenty of other attack vectors, but this takes the problem out of the evil maid category.
> You may have to pay taxes on income from US customers.

Nonsense. Your moniker serves you well ;)

As long as you do not incorporate in the US you do not pay taxes in the US, when you do the rules change and depending on the precise ownership structure and form of incorporation you then may have to pay taxes. For instance, you will have to pay sales tax to sales done to residents of the state where you incorporate.

It all revolves around the concept of having a 'nexus' in some state in the US. As long as that isn't the case you are not liable for taxes, since there is nothing that could be taxed. As soon as you have an agent or presence in the US that you control that changes.

> It is best to consult an attorney.

That is always good advice.
Huffington Post CTO on MySQL: Heavy-Traffic and Ultra-Availability [video]
If the market will support it, £200 is not a lot for a fan ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) is a good ref. Gmail chat does this.
In the pg essay "It's Charisma, Stupid" http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html he says Opinions seem to be divided about the charisma theory. Some say it's impossible, others say it's obvious.

I was in the "it's obvious" camp, but I had a sense of deja vu as I was reading the essay. I have the vague feeling that I found it obvious not because I had figured out on my own, but because I'd read about it elsewhere.

This article brought it back to me. Back when I was in high school, some popular math book that I read (don't remember which one) had this as an example of how simple mathematical reasoning can explain questions of great social importance. I remember being impressed.

The other half of it is that many commentators* have noticed that charisma is an important factor in presidential elections, even if they didn't say it was the only one. So I guess at some point I'd put two and two together in my brain, which was why everything in the pg essay looked familiar.

Anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying "thank you for posting this!" :-)

*Scott Adams is one. I recommend reading his blog if you don't already; guised as humor you will regularly find deep wisdom.
readers actively flagging spam posts helps

I agree with this. Maybe some karma encouragement for being on new page might help (Maybe badges like stackoverflow ;)). And also, If there's a flag link on new page itself (not discussion page for each submission) would make things easy in my opinion.

Too much submission hurt the quality as I mentioned in an early ASK HN (which was deleted). So I think it's ok to take some steps, at least for a short period of time.
Is it? Poisoned milk is not the same as milk, so selling poisoned milk as milk would be fraud (among other things). Of course fraud should be illegal. But it should be possible to sell something that has risk attached. Of course claiming it has no risk would be fraud again, but I think that would be covered with current laws.
I wonder if you'll have collaborative lists -- so you can invite others to contribute to your 'spambot' list, and then get to that list through the API for preferential treatment of tweets you receive.
Most corporate laptops support it, IBM/Leonova do.
The problem is how do you know there isn't a master password (for AMI's bios it used to be "AMIBIOS") how do you know their encryption is any good (there was an enterprise tape vendor that advertised DES encryption but actually just XORed the data with your password)

And finally how do you know they haven't done exactly the same trick but replaced your bios with one that includes a keylogger?
Nice. Also looks like Probabilistic Voting Theory works in N-dimensional space:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_voting_theory
Indeed. What the guy who said that quote really meant was "Boo hoo, he's made us look stupid".

Bolton will probably be a billionaire by the time he's 50.
If you come anywhere near Machine Learning, statistics becomes extremely important. Statistics, Calculus and Linear Algebra are definitely prerequisites for even a rudimentary understanding of the algorithms. You are dealing with inherently probabilistic problems, and optimizing functions on many dimensional spaces. It's pretty much all math, actually.
Solving the crystal maze: The secrets of structure
Freakonomics: Monkeys Too Are Freaked Out by Almost-Reality
You're right, he didn't generate any overall utility. But on the other hand, he didn't create overall disutility (i.e. harm people). So he's in a better moral position that Nathan Myrvold or other patent trolls.
Perhaps it was an attempt to stop people from "stealing" his images.. or perhaps the author just doesn't know any better...
This wiki page covers mostly the frontend part.

The link covers a server side message passing interface.

I just glanced over it (do not use nginx) think it's just a more efficient way for your idle process to know if they need to send anything over the wire or if they can keep idleing.
"Of course fraud should be illegal."

This applies very well to the insurance business. If you are promising to pay a certain amount if a certain event happens, then it turns out you did not actually put away any money to pay out, that's a pretty straightforward case of fraud.

With milk, the government has decided to put processes in place to keep milk that could sicken or kill people off the shelf, instead of just letting the survivors of people killed by poisoned milk sue after the fact. Regulating the financial industry is the same idea, make sure companies have enough assets to pay off their obligations, for example.
> And also, If there's a flag link on new page itself (not discussion page for each submission) would make things easy in my opinion.

Yes, that would help a lot. Especially because HN can be quite slow which makes flagging stuff a lot more time consuming than it has to be.
I expect this is part of the reason they only have pictures from bright and sunny days in most places.
Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills
Beware! Tax law is full of dragons and thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

If you have an agent or reseller in the US you may be required to collect US taxes from your/their customers, depending on the parties to the contractual relationship and the flow of money.

(Unfortunately professional advice doesn't always give you someone to sue in case of disaster, as advice can be wrong but not negligent. It's a good start though, and insurance is available against some risks as well.)
A limited company is a firewall through which debt can't pass. How is what he did any more unethical than any other limited company?

(Or are you implying that limited companies are in principle unethical?)
That's not even the whole story, in the US people routinely pay for 'airtime', in other words you pay too when you are being called. In Europe that usually only happens when you are abroad.

As to your question, given that infrastructure is a fixed cost that can be amortized over more calls as call volume goes up (there are very few bits/second involved in a phone conversation, once you hit the tower nearest you the cost of a single conversation is very small) my guess is that price gouging is a huge factor here.

For even more fun think about what it costs to handle an SMS and compare that with the amounts paid.

Telcos are great at selling bits at ridiculous markups.
How will the farmers who don't get any money be able to sustain their business when the farmers who do are able to lower their prices due to the subsidy?
> Sigh - privacy in the age of information seems to be an impossible dream.

Well, it's better than before: Non-electronic documents are arguably much easier to steal. At least with encryption, breaking into your house isn't necessarily enough to get your data.
First glance at Barnes & Noble's e-reader
Obviously paradoxes don't have to be actual contradictions, merely results which fail to conform to our intuitions (e.g. the Banach-Tarski paradox), but in my experience when the term is used in the context of the foundations of mathematics, it does mean that a contradiction is derivable within a foundational theory (the class paradoxes being the obvious case in point). This is not a complaint, I'm just explaining why I took your remark in slightly the wrong way.

Working mathematicians ignore the shortcomings of ZFC because foundational issues just aren't what they concern themselves with day-to-day; I'm sure you're aware of the remark that mathematicians are platonists during the week and formalists at the weekend. It's generally left to logicians and philosophers of mathematics (two tribes which, while not coextensional, have a rather large intersection) to worry about these things. Certainly according to structuralists like Shapiro, this is not actually a problem. [1]

[1] Shapiro 1997, http://bit.ly/3om0CO
Time isn't what it used to be
The nginx module is ideal for heavy frameworks like rails, so that you can handle clients waiting for chat messages (for example) on the web server, and not by the heavy framework dispatchers.
He doesn't sound like a likeable guy, but that is besides the point.

His actions did demonstrate the pitfalls of "stapled units" to Australia. Shame should be on the people who created this instrument. Any time you have a security created to manipulate tax code, it is ripe for abuse.
If you're assuming the attacker has physical access to your laptop, you can also assume they have access your USB stick. Even the article admits this is a problem:

"somebody who can get access to my Disk Hasher USB (e.g. when I’m in a swimming pool), can infect it"
Yes, that article is mind blowing. Unfortunately it was published in Rolling Stone, meaning that there's a large portion of the country that would refuse to read if given the chance as well as some who wouldn't believe it if they did. As far as the Obama comment is concerned, he is lockstep with the Bush admin on more than just financial policy, he's also followed their lead on torture, search and seizure etc. The emperor truly has no clothes. (I feel that I should actually be posting this on Reddit...)
The problem with buying in-store is that most reasonably intelligent customers can find more out in research before hand than the in-store customer service. I think people would like an experience in store, it's just that the only experiences available in these stores are bad ones.
China’s BYD – A Model For Chinese Innovation?
How to Write Your Sales Page
Adapt (Real Entrepreneurs Never Fail)
Summary: position is, er, a positional good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good
Under my proposal, those who can't evaluate the stability of banks should stick to insured, non-interest-bearing accounts.
There's no stable equilibrium. The ones on the edges are constantly incentivized to move towards the center, but at some point the guy in the middle is better off moving anywhere else. Kind of like the "divide the dollar" game.
Collaboration is not Communication
Underwhelmed by Wave: Google's Wave Falls Short
How about a karma threshold for posting?
Ask HN: $4.99 vs. $5.00? And what do you call your premium memberships?
Two-part question. First, when naming monthly subscription prices for a premium account, do you recommend rounding to the nearest dollar, or keeping it at $_.99? e.g. $4.99 vs $5.00 vs $5.99?

Secondly, if you were to name those premium accounts, are there any names you recommend (or recommend staying away from)? Typical suggestions I've received are Gold, Premium, Platinum, Pro, Premier, Club... It depends on the context, of course, but some might seem more cliché than others.
Of course, and that's why there are so many of them: that's as much evidence as most people need, and he is the attribution sink for quotes about the power of intelligence.
Eh? That's like saying, "if the market will support it, $2000 isn't a lot for a pair of jeans." Just because enough people are willing to spend $2000 on jeans to keep the company in profit doesn't mean that they're not expensive.
It just occurred to me that Slava is doing something a little innovative with this blog. Most articles with code in them use sample code to illustrate some abstract idea. Conversely, most articles about working systems are written at a feature level. Slava is producing posts about a real system, organized around real code. It's a kind of documentation, really, but a publicly accessible, general-purpose variety. Now that I think of it, I'm surprised that this is not more common. Can you guys think of other instances?
If only they developed an on-line store and a delivery mechanism. It would be the optimal solution from the customer perspective (price, feature and distance). Thanks in part to the ubiqutious internet.
wouldn't that just be defeated if the form post was intercepted?
> Beware! Tax law is full of dragons and thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Or even without :)

> If you have an agent or reseller in the US you may be required to collect US taxes from your/their customers, depending on the parties to the contractual relationship and the flow of money.

This is very true. It mostly applies to sales tax.

> (Unfortunately professional advice doesn't always give you someone to sue in case of disaster, as advice can be wrong but not negligent. It's a good start though, and insurance is available against some risks as well.)

This is also true, and something that plenty of people seem to be unaware of. You and nobody but you are responsible for your taxes. If your accountant or lawyer fuck up YOU are liable for the deficit in taxes, not they.

And that's pretty logical, since you were responsible for your taxes anyway, hiring someone to do some work for you doesn't change that in any way that matters.

You may or may not have a case against them depending on the amount of negligence involved, but usually they're pretty good about covering their asses, and leaving yours exposed.

I've had a (fortunately small) issue like this with a bookkeeper doing our payroll, he forgot a 400 euro deduction for some government fund. That wouldn't have been a serious problem if it didn't take over two years before the fault was detected. So, then you owe x employees400 eurosy months to plug the hole. No fun.
I'm in the same situation. I just don't think "decent" is the right way to describe these games.
Not only are the differences between Republican/Democrat not that great, but in the last 50 years they have largely swapped constituencies!

It started when JFK pushed civil rights. This made Democrats popular with Northern civil rights activists. Nixon took advantage of this with his "Southern strategy" that used the issue as a wedge to get Southerners to vote Republican for the first time ever. (Previously the South wouldn't vote Republican because they held the Republicans responsible for the Civil War.) The swap cascaded from there as each successful candidate got there by appealing to what had once been the other party's base. (Reagan took a particularly chunk, hence the phrase "Reagan democrat".)

The swap completed with George Bush.
Speaking personally $5. $.99 stuff has always annoyed me :) (mostly from having pocketfuls of change)
Ultimate! Got to be ultimate .. though I named a web hosting package "Emperor" once it was only a tailored package for a previous business partner.

I always round things and never go for the only $999.95 type pricing - simply because it annoys me; I probably lose out as I think the psychology of that sort of pricing actually works on people. "Wow 999.95, it's not even a thousand dollars" ...
LHC gets colder than deep space