skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not in the tech field but I know someone who had to lay off an employee because there was a restructuring wherein the night manager position was basically eliminated in favor of transferring certain work to different positions. The person had been with the company over 30 years. That's loyal.

Another friend truly does have a terrible manager. He's been with his company for 5 years and had consistently great performance reviews until he transferred locations. Six months later there's a position at a different location and they won't let him transfer and he's getting poor reviews with no suggestions for improvement. He's thinking about quitting and getting re-hired at the new location. This would result in a pay cut and loss of vacation time but he's willing to do it. He loves the company overall but his current management has made things very difficult for him. That's loyalty.

Then this guy gives examples of a bunch of founders who started immense companies and stuck with them. Of course founders are going to be loyal to their company. They're the founders.

Now for this example he gives:
You start fighting with your co-founder whom you thought you understood. Your revenues are “just around the corner.” Your angel investors are nervous because the VCs aren’t moving that fast to fund your next round.

As an employee faced with that situation and with a better offer standing, which would you go with? The company you're not sure is going to be around because the founders are arguing and the capital is drying up or the one with money to pay you more? I'm not sure why he used that as an example.

The author of the post seems to expect a lot from people he describes as feeling entitled.
Gawker Owner: Gizmodo's iPhone Scoop Didn't Make Me Money
You're wrong for doing what's best for you, instead of what's best for an unreasonable employer such as this author. At least, according to this author, that is.

Also, notice that the "Japanese Salaryman" model is not only completely unworkable for high productivity, highly creative projects such as tech startups - it doesn't really apply here. That model, and all models like it in Europe and elsewhere, has two sides - the employee doesn't leave, and the company doesn't (easily) let him go. Needless to say, nobody in his right mind would suggest implementing the latter part, least of all the author who comically insists on the former part.

In other words, what we have is an employer who insists on applying half of a completely irrelevant model to his particular line of business.
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Well done, India. It's not bad at all.
You’re in it more for yourself than your company.

No shit, Sherlock. Is the company going to be in it for me? Quid pro quo.
That sounds a little too conspiratorial. However legally, it would somehow make sense.

NSA probably already copies all the data it wants by tapping straight into the backbone connections via AT&T and other providers. NSA is more hidden from public scrutiny and doesn't have to worry much about those pesky little laws. CIA on the other hand, is more visible, might not have access to all of that technology as NSA, and is scrutinized a little more by the public. So they might choose a "smarter" approach than just brute-force copying everything.

So legally I would guess that other parties (companies, other citizens) probably can spy on American citizens, and then sell the data back to the CIA. I am sure that is already going on as far as Choicepoint, for example, is concerned. So I would say, it would certainly make sense for them to somehow obtain data from Facebook.
I wonder if they would accept a pre-paid credit card at the Apple store. These technically use the credit network the same as a regular credit card...
Found Footage: iPhone OS 4.0, multitasking, app switching
But was he also buying formaldehyde, rope, a shovel and was google-ing stuff like "how to dispose of a body" recently.
I think sometimes people put on a show that they have resources that they do not have and think playing fast and loose with other people's careers is alright as it is only business.

This is irresponsible. And once discovered, we'd do well to not deal with such people.

I would not be overly strict about that, though. It would be ok, for example, to have them make license plates for you.
I didn't, and my post is unhelpful to the discussion, a discussion which could be good. But it's difficult to stomach a lecture on leadership from someone who allowed themselves to be led so badly astray, leading so many to such ruin.
"Release a device when it's possible, and you sell toys to a a few propeller-heads."

To be honest, I feel that the iPad falls into this category more than anything. The slate form factor won't be appealing to the masses until it has pen input that's seamlessly part of the user experience, Microsoft never really did that and I don't think Apple can do that the way they want at a reasonable price yet. I think the iPad is the bare minimum Apple was comfortable with releasing in the slate form factor, and it's just the start for them.
The modern liberal arts student avoids math and science like the plague.
Please take a look
In México there are pirate DVD operations on busy street corners and ads on teevee trying to embarrass infringers. The government doesn't care. MPAA wants to charge one full week's wages at the legal minimum wage before taxes for each single copy of a movie and the state is just not going to make people pay that.

The IPAA people have to jail every digital device in China, India, Mexico, and the like to close their content, overturn the doctrine of first sale, and permanently deny all fair use. They won't be able to.

Instead what happens is that technology development gets blocked in the countries IPAA runs. It's illegal to jailbreak, unlock, and otherwise innovate with cheap mass market technology in the USA. And that just means the Congress is sending the future to China. Or México. Or India. Or Canada, apparently, if this article is right.
Forget "dream jobs". This example is not just ridiculously inappropriate: it actually works against the authors point.

If you founded a startup, then quit abruptly at the first sign of real challenges, and now you're trying to found another startup - how would prospective investors look at you? (Even if the former investors aren't already suing you, which is entirely possible).

On the other hand, if you are an early startup hire, and you stick with what is obviously one of the vast majority of failed startups, so you get to be fired when they reduce their headcount to what they consider the best engineer (you, alas, happen to be considered the 2nd best) - how is an employer going to look at you, compared to someone who left two months before?

That's right - you were fired, and he quit. There's obviously something wrong with you.

Comparing employees to founders isn't only completely bogus - it also shows why the entire article is false, trying to explain why employees need to behave like founders while they are a very, very different thing.
There is an enormous opportunity here for a simple social networking startup to pull the rug out from under Facebook.

Just look at history. MySpace went from hero to zero in the blink of an eye.
I'm not sure, but you just made me miss the day of scripting BBS Door games such as Trade Wars 2002.
Facebook, it's the new ICQ. Only a matter of time...
I do get your point, but really can't agree that just having the device outside their perimeter is equivalent to 'letting it out in public'. As I mentioned earlier, the fact that the device was disguised as something else argues for the company's intent to keep its provenance secret.

Rather than attempting to bulldoze you, since we disagree about this fundamental distinction and have no judge handy to rule on it, here's some extra information which I feel underscores my view of things, and which you might find interesting:

http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/program/law/08-732/TradeSecrets/Not... Washington U. Law quarterly, particularly pp945-950;

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/law/st_org/iptf/articles/conten... a more general article (but a little out of date, from 1999);

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175839/Apple_demands... about the Gizmodo incident in particular, with some commentary by an IP lawyer. FWIW, Mr Church seems to agree with the basic argument I've been making, although obviously we're all limited by our awareness of the actual facts.
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The AntiPad
If I'm not mistaken, and I may very well be, this new facebook paradigm shift is just friend feed on steroids, and since facebook didn't create friend feed, they bought it, can't somebody come a long and just make a new version of friend feed that embraces authentic openness instead of this command and control, top down, DRM vendor lock in dystopian reality that corporations seem to love so much.
anecdotally, ironically, I interviewed with mahalo.com (Calacanis' company), while I was working for a startup in an office about 2 blocks away in Santa Monica. They offered me a job, but I declined, as it was a 15% pay cut or so from my current position.
German airline invites guy who lost iPhone prototype over for a beer
I was referring to the parent posting, where this was already presented as a fact. I just summarized it to "most women don't want to engage in programming".

Please correct me if I misunderstood the parent posting in that regard.
Well yes technically the API does "work." The problem is that most people are coming from rails land (which is also where I'm from, btw) and over there, they have implemented "REST" as POST=create and PUT=update. This doesn't even really make sense in rails actually.

For a proper PUT request you have to specify the full body of the resource to be "put." It literally is supposed to be telling the server, "hey, put this thing I'm giving you at this url." For that to work you have to actually be delivering the thing, and in rails with PUT you are just submitting form data, which is a set of paramater name/value pairs (this is also what's going on with POST but in that case it's ok). This mistake derives mostly from the fact that rails works off of forms, and form data is always passed in parameter pairs, so you are never passing a full resource to the server. I'm still not sure why they don't just do create and update with POST though.

Anyway yes, your API will work fine. You can define it any way you want, and you don't even have to stick to the original intention of the HTTP verbs. It's just that to me, create should be idempotent in the case of creating zones and records, so why not use the idempotent http verb?

I highly recommend this: http://jcalcote.wordpress.com/2008/10/16/put-or-post-the-res...
and this: http://www.elharo.com/blog/software-development/web-developm...
hmmmm that's really great. Best of Luck dear.

Thanks,
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How to install LAMP on EC2 Ubuntu with phpmyadmin in 4 mins
The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been extremely damaging to innovation and research in the US. There was a great lecture at defcon 17 about the specifics of the laws regarding jailbreaking and reverse engineering (when reverse engineering actually is legal, usually only to create/implement interoperability).

https://media.defcon.org/dc-17/audio/DEFCON%2017%20Hacking%2...
A co-worker built his using the GeekDesk frame and a butcher-block table top that he scavenged from somewhere. Quite nice.
I realize you probably didn't mean this, but the thought that went through my mind reading it is "What kind of psychopath would take such a position?"

Actually, I know what kind of psychopath: the kind who ran the only startup I ever joined. He once told me, "I am at war, and if one of my men can't keep up, I will shoot him." A remarkably similar sentiment to yours! He also used to phone people up and yell at them if they didn't stay till midnight or come in on weekends.

Needless to say (or so I would have hoped), this is an algorithm to produce not a "complex product" but a fiasco, and that is exactly what happened. I was long gone before then, though. What kind of leader shoots his own men? What kind of people want to work for a leader who shoots his own men, or doesn't care if their families die? I know what kind: scared, servile placators. And since such a team hardly makes for startup success, there really isn't an argument here, only a form of hypnosis.
This. In a followup, the author writes

> The types of people that are going to come to us and demand large titles they can stick on their resumé now aren’t primarily concerned with building a company; they’re worried about building themselves.

which I see as a mistake. No matter how little I'm thinking about another job search, to knowingly sabotage it before it starts would be foolish. I can't gamble that your startup is going to see me through to retirement. (I've never worked for a fifty-year-old company; have you?)
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As much as I support job changing (see my other comments), it's perfectly fine to stay at the same job for 24 years (heck, why not 50?) if it's really good, you're constantly growing, and can demonstrate a rising skill curve throughout.

Your extreme suspicion of anyone who stays for so long reveals a more fundamental truth about the software industry: very few companies manage to keep employees happy and challenged for so many years.
Anyway, why doesn't the OP go to Best Buy or something to get the rest of the iPads?

They probably don't have any, and that's important here. Unlike the EEE example, the context here is that the iPad is in short supply. So short that even the Apple store he was buying from had ran out of stock--as have most. The story he tells is about picking up one he had reserved several days earlier, and reserving yet another while he was there.

Now, from the retailer's perspective, this guy is taking the limited supply away from their actual customers. Even though a sale is a sale and they are making the same amount of money from it, they have no incentive to sell to him over anybody else in line. It's going to get sold anyway--and if you have to pick between selling it to an end consumer vs. selling it to a middle-man who is going to raise the price to your end consumer, you're probably going to chose the end consumer. It sucks if said middle-man was really just trying to do a favor for international buyers that can't get one any other way, but his purchasing behavior is indistinguishable from someone who is just profiteering.

If supply were adequate (as it is for EEEs, presumably) then they probably wouldn't have taken notice.
'No title' is a title itself. Worth thinking about.
I'll mail this link to my mom right away.
I'm sure that people like Martin Luther King Jr and others who have made a difference would beg to differ.

Your life doesn't have to be pointless.
> What's the best way to block this entirely?

A greasemonkey script to always click 'No Thanks'.
Previously on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962524
Docs.com – Social Online Word-Processing By Microsoft and Facebook
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Blackjack basic strategy and many other strategies are based on the mathematics of the game. The advantage of the blackjack house is about 5% and if you are playing with a good strategy, you can considerably reduce the house edge.
According to the classic article on that topic, it's exactly that kind of comments that contributes most to the discomfort of women in male-dominated groups:

Sexist jokes are the number one way to drive women out of any group, and they are more common than many people realize.

[...]

Sometimes he tells me that it's okay to make a sexist joke if it's true, or it's funny (funny to whom?). What some people fail to realize is that jokes about gender of any sort almost always make fun of women, and will make most women angry, regardless of the context. It doesn't help to first make a sexist joke about men and then one about women.

[...]

your comments and jokes are driving women away. If that's not what you want, then don't make sexist jokes. If you're not sure if your joke is sexist, find something else to say.

[http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/]

(The title suggests that the article is just about LUGs, but it's really about the whole computer-tech scene.)
I don't know why there isn't a groundswell in favor of a gnu facebook, democratically run, ssl enabled, with powerful opt out privileges... Maybe because I don't have time to start it...
Google spent $1.3 million on lobbying... what are they buying?
Well if you want to be a startup loyal to your employees you wouldn't back yourself into this kind of corner in the first place, if I was applying for a job at a startup like you mentioned I wouldn't expect much job security and expect to be compensated accordingly.
Mike Hanson, Douglas Crockford, and Facebook; security, privacy, and performance
A great and constructive game for engineers of all ages. i expect we'll be seeing it at conferences for the next few months.
Your two sentences are inconsistent.

The assertion was that life or existence itself is pointless, nothing to do with the esteem of individuals. You say "people like Martin Luther King Jr" would beg to differ about gtt's assertion, but you follow-up by saying "your life doesn't have to be pointless." So, a life can be pointless? So you disagree with MLK? Either that, or your entire comment doesn't really have anything to do with gtt's.

Regardless, the worth of an individual wasn't really what gtt was getting at.

So, SimCity guy felt compelled to be awesome at SimCity, besides that I don't know much else about him. But there are billions of people in the world, so there is room for someone like him and there is almost no reason to stifle diversity in personalities. After all, that's how MLK eventually came to be. Perhaps the same force that compels SimCity guy to build awesome Megacities is compelling him to do something else that most people would consider more worthwhile.
We don't talk about this much on HN, but people have motives other than money. It's possible that the people who invested tremendous effort into making a powerful film about a very serious topic just didn't want it to be co-opted to whine about Xbox 360, and were willing to pass up some revenue to prevent that.
Oh, RLY? Tell this to all those botnets.. Ah, it is pcworld..

http://www.milw0rm.com/platforms/windows
How to reclaim your privacy by disabling Facebook’s “Open Graph”
Good guess. Where I'm from you can start on your phd work in your fifth year of study normally (for some earlier), and it takes 2-3 years after that to complete your project + thesis.
This was quite interesting.

One error (omission actually) I noticed. He talks about the checks and balances on debt caused by canceling debts every jubilee (7 years). But does not mention that in practice what actually happened is that people would refuse to lend money the closer it got to the jubilee.

And this refusal actually caused social ills, because people needed loans. So in the talmud they instituted something called a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruzbul which allowed people to collect debts after the jubilee by turning the debt over to the court.

It's still quite interesting though, just thought I'd share some more info on the subject.
If you read my other comments in this discussion, you will surely see that I am in fact very pro-employee.

I also am, however, very pro truth.

Anyone who tells you he can have employees with low or zero productivity, for whatever reason, as select members of a small, highly leveraged startup - is either lying to you, or will fail unless he's extremely lucky not to have such employees.

If your team consists of 3 senior developers, and one of them stops producing, your project will likely be pushed back a third or more over schedule. This can easily kill a startup, since if your idea has any merit at all (which is your only chance of success anyway), then you have ten other teams competing against you to launch first.

I totally agree that employees should be respected and cared for, and that a key employee leaving a startup is generally the startup's fault. However, if someone doesn't work out, he will be let go. Not just by the employer - his co-workers will call for his head, since his problems (whether he's to blame for them, or not) endanger the entire team.
The german (alledged facebook ripoff) MeinVZ/SchülerVZ/etcVZ seems to do something in this direction with its OpenSocial interface. Instead of exposing your real account, you can generate additional pseudonymous personas that look just like OpenSocial accounts for external apps, but can only access those data from your profile that you actually authorized for this persona.
This dos not address the data export problem, but helps keeping the things a user want to keep private private.

I think this is a beneficial effect of the rather strict data protection laws in Europe. Especially since one of the *VZ properties explicitly targets minors, they had to come up with a novel solution that actually takes user data protection into account.
What "corner"? Having to launch a very successful product, very fast, or die - is what startups are all about. Certainly all the VC backed ones.

And yes, anyone expecting any kind of job security at a startup, especially a VC backed one, is simply fooling himself.
> without worrying that it will hit the screen's edge or leave the active area. Flash can't do that

If Flash didn't provide a mechanism to lock cursors, how about fullscreen?
One of his points is that when you have a certain amount of information you should go with your gut - if you wait until you have 100% information you'll almost always be too late. Guess he heats his own dogfood for better or worse.

I wouldn't trust a leader that hasn't made any mistakes.
New record for paper airplane flight.
That was a good read. I haven't heard many positive things about Facebooks new plans but I like the new features (ie. instant personalization). If this can make my experience of websites more interesting and relevant I'm all for it.

But like Jeff Jarvis says: Facebook should give us the control of which sites get instant personalization etc.
It's like walking through a mall and every time you enter a shop you're not sure if you're wearing clothes or not.
Google has been pushing OpenSocial, a truly open (multiple provider) and deeper version of what Facebook is now offering, for over a year. It's a chicken or egg problem, however. FaceBook can deliver more traffic now, but the tradeoff it you end up helping promote FaceBook's ownership of the social graph.
The paranoid part of me wonders if this isn't some deliberate net neutrality play. Maybe they'll start throttling bandwidth to sites that don't pay up, and they'll be able to point out that they have to do these things to keep the free wifi service going. And then after people are used to the idea...
Proposals for changes to the system for controlling the export of technology
Two friends of mine did a startups some years ago. One technical guy and one business guy. The tech guys title was simply "technology" and the business guys title was "everything else".

It worked - everybody understood it immediately and it brought a smile to peoples face.
This is a very insightful post. At the end of the day, having some company (especially one run by a volatile 25-year old) be the intermediary between me and my online identity just doesn't work. My identity should play by my rules, not theirs.
Based on what I've read, specifically in Bob Woodward's books, Powell put his loyalty to his party/President first. On leadership I can't take him seriously. If he decides to write or teach about how to be a head-in-the-sand loyalist I'll definitely check it out. That can be a valuable skill in certain situations.
Interesting choice of words: "mistake".
When you have a lot to protect, you have to pay up.