skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I just find it odd that people tread so lightly here, while at the same time I can fairly easily trash a business on Yelp/Craigslist/Angieslist/TechCrunch/Wherever with varying degrees of anonymity.

The difference between Yelp/etc and HN is that on HN you have a very long lasting reputation, not just a throwaway anonymous comment on some article. And then there is the ban hammer to consider, I'm sure that puts the brakes on for some people.

My own HN username is tied very hard to my real life identity, and that goes for a very large number of people here.

re. your edit: Because HR is a minefield from a legal perspective.
There of course would be a period of migration.

Ebay would tell ICANN redirct ebay.com to ebay.co.us indefinitely. And maybe at some point in the future .com is entirely eliminated.
I know multiple trends that address your paradox, and I do not know the relative importance of them.

The first is that the savings rate has dropped significantly. People who do not save can purchase more goods with the same income. (At least in the short term.)

The second is that due to widening income disparities, the ratio in earnings between the median family and the top fifth has increased. Therefore college has not become as proportionately hard to afford for the top fifth as it has for the median.

The third is that the increasing income disparity has come with widespread recognition that a college education is a good way to improve your odds of being in the top fifth rather than the bottom half. This makes education proportionately more valuable. People are willing to spend more on things they value more.

Fourth, the structure of financial aid has changed. It is less often true that students pay the full sticker price for college today than historically. And the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get a break. (Harvard's policy being an extreme example.)

And last but not least, in a very different tangent, income disparity leads to an increased fraction of consumption being accounted for by a small fraction of the population. So changes in total consumption do not necessarily indicate changes in consumption for the median.
Someone reliable said that one of the things happening is that a lot of Sun software engineers had their salaries significantly reduced in the transition. This would suggest that either Oracle plans on having different people work on Solaris (and as you note many of them) or they were lying through their teeth.
I am 100% with you, just on the basis that people aren't that obsessed with slander in general. I can see 1-2 people commenting multiple times in a malicious way, but if there are more than 2, it has to be 4chan. Normal professionals do not have the time to sit on tech crunch all day slandering former coworkers, even if they are scumbags.

With that said, I feel kind of bad for Madhu. Slander, is illegal under U.S. law. If the coward had not been anonymous he could have a court case against him.

Although I am sure he has learned his lesson about not being a flaming dick to people.
After you start to hit many items on that list, though, some people box you in and hear impairment without objective evidence of it. I was seen by a counselor a few times for a witches brew of issues, mostly synonymous with being shy. She gave me the usual battery and picked up on my pervasive disorganization -- loses pencils, check, routinely avoids doing homework, check, not looking intimidating counselor in eye, check. She became convinced, quote, I would have no academic success without addressing my ADD. My mother explained that I had had straight As for my entire life and she wrote that off to "unusually good coping skills for his ADD"

I have one or two friends whose lives were very improved by medication, but the use of this diagnosis to label and crowd control scares me. And once you get it, that is the scarlet A. God bless my mother for keeping it out of my record. Otherwise, every paper I delivered late would have been because I was ADD. Bored in pre algebra because I had already solved systems of equations in two variables? ADD. Prefer reading books to group work? ADD.
Might have something to do with the fact that university donors love to build new buildings instead of just giving the university money to be spent on HR. (And then the university doesn't have a guaranteed funding source for a top professor? Yikes!)

Endowed chairs work a bit better, but those usually don't go towards new recruitment.
It is trivial for a multinational corporation to register company.co.kr and company.co.us. If they don't really want to run separate websites one can redirect to the other.
I really think there is a missing piece of context here.
If you are creating the next social application charging for your application would be counterintuitive since you are banking on the number of users.

On the other hand if you have an application that actually makes money for someone or saves money (in other words translates to direct dollar amount) you might be better off charging as long as your user base perceives the value they get out of your application as more than what they pay for it.

I really think that me-too-free app mentality has to change. Startup founders (especially micro ISVs) need to understand the fact that coming up with a business model is the core of the business not an afterthought.
I generally like "The Algorithm Design Manual" for its high-level overview of algorithms, how they relate to each other, and how to choose them. The "war stories" are fun, too. My copy has been on loan to various colleagues almost continuously for the last couple of years.
s/Profit/Big Brother!/
They're not really counting cars, they do "parking lot fill rate analysis". Much easier to do - you just subtract the percentage of the parking lot that has the same color as the ground.

I see two main issues with this analysis. First, the amount of profit per customer visit is not necessarily constant, and can depend on things such as gas prices (e.g., cheap gas encourages two shopping trips per week, even though the total amount spent on groceries remains the same; expensive gas makes some people take the bus).

Second, is even the amount of visits well estimated? The article mentions things such as 0.7% accuracy in profit estimation. Random fluctuations in the number of car passengers, time of visit etc. (how often are these images taken anyways: once a month, or ten times an hour? the article doesn't mention) can lead to much greater variations than that.
I'm not entirely sure I understand your point. All of these examples were likely designed in PhotoShop (or Gimp) and then realised as PNGs, GIFs or in this case CSS. Beyond that adding a button is pretty simple regardless how you do it; however, how that button is rendered, which is the point, is certainly simpler with an image (and can be made trivial for developers with appropriate use of CSS).
Maybe. But ICANN isn't capturing the value, or is it?
Snapping up domains names to sit on them and resell them at a SIGNIFICANTLY higher price when someone finally wants them is commonly referred to as squatting. It doesn't matter what the official definition is. People will use words as they see fit.
Greece Enters Death Spiral; Some Unemployment Rates of up to 70 Percent
Google ran a Superbowl Ad this year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
This is a perfect example of why you need to be super wary when investing on your own -- the technology, resources, and knowledge in the hands of these big firms is simply unattainable by individuals.
At Small Firms, Job Cuts Run Deep
I agree -- I rarely (few times per week) receive spam to my main inbox.

I used to obfuscate my email address, but realized it doesn't matter. Spammers will get at you no matter what (unused email addresses get spam), and obfuscation just annoys people who would like to contact you. I let GMail do its job.
Except they pretty much disproved the auto-follow stuff ...
It is possible for incomes to have gone down and people to have more stuff. A lot of people have bought their stuff by taking on debt. Incomes over the past 10 years have marginally increased but their debt levels have increased. It seems to me that a lot of people are living a middle class lifestyle without a middle class income.
> Computer gaming was already a high-end, enthusiast market before the whole phone/tablet thing started.

I'm not sure what you mean by "computer gaming" but if you mean graphic intensive games, I don't think that's what Google is aiming at (at least, not as a priority). Google is aiming at social addictive games that millions of normal people (not hardcore gamers) play, such as farmville and co. Google has already bought/invested in 5 social gaming companies and those are doing great on the "computer gaming" market.
The lower boundary on the number of people that hate his guts can be safely pegged at 1.

Now if more than 1 would step forward and do it in a non-anonymous way it would amount to something. Especially since those left at Yahoo have nothing to fear from their bosses in this respect. But maybe Yahoo has a policy about not speaking publicly about ex-employees which extends to current employees, and maybe they're afraid that this guy would sue. He might even have a case.

TC should analyze their logs for that thread and put up a count of the number of IPs tied to known proxies and tor exit nodes and how many of the comments were made from the same IPs. That way they would not reveal any sensitive data but you'd get a much more reliable impression on how much of it is one guy with an axe to grind and how much of it is real.

That goes for both the attackers and the defenders.

Referrers would be nice as well, especially if they came from some 'call to action' somewhere.
Greece is a good example of what happens with an over-reaching government, high taxes, and expensive social programs.

If things continue, the US won't be far behind.
"This mindless Apple/iPhone fanboyism"

And that's not a generalization?

If can't find more than 1 or 2 quality apps, yes, the damn thing is useless. That's its "use". It provides maybe 2, so it's not "useless", but it is "just about useless".
If you need to handcraft graphics for every label the application needs then you are doing it wrong.
Careful, such a device likely has legal implications in many states as it would certainly qualify as a concealed recording device.
Nvidia should team up with Qualcomm to take down the Wintel.
So this wasn't specifically aimed at Kevin - I know Kevin and he's very much the man in demenad. And anything but a douche.

I was more talking from the perspective of 'regular folk' implementing his methods into their own work-stream. What is appropriate for him is not appropriate for the majority.

I know a number of 'normal' folks who also have the "1000+ unread emails in my inbox" issue who are not a Kevin Rose/Scoble/etc... I don't see their excuse.
The big part of this article that raises my skepticism is that it's talking about rat studies without mentioning that there are very many well known, dramatic, and fundamental differences between rat and human metabolisms.
I tried to submit a question and it came back "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down." I am not submitting too fast. I only submitted once. It's not clear to me what the issue is. Please fix this. If it's some sort of Fail Whale then make it clear that that's the issue. If it's something else, please make it clear. What I see is a puzzlement and an error on your side and that just causes me frustration.
Just because you can use a crowbar in the place of a hammer, doesn't mean that you should.

The right tool for the job, and other such anecdotes.
This is probably how it happened: (1) This guy glammer-BS'es his way to the position, based on talking to top managers, who probably aren't very sharp technologically. (2) The TC comments hit the fan, which the execs see (this is interesting, high level managers in my company don't even know TC exists, kudos to Skype in this regard). (3) Execs do due diligence and find that the rumors are indeed true. (4) Guy has to walk out.

This part is not very interesting. What's interesting to me, is how companies like Yahoo nurture such people to VP positions. I now totally believe all the criticisms that PG leveled at them in his essay, e.g. managers being termed "producers", etc. I guess such guys exist in all companies, but their ratio is a strong indicator of the weakness of the company.
Definitely agree, 100% which is why I said it was the first place to go.
Apple gets 30% of all revenue developers generate, so they aren't really competition.

Name one app that has existed on the App Store that Apple banned because they released their own version of it, and charged for it.

I trust that they want me to succeed to they get 30% of a much larger number.
What It's Like To Suddenly See Your Bank Account at Negative $900,000
Pentagon Rebuffs WikiLeaks on Review of War Documents
This is something we're putting thought into. It is not intended to be used without the knowledge and consent of people being recorded. If someone wants to record you without your knowledge it is already trivial. That said we're designing it to be easily identifiable for branding as well as to signal it's dual purpose.
Oh man, I thought greek gods/musicians/composers was a bad setup.
This should be irrelevant. I'm sure Skype didn't force him out just because these comments, they must have found extra information backing the claims. The comments just acted as the initial warning signal.
"Finite" would probably have been a better choice.

I have a micro SD card, smaller than my little-finger nail that holds 4GB - x8 more than the human genome (using the article's figure of 4 billion bits). And that's pretty much the lowest capacity you can buy. Yet, that amount of information is limited/finite: the possible states that that memory can hold is limited/finite.

BTW: I found the absurdist levity in the top 10 comments or so of reddit version of this thread a welcome relief - and also some penetrating insights, concisely put: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d24c8/ray_kurzweil_...
true, I think you'd definitely have to have a lot of controls in place; I mean I in principle agree with it - there are plenty of incredibly sucky, actually nasty, people out there and it turns your stomach to think they'll con their way into another job. Plus the opposite - the great people you'd like to see do really well. It's just trying to avoid abuse/errors, a big responsibility given the potential consequences.
Yes, the Twin Cities have improved for bikers in the last twelve years. The metropolitan area here is one of the most sprawling in the United States, so many people rely on personal automobiles for all of their transportation, but there has been a major effort since you were last here to improve bicycle trails.
Make sure that people in the room where the thing is located are made aware that they are recorded. Unobtrusive smacks of concealed and that's a no-no in many places.

read this:

http://www.fixyourthinking.com/2004/01/recording-phone-call-...

It is really about phone calls, but it has a pretty clear section in the introduction:

"You are NOT permitted to record ANYONE (video or voice) without their specific confirmation and written release that they know they are being recorded at any time, in ANY place (even inside your residence or your business) - unless it is a telephone/cellphone conversation - THEN you must also follow each state's laws regarding such."

Neat idea though!

Edit: I see noonespecial beat me to it :)
It's also contradictory to existing research. They're saying a decrease in dopamine due to high-fat intake is linked to obesity, however high-sugar diets are known to increase dopamine release, which increases the bodies demand for sugars which leads to diabetes and obesity.

If it's a choice between the two then to me it's better to be fat than fat and diabetic.

You're also correct, polyunsaturated fat behaves wholly different than monounsaturated, or saturated, or hydrogenated. Even if they all have some effect, is one less or more dramatic than another?

Finally, is this going to be useful to anyone in planning their diet to control weight or is it just more utter bunk like 'avoid eating carbs'. If I'm avoiding carbs and avoiding fat, I'm left eating ultra-lean-ground-beef and fat-reduced chicken, which means I'm on a ultra-less healthy version of the Atkins.

Perhaps these diet doctors can simply say: Don't be a fat ass, exercise and eat a good mixture of protein, fat and carbs because excluding one is quite probably extremely bad for your health.
Human brains are divided. This creates a meta-contrasting effect. Good, bad. Edible, poisonous. Etc etc. It's a survival technique hardwired into us.
Astronaut Muscles Would Wither by Mars
The bigger screen size is useful. The 7" was, admittedly, a little too small.

However, you're totally right on everything else. If they could offer $200-250 models again, I might even buy one on impulse.

They really need to compete hard and drive the price down; the Kindle, iPad, cell phones and new Android tablets are making the market more competitive.
Exactly. At some point it's about making something real, just to make sure you still got it.
Luck or not, this is another story.
The Prius is not particularly effective.
true. just surprising that "people from skype" started tagging on to the comments on how everyone's leaving and add to the bucket of comments against this guy. I hope the actual story behind this saga comes out in some manner
adding an icon inside a button is far simpler with css buttons, stretching it vertically is obviously miles miles easier with css than with images, email is just a whole other nightmare that I really dont think should even be considered when talking about sane html / css.

I dont understand how you can possibly think generating text inside images to be more readable or semantic, future proof or maintainable.

nor do I understand how you think things creating generating images programatically on the server is easier or nicer than coding up a a .btn class

the cross browser issues might have some possible point, but in reality most people are just going to be copying and pasting from someone else who has worried about these things (I regularly copy and paste the css from gmail buttons)
Supercomputing: There's an App for That
What? How is that the cause of the situation in Greece?
Should the water vapour also be an important part of your cars greenhouse gases?

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Role_of_water_va...)
Yes they fact checked the story about WMD's all right. - http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/
> The comments just acted as the initial warning signal.

I sincerely doubt it. If skype execs would use anonymous commenters on a blog as the input to their HR process they'd have a serious problem.

Assuming it's true the order is more likely that some people came forward and voiced their concern, and now the public makes the link with this article because they have no other knowledge. After all, would you start a fishing expedition against a new hire post-fact if you saw anonymous text of the kind posted in that article?

Personally I'd like something with a bit more substance before digging in.

Either way, substance or not, the guy will have a hard time finding another gig after this. Google doesn't forget, and whoever does a background on this guy at some later date is doing to find an awful lot of smoke, even if there was no fire.
It's somewhat unfair to limelight the situation of a one-industry town (Perama). Greek shipbuilding was probably on its way to China anyways (just like US steel making, and uncounted other industries), and the crisis merely sped up the process.

The article overall seems a bit on the sensationalistic side, full of cherry-picked alarmist anecdotes. I would take it with a decent dose of salt.
> However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.

Do you have a source for this? I am quite amazed that the British drink their bear out of virgin bottles. In Germany re-using bottles is common place.
And if you need a cartoon picture of a panda's anus...well there's an app for that too.
TechCrunch article which is cited in the article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/06/skype-recruits-yahoo-engine...
is it just coincidence that this release was on whyday? http://whyday.org/
I'm sorry but this is shoddy journalism. The article leads with "unemployment has hit an unbelievable 70 percent in some places" but waits 16 more paragraphs before saying the nation wide number is expected to be 12.1% by the end of the year (which incidentally is lower than the state I live in which is California)

The whole article is stuff like that. They go on about the guy who used to work 300 days a year but now can only get 25 or the street where half the shops are closed but gloss over the reality that GDP only dropped 1.5% in the last quarter (2.5% in the last 12 months)

In the end Greece has it a lot better than they could have had it. To me this is like the guy who spent all his money and had to be bailed out by his neighbors complaining that his neighbors aren't doing enough for him.
"Are We Taking CSS Too Far?" I would say yes. I first had thoughts like this when Webkit introduced CSS animations. Something like an animation seems to me to be a behavioural concern rather than one of presentation, and thus belongs in the JS layer.

Pragmatically speaking I don't mind CSS animations as much since they can do things that are non-trivial to pull off convincingly in JS, e.g. 3D transforms. I also understand CSS animations are, or imminently will be GPU accelerated too.
A carbon tax is more free market, because it just puts a price on the externality and lets the market decide how to respond. Cap and trade involves setting a limit by fiat and allocating the initial permits. Some on the left see those attributes as features, because they get to pretend to control total emissions, and help "deserving" companies. In reality I expect cap and trade would be corrupted by rent seekers to a far greater extent than a carbon tax would be.

Economists generally view carbon taxes and cap and trade regimes as equivalent

I agree with Greg Mankiw that cap and trade equals carbon tax plus corporate welfare: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/05/reading-for-pigou-clu...

I think this reflects a belief that raising the gas tax is political suicide and completely impossible.

Could be. From the conservative wonks I read there's a surprising amount of support for a higher gas tax, but you're right that it would be a hard sell to the public, compared to regulations where the costs are much easier to hide.
I do not think they advertised much back in 1998 though. Once you get to be what google is, then sure.

I do not think twitter advertises much either. So, build it and they will come works sometimes when the product is great, but sure with advertising it works even more.
The different model numbers has put me off from purchasing a product as there is no clear way for me to figure out which one has higher specs, not only that but based on just the model number I can't tell the difference apart.
Your comment reminded me of this op-ed (also NYT, 2005): http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/opinion/01kristof.html?_r=...
If you want to improve a netbook try this:
http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKPQ...

You can now buy the Pixel Qi (read: replacement for e-ink that does colour and video) screen and put it in a number of netbooks yourself.

Perhaps Asus are looking at making their own official models with it in there?