skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Financiers are buyers and sellers of risk. They do so at prices that are generally advantageous to them. They are able to do so because they make a profession out of it: they have a lot of capital to work with, and they spend a lot of time thinking about it.

To call finance intentionally opaque is a perhaps true, but it shouldn't be vilified much more than other goods and services, the providers which all maintain some level of "opacity" towards their customers. In a sense, it's a fundamental part of any capitalistic transaction. A farmer sells an apple for more than it costs for her to make it, but you're willing to pay her for it because you aren't that good at growing apples. To her, it might be worth what it cost her to grow it, but to you, it is clearly worth what you are willing to pay for it, because you have the added benefit (or requirement) of being able to eat it and survive. So it is worth more to you, less to her, and she profits.

One could see similarities in insurance (much closer to finance than apple-growing, if not finance itself). An insurer charges you (or maybe an aggregated group of "yous") more than it costs to provide a certain protection (or hedge against a certain risk). You are willing to pay the premium because clearly the risk protection matters more than getting some "theoretically optimal" price.

With increased availability in technology and information, certain kinds of finance are becoming easy to do "on your own" - the most salient example is perhaps index investing. Many people are realizing that financiers cannot add value and they need less of a middleman.

I thought I'd share my contrasting thoughts, but I very much enjoyed the read.
:-) The slight tone of sarcasm was there if you were looking for it.

Ultimately it comes down to "Trust us". Unless you are well versed in computer security, anything other than what I wrote, is meaningless. Even the rootkit stuff I put there is above the head of the average computer user (we're probably talking the 98th percentile and above that would understand what a rootkit is).

Probably talking the 99.99th percentile for what's above.
Consider that the Brownian model of financial markets was discovered by Bachelier in 1900, five years before Einstein, and the pace of financial innovation in the intervening century, and you have your answer for why finance is complex.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Bachelier
Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming from data science, and under programming have separate sub-topics like Javascript, Python, and web).
Object.observe()
27 Ways to Generate Revenue in B2B
I wonder how this will fare. Coming from a company that generates most of its revenue from ads, it's a great indicator that companies will need to find alternate forms of monetization for free services.
I was with you until here:

"it has nothing to do with whether they were giving dolls or cars as toddlers"

Either you're being hyperbolic in which case I can't really parse your comment because I don't know which points you're serious about, or you actually believe that there is no relationship between the specific toys children play with and their development, which ignores a massive body of reasonably well conducted research in developmental psychology.
Oh absolutely. I certainly have. And boy do you hear about it! Due to the trust people have in manual curation, mistakes are quite painful. This is one of the reasons I think people subconciously like manual curation. If you can blame and chastise the curator, that makes it more appealing.

If The New York Times runs some vile headline on their front page, it would do incredible damage to the brand. If Google News automatically ran a similar thing, fingers would get pointed at some blameless algorithm (like with the black people/"gorilla" auto tagging debacle last week) and we'd all shrug at how funny technology can be while remembering just how uninteresting Google News usually is at the same time.
Great. Thank you for the clarification. What you just described definitely sounds like something PipelineDB would be great for. I can see it being especially useful for quickly standing up dashboards and maybe even datamarts when considering new data sources. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing something.
Is there any evidence that Vanguard gets kick-backs in return for their dumb order flow?

I would think that would be a HUGE scandal if it were true and ever came out.
>Apple aiming to curate the world's supply of music is a different issue

Well it's pretty much a non-existent issue since there's no possible way they become the gatekeeper to all music. I think you're raging against a scenario that exists only in your mind.
I find it amazing that someone can write so much about the cost of college, and yet treat tuition bills as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai, rather than something colleges themselves might have any responsibility for. Colleges have become giant money-sucking machines, similar to Scientology. In fact, they're so similar that I made a handy comparison chart (http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/06/15/universities-vs-sci...).

The author here insinuates that the increased cost comes from paying for teaching and research. But this is wrong for at least five reasons:

1. Research is not a cost center for colleges. It is a profit center. Usually, research is not funded by the college itself; rather, professors get grants from outside agencies, which the college then takes a large, juicy cut of for itself. (Ask any professor.)

2. At most colleges, the number of faculty members per student has remained stagnant for the last thirty years. The author waves their hands about "new areas of knowledge", but these new areas aren't leading to more hiring.

3. Wages for tenured faculty have also remained stagnant, adjusted for inflation.

4. Colleges are rapidly replacing their tenured faculty with adjuncts, who are given heavy courseloads, and paid peanuts even compared to tenured faculty (barely minimum wage, in a lot of cases).

5. Most of the actual work of research and teaching is done by grad students, of whom there are far more than tenured faculty. Grad students are, again, a profit center rather than a cost center, since the university gets to charge them "tuition" (despite most of them taking few or no classes). This "tuition" is either paid by an outside research agency, or "generously" waived in exchange for the grad student doing teaching and grading, again at very low wages.
Good article. 'Horse race narratives' work just as well outside tech news as well. It is good for readers to pick up on this pattern and be skeptical of articles before they get sucked in.
Try converting to a numpy array, executing the operations and converting back to pandas.

More details here: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/version/0.16.2/enhancin...

Also they recently added support for array expressions and allocation so you should upgrade if you haven't already.
Someone other than Terry Davis has written an app for TempleOS (frotz port)
The key exchange high-level overview looks like it has some typos.

Firstly, the <sub></sub> is being escaped instead of being interpreted as a tag. Also you say that the client and server make a keypair and create a tuple k_(pub,1) || k_(pub,2) || sig. Why would one participant have 2 pubkeys? If you meant it to be one public and one private, why would it include a private key? Is it actually that the client makes k_(pub,1) || client_sig and the server makes k_(pub,2) || server_sig? Also later you reference k_(peer,1) and k_(priv,1) which weren't mentioned previously at any point.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding anything. I'm gonna read through the Go code to see if I can understand better, this looks really interesting!
This is what happens when people confuse something which reduces complexity, to something which can move complexity. It's important to note that it can move complexity, if you can set up the container host environment in such a way to allow it. At which point the complexity normally associated with the OS management/systems administrator can largely be moved into build process/software developer complexity.

The number of tools which one would suggest you use along with Docker are a reflection of this, and are additional layers to try to provide further movement of host complexity up into a software controllable level (Consul, etcd, yada yada).

The whole ecosystem plays well with "cloud" hosts, because their systems people have taken the appropriate steps in creating that host architecture and complexity (which is not gone) for you.

As someone else stated well, it is the modern static linking. I have no idea why people would ever have done "build, test, build, deploy" - that sort of insanity should have been obviously wrong. However, "build, test, deploy" does not depend on static-ness of everything related to build, but compatibility of environment between "test" and "deploy". Those who invested not enough time in making sure these environments were always in sync I think have found a way to wipe the slate clean and use this to catch up to that requirement.
Not being aware of the situation I cannot comment on the bulk of your post, other than to say that I hope you are OK now?

I'm always cautious about pinning anything I do online to an identity - HN is actually about the only site I use where I post under my own name. Largely this stems from not wanting to make mistakes and avoiding any possible future public repurcussions. I truly wish anonymity was more embraced on sites like GitHub. For instance, I think the ability to hide your identity from others when submitting a pull request would strongly encourage people to contribute, which could only be a good thing.
It took me a while to realize that they are talking about the number of birthdays listed on the page about March 27[1], not actually combed from all Wikipedia person pages, as I expected from the title.

To anyone who knows even a little about how Wikipedia is edited, this shouldn't be a mystery at all; there are no automatic pages or statistics, even for fixed entities like dates, and there is no automatic cross-referencing.

So as you'd expect, a person entered every birthday on that page, and there is absolutely no reason to assume that comparable detail has been given to all other days of the year.

(I'd hardly call this an easter egg, and I wish more people understood Wikipedia enough to make this entirely uninteresting.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_27
Just use numba and get fortran like performance by writing in python.
I think this is just a sign that there's healthy decision making going on. If what the CoC claims is true, that Jamaica's law was passed without following the proper process, then that is a problem and it should be challenged whether you want the law or not. You can't have a law-making process, trademark protections, etc and then just walk over them when you decide it's an important law. The whole point of the process is to decide if it's the correct law in the first place!

The CoC's purpose is to support the interests of it's members. So they absolutely should be doing this. What good is a chamber of commerce that arbitrarily decides to throw some of its members under the bus when new laws threaten their businesses? The real complaint people should be making is that it allows tobacco businesses as members, or even that the government allows tobacco businesses to exist at all.

What shocks me the most is that the CVS pharmacy was selling cigarettes 1 year ago! What?! Pharmacies sell cigarettes in America?!
Banks don't necessarily borrow at 0%. Granted, they are able to borrow at a much lower rate than you or me (closer to the Federal Funds Rate managed by the U.S. Federal Reserve), but they still pay interest on their loans.

Of course, real interest rates have gotten close to zero, but in general real interest rates of 0% are nonsensical in stable, developed economies. Economically speaking, if rates were 0%, it would in the long run make sense to bulldoze the rocky mountains to save money on gas, because there is no marginal cost to consider.
Took me awhile to clean up the WebCrypto library which accompanies the article. I didn't want to submit the article until at least a bit of documentation existed.
I can redo benchmarks somewhere else. Any good alternative to jsperf?
Regular Portland cement goes off under water too - it is exothermic as it reacts but it doesn't continue to generate heat. The "heated hull" would only be during the initial setting when the cement was weak and prone to cracking.

A heated hull riding on a bed of steam sounds like an interesting [and very high energy cost] engineering challenge though!

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement
I know a few things that no one else does, as well as some that others are reluctant to discuss.

A few years ago I dropped a dime to the FBI to request they tap my phone. This led to my iPhone's return less than five minutes after it was stolen.

"Don't lose your iPhone," said the officer, "that's how we're keeping track of you."

I once threatened to murder a Vancouver PD officer when he refused to take my report when I wanted to report a drug informant hit. Hilarity ensued.

For unrelated reasons I am concerned that my days are numbered so tomorrow afternoon Im going to drop by the FBI field station here so I can sing like a bird.

I dont really know but speculate that my uncle died because he decided not to run for office rather than move legislation for Boswell Cotton Corporation. My father's older brother was VP of accounting.
I would think, by strict definition, a bold recommendation would be one you doubt you'll like but that turns out well, and a mistaken recommendation would be one that turns out poorly. In other words, the value of a recommendation is not something you can evaluate at the time, before following the recommendation; instead, it's a measure of regret. (And by that vein, yes, human recommendations can totally be mistakes, too.)

On the other hand, people do tend to try to filter on the recommendations themselves before knowing their regret-value. People will subconsciously multiply the likelihood that something was a "bold recommendation made by design" by the relative status of the recommender.

Celebrities, leaders in your industry, people you're attracted to, etc. can get away with recommending all sorts of crazy things. Just because of their source, these things seem much less crazy. And this doesn't seem to correlate at all with how well they would know you or your tastes as an individual. Kind of a mysterious behavior, though it reeks of evo-psych tribal status dynamics stuff.
The fundamental reason is because we may create financial products. They can be socially very useful, they may endow their creators with vast profits, or both. So the creation of financial products is strongly incentivized both from the buyer- and seller-sides.

However, there are only really two things that we can use to create these products: debt and risk. Thus, when we try to create financial products, we create structures composed entirely of debt and risk, which become very complex. The reason why they become so complex is similar to any other case in which you try to make highly sophisticated structures from only very simple/basic components: there ends up being a great number of details.
I had heard this word before [1]. So there were some benefits to spending all of high school playing Everquest.

[1] http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/spell.html?spell=5461
There's a note at ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/ETHOberon/readme.txt that says they've all been moved to ftp://ftp.ethoberon.ethz.ch/Oberon/
>The core purpose of status quo finance is to coax people into accepting risks that they would not, if fully informed, consent to bear.

That is a pretty loaded statement. That would be like saying the core purpose of the software industry is to destroy jobs and in turn collect part of the salary that those jobs previously paid. It might technically be true, but it is twisting things to make them sound intentionally evil.
Leaving a trace?
Bing Image Search.

The ITU's Child Online Protection initiative notifies Google of child pornography links. Google prmptly removes them from its index.

I expect Microsoft is so notified as well but Satya Nadella doesnt remove the links nor cached images, despite the original servers having been dead for years.

I am convinced that kim dotcom's bust gad nothing to do with copyright but that much of the, uh, "digital media" was distributed from his servers; however most is encrypted, but typically with very obvious or easily brute forced passwords.

More or less you start with bing then pay for a premier account with a filesharing service.

There is also "link protection" mostly our of India, which hides the referring page. One can earn decent coin by promoting a popular ptotected link.

Most of those links are found on what should be dead forums but whose servers are still operating.

An easy way to rain on the mob's parade would be to scout around for threads that go on for hundreds of pages.

http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...
YouTube gaming star PewDiePie 'earned $7m in 2014'
i reserved my slot and scheduled a phone call, then they sent me an email that i lost the slot till further notice because they got busy. that's worse than the bad hiring practices that companies already have.
Be sure to read "Project Oberon, The Design of an Operating System and Compiler" generously published online as a pdf: http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/ProjectOberon.pdf

There are emulators for Wirth's new cpu in JS, Java, C, and Python.

You can run it in the browser from here: http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

(Shameless plug: https://github.com/PhoenixBureau/PythonOberon I wrote the Python emulator. It is sloooooooow, but it will boot and draw the screen (after a few minutes...)
It will stick around like Perl4 did and then fade away with time.
The concept of inalienable rights does not require supernatural powers for validation. Saying we have these rights merely by being born human is exactly as logical as relying upon creatures whose existence cannot be proven. Nothing has been taken away by society's turn from mysticism. In fact, I feel that saying my natural right to speak, to defend myself, to live privately as I choose, is much stronger than if it is simply derived from a posited creator. I feel these rights are clearly mine by birth, and they have never been merely granted to me, not even by a currently-favored fairy tale.
Seconded. This is called the "Grossman-Stiglitz paradox".

There's also a kind of second-order version of market efficiency that says that active fund managers that can actually beat the market will increase their fees until their post-fee returns are the same as everyone else. So even if active _fund managers_ get compensated for making prices more efficient, there's no reason to believe that _fund investors_ will be.
> It's a mystery why it has taken so long to get to the point where we can target the browser with a statically-checked higher-level language that has API access to the native browser event loop and dom components the same way that Javascript does it.

We are already there. Compile to JavaScript (or, heck, WebAssembly if that ever becomes feature-complete enough).
good start! :)
I haven't offered any, and it would most likely be illegal if it was explicitly going on. And there is likely a wall between the different trading desks (though often the physical embodiment portion of this is literally a cubicle wall the employees can hear each other over). But the orderflow compensation doesn't need to cross over into the retail desk if the ETF itself has enough trading volume to mask some kickback without appearing too egregious.

But price fixing is also illegal--nevertheless, two gas stations across the street at a profitable intersection can engage in it solely through price signal tit-for-tat[1]. This effectively masks intentionality.

Much more fantastical and speculative: machine learning algorithms at both firms could now, or in the future, arrive at this cooperative strategy, even with the only communication being through price signals. Without any human ever even knowingly giving the explicit go-ahead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#The_iterate...
Measure Programmer Productivity with Lemons
Derivatives are instruments for transferring risk from those who understand it to those who do not.
Looks like this is the video referred to: http://pyvideo.org/video/3432/python-concurrency-from-the-gr...
Yosemite rock fall changes face of world-class climb
The presence of "yield" also changes the return type. No extra keywords needed for that.
Building Rumprun Unikernels
Where is the evidence that present hiring methodologies don't predict successful business outcomes? I recall seeing evidence re: resumes, but not on the overall process itself [1].

If this data is present (data showing that present hiring methodologies don't predict successful business outcomes), do you have data showing that hiring people who need jobs is any better? We /are/ different from each other -- as an example so obvious it borders on the ridiculous, people who have been programming for ten years will be much faster at it than people who haven't. At what point do you draw the line to state that people stop being different? If so, what data did you use to draw that line?

[1] http://blog.alinelerner.com/resumes-suck-heres-the-data/
I've heard people talk about how 40 years ago, or less than that, if you asked someone to put out their cigarette in the office, everyone would think you were some kind of jerk.

Now no one smokes, but we have an obesity/diabetes epidemic, and people bring in homemade cookies or brownies every day.

I can just imagine the uproar if anyone proposed a sugar free office though.
Thanks in part to the submitter, the Wikipedia article now exists:

1. In that HN thread,
2. As its own item on HN, and
3. With a link between the two.

It has been exposed it to a wider audience than those who clicked the Boston snow thread.

Your "passive-aggressive" and "desperate for attention" comments are out of line. There are more than a few differences between HN and Imgur.
RPerl – optimizing compiler for Perl 5
I was in a situation kind of like this. I was brought on to a Canadian company to make and end to end software system for gambling kiosks. They kept on making odd requests of me like being able to reseed random numbers on units until they found a set they liked (our games were deterministic). IE ones that payed out how they want. Also wanted me to not use encryption for various portions of the system that handled money.

Eventually I got a picture of the business where they were defrauding their investors by winning their own games or through exploiting purposeful holes in the system. Eventually I just delivered them a functioning and secure system. Refused to go down to the Dominican to install it (Since they had considerable pull down there) and walked away. It was really the first large project I had done and walking away hurt me considerably. But it was the right thing to do.

Those guys are in jail now and the investors pulled the plug. So at least I have some vague sense of Schadenfreude over the whole thing.

Unfortunately ethical software developer isn't exactly a winning eye popping line item on the resume.
I don't know what you are rambling about? What are the real constraints in an economy? Resources. That's about it. Everything else is virtual.
How the heck is it "passive-aggressive"? Who is being aggressed?

OP posted what they thought was an interesting link. Enough other people agreed to vote it onto the front page. Nothing nefarious going on.