captainobvious

Uhh doesn't Eliezer Yudkowsky's account explicitly discount the envelope explanation?

Violates the EULAs of most of these programs. Someone should get it taken down if we have any respect for copyright law.

But if your bet was placed as a CDS with Lehman, you actually may not have made money.

>- I agree you don't have any advantage. On the other hand the meltdown has already happened, so the prices have been corrected already.

A couple of summers ago someone could just have easily said: "on the other hand, house prices have ballooned, so the massive undervaluations in the housing market have been corrected already"

You are arbitrarily calling a bottom without any justification other than an efficient market hypothesis, which, given recent volatility, is hard to put forward.

Only if you callously assume that the NFL player who gets his spot in the NFL won't do the same.

Seems like theft that isn't illegal. No thanks.

Are you trying to get excommunicated?

beware looking for this on youtube; youtube is mono =)

If it involves more than one patent owned by different owners it is a classic tragedy of the commons problem: each patent holder has an incentive to maximize his demands because the downside (risk that the overall patent cost is too much for the purchaser) is shared by all the sellers (the patent owners).

>sorry, but can't remember the source

You'll have to do better than that; it definitely isn't like the immune system stops adapting after the age of 20; otherwise vaccines wouldn't work.

False dichotomy.

just run:

    firefox -ProfileManager

The EU practically is a country. There are plenty of other counter examples, mostly countries that were formally some part of an imperialist empire, or essentially still are (many countries in the Caribbean).

>* Depending on your site, you could hold a competition and submit it to whatever forums and BBS's you'd like to. The winner gets a brand new $200 iPod.

Bad idea; there are strict laws about contests and they vary by state. You don't want to have a VC doing due diligence 6 months down the road run across this and put a large penalty on your valuation or rule you out altogether.

skreet skreet

Unfortunately my favourite one missed the '08 deadline: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417782

Guess you are anti-ISP too?

>helps architects to work better Is that proper grammar (I have no idea, but it sounds wrong).

I would have used: >helps architects work better

Looks like paper mache made out of $100 bills, formed into a curvy box, and then painted with pure silver sprinkled with crushed black diamonds to darken it a bit and then laser etched inside of the Macbook factory to make it lose it's luster.

wait a minute, are you spolsky?

Human babies have similar innate behaviors (a quickly growing shape, say a circle, will cause a fear reaction in a newborn baby).*

* Chomsky - Language and Responsibility - p52

This dude has consistently nailed it:

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press

Kind of nuts seeing that graph after just reading "Dear Hacker News, which 50k car should I buy" =P

Damn, that is insane. I lucked out and made $110k my first year out of college and rewarded myself with an almost brand-new Camry that had a couple of scratches for $12k. Now I'm kicking myself after finding out about the Chevy Prizm through this thread.

I can't believe someone who was making $70k (~45k after taxes/social-security) would trade in more than a year of 8 hour days 5 days a week in some shithole development job just to be able to commute in style (though perhaps he just wants to engage in parking-lot dick waving for some girl at the office; fine, I can believe it).

interesting stuff on perfect pitch wrt chinese: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segme...

It's a collective action problem. I'm just giving the my Ayn Rand-esque solution to the problem, whereby I look out for myself and end up unintentionally screwing everyone else. =(

The problem with mentioning a few anecdotal examples to show why we need more government regulation in a given area is they are just that, anecdotal. Here's an (anecdotal) counter to your take on the FDA:

Chicago Tribune - Stop the government's mad cow disease test ban - http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/chicago42304.cfm

Are you talking about medicare or social security? If we took a little under half of the increase in defense spending in the ~2002-2006 period, social security could be made solvent for the next 75 years: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6514572148606053094...

It isn't exactly out of our capacity to do. We just have to stop blowing things up and destroying wealth.

It would be hard to find a 10-year stretch post Great Depression with less regulation on banks. Here's a video that was on CSPAN of the former CEO of Wells Fargo, with a detailed breakdown of every regulation that was lifted since he started (with Citigroup, if I remember from when I saw this on TV) in the 70's:

http://fora.tv/2008/10/21/Richard_Kovacevich_Evolution_of_th...

Take something like day trading, where a company is out of all positions at/after the close each day. Every transaction they engage in is zero-sum. No wealth is being created, but tons of people are wasting time on it (destroying potential wealth).

I don't think the case of day trading is covered by the baseball player analogy.