6 ms·

The End of Wall Street's Boom

123 points by naish 18y ago

jbyers 18y ago
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412
geuis 18y ago
yet another site that doesn't correctly forward urls when surfing via iPhone
- dmaclay 18y ago
  Don't you mean "yet another site that iPhones can't navigate" ? It's kind of like buying a golf cart instead of a car and then complaining that the roads weren't made to accommodate it.
  - geuis 18y ago
    No, you're wrong. Read my other reply. Their site is broken.
- czstrong 18y ago
  I found a nice workaround for this. I saw this post via icombinator.net and easily saved it to my instapaper, then read it easily using the instapaper iphone app.
- geuis 18y ago
  If you were using the iPhone you would see what I mean. They specifically setup a mobile version of their site. However when you click through to a url for a specific story on their site, their system doesn't know how to handle it and just forwards you to the front page of the mobile version. It leaves you no way to get to the story via the url, because their system is detecting the iPhone Safari useragent and just shunting that traffic to the mobile version. It needs to know I'm trying to get to the specific url that I am trying to view. If that URL isn't available in an iPhone friendly version, then just show me the regular page. If it does have a friendly version, then show it to me in that version. So when I say "yet another site that doesn't correctly forward urls when surfing via iPhone" I am absolutely correct. Their site is broken and it should be fixed if they actually want people on mobile devices to browser their site.
davi 18y ago
1) Click through, read, upvote post. 2) Look at comments to see what HN denizens have said. See post is a duplicate. Upvote comment noting that. 3) Think to myself, "I should've checked comments before upvoting post." 4) Think to myself, "Why is it incumbent upon me to do this? The site should do it for me." 5) Think to myself, "There is an interesting analog between a social news site and ebay. At any given moment, there is some market for a given story or item (respectively). The size of this market varies around some mean, through time. The traction that a particular story/auction receives is a function of the size of this market." I have a friend who makes his living off ebay, and he likes the store a lot better. He says he's getting triple what he would for small-market, rarely purchased items than he would if he'd posted an auction for the same thing. A store averages the size of the market through time. An auction samples the size of the market for a much shorter time, and so experiences more noise in market size. A social news site has some algorithm to let stories with traction decay from the front page as a function of time. The faster this decay, the more approximately instantaneous the sampling is of the size of the market. So went a semi-random, diverging-from-topic chain of thoughts during lunch break. Maybe others will be interested.
- 13ren 18y ago
  Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm? Also, there's arguably a market in titles - I know I've missed stories of interest to me, because I didn't recognize that aspect of them from a specific title. 4) [I believe] the site matches URLs, but doesn't catch non-significant differences, because it's difficult to tell what's significant. e.g. in this case, the previous submission's URL had an appended: ?tid=true 5) [I believe] there is a HN list with a slower decay, so it's averaged over a longer period of time (like Digg's "Top in ..." on the RHS): http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best but it's not very newsy, because it's averaged over a longer period of time. With your friend, isn't the asking price also an input? The experience of getting more sales when you increase prices is not uncommon.
  - davi 18y ago
    5) cool! Didn't know about that. 4) fair enough "Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm?" - It harms the people who already read the story, and now have decreased signal:noise on their front page. - It helps the people who missed it the first time around who find it interesting. - It helps the people who already read the story, and who were interested in the HN discussion of the story (at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412). These people now get an influx of new comments to think about. The last point only works because the user community pointed out the duplicate, and collectively decided that on-topic discussion (as opposed to this meta-ish discussion) best belonged under the original posting. Possible conclusion: dupes are okay (even net good) on a site with a principled user community. Probably net bad on a site with a more chaotic community. Feature idea for social news sites: let (high karma?) users fuse dupes' discussion pages into one.
shimon 18y ago
My favorite part: some guys from a hedge fund that's betting against subprime mortgages, at a subprime industry conference in late 2007: Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part of his speech about Option One’s subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. “It wasn’t a Q&A,” says Moses. “The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve’s hand and says, ‘Yes?’” “Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?” Eisman asked. A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech. Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no, Moses thought. “The one thing Steve always says,” Daniel explains, “is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always lie to you.” Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these subprime lenders but didn’t see the need for him to express it here in this manner. For Eisman wasn’t raising his hand to ask a question. He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said. “Yes?” the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. “Is that another question?” “No,” said Eisman. “It’s a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent.” The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman’s cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “But I need to take this call.” And with that, he walked out.
jeroen 18y ago
Single-page link: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true&print=true http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli... (I posted this in the other item first, but as this one is getting a lot of reads as well and the article is split up into 9 pages, I thought it was worth a repost.)
mberrow 18y ago
Very revealing. I believe in the conservation of value. In the end there are losers of value and those that made off with real value. This article explains the convoluted pipes and flywheels through which the most massive theft of value in history was performed. Now if someone (or some article) can explain what the deal is with the black hole that is AIG and why they are so special to get such huge transfusions of capital (and Lehman didn't), I would really appreciate it.
- ksvs 18y ago
  I believe in the conservation of value. You don't think it's possible to create wealth? Or do you just mean that it is conserved within the finance industry?
  - mberrow 18y ago
    Not by pushing paper around. If you make something concrete, yes. If some creates a brilliant new patent or technique, yes. But purely paper financial maneuvers like CDO's and short selling etc. do not create real value in the aggregate.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

123 points by naish 18y ago

jbyers 18y ago

Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412

geuis 18y ago

yet another site that doesn't correctly forward urls when surfing via iPhone

dmaclay 18y ago
Don't you mean "yet another site that iPhones can't navigate" ? It's kind of like buying a golf cart instead of a car and then complaining that the roads weren't made to accommodate it.
- geuis 18y ago
  No, you're wrong. Read my other reply. Their site is broken.
czstrong 18y ago
I found a nice workaround for this. I saw this post via icombinator.net and easily saved it to my instapaper, then read it easily using the instapaper iphone app.
geuis 18y ago
If you were using the iPhone you would see what I mean. They specifically setup a mobile version of their site. However when you click through to a url for a specific story on their site, their system doesn't know how to handle it and just forwards you to the front page of the mobile version. It leaves you no way to get to the story via the url, because their system is detecting the iPhone Safari useragent and just shunting that traffic to the mobile version. It needs to know I'm trying to get to the specific url that I am trying to view. If that URL isn't available in an iPhone friendly version, then just show me the regular page. If it does have a friendly version, then show it to me in that version. So when I say "yet another site that doesn't correctly forward urls when surfing via iPhone" I am absolutely correct. Their site is broken and it should be fixed if they actually want people on mobile devices to browser their site.

davi 18y ago

1) Click through, read, upvote post. 2) Look at comments to see what HN denizens have said. See post is a duplicate. Upvote comment noting that. 3) Think to myself, "I should've checked comments before upvoting post." 4) Think to myself, "Why is it incumbent upon me to do this? The site should do it for me." 5) Think to myself, "There is an interesting analog between a social news site and ebay. At any given moment, there is some market for a given story or item (respectively). The size of this market varies around some mean, through time. The traction that a particular story/auction receives is a function of the size of this market." I have a friend who makes his living off ebay, and he likes the store a lot better. He says he's getting triple what he would for small-market, rarely purchased items than he would if he'd posted an auction for the same thing. A store averages the size of the market through time. An auction samples the size of the market for a much shorter time, and so experiences more noise in market size. A social news site has some algorithm to let stories with traction decay from the front page as a function of time. The faster this decay, the more approximately instantaneous the sampling is of the size of the market. So went a semi-random, diverging-from-topic chain of thoughts during lunch break. Maybe others will be interested.

13ren 18y ago
Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm? Also, there's arguably a market in titles - I know I've missed stories of interest to me, because I didn't recognize that aspect of them from a specific title. 4) [I believe] the site matches URLs, but doesn't catch non-significant differences, because it's difficult to tell what's significant. e.g. in this case, the previous submission's URL had an appended: ?tid=true 5) [I believe] there is a HN list with a slower decay, so it's averaged over a longer period of time (like Digg's "Top in ..." on the RHS): http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best but it's not very newsy, because it's averaged over a longer period of time. With your friend, isn't the asking price also an input? The experience of getting more sales when you increase prices is not uncommon.
- davi 18y ago
  5) cool! Didn't know about that. 4) fair enough "Lots of people (51 upvotes) didn't see the first one, so maybe it doesn't do any harm?" - It harms the people who already read the story, and now have decreased signal:noise on their front page. - It helps the people who missed it the first time around who find it interesting. - It helps the people who already read the story, and who were interested in the HN discussion of the story (at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360412). These people now get an influx of new comments to think about. The last point only works because the user community pointed out the duplicate, and collectively decided that on-topic discussion (as opposed to this meta-ish discussion) best belonged under the original posting. Possible conclusion: dupes are okay (even net good) on a site with a principled user community. Probably net bad on a site with a more chaotic community. Feature idea for social news sites: let (high karma?) users fuse dupes' discussion pages into one.

shimon 18y ago

My favorite part: some guys from a hedge fund that's betting against subprime mortgages, at a subprime industry conference in late 2007: Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part of his speech about Option One’s subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. “It wasn’t a Q&A,” says Moses. “The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve’s hand and says, ‘Yes?’” “Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?” Eisman asked. A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech. Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no, Moses thought. “The one thing Steve always says,” Daniel explains, “is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always lie to you.” Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these subprime lenders but didn’t see the need for him to express it here in this manner. For Eisman wasn’t raising his hand to ask a question. He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said. “Yes?” the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. “Is that another question?” “No,” said Eisman. “It’s a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent.” The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman’s cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “But I need to take this call.” And with that, he walked out.

jeroen 18y ago

Single-page link: http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true&print=true http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfoli... (I posted this in the other item first, but as this one is getting a lot of reads as well and the article is split up into 9 pages, I thought it was worth a repost.)

mberrow 18y ago

Very revealing. I believe in the conservation of value. In the end there are losers of value and those that made off with real value. This article explains the convoluted pipes and flywheels through which the most massive theft of value in history was performed. Now if someone (or some article) can explain what the deal is with the black hole that is AIG and why they are so special to get such huge transfusions of capital (and Lehman didn't), I would really appreciate it.

ksvs 18y ago
I believe in the conservation of value. You don't think it's possible to create wealth? Or do you just mean that it is conserved within the finance industry?
- mberrow 18y ago
  Not by pushing paper around. If you make something concrete, yes. If some creates a brilliant new patent or technique, yes. But purely paper financial maneuvers like CDO's and short selling etc. do not create real value in the aggregate.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]