skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2007 called, they want their "mortgaged backed[1] security-derivatives[2]" back.

[1] (mortgaged backed) = lenders were rubber stamping home loans to people who given their current income would not be able to pay back the loan.

[2] "security derivatives" were created on those mortgages as financial instruments that could be traded like stocks, effectively like allowing a 3rd party to take out insurance on your car and get paid when you get in a crash... a full on BET against the bad mortgages - paying out if the mortgages went into default

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the... — credit rating agencies, trusted to research, validate and rate the mortgages were for some reason giving the obviously bad and likely to default mortgages ratings on AAA, thus allowing for a greater insurance pay out on the security-derivative bets, creating an incentive for investors to make shit tons of money from defaults on these loans not to mention the repossession of the properties by banks.

TLDR; Unregulated 'prediction markets' seemingly colluded to create loans that could not be payed back, than created insurance on those bad loans - falsely evaluated as safe, inflating the pay out, and effectively fabricated a profitable bet against the entire global economy.
It's a very divisive book, people seem to love it or hate it. I'm a long time Stephenson fan, have read everything he wrote multiple times (excepting Seveneves for the moment), and Anathem is my most favourite of his works.
I take personal issue with the fading of downvoted comments.

1) The mechanic silences an opinion by making it harder to read/requiring highlighting to read

2) Swaying public opinion of a comment without even reading it. "Oh, it's already almost faded out entirely. It's probably a terrible post that I should just downvote without actually reading." (E: I understand HN requires you to "spend" a karma to downvote something. This doesn't prevent people from using their karma in this manner when they have 1,000's)

3) Allows self-validation of "others agree with me, because this comment has been downvoted and I disagree with this comment", which is fallacious reasoning. Popular/majority opinion can be wrong and patting yourself on the back for having other people agree with you can be detrimental. Self-validation without critically thinking about your opponents arguments is an injustice to them.

I have a rule in Stylish to set "font" to #333 so that all comments appear the same for me. Unless someone mentions "why is this downvoted", I'm completely unaware of any comments being downvoted. I find this leads to a better experience on HN.

Note: For #3 I use "you/yourself" in a "third party not necessarily you 'you'" way.
If you're having a person own a branch, implementing it in their fork would probably make more sense: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows

We using the forking model for bigger projects with more developers, and the branching model for smaller projects. It works out very nicely.
> We are always faced with a choice between staying still with the technologies we know, or taking a bit of a leap and trying the new thing, learning the lessons and adapting and iterating and improving the industry around us.

I think they forgot the third popular choice -- taking a bit of a leap, trying the new thing, and finding that it doesn't involve really adapting, iterating, or improving, it's pretty much just a reinvented wheel.

This might explain why the author apparently has trouble drawing a picture of the motivations behind curmudgeons who hate anything new.

If your tool really genuinely solves problems without creating a new layer of complexity, it's not going to have very many haters.
Once the merge commit occurs, the 'messy real work' is now part of the main branch's history just as much as the rest of the commits, as they are ancestors of that merge commit.
On a related note, MS has PPL on Windows:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd492427.aspx

Very similar to C#'s TPL.

And VS2015 has experimental support for async/await in C++:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2014/11/12/resumable-...
Many of the statements in myths are testable. Some claims are credible. Most testable claims not true. Some of the things that are true are trivially true, as the example I gave where a tree can indeed grow from a seed.

If one creation myth says that humans came from "the nethermost of the four cave-wombs of the world", another creation myth say that humans come from logs given spirit and life, and a third says that people come from the tears of Khepri, then we know that at least two of them, if not all three, are incorrect - even if we cannot test them directly.

(In any case, we can test them - none of those myths are compatible with the physical evidence of human evolution.)

The original statement was that "many [myths] must, necessarily, contain a kernel of truth". My question was, how do we tell which is the kernel of truth? That trees grow from seeds? Or that humans come from cave-dwelling creatures? Or that the Zuni people tried to make sense of the petrified bones and landscape forms by creating a post-hoc story to explain things?

At some point the suggestion that there is a 'kernel of truth' become useless, as there is a kernel of truth in nearly everything that humans do.

Your statement, that myths could be used to understand history, is not controversial. I gave examples from the 1800s and 1900s as previous examples, and there are certainly many more.
As I sat on the homepage, the first thing I asked my self was how does this work? And I am not curious about the actual tech behind it, but:

- What do I have to do (install, sacrifice, compromise) to make this work?

- What do other people have to do when they get my messages for me to have these features?

That video on the home page doesn’t have it, the how it works page didn’t have it…the video on this business page sort of showed it (I wish that video let me scrub through the video)…

https://www.virtru.com/business/

It wasn’t until I come across this one slideshow that I finally saw this screenshot:

http://cl.ly/image/2Z1V1j1q0O1i

Honestly, I can’t find where I got that screenshot from now that I’m writing this down. Anyway, once I saw that…I thought, okay…great…I get it. Now I can move on.

Mostly, I’m asking myself from the beginning: “So, what’s the catch?” When it comes to security there’s always going to be one and you should just help me see everything once and for all. As a designer, I’m caring about the overall experience…but I can see other people caring less about that. If it’s the IT guy, he’s thinking…how hard is this deploy? How much does it cost? Is it REALLY secure? I think some of those answers (substantial ones that aren’t just bullet points) aren’t easy to find either.
Can someone explain to me what does it add over http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_58_0/doc/html/thread/synchro... and pros/cons ? Thanks.
Ask HN: Simple data collection apps with QR/Barcodes?
Hi, I'm looking for a relatively simple iOS app that probably already exists - however after trying dozens of apps from iTunes I've yet to find it.

Basically I have a collection of plants that I would like to collect data on throughout their life cycle. Each one is labelled with a QR code that I've generated.

I want to scan a QR code, have the plant come up, and be able to enter measurements into custom fields. For example, I would like to create a custom field called "Plant Height June 18", so that I can scan each plant, measure it, and enter the value. Ideally the output will be a csv or similar table, with plants as rows and my custom fields (measurements) as columns.

It's much simpler than the hundreds of inventory apps available already, however I have no need for quantities or pricing, just simple data entry with the ability to create custom fields. The closest I've been able to find is an iOS app called Inventory Scanner 2015, however it only allows up to 3 custom fields. Other promising apps like Sortly can only use QR codes generated by their app, which is an issue.

Hopefully I've been clear on what I'm looking for. If anyone knows of any apps that fit this description, I would love to hear about them. Perhaps I'm missing the magic combination of keywords to find it!

Cheers
Show HN: Test your Git skills with the git-game-v2!
> You're being evasive.

No, I'm not. I directly answered both as to the accuracy of the "up to" statement (stating that that statement is, stricly speaking, accurate) and its likely relevance to actual sentencing (stating also that is misleading in the absence of an understanding of how federal sentencing works.)

> For instance, in his most recent comment, he suggested that Swartz's political activism made the longer sentence likely.

That's a different claim than the one you asked me if I agreed with. FWIW, I've done no study myself and aware of none that gives any basis for saying what effect, if any, political activism has on sentencing decisions (my intuition is that crimes related motivated by it probably are correlated with a lack of remorse shown and negatively correlated with factors -- both within the guidelines and that judges are likely to apply in considering outside the guidelines -- that favor mitigation of sentences, so the idea that it does lead to greater sentences is intuitively plausible.)

> He was strongly implying that the 30-50 year sentence DOJ bragged about was anchored in reality.

And I directly addressed the connection between that and reality.

> Do you agree with him?

Asked and answered. Repeatedly, at this point.

> When we consider Swartz's predicament, or really the predicament of anyone faced with federal charges, should we assume that sentences will not group, regardless of what the guidelines say?

We should assume that there is the potential for that to occur, yes, particularly if we are the ones facing them. Any other assumption in a post-Booker world is imprudent.

As to the likelihood of upward departures, what assumptions we should make depends on the available information we have on cases that are similar, and what judges have done and appeals courts have allowed or not in the way of upward departures. But the history of the guidelines being advisory is short, and in many cases there aren't much in the way of similar cases from which to form much of a judgement about that probability.

> Is the "30 years" top-line sentence useful to our discussion?

I don't think raising the Swartz case (upper-bound sentence or otherwise) is particularly useful in the context of the Bitcoin case.
Thanks in advance for being more civil in the future. It's important, and we appreciate it.

> Can you clarify why my comment was rebuked, but the parent was not, please?

I simply didn't see that bit. You're right that it broke the guidelines as well. Had I seen it I would have said so.

Still, accusing a fellow user of shilling is worse than accusing one of not having read an article. The shilling thing is its own circle of forum hell. I've written about it, if anyone wants to understand why we single this out: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR....
Why are mom and pop businesses better than those who buy or sell/cut hair? Shame on you for objectively deciding one group of people is better than another.
All other things aren't held equal in the real world. You may add a new campaign, or stop one that is currently running. You might change up the audiences or add to them. Basically any activity you would do to optimize a campaign is going to potentially change a channel's behavior. Either you limit yourself to not making those changes, or you severely slow down your decision cycles by constraining them to an amount of time based on the longest conversion window.

That may be an acceptable way to run marketing with small budgets (say under $20k/mo) since you don't have the spend volume to come to many new statistically significant insights about what is working and what is not in short timeframes, but once you get to larger budgets the method of hoping that all other variables are equal-ish is a great way to lose money on marketing. If you run substantial marketing accounts it trivial to see the differences in practice between the model you suggest and a more accurate model, you shouldn't just hand-wave away the differences.
Lots of companies have services where their employees are contractors to other companies. Other companies can require the services co to screen all their contractors for drugs as a part of liability coverage.

For example - if you work for a company that provides contract services to healthcare / hospital / gov / dod companies or agencies - you will likely be required to take a drug screen. and this is done prior to your offer being officially accepted on their end.
Funny thing is, he didn't even call it that. His title was "A Case against the GO TO Statement". His editor Niklaus Wirth (yes, the guy who created Pascal and a ton of other languages) renamed it because he wanted to get people's attention and rustle some jimmies.
http://www.unlicense.org is the only civilized thing to be using these days.
Futures can be created with promises:

- http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/future

- http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/promise

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_and_promises

- http://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/futures.html
Keurig's model for hardware startups
ELF is just a container format for ISA-specific binaries. It doesn't solve portability between x86 and ARM, for example.

The JVM lacks integration with the DOM (important when you have, for example, cross-language cycles) and is also not a good target for C and C++ apps due to various missing features (unsigned ints, SIMD, etc). It is also not easily polyfillable.
Reminds me of the old story of the onion in the varnish. As recounted by pg:

>>In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi tells a story that happened when he was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry.<<
This is not the reality for the vast majority of homeowners. Banks are very good at estimating these costs, and they will decline loans that are too large for the homeowner to maintain a financial margin of safety.

I anticipate the objection that the financial crisis proves me wrong. Well, even at the worst of the crisis, annual foreclosure rates were under 10% (i.e. 90+% of mortgages were stable). And, banks have certainly further tightened up their underwriting since then.
There's no such thing as "further away" with a VR headset. It's always an inch away, and the appearance of depth is just a stereoscopic trick.

> If the VR headset is 1080p and the video footage is 1080p, if you put it far away (i.e. it only takes up 50% or 25% of the VR headset's screen real-estate)

How far away it appears has nothing to do with the viewing angle, unless you also mention the virtual size of the virtual screen. A 10" screen at 1ft away will have a smaller viewing angle than a 1,000,000ft screen 500ft away.
> I don't visit them at all.

I honestly don't get this part. You don't visit any website that has ads?
Not to take anything away from the Serif guys, they’re doing a fantastic job, but most of the underlaying value of these software packages (Affinity Designer, Pixelmator, Sketch, iDraw, etc.) come from the strong frameworks in place on Apple’s platforms (i.e. CoreGraphics, Quartz, Metal, etc.). Moving to another platform would mean to either find replacements or having to roll their own, which they probably wouldn’t want to do. There is nothing bad about focus. I’d much rather have a platform-specific, focused tool that does a great job than having cross platform, half-assed set of barely decent tools like what Adobe does with their desktop apps.
No, the grouping I'm talking about is not by some arbitrary trait but by genetic relatedness. Two groups with recent common ancestry within the group and only distant common ancestry across groups.

Genetic similarity is the "master mechanism that would correlate the group average of one trait with another."
A Week in SF as a Startup from “Somewhere Else”
So, you clearly do not have social phobia. Yes, it is a legitimate disorder, and it can be quite disabling when it's severe.

It's not about not being able to speak in public. Imagine suffering from panic attacks and not being able to leave your house for days, because you're afraid someone will say hi to you. That's social anxiety.

Your attitude "STOP IT. tell them to fit in" is the reason many people with social anxiety, and many other psychiatric disorders end up committing suicide.
Not just DLL after DLL.
MS DLLs of course are not included in ISO releases. Nor they could come under license of the releases.
They though might work, but they not necessarily are tested nor they are planned to be used.
The Bitcoin world has replicated most of the known financial scams. This has worked because it preys on a population that doesn't know the known financial scams.

There is a long, long history of financial scams. That's why the handling of other people's money is regulated. FINRA fines about one broker a day, year in and year out. Even with regulation, there are problems, but today in the US you can often get your money back. Bank failures occur, stock brokerages fail, and the SIPC and the FDIC pay off the losses up to $250K per person. Madoff's victims already have about half their money back, after years of litigation and clawbacks. Madoff himself, of course, is in the federal pen at Butner, North Carolina.

The Bitcoin world thinks it doesn't need regulation. About half of Bitcoin brokers, and most of the Bitcoin online wallet companies, have gone bust, most of them taking customer assets with them. Any questions?
"Considered harmful"?
> If your tool really genuinely solves problems without creating a new layer of complexity, it's not going to have very many haters.

OP here. A thing I wanted to touch on, but left out. I don't think it's possible to solve problems without adding some complexity. For example, golang genuinely solves problems but you have to learn go and the new toolchain, etc. Once you learn them though (and the same is true for Docker here), you get to remove some of the complexity that existed with your previous tools.

So for example, in Docker, we'll be able to remove the host OS and move it into the hypervisor, and the complexity will drop to lower than it was before the start. Or we'll start to use the Google Cloud Platform (which is Kubernetes) and we won't think about anything other than our container image and the exact resources it needs.
Presumably animal fur isn't prohibited. You can catch nasty things from fur and hides, and some tanning processes are nasty, too.
The Erlanger Playbook
Of course there will be exceptions, but, given two candidates, the one who did better will get the offer. At big tech companies there is no shortage of people who ace a white-board problem.

Also, if you interview with multiple people for a position (and do multiple white-board problems) you can get an offer without acing all of them.
A lot of the law around derivatives regulation seems to have the explicit purpose of building a wall between "gambling" and "risk management" (trading, hedging, &c). A regulatory problem with OTC derivatives in the '90s was that they were determined to be gambling devices, not real financial products.

The law is obviously imperfect. But the goal --- don't let us pretend we're financing we're just running games --- seems pretty straightforward.

So to my mind, debating the regs that brought down this exchange takes you in one (or more) of three directions:

1. You can believe we shouldn't regulate gambling at all, because people will find ways to gamble, and many people can gamble responsibly. As Levine points out, we might even benefit from the information generated by the gaming activity.

2. You can believe "main street" investors should have access to private company equity and not just large institutional investors.

3. You can believe we should not have "safety and soundness" as a goal for regulating retail financial transactions, and that the SEC/CFTC/&c should not serve a role for the financial system that is similar to the FDA's role for drugs (lots of people also think that the FDA does more harm than good). That is to say: companies should not have to spend large amounts of money to ensure "truth in labeling" for financial products.

I tend to think you probably have to believe all of these things to think what Sand Hill Exchange was doing should have been lawful. For instance: if you think there's value in generating retail exposure to startup equity, there are obviously saner ways to provide it than relaxing regs on derivatives betting exchanges.
About Network Effects
It implies to me that nothing's infiltrated science except scientists.

It shows to me that the fossil fuel lobby knows AGW is real, knows that if they hire any scientists to look at the issue, those scientists will once again confirm that AGW is real, and so they prefer to fund denialism.

That's the thing: you can have debates and disagreements, but physical reality does take sides.

[update]

You're a citizen. You can read the scientific papers on AGW regardless of whether they're used by the IPCC for their own papers.

Might I suggest you do that?
> There's no such thing as "further away" with a VR headset. It's always an inch away, and the appearance of depth is just a stereoscopic trick.

Meaning objects get smaller, meaning that they take up less space on the resolution, meaning that you need higher PPI to render them at the same level of detail.

> How far away it appears has nothing to do with the viewing angle

Nobody is talking about viewing angles. I certainly never brought it up.
From January 2015
> Should all the financial regulation exist?

Almost certainly not. The regulatory burden of operating in the finance industry is overwhelming - innovation is not so much stifled as killed. The big boys thrive because the little guy doesn't stand a chance from the get-go. The whole industry is estimated to be worth ~17% of global GDP and that money, which is almost equivalent to the output of Europe (or every country in the world except the top ~17 richest nations), goes to a list of companies so small you could probably write their names on a single page. It's a joke.
Itemtopia- receive instant recall notifications
No one would have been using Mt Gox if there were better options back then (the coinbases, krakens and bitstamps didnt exist then or were just starting off)

I used bitcoin since 2011, MtGox was fairly much unavoidable at the time, tho I do remember #bitcoin-otc :)

Everyone knew mtgox was dodgy, and in the end the people who did get burned are those who forgot about their bitcoins there and those who were willing to gamble despite months of warning signs of impending doom.

Hell I think i have like 100$ worth of bitcoin there at todays rate but for the life of me can not remember the password I used.
Houston Astros Hacked by Members of St. Louis Cardinals
> I also tend to leave things up on my board for a few days, after which a lot of dry erase markers become a pain to erase, whereas chalk always erases nicely.

This. If they could fix this with whiteboards, I figure they'd be a lot more popular--and no I don't need to know tricks to clean the whiteboard, indeed even deodorant spray works well enough, but it'd be nice to have a whiteboard that just wipes clean as well after a few days as it does after an hour :)

That, and the problem with pens running out. But that's a problem I feel I could have more control over if I were to use a whiteboard more often :)
By the time they have hundreds of thousands of users, it's too late to prevent MtGox scenarios. Better that they get shut down quickly --- for their own sakes.