skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure you're being sincere, but on the whole I find the discussion has gone far beyond "How trustworthy is TC" and well into personal axe-grinding, schadenfreude, and public shaming. For example, look at all the discussion of an intern's character and speculation about whether his actions were entirely within the range of "normal" for a minor or not.

If this was just about judging TC's trustworthiness, the discussion would stop at the point where the intern was dismissed and his posts removed. Shaming the intern publicly for his action is not about judging trustworthiness, it's about participating in a public stoning for the sheer pleasure of feeling holier-than-thou.

I honestly find it sickening. We work so hard to rise above the petty politics of BigCo, we try to distance ourselves from the bible-thumping anti-evolutionists, but when there's a little blood in the water suddenly everyone wants a piece of this kid.

I find it says a lot more about us than him that we spend so much time reviling him for corruption on the scale of a laptop while both of our economies are being systematically looted.

Why are nerd social politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low.
Arrington offers a fake mea culpa while erasing evidence as to who the guilty company could be and offering readers no insight into where exactly they were mislead. To me, that’s dishonest. That’s Arrington deciding that his connections are more important than his readers.

Arrington is a lawyer by trade, so he knows it's dangerous to post unfounded allegations and hearsay that directly relate to people under his employ (publishing hearsay about other people's businesses, however, is journalistic privilege ;-)). Removing the actual posts shows more integrity than shuffling it all under the carpet.

[..] because Michael Arrington won’t tell us which it was, every company on that list is now called into question. They are all potentially guilty

Any company mentioned anywhere has "potentially" bribed someone to be mentioned. Lisa Barone, the author of this article, is potentially a hermaphrodite (statistically), but that doesn't mean I should publish an entire article about my wacky suspicion (which isn't really valid - other than this weird article, she seems an entirely lovely person).
Parts are (Tamarin, frameworks, Open Screen Project partnerships), but parts cannot (codecs licensed from third-parties are a key blocker).

Dave McAllister has a single-screen summary, and I've got some background history, both with plenty of links:
http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail...
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/07/opening_the_flash_file_for...
Dear Investor, F*ck You. (Not Really)
Kindle Development Kit for Active Content - Sign up for beta devkit
"Officials say such labeling will be voluntary, but the agency may set rules to prevent companies from highlighting the good things about their products, like a lack of trans fats, while ignoring the bad, like a surfeit of unhealthy saturated fats."

That one is pretty bad because saturated fats are actually healthy.
I guess MSFT doesn't have a mobile operating system...
Those are valid points, but the publishing company's value add is not as significant as you might think.

My startup is working specifically in this area, and the results might surprise you.
I've self-identified as having Asperger's since I heard about it, despite being relatively normal socially since high school (about 5 years before hearing about AS).

Social skills are absolutely skills. They're learnable, somewhat teachable, and definitely not fixed at birth. A diagnosis of Asperger's isn't a life-sentence of nerddom.

The difference is in how easily you can learn those skills. I had to painfully, laboriously, slowly observe people and pay close attention to acquire my social skills. Nothing came naturally - at times I was thinking "That's totally illogical. Why do people ask 'How are you?' when they don't care about the answer?" I'm told that most normal people pick this up by osmosis. Plop them in a social situation, and they'll have an intuitive feel of what to do.

For an analogy, it may be good to compare to another skill. As a kid, I always had an intuitive feel for math, such that I could rederive trig on the car ride to a math competition (nobody in our school had had it yet, since we were only 7-9th grade and competing in a high school league) or place in the top 10 on the geometry section of a big math competition despite never having had formal geometry instruction. I assume this is the same sort of intuitive knowledge that most people have of social situations. But since it's expected that people will find math hard and people easy, there's a whole institutional structure for instructing people in math. Similar support structures for instructing people in social skills are often stigmatized - why can't you figure it out on your own, people think.
Precisely.

In fact, on the day of the video, we had started with the discussion, "do we change the name of our company?" This, however, turned out to be a much more enjoyable option.

It's a little like the "Michael Bolton" bit in the movie Office Space. Although the singer (in this fictional setting) knew little of the inconvenience caused to the fellow who he shared a name with, it became a nuisance nevertheless.

That was the spot we were in. We didn't feel that Discovery had done anything deliberate here. They likely just came up with a name (or the producers of the program did) and used it. They may have seen that someone had the URL and was operating with it, but didn't think much more of it.

In a way, I'm quite happy that the program is so bad. (Well, from what I hear at least--I've only watched a brief snippet.) Being so poorly received means that the program will likely not be renewed. Sure, it will live on in syndication for another few years, but we'll likely outlive it.

If we would have been called Mythbusters... we would have been completely screwed. ;-)
Could someone please explain this (joke?) to me?
Leaving existing stories in place isn't in any way dangerous to Arrington. They aren't either "unfounded allegations" nor hearsay. They may cause others to make unfounded allegations or rely on them as hearsay, but those are mistakes for others to make.

On the second point, Arrington said that the person in question had accepted gifts for publishing stories in the past. So that's not "potential" - at least one of the companies mentioned actually bribed him.
Techcrunch isn't really credible. And as for not releasing the names of the alleged companies, of course they didn't. Arrington doesn't want to alienate any potential advertisors or suckers^Hsuckers who might be willing to pay $5k to demo at one of his silly press rallies.
BTW, assuming you're the guy from the video.. good job. It reminded me of Ze Frank a bit (a good thing) :-)
There are two sides to this -- layoffs are acts of desperation, and layoffs can be good for a company's health.

Here's what I mean.

The corporate world seems to have Layoff Fever. So many of the 2009 layoffs seemed as though they were inspired solely by herd mentality, and perhaps by a desperate attempt to please investors. Layoffs cost a lot of money in severance packages, decreased ability to execute, and probably more. A layoff is a bet against the future.

Conversely, though, if you've ever worked at a larger company, you may have noticed people who don't actually seem to do anything except play political games and collect paychecks. It's corporate welfare; they take more away from a company than they contribute. Those people should be laid off in any economy. Unfortunately, because of their political savvy, they usually survive at least the first rounds.
Perhaps you could post an unedited version and a version where you compress the gaps?
Perhaps it is to send a message, Reginald. Perhaps it's not to feel holier-than, but rather shitty-as. I read this as a message to us that we're wallowing in a lot of turd, and that we're not better than this kid who doesn't really know what he's doing. (Renaissance men we ain't.)

Perhaps the message isn't that it's good to be vicious, but that maybe it's time to raise the stakes.
Careful if you start messing with Google results and sending them fake user agents, etc. You might start seeing CAPTCHAs before some of your searches ;-) You'd probably be safer sticking .nyud.net:8090 on the end of the hostname to go via the Coral Cache. Example: http://www.google.com.nyud.net:8090/search?q=hacker+news
Paying to Pitch Brawl
Some can be avoided by not doing cyclic shedding/adding of workers. The justification for layoffs in a downturn followed by hires in an upturn is that it cuts costs: if you fire someone today and then hire someone else two years from now when things pick up, you've saved two years of salary/benefits over just keeping them on payroll through the downturn. I see this article as providing an argument that maybe saving that two years of salary isn't worth it.

(There are other problems in that particular case, like companies that follow that hiring/layoff model always being a step behind in recoveries--- they're never well placed to catch booms early, because they spend the first year desperately scrambling to hire talent instead.)
It's something he used to notice his goldfish doing before it died of loneliness, apparently.
Turn your work experience into a job
Your first sentence a verb.
Why prolog is by far the best, most productive, easiest programming languag
Nobody apparently include the growing mass of Scala and Clojure developers.
Those people shouldn't be laid off. They should be fired. There's a big difference.
The role of designers in the Django community
That's not a bad idea, but then I'd have to spend even more time on these videos, and my wife would really hate that. (I'm home far too little these days as it stands.)
Tell HN:  An idea for product "duels" where loser gives company to winner.
The idea is for one startup to challenge another to a "duel". This would be some sort of officially supervised competition over a short period of time.

For example, it might be who will gain the most active users in a week say.

The loser of the duel must give away their company to the winner.

I think this could be quite a spectator sport -- attracting a lot more interest than typical marketing.

Moreover, it might really benefit sites with user created content, since there would be fewer competitors and hence more traction in each site.
i once wrote some notes, scanned them, cleaned them up with thresholding and a raster to vector tool, and then added used them as images (sole content) in a powerpoint presentation. it was a lot of work and loses many of the advantages listed in the article, but it did get a lot of positive comments (the audience was fairly academic, however, so most people in the audience grew up with handwritten overhead notes and so found it "familiar" rather than just "weird").
I was referring to his vague commenting on the issue, rather than the removal of stories - so I've amended my post to be a little clearer. But still.. surely pulling all of the stories off was a good move if, as you say, one/all/any of the stories posted by Daniel was payola of sorts.

TechCrunch stories are woefully ephemeral, so pulling old stories off is just too easy. 99% of their value has been extracted, so it's easier for him, I guess, to just make it all go away.
Thanks--glad you liked it! I worry about the Ze Frank feel. He's great (and I do appreciate the compliment), but I really don't want to rip him off.
Besides reading-related apps, what types of apps is the Kindle more suited to over, say the iPhone/iPad/any other smart phone? From what I've seen, the refresh rate seems to limit its usefulness, such that any non-reading centric app would be at best a poor cousin of apps on those other devices.

Am I missing an elephant in the room?
Not religious about technology (or anything really). This is useful at any size company, but at a startup you really don't want to waste time debating the merits of Python versus Java.

The take-away should be that start-ups prioritize completeness over correctness. I think everyone agrees with that. Getting a feature out the door is more important than whether that feature was built in Python or Java.

The question is, how do you get tons of features out the door at a sustainable rate? I think the answer lies in finding passionate people-- hackers who some people might call "religious about technology."

The real traits needed in your first hires are all related to aligning peoples' passions:

1. Hire people who passionately believe in the product. Make sure they are well-aligned with the founder's vision. This reduces the chance of needing to argue about completeness vs correctness.

2. Hire a group of hackers who share the same vector of programming language and programming culture. For hacker-entrepreneurs, this is easy: hire hackers who share your values in technology choices. This reduces the chance of arguing over the definition of correctness.
In Google's case, though, it probably doesn't pay to waste time setting up systems to properly deal with small fry customers. And since the free users are being advertised to anyway, they don't miss out on much.

You're right though. Someone ran the numbers on Spotify (the music streaming service). They charge $15 a month for ad-free listening or you can just use it free. Based on average listener profiles, it worked out at something as small as 1-2% of the userbase needing to pay to cover all the streaming costs involved (from what I recall).
Perils of web taste personalization algorithms
Hedgehogs - the social network for bankers
ELECTRIC SHAVER HIDDEN CAMERA W/BUILT-IN MOTION-ACTIVATED DIGITAL VIDEO RECORDER
Can Search Discover the Spark of Life?
I couldn't distract myself from watching the guy humping the Google logo long enough to get the value from this. Classy stuff.
er ZFS not NFS
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100206/tts-uk-iraq-usa-contrac...

Be careful if you go...
Perhaps the message isn't that it's good to be vicious, but that maybe it's time to raise the stakes

Very well said. I will ponder this. Your comment matters. Thanks.
Got this on Chromium (Mac):

"Your browser is not fully supported"
Isn't this already happening? I suppose there's a business opportunity in making a spectacle of startups, but is it something you'd want your new company to endure. There's a lot of investment by founders and early employees in a startup. One slight design advantage could extinguish a business who may later become an incredible corporate machine.

Admittedly I'd be curious about startups that would engage in such an activity. By why not go all out. Have founders wear padded sumo suits and battle on a massive trampoline. The last one standing after a 5 minute duel takes all.
it's taken me a day to "get" that - i'd been thinking it was a confused comment rather than a (questionable quality!) joke... have a vote back to 1 since i suspect you've been downvoted by others as confused as me.
And how about node.js on rails? Anyone working on it? Maybe with MongoDB backend? It looks like a convenient fit to me.
One of my professors likes to print out all of his slides (which can be up to 50 for any given lecture) on transparencies. Then, when he's showing them on the overhead, he'll stand there and underline things, make check marks (while saying "check please"), etc. Draws smiling faces when something good shows up ("now the numbers are already there for the ALU") and frowning faces for problems ("we have to insert a bubble in the pipeline"). In the end, each slide ends up full of lines, boxes, checks, and faces.
Ask HN: Review my event directory/calendar (and clone/fork it)
Our industry (professional photography) has tons of events and workshops–but no central directory for them.

I built this in the hopes of aggregating events. It includes FB connect support and selling tickets via PayPal.

Any feedback appreciated and the code is open-source if anyone else wants to use it for their industry.

http://pixelcal.com/
Link: http://pixelcal.com/

Source: http://github.com/bigfolio/pixel-calendar
I generally find criticisms like this a bit odd. The issue seems less about PowerPoint than it is about how the message/information gets presented and used. It's sort of like blaming the web for websites where companies just cobble together some of the hardcopy content from brochures and newsletters.
U.S freelancers pretend to be from other countries to get jobs
AND BRIAN HARVEY.
makes me think of http://sivers.org/1pct - there's a number smaller than 1%...
Is it just me or does the misuse of the label "Engineer" bother anybody else?

Do people who work in software startups generally take Physics, Chemistry, Calc 1-4, Diff Eq, Statics, Dynamics and so on while at University?

I was a little squeamish calling myself an engineer since I never took the certification exam to become a Professional Engineer after graduating with a BS in Aerospace Engineering...
He's at Google and recently announced their new static analysis framework for Python: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054036
Can the power of thought stop you ageing?
Study: reading cuts stress levels by more than 50%
It shouldn't be surprising if you understand a bit of basic logic. No one can prove a negative, yet this is exactly what the so-called "precautionary principle" demands of us.

I can't prove that cell phone radiation is always harmless to all respects of human health under all conditions, and you can't prove that there's not an invisible teapot in orbit around Neptune. Instead, the burden of proof must lie with the party making the positive assertion.

It would be very obvious by now if handheld radio transceivers caused cancer. The physics say it won't happen, and so does the epidemiology. Case closed for now, worry about something else.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106601
It's costs server time to create a search index, as well as coding time, and even then you'll always do a worse job than google can when ranking. On a public site, adding a google custom search box is far easier and better

Which is the real question - why no custom search box on hn?

Just do site:news.ycombinator.com on google
"I'm home far too little these days as it stands."

Well, the solution there is to be sure to have a complete development setup at home as well.

Who could possibly complain then?

:)
Some of my initial excitement was dampened when I saw the specs. Not that there aren't interesting things to be done, but full-blown multimedia seems unlikely.
Neat concept, although the organization of items in a temporal fashion is different from culture to culture. Dr Alice Gaby speaks a little about this in episode 41 of The BrainScience Podcast (http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/2008/07/bs41-alice...).

For instance, given a series of photos of a baby, a young boy, a man, and an elderly gentleman, Western cultures would normally place these items from left to right then top to bottom. Chinese cultures might place them from top to bottom first and Israelis might place them from right to left.

She also speaks of an aboriginal tribe that has no concept of left or right. Whereas you or I might say, "Would you please pass the salt to your left" they might say, "Would you please pass the salt north. She speaks of the above experiment being performed with people from this tribe. Not all, but a statistically significant number put the temporal or from East to West (sunrise to sunset).

So while interesting there are always surprising items to consider when writing your software. Know your user, for he is not thee. ~David Platt
Is this story linked more than the NYT story because TOI have come up with a better headline?
Same here, with Safari 4. Looks like it worked fine after spoofing the user agent though.
Alternative Uses for WordPress
But presumably it was a 1:1 port, not a 'lite' version. In which case, the only major difference there might be would be would in the performance department, though I'm unsure if the competition weighed that heavily.
Maybe Discovery chose the name SmashLab in order to (subconsciously?) piggy back on the popularity of their other show, CashCab. I mean, they rhyme.
If they can't get jobs for more than $200 they're either terrible programmers, or they need to look for work on places other than rentacoder. Probably both.

EDIT: To be clear, I meant to say that if they can't get jobs making more than $200 for two weeks of work, they're either terrible or need to look elsewhere for work. Further, I'll put my money where my mouth is: if you want to make $5 / hr and you can write good code, email me and I'll give you all the work you can handle. I'm guessing I won't have any takers.
Ever tried to edit video with a 1 year old and 3 year old at foot? ;-)
HTML5 Canvas based fast painting app
So, the author's back-of-the-envelope calculation is 10%, yours is 13% (the average of 19% and 7.2%), and your conclusion is that "the author is just plain wrong"?

What would the author's rough estimates look like if they were "in excellent agreement" with yours? Would "11%" be close enough for you, or are you holding out for "12.8% to 13.3%"?

Can I suggest that you read the Wikipedia article on "orders of approximation"? Or, better yet, "Fermi problem"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_approximation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
Anyone who thinks that _some_ of the TC post are not paid post are delusional. It just happens that the kid was doing it on his own (and got called out) without going through the TC heads.
I guess the real question is: Are these people really able to take enough projects at the cheaper price level to survive? How about thrive?

If they are only 'getting by' at the cheaper level, then it's a fair assumption that they will move on to bigger and better things if they ever come along. If they are able to thrive, then assumptions about the economics of taking these cheaper jobs is grossly misunderstood.
AND PAUL TWOHEY
Depends. Who says that these aren't side gigs to their main source of income?
Yeah I'm completely perplexed by this. I'm not questioning the guys article, but there's got to be more to it then we are reading. $200 for a two week project is $5 an hour if you only work on it 4 hours a day.

Even in the current economy any halfway decent programmer should be able to pull in more than minimum wage.
First, let me say that there's a huge difference between teaching presentations (presenting material that students will need to use and be tested on later) and idea pitching or research presentations (where you want people to leave with a general idea and a pointer to the material).

My algorithms professor wrote out the whole outline of the presentation, then would do the whole thing on the board as he went. I loved it.

That said, powerpoints have a very worthwhile benefit in that redistribution is trivial. If you're fortunate enough to be in an Operating Systems course where you're writing an operating system, there's a large amount of stuff where details are very important that can get screwed up when twice-transcribed. Something like a powerpoint is invaluable.

I think the best presenters use both powerpoints (for main ideas) and a (chalk|white)board, for actually working through it.