skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somewhat OT, but it's better if you do vote. In such a scenario I generally vote Libertarian or Green as something of a protest/none-of-the-above vote.

If you can't vote "either way," and you don't vote, then you're effective voting for (or giving the vote to) the combined LeftRight party that you can't bring yourself to vote for.

If you can't be a participant, at least be a Jammer.
When did hacker news become the place to post musings worthy of King of the Hill's Peggy Hill?

And to everyone who might call this an article, have your standards really fallen that low?
From the actual report:

"Apple discovered three facilities that had previously hired 15-year-old workers in countries where the minimum age for employment is 16."

Hiring 15 year olds was illegal in these countries. The "Western point of view" had nothing to do with it.
a. Where is the assurance that the labor is voluntary?

You might have a point if people are enslaved into working.

b. "one less cheaper worker"; perhaps encouraging the supplier to pay wages to adults that will allow them to raise their children?

Perhaps, but you could look at it in another way. The person who own that factory will have more money into investing in human capitals or factory capital that will provide more jobs or increase specialization. Specialization will naturally lead to higher real wages as workers of certain type become scarce. Also, they may also get training on the job.

It's the seen that we know, but the unseen that we may not know precisely. It could be either way. It would be presumptuous to think that we know the best path to economic development.

c. "Drive the engine of progress". Well, or serve as corduroy on the road that party insiders take to the bank.

Well, I don't know what you mean by that. The poor can choose to save what they earn too.
While I can empathize with your point of view, I have to disagree. Children don't have the perspective to make an informed decision about whether they should accept certain working conditions. (I'm speaking as a former child who would have accepted any kind of working conditions to have a "real" job.)

For a child, there is a very real chance his entire life could become dominated by insane work policies. He really shouldn't be deciding whether or not to accept those policies until he reaches a certain level of maturity.

Also, you say that we should accept child labor in the name of progress. However, if we do not discourage this practice now, then it will always be accepted later, after China or whoever is a "modern" country.
This article is incredibly poorly written. Apple did a good thing by investigating their suppliers' practices. Why are they being "taken to task"?
No, you only need memory safety. Other than that you can make your language as crazy as you want.
I was discussing the morality of child labor, not whether child labor is illegal.
Can somebody describe what this document is all about in simple words, for the average "high level" developer?
Thanks in advance!
I should add that to really know how much you should be taking, you should have your blood levels tested, as different people absorb it differently. Here's a post on William Davis' Heart Scan Blog (oriented toward heart health, which includes Vitamin D supplementation):

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/getting-vitamin-d-...

He suggests about 6000 units/day as average.
How about : Any achievement the game rewards you for is a fake achievement.

Whenever I go up a level in WoW, or gain a kill in Quake, or beat a boss and pick up his loot I have a fake achievement.

Sure, there are some real achievements in there, but they are not provided by the game world - they are almost a side effect. Most likely they are not the reason that people are playing these games, but they are a useful excuse to continue playing.

Consider how much real achievement we would see if all the motivated hackers put down WoW and started up their development environment of choice.

I'm not saying that games aren't cool (I love computer games and have been strongly addicted in the past) but don't delude yourself into thinking that they are more productive than applying yourself directly to the task you are trying to master.

I might get HN points (i.e Karma) from posting this comment. That is not my goal, I don't care about those. My goal is to inspire fellow hackers enough to pay attention to my cool start-up (Gridspy). HN doesn't give me "pay attention to me" points - I don't think that is really possible.
Okay, that's silly. A fifteen year old is basically a sixteen year old, so if a company wants to hire
him, it's stupid that they have no way of doing so.

Also, that issue isn't really related to the core child labor morality debate.
"What is the meaning of life?

It's up to you to define it."
[risky startups] were the only ones that applied. Now [...] we get a lot of applications from older, more legit seeming founders

Have you seen a shift towards less risk-taking applicants aside from the fact that they are now older and more experienced?

Speaking as a complete outsider to YC, it seems to me that the first cohort was in many ways the most successful one; leaving aside the question of whether my perception here is accurate or not (I don't expect you to comment on this any more than I'd expect someone to say which of their children they like the most), I've wondered for a while if Y Combinator becoming "mainstream" has diminished a formerly beneficial applicant self-selection advantage.
SwiftBoot
That's funny. It's pretty sad when a spelling mistake improves my writing.
Aside from the technological and legal issues, the availability of free wireless seems to reflect (perhaps even change) urban culture noticeably. I've stayed in major cities on three continents and the places with free wireless invariably had a more creative and lively vibe about them.
Here's a much better treatment of the subject:
http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/are-liberals-sm...

Summary: For various reasons the general population skews conservative, essentially driving the correlation. "Smart people" probably don't much skew liberal.
Regarding your last statement, conservatives and libertarians don't think that people 'dont' matter', quite the contrary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=...
Usually referred to by the title, "On the Shortness of Life"

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/24/on-the-short...
From my comment:

There is nothing more pathetic than seeing someone profusely blame the wrong thing for their depression.

I'm wasn't specifically talking about people who casually blame the wrong thing. Maybe I need a stronger word than profusely....

On Darwin's side of the spectrum you have, well, Darwin. On other end of the spectrum you have people coming up with intricate ideas about how minorities are destroying everyone's lives.

Even though there is a lot of mental work in carefully choosing their illusory axioms to make the rest of their ideas naturally fall into place, I am very reluctant to call that work productive and I do think that it's pathetic.

Of course, the very same mistake was made with this person, who profusely blames the wrong thing, as the person who casually blames the wrong thing: they stopped trying to find the real problem too soon. There are only two words that come to mind: undignified and arrogant.

Arrogant that they're questioning the wrong thing and not questioning whether the output of their thought process is precise, and therefore they're not questioning the thought process itself.

Perhaps it is questioning that compels people into great, productive work. Depressed or not! Darwin held himself to high standards while he simultaneously, and perpetually, questioned his thoughts and the results of his thoughts. He did this to a point where his thoughts were very precise and congruent with the real world.

I do not think it was the depression that compelled him into productivity, but his dignity. Compelled into a productive depression! He couldn’t just shrug off his depression since that would mean ignoring certain issues. Again, this really is only my own speculation, but I don't think depression needs to exist in the amount that it does today. I don't think we're born depressed and very rarely chemically imbalanced.

Since so many minds are malfunctioning, these are not problems of the individual but signify a much larger problem: a problem of a malfunctioning thinking on a global scale. It is how people mis-attribute this malfunction that I find pathetic.

This "malfunctioning of thinking" expresses itself a lot in life. It accumulates and wears down on people to a point of depression or lethargy.

I should also point out that I don’t mean “pathetic” in the sense of “hate.” When it comes down to it, the problem is too complicated to just blame an individual and I can't expect everyone to have this natural dignity that Darwin possessed, or the will to teach it to themselves. I feel more compassionate at the individual's level than ticked off.

The reason I’m ranting a little bit is because I take issue with glorifying the wrong thing (not you, but implied in the article). In this case: depression. I hope this makes my thoughts on this clearer.

Also, checking out that book.
Two part terribleness of globalization - we port manufacturing jobs overseas to cut costs. The cost savings are based on acceptable exploitation in another land. Meanwhile the US transitions to an icky service economy and lose core middle class manufacturing jobs. (I'm ok paying more for transparent and/or domestic.)
Pete – Great post! I understand your point that a site like StackOverflow awarding points, rep, badges, whatevers, is pointless and some people pursue them without stepping back to ask why (which is a bullsh*t pursuit on their part).

I would argue that some members that answer programming questions posed to them actually do take passion / interest in what they are doing AND their actions contribute to society (in this case – to the programming community in general and for the person asking the question specifically). It could also be a way for interested developers to initiate conversations, etc.

Where would you draw the line on something like this? When do you think taking part in a service like StackOverflow crosses the line into fake achievement / pointlessness? Interested to hear your thoughts, thanks!
Newsweek in 1995:  Why the Internet will Fail
Coolidge might be the last conservative President. Barry Goldwater might be the last serious conservative presidential candidate. The Republican party has not much been for American conservatism (constitutionalism, states rights, extreme caution in affecting the social order) in practice since Nixon. The Republican party has been in practice very much about the established order.
"Instead I resubmitted and bypassed the url-duplication filter by adding www to it."

Why?
This entire debate is stupid without defining what we mean by liberal or conservative.

In my experience, in the USA, this is nothing other than a vague cultural affiliation and it has relatively little content. Conservative oldsters love their Medicare. Liberal Silicon Valley types are enthusiastically anti-union.
How about $175 just to get in the door for an afternoon of schmoozing with VCs?

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/vcs-ill-...
One person you might want to Google is Mike Mothner - he's a Dartmouth College graduate and started a business from his dorm room when he was a senior (I believe). He turned it into a company called wPromote, which specializes in site optimization (which, I agree, will pretty much fall into the category of "writing HTML" if it hasn't already) and other consultative areas. He's an interesting guy and his story might be of interest to you!
I'd like to see a survey which pitches the ideologically driven (on the left and the right) against the pragmatic centrists.

Perhaps this is evidence that despite the attempts by the american right to re-define 'liberal' to mean what most europeans would call 'centrist' or even 'center-right', the american right is actually the one harbouring fringe, ideologically-driven politics, and those they see as liberals are actually the smart, pragmatic centrists.
Getting British Business Online - backed by BT, Google, PayPal and UK govt
MapReduce for Idiots: The Musical
But the minute you say that, I will respond, "Okay, that's silly. A fourteen year old is basically a fifteen year old."

So since you've argued that a fifteen year old is basically a sixteen year old, then by parity of reasoning...

And the next thing you know, we have nine year old kids in factories and William Blake rolling over in his grave.
Classic scam, seen it before in charging starving musicians $150 a piece for "auditions" with so-called A & R's associated with record labels. One of the lowest forms of bloodsucking on the planet.
Basically, if you have any potential memory attacks in your software (buffer overflows, bad printf format strings, stack smashes, etc), an attacker can make your software do whatever he wants. He can do this without using a RET instruction (which is the more "standard" way of doing this, so people have been investigating looking for it as an active defense).
I agree with that completely. I use dsa for my boxes, but still there's so many other services I use where it isn't an option.
Why Animal Rights are Not Wrong
They must really love you in Vegas...
The New ABC's of Success: Always Be Creating
Federalism and the Akaka Bill
While I can empathize with your point of view, I have to disagree. Children don't have the perspective to make an informed decision about whether they should accept certain working conditions. (I'm speaking as a former child who would have accepted any kind of working conditions to have a "real" job.)

How do you know if you have the informed perspective? What is a informed perspective anyway?

How do you determine maturity, for that matter? Only parents have that kind of knowledge, and we don't know if they are particularly good parents.

Will his life really be dominated by insane work policies? What do you consider insane?

All of this is because some people don't have knowledge. Therefore, we're going to make laws outlawing certain type of labors, damn the unforeseen consequences, and damn the teenage stakeholders!
When a retail store chooses not to carry a software product, you can always go to another retail store.

When the app store chooses not to carry a software product, you can always go to ??????
This truly is a classic scam. Same thing happens in modeling, acting, even "boiler room" type trading outfits.

The big win for this "angel" group is that they got anyone, including other VCs to talk about them as though they were legitimate...
I too fall into this group. The redesign is very interesting and the javascript work is amazing.
I thought it was a really good video and other HNers should see it. The 2 day old post only had 2 points and would never have gotten any more traction.
Memory safety _can_ be compromised in a cool, albeit unlikely, scenario: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar/papers/memerr.pdf

But for all practical purposes, you're right :)
I know it's an economic fallacy to say "this time it's different" but really, I think this time it is.

The push for green energy has gotten enough momentum that new nuclear plants are being built and the money is flowing into silicon valley energy startups. I think this go-around the smart minds are going to be working on energy, not dot coms or wall St. One can reasonably hope that we will see more than a few energy breakthroughs in this decade. When they come all bets are off.
As a New Yorker, I can honestly say I don't think I have ever heard anyone actually pitch NYA. David Rose frequently gives how to get funding talks, and they all sound the same.

NYA's portfolio of companies is simply un-compelling: http://newyorkangels.com/portfolio/default.html

How can an organization like this compete against innovative forms of funding like Betaworks and Founder's Collective?
2009 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letter [pdf]
Thanks for the reply PG.

As an investment strategy then, does YC weight a certain amount of risk acceptance per class? Like:
60% (relatively) safe plays
30% risky plays
10% crapshoots

Or is it still a "touch and feel" process with co-founders?
It would be fair to sum up much of security and vulnerability research over the last 15 years as "trying to answer whether it's possible to secure a runtime when an attacker has limited but unanticipated access to raw memory". The weight of the evidence says "no", but secure runtimes are in their infancy (look at Google NaCL for a recent example).
The membership of the New York Angels includes a handful of VCs, along with a lot of entrepreneurs. While the fee's distasteful, David and his angel group are legit.
Why is a service economy "icky"?
Attitudes like these greatly inflate the actual incidence rate of outright illegal abuse of internet services, most notably child porn. There is not a pedophile lurking for open wifi on every block, as popular hype would have you believe. (By contrast, there often IS a violent domestic abuser lurking on every block in US cities, yet nowhere the same magnitude of public shame campaign directed against them, despite the magnitude of their damage to society.)

Also, downloading copyrighted material generally amounts to a civil offense in the US, even though it is often conflated with more serious criminal behavior (aka child porn) by the MAFIAA.

The risks of running unsecured wifi can be easily communicated to its users, and likewise contained by promoting use of secondary encryption such as SSL.

To claim these risks are so grave that people running unsecured wifi must be idiots is comparable to saying that people who leave their personal cars parked on city streets are also idiots, since those cars be stolen and used in violent crimes.
I think this is part of my problem - I don't have a close friend that I can talk to about stresses at home, etc..
Yet Go still remains as syntax clunky/ugly as ever.
How is it different to bookmarks, sounds like very well marketed minimal bookmarking?
sour grapes disguised as witty compassion from an obviously more grounded source, (witty compassion...really?)
I wonder if someone will develop a "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" for English pronunciation. Something you could read aloud that would cover all the sounds they needed to build something like this.

It'd be a cool graduate project... kinda wish I was into linguistics right now.
Considering history, voting is delusional. Might as well buy lottery tickets. You can't reasonably predict what candidates will do once in power based on what they say.

Besides, the political environment is essentially driven by the "madness of crowds". You are irrelevant. Better to remain detached and regard politics like the weather, something to be dealt with as necessary.
Cute, but it dodges the issue that it's hard to define what a "child" is. I think having a minimum accepted age, and a way to hire special children under that age (but with greater working restrictions) is a good compromise.
One of the key points in the article is how inexpensive energy is critical to both economic recovery and a high quality of life.

Making a jump, if we put together a heroic "Manhattan Project"-like commitment to supporting such energy measures, it’s feasible that we could all live better with a lower GDP, is it not?
Can we at least agree that the $150 is very reasonable relative to what the worst offenders of this practice charge?

If you get 100 applications and can only take 5 in an OAF event, there are still 95 other candidates of which some might find $150 to be a nominal cost to avoid this sort of scrum. Its admirable that folks are protecting startups from obvious scams but its dangerous to get overprotective when the end result is that you remove a reasonable option from the table. For $150 you get a sit-down with smart people and will at the very least get practice pitching under pressure and good feedback.

And at $150, we're talking picking up the tab for a nice steak dinner, which is something you've advised numerous times.

If these dudes have invested in companies they met through this type of forum, all the better. And there's a certain amount of due diligence an entrepreneur should be expected to do -- no need for the rest of us to protect people from their own stupidity.
10 Startups That Want To Change How You Pay For Everything Forever
At this point, I think this thread has gone way too far of course, but I'll give clarification one more attempt.

I think the confusion here is in neglecting the various definitions of the word, "conscientious," in combination with the aforementioned definition of the word, "of." In terms of being guided by conscience, or of being thorough and assiduous (two possible definitions), I agree that being "conscientious of" something makes absolutely no sense.

However, it can also mean to be careful (more along the lines of my intentions), in which case using "of" certainly makes sense, as you can be careful of some idea. Perhaps next time I comment, I'll just say "careful" to avoid the confusion.

Furthermore, it's important to remember that English is an ambiguous language. Part of the beauty (and perhaps the downside) of the language is that there are no rules, only guidelines (this is a good article on the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/books/01book.html). The best we can do is to know our audience and tailor our language to most effectively communicate our message. If nothing else, this thread has at least taught me something of my audience (something I should have known: that we are all very detail-oriented and so care must be taken in our communication). Perhaps saying "conscientious of" was not the best and most effective use of the word, but to say it's "wrong" or unacceptable I think is quite naive.
Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy