skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's put aside the specific instance of Gates/Stallman and extend your argument to the general case. People in the philanthropic-billionaire camp usually only exist in countries with basic rights that roughly approximate those in the civil liberty camp. Consider the wealthiest charitable foundations [1]. The only outlier is a foundation from the UAE (whose endowment is a relatively small percentage of the sum). This is only a basic analysis, but I hope you get the gist of my argument: you can't naively separate the contributions of businessmen and civil rights activists; it is a mutualistic relationship.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_f...
I hope you meant reported not ported.
Yeah, same sort of amazement here that people are upset at me for pointing out the controversy (and that you're getting down-voted as well). I am a brown male who grew up in Jamaica, Queens and then New Jersey and saw a lot of interesting mixtures of culture growing up. It was mostly good but I realize that I've seen more racism up close than most of my friends.

I honestly don't blame them though -- they are right by the books and I understand this stance if you've never seen or experienced the words used in that way.

Though the definition has nothing to do with race, but once you know racists have associated the two, what I don't get is why would you get upset at the person that tells you and shows you that racists are doing this?

Check out the dude below -- he's all worked up and offended that I pointed out that people are doing this. And he's offended at me for saying it's troubling and wise to steer clear of that mess. At least he agrees that they are morons.

And yeah this is definitely a bit disturbing. I don't think it's outlandish at all to avoid certain language once racists start using it to hurt people. If he's fine using word that we've experienced racists use to describe African American babies, that's his call. I don't understand why anyone would be offended or flabbergasted that the word itself has some controversy around it. It's not like there aren't other words to use.
Flip A Coin:  Decide for Me
This of course explains the great disparity in minority vs. poor white student admissions....
Please read http://twitter.com/tos and http://twitter.com/apirules
Regardless of my opinions on whether China has a right to block things or not, I'm going to say that I'll wait for a week to see if this is actually a huge blockage of Google's apps or if this is just "a bad day for Google in China."

If you look at all of their reports, there are some days that things seems more blocked than normal. (Check out May 26 and June 18.) I'm not sure if this is just bad data getting into the system or what — maybe when it was time to ping services they couldn't. For the most part things go back online the next day.

This does seem to be the first time things are in the red, but I think it's too early to assume everything is gone for good.
> I understand it's a bit of a joke in the humanities

Huh? Do you have any first hand insight?
"Good execution" is somewhat of a question-begging term, and the details differ depending on who you talk to. If you have an idea, execute it, and make lots of money, it's hard to argue that the execution was bad.

In general, I think a good execution would be one that a) didn't take years to launch b) doesn't take enormous effort to maintain as-is, c) can be iterated on, d) actually solves a need, e) in an efficient and compelling manner. An investor would mention other things like a good hiring pipeline and management structure, IP, business relationships, etc.

Here's the thing: the only people you really have to convince of your execution is your customers.
Interestingly grok was originally a noun! It means "water".

People look at me funny when I point that out.
Lists of length 1, 2, 3 and 4 have special meaning
The popular AlertFox monitoring service runs on Windows: http://wiki.alertfox.com/Monitoring_Server

...which is no surprise, as they offer transaction web monitoring with Internet Explorer ;)
Britain Plans to Decentralize Health Care
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/google-confirms-were-not-cu...
Where would you invest $500K?
If you were generally a risk-taker, what would you invest $500K in?
Your API credentials are the keys to the kingdom, so you're rightly cautious about giving them out.

However, we can proudly say that with nearly one million servers having passed through Cloudkick without being inadvertently rebooted, terminated, or otherwise... statistically, it's probably more likely that you'll accidentally terminate it yourself manually than that something untoward will happen to it if you're managing it with us. Our entire business is based on making server management better, easier, and safer for you and we do everything we can to make our service infallible.

In fact, some of the initial inspiration for our dashboard was that existing tools made it too easy to accidentally kill the wrong machines. Some providers give nodes names that aren't exactly user-friendly, and without some basic sorting and labeling tools, eventually almost anyone would make a mistake. So, we added coloring, sorting, and renaming to mitigate that kind of user error.

Also, on the subject of security, we just added the ability to require multi-factor authentication to log in to your Cloudkick account. You can choose to require a YubiKey, one-time SMS code, or one-time email code to access your dashboard. We did a brief write-up on our blog if you're interested in learning more: cloudkick.com/blog
Ask HN: What is the best option for design?
I have technical skill but I don´t have the skills to make the design for my app.
What did you do to have a budget acceptable web 2.0 design? Freelance, read tutorials, professional designer, friends...
Mostly from reading the forums on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Full of assistant professors in the humanities complaining about how they have to do this "research" BS, whereas if you hang out with assistant professors in the sciences they'll complain about their onerous one-course-per-semester teaching load.
If he said anything different, everyone would be chastizing him for flip-flopping - but when he stands his ground - we need to get him a parrot?

At least he's consistent.
* Check out the dude below -- he says he's actually offended that I pointed this out*

You're right. Being offended by words is absurd. Doubly-so when they are not even uttered with an offensive meaning. This may be too subtle, so I'll clarify: I was taking the piss out of your position.
I've always had a favourite general-purpose language for personal projects. This has been Haskell for several years now. Yet, I regularly find myself writing things in other languages. I use Ruby at work. I did C++ on a previous job, LISP even before that. I've written side projects in C.

And I'm constantly looking forward to the next opportunity for broadening my horizon, basically looking for a good excuse to learn and apply a new language. But I'm also a person with a distinct thing for languages and their design.

Then again, like somebody else has already stated, learning a new language gets easier every time. I think everybody should learn a few.
Well he didn't say anything I disagreed with. If you want my opinion, take a look at this article

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/26/ipad.universit...

>Students at Reed College complained of the slow refresh rate of e-Ink displays, problematic input, inability to load PDFs over the network, and inability to view more than one text at a time as major sticking points. Reed faculty found converting documents to work well on the Kindle to be particularly difficult in most cases.

>Students participating in the test at Darden School of Business, while loving the Kindle for personal reading, overwhelmingly felt the Kindle didn't pass muster in its current state for academic use -- about 4 out of 5 would not recommend a Kindle DX to incoming MBA students.

I came to that exact conclusion after using a kindle DX for a few months. Additionally, battery life & weight don't really bother me. It's lighter than most textbooks, & I don't mind putting it to charge right before I go to sleep. I spend a lot of time looking at LCDs anyway, so that isn't a problem.
Another big factor, which I don't think you said explicitly, is that oftentimes the majority of applicants for a software development position seem to lack the actual ability to write code. There are many horror stories from folks doing hiring where they experienced applicants who seemed to lack the ability to write even simple, small applications. Granted, some of those situations could have been caused by pressure and nervousness, but other times it isn't. Some of those folks just can't code at all, but they applied anyway.
Thank you Andy.
I'm ignorant about why PNG is better. Can you teach me?
You're presenting a false dichotomy, and nobody with who thinks of students as "spotty-faced teens" should be allowed within miles of a college faculty position.

Andrew Hacker himself (one of the co-authors of the book under discussion) is a good counter-example. He was a longtime professor at a public college (Queens College). (Full disclosure: I was a student at QC from 1986-1992. I never took a full class with Professor Hacker, but I heard him lecture a few times.) His classes always filled up quickly despite their reputation as challenging, he won numerous teaching awards and he was near-universally regarded as an inspiring lecturer. Nevertheless, he was also a respected scholar who regularly published articles and books that nobody in his field could ignore. It doesn't have to be either/or.
Hats off to Richard Stallman.

Whatever your views on software—and by default most people will disagree with him on many points—his contributions to the software world are undeniable. There are a lot of fundamentalists out there, and 99% of the time they scare the shit out of me because of what their unchecked advocacy could ultimately lead to. Stallman's fundamentalism on the other hand, does not seem likely to ever lead to any detrimental effect on society.

In other words, it's not just about respecting Stallman's conviction, but also acknowledging that his convictions are well-placed, even though my lifestyle would never allow me to share his position per se.
I'm finishing up a postdoc and am not actively looking for a job just yet, but I will be soon.

Like lutorm, I'm wondering who in the startup/industry world might find my skill set useful. (Yes, I know about finance.) I'm located in NYC, and will be staying here for the foreseeable future.

Me in a nutshell: PhD in electrical engineering, research experience in audio processing and machine learning, mainly speech recognition and music analysis. These days I do lots of scientific coding in Python.

http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~ronw
http://github.com/ronw
It's all online for free: http://books.couchdb.org/relax/
I see. We may be able to work something out, email me at brian AT gazehawk.com and we can discuss the details. Our upcoming plans to let you use your own users may solve this.
A good readable-sized overview of the book by the authors themselves from the Chronicle of Higher education: http://chronicle.com/article/Are-Colleges-Worth-the-Price/66...
Melbourne, Australia. Programming since 1986.

Latest work: Linux device drivers for an air traffic control system, medical equipment and a cell phone base station.

Earlier work: portable data terminals, air conditioning control systems, remote order entry systems, telephone banking, EFTPOS terminals and networks, various communications programs, web pages for remote control of communications equipment.

Major accomplishments: rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script; rewrote a VME to PCI bus chip driver reducing the packet transfer time from 40 milliseconds to 200 nanoseconds.

Worked at NCR, Nokia, Philips, Telstra and Wang among others.
The foundation itself isn't completely blameless. They have some of their n billions invested* in the very companies who's environmental and social policies are are causing harm to people they are trying to help with their clinics, etc.

*I heard about this several years ago so would be happy to be told they've changed this. Their response was that the fund management and philanthropic arms of the foundation were firewalled and the former's directive was to simply maximize growth. I find this unfortunate at best.
Were the majority of governments in human history, many lasting hundreds of years and immensely beneficial to their populaces, not legitimate?

And dare I ask what was the great moral challenge of the 20th?
I'm using web-app-theme to tide me over until I'm done with coding.

http://pilu.github.com/web-app-theme/
Thats interesting. As far as I recall (and I used to read his website everyday, before PG slapped me with his "how to create wealth" essay and showed me how wrong that world-view was) Stallman has always been a leftist, never liked corporations, and always been interested in human rights. He may have refined his position over the years, but it hasn't changed much.
This video explains exactly how the governance works:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdcAxGGRafc

Yes. It would be totally possible to overtthrow the governing members of bettermeans.

However, shares are not tied to your membership. Ownership is based on contribution, and cannot be taken away from you. Just wether or not your votes are binding.

This video explains our model in detail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdcAxGGRafc

As does this doc:
http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=312
My post got to the front page of Digg yesterday, here's how much money I made
This is how you build loyalty
Google Opens Places API With Initial Focus On Check-In Apps
Thanks for the tips! I did find a couple of interesting submissions through searchyc, in particular via http://searchyc.com/submissions/newsletter and http://searchyc.com/submissions/email+newsletter

These are the mixergy interviews I've been able to find:

* How Ideal Bite (a email newsletter company) sold for $20 Mil (http://mixergy.com/jen-boulden-ideal-bite-interview/)

* Peter Shankman HARO: The Email Newsletter That Grosses $1+ Mil A Year (http://mixergy.com/haro-peter-shankman/)
Top tweeters as followed by HN readers now in FluidDB
Flagged. The headline is terrible. You have no idea of the details behind this, nor do you have any idea whether it was a good or bad business decision.
Silicone Valley = San Fernando Valley

Silicon Valley = Santa Clara Valley
Amen. That's why, when I was seriously dieting, I had a calendar where I would write my weight every day.

Worked much better than the excel spreadsheet I had tried before (the one from the Hacker's diet).
Both firms were funded by and had close ties with Sequoia.

And that's why Google bought YouTube for more than they were worth?
San Francisco Bay Area

iTeleport (http://www.iteleportmobile.com/about-us)

We're building a remote access platform that will enable users to get access to all of the digital stuff they store on their personal computers (their desktop, music, photos, videos, files) from any device.

Check out http://www.iteleportmobile.com/jobs for some projects we've been working on lately.

We're currently profitable and growing. We offer a competitive salary, significant equity and full health benefits.

Send us an email at work@iteleportmobile.com with your resume and a few words on why you think you'd be a great fit here!
Honestly, these authors sound pretty nuts. Take engineering only after liberal arts because "young people today are going to live to be 90"? Really? So we're all going to work until we're 75 and hope that modern medicine is able to wind back the clock of youth and add useful working years, rather than just prevent our aged bodies actually dying? Who's going to pay for 25 straight years of education?

Even after throwing away the obviously mental comments, it's bothersome that they've framed the problem of universities doing public research as:
a) Wrong - Who else is going to do it? Industry?
b) American only - I've been at universities in the UK, US and New Zealand, and it's all the same.

It's not wrong for good scientists to do research, it's reality. Not only that, but America actually has a system that supports teaching colleges: the state and community colleges are almost entirely geared towards teaching. That doesn't exist in the UK and New Zealand, and I'd hazard other places as well.

Universities have always been research-oriented, even Plato's Academy was: "In at least Plato's time, the school did not have any particular doctrine to teach; rather, Plato (and probably other associates of his) posed problems to be studied and solved by the others." [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy

EDIT: Because this interview is just filled with little morsels of insanity, I couldn't resist another good one: "It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously." Read: the faculty are resigned to the fact they're not going to get hired by anyone else because they didn't make the grade, so they're just going to teach rather than bother getting their papers rejected.
While I might not agree with Stallman on a lot of things he is my hero for championing the cause of a computer where you can understand things on most layers of the stack. Comprehensibility of the underlying system is an important side effect of Free as in freedom.
My feeling is that code samples are good. One of the best programmers I recruited for a starup worked @ Wells Fargo and was getting an MBA (undergrad was chemistry). I fought hard for him to get the interview. He ended up getting the job because he nailed the coding exercises.
I live on long island(in NY), and would love an entry-level coding opportunity in the area. Obviously I read HN, and I'm always reading and learning more about technology while dabbling with languages. For example, today I've been writing utility scripts in powershell( http://is.gd/dRJWZ ). I've played with PHP, Android development, Ruby.. heck, even a little security exploitation in assembly. The list goes on. I started by writing in C, and it's fair to say that's the language I'm most comfortable with.

I may not have a Ph.D. in astrophysics like that other guy, but I really do think I could contribute somewhere given the chance.
I almost used a SaaS design from http://themeforest.com

Though I ended up biting the bullet in the end and making my own design.
'Artists want to be original… They don't want to be asked to design "rip-off's" of other people's work. Artists can be easily offended if asked to "improve" upon someone else's work.'

It would be hard for me to hire someone like this. If one wants to work, a client's requirements supplant everything. If one is difficult, one is unlikely to be hired again, and word of it will circulate too.

Her own words sum it up. It's like she prefers to cathartically vent her suppressed contempt for client work via blog posts, replete with egregiously deployed scare quotes rather than make a living.

Vis-à-vis lack of communication with a client, I feel that it is the designer's place as a professional to set communication expectations. Clients are not nearly as familiar with the design process as a professional designer, they are unaware of the creative process, and what is required/expected of them. On the same token, if I'm paying for a designer's services I don't expect to be holding hands all day.
If you enjoy reading about this kind of thing, check out Black Diamond's QC Lab blog, which has lots of interesting posts about climbing gear strength from their head of quality control.

Here's a post on the strengths of three knots commonly used to tie two ropes together: http://www.blackdiamondequipment.com/en-us/journal/climb/qcl...
tiz friday in china
this doesn't seem to work to well on a complex page like http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/29/apple-location/ .
Just to make sure: can the customer download content, not just stream it? Thanks.
Telecommute
We are looking for an online marketer. Typical tasks will focus on writing web site content/landing page optimization, business proposals, blogging, and SEO/SEM work. My contact info is in my profile.
What I Learned When I Fell in Love with Piano Scales
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_on_cryptography has an excellent set of recommendations.
I have to call bullshit. The best professors I had loved to teach, they couldn't be stopped from doing it.

In particular I remember one who, when teaching us a brilliant technique, behaved exactly like a kid on Christmas morning. His enthusiasm made us all remember that class.
No, no need to clarify your position. I understood it the first time, though I wish you'd go back and read what I wrote such that you could at least understand mine. I said that I find the word "troubling" b/c of how racists are using the term & that many newspapers and magazines are avoiding it for the same reason. I didn't write the wiki page or create the controversy, I just pointed it out to you and said I'd avoid it altogether. Apparently that offended you.

I see your argument though and I'm somewhat sympathetic to it. It reminds me of a recent south park where they talked about another word with a lot of controversy around it as it's recent usage is different from it's dictionary definition. I'm all for people using the words they want to use, but I don't think I've done anything wrong by pointing out that ignorant people are mis-using the words to hurt people. And I'm perfectly willing to accept that there are different opinions on this. I think what you don't get is the subtle difference between something troubling me enough for me to find it wise to avoid it and me being offended by it.
Ironically, and I recognize this is more a behavior than product issue - the battery on my kindle is dead almost 100% of the time when I want to use it, but on my iPad, the battery typically has 8-10 hours of reading life on it.

As a result, I do most of my reading on my iPad, even though I prefer, all things equal, to do so on my kindle in the sun. The battery is just never charged _when I want it_.

The difference - I use my kindle for solid, long stretch reading, and may set the kindle down for a few weeks or more, and that stupid wireless always gets turned on sometimes in that interval. (It's better on the K2, but the K1 was horrible) - And I've used the wireless function a grand total of 15 minutes in the two plus years of ownership and 200+ hours of reading. Worst design flaw I've ever seen in a product, where a feature that should be off almost 100% of the time is frequently turned on, wiping out one of the key differentiators of the product - long battery life.

Now that I think of it, I didn't have really that great an experience on battery life on my K1, even without the wireless, and would typically go on a trip with multiple battery packs, and a solar charger. Better than the iPad (obviously), but a week of reading would typically require 3 or so recharges.

K2 has been better - most of a week of casual reading, and I am looking forward to seeing what the graphite will do for me.
When RMS made his decision, BG was just another robber baron. Nobody knew what BG would do with his money back then. It's only in hindsight that we know he became a great philanthropist.

EG, we can't judge RMS's decision then based on what BG later became.
Myself doing a startup