skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This has such a linkbait headline. This is some completely uninteresting drama about, at least to me. But the headline is such that my impulse is to click on it. I guess that makes me weak. But why do people upvote shit like this in the first place? Do people really care about some squabble TechCrunch are having with some other crowd? Is this really actually interesting to hackers? I really hate when I come here and I see headlines like this on the front page. This is not what I come here for.
"As Frank Rich pointed out in a recent New York Times column, of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration bill, 31 voted for another law that would have barred any presidential candidate from appearing on the Arizona ballot in the next elections if he couldn't provide a birth certificate that satisfied the Arizonans' standards. So, ban Obama. But register guns with the federal government? Forget it. Too much paperwork. Too much invasion of privacy.

It's this kind of self-contradicting conservatism, bordering on lunatic libertarianism..."

Two things:
1) Libertarians are strongly against any form of national ID, and this author's casual classification of libertarians as lunatic is incredibly childish.

2) Although I agree with the author that national ID is a bad idea (TM), his comparison here is quite off the scale: the president of the united states is not only significantly more powerful than one person with a gun (he controls thousands of people with guns, and nuclear weapons). In addition, there are legal requirements for office that can be verified by a birth certificate (age among others, and I won't be debating the value of these legal requirements), whereas the federal government EXPLICITLY has no jurisdiction over gun ownership. And these are contradictory laws passed recently by a transient legislature - this is the Constitution of the United States of America. A document, without which, there is no legality of the United States.
I like how they have a Techstars company in the mix. Very nice.
This is definitely interesting. I'm currently working at a startup, but it's always good to see how others work too. Is this specific to developers, or can business side folks attend too?
Again: the impact of this "modest proposal" is that you could be held in a city jail (note: there are jurisdictions where strip searches are standard operating procedure before being admitted into a holding cell) for nothing more than forgetting your wallet. He's not being serious.

The point is, in Arizona, this psychotic policy already has the force of law if your skin happens to be brown.
I'm sure most on HN would agree that you get what you pay for in outsourcing and oDesk has little liability. However, in your comparison to eBay, I'm not sure it holds and there may be a lesson here for how online marketplaces evolve. The last 6 purchases I've made through eBay resulted in products delivered that were not as represented. What did I do? Well, the first time, I had about 4 email exchanges with the seller and decided it wasn't worth $30 (what I paid) to deal with ebay or the seller. The subsequent times (all in the last 12 months) I also decided not to deal with it. The result: I only buy on eBay now as a last resort. Its not absurd to expect the marketplace to ensure, within reason, the quality of its sellers.
It's a bit like "Desert Island Disks": if you are washed up on an island, and by some odd chance you have precisely 10 recordings, and ... A silly game. As you say, the monolingual programmer is unlikely to be proficient. How many professional musicians are competent on exactly one instrument? (Admittedly, they may be professional-grade on one only.)

(Though a one-legged stool, otherwise "a shooting stick", has its uses.)
Turning into a working vacation works until your kids reach school age, or your significant other gets a job of their own that they can't just "put on hold" for a month.
Interesting. I was reading it as an actual (and modest) proposal and, living in Europe, wasn't able to understand what's the deal. Carry you ID on you? Oh, sure, I've been doing that since I was 15 and never had a problem with it.

Quite a strange issue (for me), really. I like these articles pointing out interesting differences that would otherwise never occur to me. Like there might be a country where such proposal actually parodies something. :-)
Looks like a great event!

If anyone ever wants to talk about what it's like to work at a startup from the perspective of someone who has worked at Justin.TV for the past three years, I'd be happy to answer some questions - feel free to email me at doctorbill [at] gmail [dot] com
Time Line for Diaspora
This particular event is mainly for programmers. We're hosting this at YC itself, and we can't fit as many people as you could in an auditorium. But ultimately it depends on the presenting companies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1346178
I just knew my chair-leaning-back stance was good for you. Ha. It always seemed pretty obvious that there was much less weight on the spine itself, so it should be better.
Interesting, considering the Artima book has so many 5-star reviews on Amazon.
Will all the people needed to make a hiring decision be present at this event?

I postulate that running a hiring event would attract some very talented people if the one of the stated goals of the event was for people to leave with signed offer letters.

I helped run the "Reverse Job Fair" at the Hacker Dojo several months ago - some job seekers flew in from the East Coast and LA just to attend. From what I've heard about 5 people were hired on the spot.

This is one area where startups can really differentiate themselves: The last startup I worked for made me a job offer in about 48 hours - I was unemployed for a total of 100 hours. It took about 3 months for me to go through the hiring process with Microsoft.
Your second point is well taken, but your first is overreaching. He's not suggesting libertarianism is lunacy. He's suggesting that the interpretation of libertarianism that requires random people on the street to be better documented than guns is lunatic.

It seems clear that reasonable people can take either side of that argument, but the argument is reasonable only to the extent that it doesn't get reframed as "Christopher Dickey versus the Concept of Libertarianism".
Yes, typically. I don't know how common that will be, but all or nearly all the presentations will be given by the founders of these companies.
A Litl Box Wants to Turn Your TV Into an Actually Good Web Browser
It's sort of deeply ironic that the video doesn't play on iPads.
And six minutes later, after they actually read the post, they had a substantive response. It's the classic email pattern of respond, then read, then really respond, aka, "I just noticed your email is full of words and decided to take a closer look." Except here the initial email was actually a blog post.
This event looks like it's geared towards programmers, but aren't at least a few of these companies looking for non-programming positions? Wouldn't the information shared at this event be just as relevant to business-minded folks interested in working at a startup?

I personally have been trying to teach myself programming for the past year and getting to work for a startup in some sort of business development role alongside of top-notch programmers seems very appealing to me because I could provide value while supplementing my learning experience. I understand the need to narrow the scope of this event so that it's easier to manage applicants, but is there any opportunity for non-programmers?
You can't be arrested in the US simply for not carrying ID. Unless you're brown-skinned and live in Arizona (hence the uproar).

You can be arrested for refusing to identify yourself to a police officer, and you can certainly be arrested for driving without ID, but you aren't required to carry papers simply to walk down the street.

We like it that way.
It will depend on whose resumes the presenting companies like. I know they're most interested in programmers, so I described the event as being for programmers. But there's no coding test to apply or anything like that. Ultimately you get invited if the presenting companies like your resume, whatever it says.
On the one hand, hardcore theoretical courses at the average CS school don't exist as weed-out at all. If you're lucky, you've got a good faculty member teaching a compilers or operating systems course that'll make it challenging, but only sometimes. Teaching things like Haskell, The Lambda Calculus, Prolog, Complexity Theory and C are "impractical" for someone doing a CS degree, because, you know, everyone uses "OO" (whatever that means) nowadays so that's the theory we should teach. Plus, if we teach a hard course about the theory of computation, lots of kids will flunk, and we can't have that, now can we?

Agreed for most schools but I will say that there are good schools that still teach at that level. The Intro to Programming Languages class at Northwestern has you implement an interpreter for a variety of different languages, including a variant of Scheme called Typed PLAI. Haskell was used as an example sometimes and we implemented a number of similar features (basic type checking, currying, etc.). I know that the operating system and compilers courses here are very difficult and have heard similar things about the corresponding classes at CMU.
Most of the points covered here are things that every kid or parent should know.

The two things I wouldn't expect a kid or parent to know is the "don't make yourself searchable", and the "don't overlook your privacy controls". The rest is information that's been thrown at us since before the internet.
We briefly added these measures, but after thinking it over we've decided to disable them.

From a technical standpoint they're a fig leaf. This isn't a complex server-side app, it's a minimal UI on top of the JSON results Facebook returns for these searches: http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=po... . This is frankly the least scary use of this data. For example, it would be trivial to start crawling this data and building your own indices to enable far more invasive searches.

Our goal is to draw attention to this so that people become outraged and Facebook changes their privacy settings. The security community has been having this conversation for a while (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure ) and the only reason not to disclose a security or privacy problem is to give the company involved time and resources to fix the system.

This is not the case here. Facebook made this privacy-affecting change quite deliberately, and I think it's clear that they did so with full knowledge of the implications. If there is not an outcry, this will not be fixed. Right now, from Facebook's perspective, the system is working as intended. The longer it stays this way the worse the privacy breach becomes.
Your Cappuccino Apps Just Became Desktop Apps
I've always suspected that traditional ergonomic advice is basically pseudoscience. My favorite thing is those ergonomic brochures using cartoon people with completely unrealistic proportions. Why don't they use actual pictures instead for clarity?

More importantly, where are the references to peer-reviewed ergonomic research showing that so-called "correct" posture actually improves outcomes? Where did all this advice come from in the first place? Somebody's mother?
I think it would be better marketed as a tool for initial contact with people you may not necessarily want to have long-term knowledge of where to contact you.

For signing up for stuff, there is mailinator/bugmenot/etc., and many sites block such services anyway.
That's a point a lot of people miss; redistribution of wealth to maintain acceptable levels of inequality are what maintain the peace. It doesn't matter if redistribution of wealth is right or wrong, only that it's a practical necessity to maintain a stable society.
From Zero to Blogger in 3 Months: Thoughts and Traffic Stats from DevGrow.com
They're all YC companies.
Seems like the benefit to the lower back might be counterbalanced by being worse for the neck and shoulders. (Disclaimer: I am not any sort of doctor or physiologist.)
Nice, unexpected HN reference in there :-)
Dickey most certainly did know. "A Modest Proposal" was in the title to alert those who might not recognize satire, that he was dead set against all that he appeared to support. OTOH perhaps American education has declined to the point than nobody reads Swift anymore.
I'm very excited to try this! Sheet music reader seems like such an obvious application for the iPad. Now I just have to think about how much I trust my shaky stand with my $600 toy.
Half isn't getting paid from tax receipts for the other half. Everyone paying taxes is also getting benefits for what they put in. It's not as simple as just rich people paying for poor people. It's more that people kick in different amounts into the pool and then it's redistributed back out based on need. Wealth redistribution is necessary for a stable society.
Panasonic TX-P50VT20 3D Plasma TV Review
I just rechecked my settings and there were new things in there that were set to visible to "everyone".
Most CS profs don't teach programming because they don't have anything interesting to say and would rather teach something else. They are not programmers.

I feel this is slightly hyperbolic. CS often isn't a productless field, even in academia. While many fields in CS can get away with simply publishing algorithms and other codeless papers there are many subsections where implementation is a vital part of the project. For example, the Xen project was originally an open source academic project.

I think the biggest problem in academia is the tight schedule. Unfortunately, many of the problems you encounter in industry take too long to be properly implemented in the structure of a semester course. For example, long-term maintenance and technical documentation are at the core of any significant software project but by the time most of that stuff would come up the semester is already over.
I noticed that too. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it or not; as a piano player myself, it might seem more intuitive to me to have a visual indicator at each beat in the measure, and then just highlight each note (via color or something) as it's played. I think the reason it seems off is because it's so irregular, even though it does match with the music itself.

Kudos though, Etude looks great.
Good point...it's not clear that any of those posts were really meant to be private
I must admit I was was caught out. Now I'm a little sad that I've been so detuned by the political climate of the day that I didn't immediately identify the satire.

In most places I've travelled, "Your papers please" is not so subtle code for "bribe me before I impose some arbitrary penalty". Except when it isn't, in which case to suggest such an accommodation results, at minimum, in a good going over and the imposition of some arbitrary penalty. Thankfully I only fly over Arizona so I'll never have to decide.
I understand your point and agree with you. There was a movie not long ago that had just came to video. I checked the xbox and I couldn't rent it, only buy the SD version. So I check netflix steaming, not available. I check netflix movies and it's on a wait to rent. I can see why people go to P2P networks after I tried many ways to get the movie legally.

I still haven't seen the movie since after all that I didn't feel like watching it then anyways.

And don't even get me started on the impossible to skip commercials!
I'm graduating in a week or two with a BS in Computer Science/Systems. I don't know what schools you have experience with, but my particular school did very well at Computer Science and Software Development. I've taken several courses in data structures, algorithms, hardware, assembly, OS and all the way up the stack. I've also taken a two year rotation working with a team on a project for an outside company.

Consequentially, I have had a job lined up for several months.

All that to say schools that teach both do exists.
Chrome OS Devices to be on Display at Computex
>they asked Arrington to post "on the book excerpts", not "to post the book excerpts". As I said, a miscommunication -- and there is a simple, mature way to handle that.

... pistols at dawn?
Facebook and Apple both had near monopolies in their sectors

Apple never had anything remotely close to a monopoly on mobile phones or even smart phones.
Chu:

Here's what's happening. After the [Space Shuttle] Challenger accident, the U.S. government formed a panel of very, very bright scientists and engineers to come together and figure out what happened and what could be done in the future to prevent it. Most of the people on that panel were not aeronautics experts, not rocket experts or NASA experts. They were very smart people who had a broad range of knowledge and experience. This is actually what you want: you want a set of fresh eyes, people who can propose potential out-of-the-box solutions, who might foresee what might go wrong. If you're an expert and you're used to certain things done certain ways, that limits your ability to cast a wider net, and so one of the most important things that we're doing at the national laboratories is putting together these scientific teams, many of whom would be considered non-experts. In times like this, those are many of the people you want. BP and the oil industry have the lion's share of the experts that are exactly germane to this. So this is how we think we can best add value.

Chu here is talking about the committee for which Feynman gave the famous O-ring demonstration.

I think whatever you think about Obama's politics, you've gotta be happy that we have someone like Chu running DOE.
Yup. I started my senior year of high school when I was 16. I was 17 when the year ended. Didn't skip a year, just started a year earlier than most people. But, thats another story.

FWIW, I'll be done with undergrad work at college at 21 (assuming I graduate on time next year). Could have finished by this summer (ie: before I turned 21), but, I do enough classwork during the semester, I wanted my summers "off" (read; working/internships instead of classes).
> After all, it doesn't matter whether other countries can do it, it matters whether the US govt can do it.

If they can do it, we can do it too. The reasons that we're so bad at it now are because we're doing it wrong because so many people are opposed to the very notion of socialism. But I understand your wanting them to prove it first by ramping up slowly.
Well, your sisters or wife or dad could repost something you posted and then it's only as secure as their settings.

Also, if you are both tagged in a picture then all of your friends' friends can see the picture of you if your friend lets them.

And, if someone finds an old embarrassing picture of you they can just upload it to Facebook and tag you and all of their friends (yours if you share mutual friends) are notified and can look at it until you get a chance to un-tag yourself.
They are missing the JS-on-the-server boat for being too focused on pleasing asynchronous-rocket-scientists while the web is simply asking for plain JS.

All the web world need is a way to print('<h1>Hello world</h1>') easily, no need to create servers and listen to ports to just spit some html, and there is where node fails.

V8CGI is an interesting option but lacks penetration.

Google could hit a home run if they provide NATIVE js on app engine (not rhino on top of Java)
So, what about those stokke kneeling chairs (http://www.amazon.com/Varier-Variable-Balans-Kneeling-Natura...)?
Sometimes shit just happens. Let it go, move on.

The mistake here wasn't a miscommunication, it was in not realizing the cat was out of the bag and just cutting your losses.

Just like you can't get unpregnant, you can't retract stuff once it's posted on one of the web's top blogs. Fortune's type A control freak lawyers still need to learn that it seems.

The correct response from Fortune:

"Oops, that's not what we intended, but oh well, lesson learned - next time be more specific. Fuck it dude, lets go bowling."
I thought similar, that this would be useful for community type sites where you need someone to contact you but don't want to share your email address.

Thanks for the feedback
Nope. Dem politics writer.
I think that Facebook has failed in two clear ways.

They do not do a good job of indicating how public an action will be. This is true across the internet, but it's a real problem on Facebook due to the strong ties to your real identity there.

They change the rules far too often. If you had a very strong grasp of Facebook's privacy policy two years ago (or even six months ago) that information would be worse than useless today.

Edit: The brunt of the matter however is this: if a few people are using your system wrong, it's their problem. If a large percentage of your users are getting it wrong, it's your problem.
We play a game where you think of words you've never said before and try use them in a sentence. (So if you don't know roughly what it means, it doesn't count.) It's fun because you try unsuccessfully to search for words with the weakest indices before eventually finding profitable seams by thinking of the crazy stuff you've read.
Yeah, will fix once I'm off of vzarr.
“In police states, this is a pretty ugly process—most often an attempt at intimidation, or extortion, or both. In democracies, it can be pretty ugly, too, and sometimes for the same reasons.”

Anyone else note the fallacy in the suggestion that police states and democracies are mutually exclusive?
arhg, me too. I just applied and then found out that it is in MV and I am in Boston. Well, that's life...
Interesting, working has the opposite effect on me. This past week I barely ate. I usually get so caught up working that I'll only stop to grab a bite to eat when my stomach won't allow me to continue. I'm curious to see what the distribution is for HNers.
Pay-as-You-Wish Gaming
Finally, someone on the Internet that has heard of object databases.

Too bad there is that whole management consulting thing in there, and that every other word is bolded.
Music That Makes You Dumb
As a consultant that does understand customer development (unlike the example which paints all contractors with the same brush) I feel like this Steve post is based on iffy logic.

Our clients pay us to be highly opinionated; in fact, they hired us over the other guy because we were willing to give them the straight goods even when the news isn't good.

In a properly functioning founder-consultant relationship, it is the founder's job to take all of the factors into consideration and pivot when appropriate. The consultant has no business making this call; we can only inform and opine.

What we can and should do (as consultants) is help the founder exercise control over the scope, thereby allowing the Blank-approved Minimum Viable Product to actually be minimal.

In fact, we're in a better position to help scope growth than a founder/developer, or someone working for a founder. We're emotionally more removed (but still passionate) such that we can say no to features that distract from the core value of the business proposition.

Pivoting is much harder when development strays from the minimum viable product.
This comment will sound a little confrontational, but here it goes.

Why would anyone competent enough to work at one of these companies choose that path instead of being a founder?
Applied mathematics in business consulting
Any idea why they don't want childrens' names in captions or tags?
If they thought publishing the full excerpts was serious enough to be calling at 6am and bringing in the lawyers, they should have been especially clear in that point from the beginning.
Maybe have a constant-speed thin vertical cursor along with (behind) the jerky highlight? That would help to smooth things out and get out of the "valley."
The Arizona law, whether you support it or not, is about the farthest thing from libertarianism.