skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe it was just a joke. Every once and a while I get called up by an especially annoying PR hack asking me to write about their latest iphone cozy (macworld being next week I get 5-7 calls like that per day because I'm somehow on the press list). When they're overly persistent I tell them to give me a Pony and I'll write about them (I'll write that they gave me a pony!). Maybe "give me a pony" is just a lot easier to understand as sarcasm than "give me a macbook air, jerk"?
Microsoft Excel is arguably the worlds most successful functional programming language.
I cannot help but think that working for Arrington is cruel and unusual punishment.
The point of corporate campaign finance is not to persuade the existing officials. It is to select for officials who already support your views. They are morally rightous crusaders on your behalf.

The fact that lobbying access does in fact also bring influence is also true, of course, but don't confuse the two issues.
This was a friend of mine, really feeling bad for him. One mistake and he's paying for it. Fortunately it will eventually fade away.

Edit: http://twitter.com/loic/status/8666998987 - Loic gave some good advice, I can't get ahold of him but hopefully he'll take it.
exclusivity is definitely also a readership thing. the blog that breaks the news picks up more daily readers, which in turn makes them a bigger blog.
When a lot of money is spent on politics, a statist sees a restricted government. The statist wants to free government from spenders' influence. The statist wants to give the government more freedom to act... Under this framework Lessig is a statist.

The framework you outline is far too general to term someone a statist. Statists are in this subset of people yes, but so is anyone left of center.

If you want to claim Lessig leans more towards a statist school of thought than an anti-statist school of thought I will agree with you. But ultimately a statist believes the sovereignty of a nation lies with the government and not with the people. I don't think Lessig believes this. To label Lessig a statist you'll have to make a far stronger case than what you've presented here.
> Blindly saying "thermodynamics" and not critically thinking about how/where/why it applies is intellectually deficient.

Not necessarily. In some cases it's a more efficient use of time to place the burden of proof on the person challenging a widely held assumption. Especially if you're a physicist who regularly receives letters from cranks with no background experience claiming to have overthrown physics. If you analyzed all of them in detail you'd never have time to do any real work.

Should people challenge assumptions? Sure. Are you required to challenge every assumption at every conceivable opportunity? No, that's OCD behaviour.

Does my attitude stifle progress? I don't think so - if someone has a way around the second law they should be able to build a machine utilizing it, and empirical data beats thought experiments every time.

Incidentally, the second law as commonly phrased "entropy always increases" is only an approximation. Entropy can decrease at times with small probabilities as outlined by the Fluctuation Theorem.
I'd really be interested in seeing MS continue to develop out Microsoft Robotics, don't know if it makes the most business sense though.
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The thing is that there is a more or less guaranteed discussion of your stuff on HN if it gets posted on TC, and vaksel has more than done his bit to promote TC on HN, so I can really understand he feels taken in a bad way. Another option is that vaksel was refused a write-up by that person, in which case I really understand why he's mad.

As for the frequency being a factor, yes but only after it turns out that TC has posted guidelines.

If not then you can basically discount whatever TC writes about anything from now on.

All I read is that Mike got contacted by someone that was approached, but that if that had not happened this could have been going on (and may have gone on) for a long time.

And that's pretty bad.
As a former Techcrunch intern I can attest that they do pay their interns. He may have been an exception though.
"In particular, a programmer is a kind of user, and a programming language is a kind of user interface. So is a function or a class or a library. If the programming language or a library doesn’t do what actual programmers out there think it would do, than it sucks. If it goes as far as silently doing the wrong thing instead of telling the user about the mistake in a clear way pointing to the exact source of the problem (I’m talking to you, C++ template weenies), then, my friends, it totally and uncompromisingly sucks. Period."

This was the only paragraph worth reading in the entire rant. This is the longer way of saying write programs for others to read.
" and vaksel has more than done his bit to promote TC on HN, so I can really understand he feels taken in a bad way."

Interesting. I wasn't aware of vaksel's TC promotion here. I can (now) see why he felt as he did.
It sounds to me like you're the kind of person who has trouble recognizing OO code written in C.

Once you truly understand a programming paradigm you can express it in any Turing-complete language you want to. If you find yourself unable to do this, then you don't really understand that paradigm. And I assure you that the people at Google who implemented the map reduce framework understood functional programming very well.

Incidentally the fact that you disqualify SQL from the discussion because there is a paper standard seems to me to be silly. It is about as silly as saying that C isn't really a software language because there happens to be a written standard defining the language. The existence of the paper standard doesn't change the fact of a lot of software is being written with that piece of programming technology.
and the amount of networking and exposure available to you working as a writing intern at techcrunch is invaluable.

i'm not sure why everyone gets in a twist over free interships -- nobody's forcing you to participate. if everybody thought it was a rip-off, nobody would apply, and employers would be forced to pay the interns.

the fact is that the competition for an internship is so intense, that TC is giving a net benefit to the person who works there, even though they aren't getting paid monetarily.
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Comparing Microsoft to Techcrunch? Have you looked at how much money each company has in the bank?
If Bob Smith creates a tablet computer which runs Flash and cures cancer tomorrow, that has some news value N1 and some pageview value P1. If a particular media outlet gets an exclusive on that announcement, then it has news value N2 and pageview value P2. delta(N1, N2) is zero -- it is still news tomorrow no matter how many people report it. (See: iPad, which was apparently a story of staggering importance despite having everybody and their dog say the same things about it.)

delta(P1, P2) is nonzero. Hilariously nonzero. If Steve Jobs had a fit of stupid and had given somebody the exclusive for the iPad, that would probably have been worth hundreds of millions of page views. Page views are, of course, exchangable for money. We build entire industries on that fact.

News media outlets are willing to trade things of value for exclusives. For example, PR flacks value embargoes. TechCrunch will give you one if, and only if, you give them an exclusive, despite their professed hatred for them in all other contexts. That should imply to you that TechCrunch is getting something from the exclusive -- and it isn't delta(N).
The improved email and routing are huge! Not to mention bundler for gems, I can't help but be a bit excited :-)
I wish someone would publish this "tasteful subset of C++," kind of like Douglas Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts. Then I could just learn that and skip all the crazy template shit.
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Michael, your apology is meaningless without a very clear statement that you have learned something too, and that is not evident from your post.

If TC has posted guidelines on how its editors should behave and this person transgressed those guidelines then that's one thing.

But if TC does NOT have posted guidelines it would be comforting to know that those will be put in place after this incident, and that you will make those guidelines public.

Your lesson is that you can't just give anybody access to the TC cms without making sure they have their obligations and the consequences of transgressions spelled out.

Transparency is not spilling the beans after the fact (that's just damage control), it is making sure that the rules are known by all parties.
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> There's a lot of competition for most positions

Don't go for most positions. If you're a run-of-the-mill developer, of course you'll get shit wages. Learn something unique. Something that takes effort to learn.

> I can't tell you the number of times a recruiter emailed me something like "He says he wants 90, but he'll actually take 80".

Of fucking course they'll say that. You can always assume the recruiter will not keep anything in confidence - the dominating strategy in this situation is to tell them your minimum and NOT waver from that. With exception given to a +/- 5% counter-offer. Once you budge, they know you're weak. Give an inch, and they'll take a mile. The business managers who hire people can smell weakness from a mile away - it's their JOB to capitalize on that weakness. That's what they went to school for. It's what they live and breathe on a day to day basis. You won't be able to empathize with them until you run your own company, whether it be product or consulting. It's capitalism in the raw.

The problem is that most people who are desperate for a job think the offer on the phone is the last one they'll get, which is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Grow some fucking balls and the entire post-hoc world will open up to you.
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I know he must be protected in some way because he's not of legal age but I do not agree with deleting all his posts.

The writer has written several blog posts about milestones of important startups. I feel like I'm losing a sense of history here (though we can still find it on other blogs, google cache, etc).

Here are some of his articles that do not exists anymore:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/23/twitter-acquires-mixer-...

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/26/square-angels-mayer-cro...
> Could you please elaborate on that bit?

No. Learn something very few other people know and it will explain itself.
I think that colorForth is the simulator.

I just downloaded it from: http://greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/code/af-34k2-...

It's only two clicks from the main page.

I don't know if I'll do anything with this or not.
I'm hacking on a compiler written in C, which isn't worse than LLVM: http://libfirm.org
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You don't need posted guidelines to know that this behavior is wrong.
I'm all for that, and also for owning up completely as to how often this happened.

TC yanking the content to avoid tainting is one thing but it would be good to know what the extent of this is.

Another thing that bothers me about this is that I can't see how a 17 year old given the keys to the kingdom would come up with such a scheme, that's hardly the first thing that crosses your mind when you start your career.

If the first instance of this was initiated by the company written about then that would change my whole idea about this.
Yeah, there's a metric ton of research, saying that your alternative hypothesis is far from a complete picture of the story. Pick your field : psychology, sociology, economics -- there's stuff about poverty in every discipline.

There's also a lot of research out there about why you would prefer that line of reasoning you expressed, and would argue it in order to feel good about yourself.
You're not going to get $125/hr as a "PHP Programmer". You'll get it as a firm delivering solutions.

You'll likely need to partner with/subcontract out to others with the skills you need to offer a complete package. Marketing, design, copywriting, photography, and SEO come to mind.
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I'm sure that's the case on things like an iPad launch, but when it comes to MyLittleStartup.com I think it's more about ego/reputation than money. Arrington knows he's #1 and he doesn't want to eat Pete Cashmore's leftovers -- he wants Cashmore to eat his.
To know not, but to not have such guidelines in place for your editorial board/writers makes it vague what is allowed and what is not.

So that's why every professional organization spells it out explicitly.

Attempts to give items worth in excess of 'x' are to be reported to management, all gifts beyond a ball-point pen or a base-ball cap are to be refused.

That sort of thing.

Have read here: http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html

For how it is done in a real news outlet.
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.. I did far, far, far, far far, far worse when I was 15, as did a number of my hacker friends. Somehow, over time we grow up and become productive members of society despite our earlier transgressions.
it was him
You feel like you are loosing a sense of history? Are you serious? Is TC your ONLY news source?
The difference between being paid to cover something and covering something in return for an exclusive is that in the latter case your readers benefit as well.

Even if your only criterion in deciding what to print was how newsworthy it was, you'd still be more likely to print a story if you'd been given an exclusive.
Above all: Impeccable communication and delivery on time as promised.
Yeah, I'm going to use this to improve my python skills. The last time I used python for anything remotely serious was 5 years ago... seems like it might be a bit dated.
- Push out a system patch (and a Silverlight update for those who don't download patches) that causes IE6 to post a warning bar at the top of every page it visits, with a link that they should upgrade because the IE6 browser is no longer patched. Also, pay a sum to Adobe to cause the latest Adobe Reader Plugin to issue this same warning.

- Get out of the browser business. It costs you too much money and gives you too little in return. Let everyone use all the other browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and others. But if you plan to stay in it, then switch to the Webkit engine and please by all means support CSS3 just as good as Chrome does.

- Push for open audio, video, and vector animation standards in HTML5, moving with the pack instead of against it, and don't even bother whether Adobe or Apple are on board with those plans.

- Remember the years when Apple was going through the transition from the old OS to the new OS based on BSD UNIX? They had an arrangement where you could run old apps as well as new apps. Microsoft should do something similar, but with Novell Suse Linux.

- Take MS Office back to the old interface before the funky menubars, and slim down the interface a good bit so that there aren't so many menu items by default.

- Simplify the registry or eliminate it altogether. It's a mess. Linux guys love .conf files.

- In the new Linux-based OS, once you lock in where settings are located, quit changing them dramatically because it angers people.

- Give Steve Ballmer a golden parachute.

- Merge the company with Novell. And if not that, then rename it so that it kind of helps with the new image.

- Push for the elimination of software patent laws that you introduced in the first place. But, since that takes a long time to achieve, do the IBM approach for now. That approach is to gobble up a bunch of software patents, but do not sue people who infringe. In fact, legally protect those who infringe, who are also challenged in court, because it generates more business for you, instead.
Exactly. It's actually written in Mike's piece as some kind of afterthought, the legal stuff came first.
I am not so sure about that. Win 7 is so far, as good as or better than XP. I am now blessing it for my business clients.

New machines, granted. But that, unfortunately, is de rigueur in this industry.
The ads worked just fine today. From my understanding of the article, neither company is in trouble.
Amusing: the fact that the author uses images to demonstrate the intended results of each example.

Less amusing: after bemoaning the "(awful) state of standards-compliant browsers," 3 out of the 5 tips rely on proprietary/non-standard css. See related article, "5 More Ways to Break Your Site"
Is there a good way to keep track of AI challenges as they come up? Or does HN seem to capture most of them?
Are there not also cultural issues?

Some people see a safety net as just that, and use it as a stop-gap while planning on future employment.

Others may see it as sweet free ride to milk as long and as much as possible.
I've always hated C++ as a language syntax, but I'm coming around. rubinus, llvm, and mongo all use it and their codebases are really well built. So maybe the language isnt so bad after all, as long as you have geniuses using it.
As a fulltime and fairly successful freelancer now going on my third year, I completely agree with rwhitman here. However, I have something else to offer. The original poster needs to stop thinking of freelancing as the only thing he does. He needs passive income and affiliate marketing projects. But that requires free time. My suggestion on getting free time is to take those periods where you do sales/marketing/advertising stints for new gigs, and outsource that to offshore virtual assistants. That gives you a little bit of free time to slip in the start of a project, and then in the next month you can finish it. For ideas on what to do, visit mixergy.com and let your mind wander from there. As for affiliate marketing, just start with the advice on affbuzz.com and move from there.
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They should have split into 3 separate companies as was suggested (and ordered?) a long time ago. Now's too late.
Since you bring up Xerox PARC, don't/didn't they suffer from the same problem? Lack of/poor marketing?
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I am a Python programmer. I have toyed with functional languages (Scheme, SML) for many years. Over the time my code is becoming more and more functional, in every language I code in. Nevertheless, I do not plan to quit Python at all. Readability counts in my book and I do not see Clojure to be more readable than Python. Moreover, I am not considering F# since it is platform specific and I do not develop on Windows. In my experience Python is not losing programmers; perhaps 0.1% of them are moving to functional languages, but more are coming from C++, Java and even Ruby.
(Some) Stupid stuff I did as a 17 year old:

-> Deleted /var on a production system I had no right touching at a Fortune 500.

-> Drove my dad's car into a fence. Unlicensed.

-> Stole the street sign for Cobain St.

-> Plagiarised a philosophy essay (Hegel).

-> etc. etc. etc.

Seventeen year old kids mess up. Seventeen year old kids grow up.

Go easy tiger.
I wouldn't use any of these on a production site.
Compatibility isn't broken between XP to 7 ... only certain apps that used unofficial APIs. And for those you can use its "XP mode" (built on top of Virtual PC).

Personally I've had few problems with Win 7, granted I only use it on my home computer.

Apple breaks compatibility a lot more often, like every two years.
Over time the cumulative effect is worth well in excess of $500.

TC lives by the 'scoop', remember the time when they posted twitters internal documents only because they said they were afraid someone else might beat them to it ?

Ethics and TechCrunch have very little to do with each other.
I know enough people with NPD to realize that it's a real problem, but at the same time I suspect a little more narcissism wouldn't be a bad thing for most people. This whole thing where it's taboo for people to talk about themselves doesn't seem to be working out for society too well.
I left Python for c++ because the job called for c++.

But there wasn't anything in Python that I found compelling so I never came back.

As a scripting language, Ruby seems so much more compelling, despite it's friendliness seeming to doom it to eternal slow bugginess. I'd go back to Ruby before Python.

But I'm more likely to add Python support to an app I'm developing, since I know it's more sensible.

Python's functional aspects seem chronically undeveloped so leaving it for a real functional language makes sense. But functional approaches seem limited in the "real world".
Swap out the CEO. Ballmer has kept things even keeled and done a great job releasing Windows 7, why not go out on a high note and put in somebody that represents the future, not the past?
Well, yes and no. The farmers will do that, year. Metro workers often "strike" by running a normal service but refusing to collect fares. That keeps the public on-side.

A friend of mine was at the last Santacon in Paris, they were mistaken for striking workers...

Incidentally, the banlieus of Paris are worse than "the ghetto" of any American city. Except maybe Detroit.
I'd fire his sorry ass and make him cough up the details about each and every story he's written in the past, and I would have yanked those where there was interference but I would have left the rest because those companies already written about by this character do not need to be punished if they were in the clear.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

And I'd make very sure that every other member of the reporting staff realizes their ass is grass in case of a repetition.

If it would have been once that would be one thing, but twice and possibly more is definitely grounds for termination.

The only thing that put a stop to this is that Arrington was approached directly by a person that he trusts, and the threat of someone scooping TC on their sloppy ethics (as if that's news).
I guess. Rules like this just result in a game of whack-a-mole, especially when it directly impacts a developer's bottom line.

Every FB game has a "gifting" feature for the same reason, no matter how incongruous it is. The same will happen here: people will just add lightweight, potentially irrelevant features, that require location.
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They did, and it's called "Effective C++". Okay, it's not exactly the same thing. But they both tell you what NOT to do.