skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working for you? Not working for me yet. Leo 10.5 might be the cause? I'm in Europe, the site seems a bit sluggish to reload. I wonder if they manage to pull it off, Google IO had quite a few drop-outs.
Is this organization associated with YCombinator? Based on the use of the orange color and the H logo, it feels from a brand perspective like it is.
"Streaming video requires Safari 4 or 5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Safari on iOS 3 or later."

Cheers Apple, I'm running Windows XP !
Capitalism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Anarchism, Conservatism, etc... these labels are now so confused and bereft of concrete meaning that their use is largely counterproductive.

If you want to say something political, say it, don't stick a label on your forehead.
I don't know if the "boot at the end" thing is standard even in Europe. Many places simply stop giving you money and your advisor won't be able to help you as much, but you're free to hang around until you're done. My girlfriend for example recently finished her PhD (on time), and there where a couple of PhD students hanging around her department who had been there for close to a decade.
But despite some of his terms, he's not advocating his views on the level of an entire society. Just at the scale of a single collective or company. He seems fine with the idea of this collective competing and winning within a Capitalist framework, which seems antithetical to much of the article you linked.
What legal issues/other issues from uploading your code to GitHub are you worried about?

I can't imagine that GitHub would steal your code. They've never heard of you, they have no reason to believe your code is worth anything to them, and one "I have pretty damn good evidence that GitHub stole my code" could ruin their entire business.

You mentioned legal issues. Are you afraid someone's going to ... subpoena your code or something? Because if that happens, you'd have to turn it over anyway.

They've got some pretty intense-looking security[1], and people like Twitter trust them with their code[2]. If they aren't worried, why are you?

1: http://help.github.com/security/

2: I don't know that that's officially known, but I saw Twitter commenting on the "GitHub now has Organizations" post complaining about the lack of the cheaper plan that they added the next day. So they definitely have some private repos on GitHub.
A Couple of URLS to try

http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/sl.m3u8 (try this in Windows Quicktime?)

and

http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/sep/1009qpeijrfn/1009oiub...

I can't tell if they work or not but those are in the source of the page.
The livestream has only buffered for me once. Other than that it's been flawless. Very impressive.
Regardless, when I purchase a textbook I am buying the right to copy and redistribute that textbook after X date. By future-dating the work the publisher is taking away something that I have paid for, which seems like it shouldn't be legal.
Sounds a bit like this: http://www.thetake.org/
One of the beliefs I share with many (though certainly not all) of the regulars on HN is that upmods should be given based on the merit of comment as measured by it contribution to the discussion.

So, you're saying that the currency of upmods should be distributed based on the value of what was produced, rather than the time and effort (or, "amount of labour") it took to produce it? ;)
The much more self-serving reason to spend time learning about activities outside of your specialty: applying techniques of your discipline to another discipline is a great way to crank out some easy papers for the second discipline's journals. There's some good work waiting to be done applying dynamic code generation to graphics, artificial intelligence, or probably some other fields. This sort of work probably wouldn't cut it in a systems journal, but would probably excite some people in the respective target groups.
I've looked at this project before, it looks like a nice implementation of rsync with inotify, but it seems to be just for a typical use case for rsync, ie, push your local changes to a remote host.

I think if you try to use this like a real dropbox, ie changes occurring on multiple hosts at or around the same time you are going to run in to issues. Also does lysnc handle deleting data on the remote end and propagting those changes out (rsync --del). Also I'm wondering how it will handle conflicts and open files (which it says isn't recommended). I see the .dropbox dir using some type of uuid's or sha1 sigs so I'm sure its doing something more sophisticated to keep things in sync. I've noticed my daemon has died on my linux box every once in a while, and it somehow tracks multiple changes from multiple hosts and replays those transactions correctly and everything rolls up fine.
Thanks for the reply pg! We are based in Australia and are putting together an application for the next round of YC. Hopefully we'll join the YC community and broaden its global presence!
It's true. I don't claim to speak for raganwald. And I myself am much closer to he than to the article. Not everyone's beliefs are black and white... there are plenty of people that support, for example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act yet still call themselves 'capitalists.'
> The nature of software development, and other similar knowledge economy industries, naturally demand a more collaborative & collegiate approach to getting things done, but they are all fundamentally driven by market forces & constraints such as funding & sales.

You have heard of this open source thing, right? I don't think that you can argue that the open source ethos has anything to do with capitalism. In fact, I would say that Stallman's views on software are pretty overtly communist, as they contest the very concept of private ownership of a piece of software.
When thinking about ScottWhigham's last point, it occurred to me that telling many of the people at small software companies that "I tried my hand at management and while I'm not bad at it (or whatever) I've realized I prefer development." (And probably add some of the reasons.)

Of course one danger is that you will end up doing some management, if for no other reason than there being no one better suited. That said, that sort of reluctant manager is not likely to have some of the worse pathologies we see in all too many managers.
Broadly speaking, in American politics today the term is used to imply the increased scope, reach, and size of government, inevitably followed by an increase in taxes, It's not a textbook definition of socialism, but it boils down an aversion to the state controlling an increasing percentage of our personal wealth.
Lawyers are scum, but sometimes they are useful, even if by accident or as a side-effect :)
Scalable ACID
So this is basically another take on http://visualnoveldai.com/
I've had this nacent idea percilating in my mind that in our lifetime we are going to see the (economic) separation of American industry from the American homeland. If we look at it from a nationalistic perspective (ie America versus the world) then yes, America has much to lose if it cant get it's shit together and thus has to resort to protectionism (which ultimately will fail). If we look at it from the corporate perspective, American companies have everything to gain from continued globalization, assuming they have free access to these markets. What's the big deal of Intel engineers in California design chips manufactured by Intel engineers in Vietnam? At the end of the day this is still Intel.

We see this phenomenon playing out more dramatically as many of America's leading firms (in Finance, Energy, Tech) are pulling in tremendous amounts of money while the Nation is engaging in historic trade deficits. Long term, this has fairly dangerous implications because the interests of your nation should coincide with the long term interests of its corporations. When this fails, I can see some of these super multi-jurisdictional firms making a case for why they should no longer be "American" corporations. Coming from the Finance industry, there really is no reason why I have to be in NYC to do what i do. I could do it in Hong Kong where there is 15% income tax or Dubai where I hear it's even less. In that case, I win, America loses.

These are dark times...
Unfortunately, I think it's pretty easy to overlook that it's not the idiosyncratic mismatch, but more that some mentors never should be and some just aren't ready. The system does not distinguish between the two so it's up to students to pass the word among themselves. If you've had a good experience with your mentor, when students fail with other mentors it seems like a mismatch. But in those cases, the faculty are more at fault than the student. They have the balance of power in the relationship.

For established mentors - Full or Associate Professors - if they aren't actively graduating students, there's something wrong. If they have current students who are taking, on average, 7 to 8 years, there's something wrong. If you want a tenure track position and this established mentor doesn't have a record of placing their students in those positions, there's something wrong. The concept of lineage really does help. Great mentors really do seem to birth new ones. If a particular mentor has a limited lineage, look elsewhere.

Otherwise, I actively consul folks to stay clear of nontenured faculty as primary mentors. As I indicate above, those folks have pressing priorities elsewhere. If you like someone who fits in that category, get a more senior mentor as your primary and add the younger one to your committee. Just make sure the primary is truly signing off on everything. The politics are always there, especially with a nontenured trying to prove themselves, but they are manageable with some savvy. The point is: Stay clear of the nontenured without a safety net. Not only are they distracted, but they have no standing to advocate and defend you, if necessary. You're easily expendable when the choice is you or their career.

Basically, mentors can be classified based on where they sit in the career trajectory and their history. If they don't have a clear and steady record of graduating students, then don't expect you'll be different.
No, on second thought, I think I'd rather the overkill of the iPad app over a webapp. It leaves some very interesting development doors open for the future, and has a consistent interface like a book.
The trouble with arguing about "Purely X" for any value of X is that there are no practical examples of X for us to examine. I don't have an option of living in a purely capitalistic society. Canada is somewhat democratically socialist, but not purely socialist. There are small scale startups, bu t I am not aware of any gazillion person corporations where everyone is paid for what they really contribute. Even when bonus is a major component of someone's monetary compensation, the highest rewards go to those who game the system.

In the end, arguing Capitalism vs. Socialism tends to devolve into the No True Scotsman fallacy: "Socialism sucks because you die of old age before getting an MRI." "Oh, I got one for my knee." "Well, Ontario isn't a TRUE Socialist society."

And: "Capitalism sucks because if a corporation succeeds in exploiting people, it makes money. But if it fails, they go to congress and rob the people through taxes of their money, e.g. the Wall Street bail-out." "That was not TRUE capitalism at work, that doesn't count!"
Scuba diving. Weightlifting. Snowboarding. Offshore sailing.

Programming pays for it all :-)
Nonsense. The students are hopeless and she has no power to help or harm them. Hence, her students perform exactly as well as they are expected to and her VA score is 0 (average). That's the beauty of VAM.

If student sensitivity is measured as well, she will simply be branded as "inadequate information to evaluate performance". If you are concerned that she might be really unlucky and get a class full of people worse than their statistical predictor, that's what confidence intervals are for.

As for barriers to entry and imperfect information, VAM also doesn't provide green energy or solve P=NP. All it does is improve incentives and give administrators a better measure of teacher performance.
It's a media thing:

socialism -> bad

capitalism -> good

So any kind of social behaviour is labeled socialism, whether it is a health care plan (how could universal health care ever be construed as a bad thing?) or pensions are leftwing and socialist, therefore bad.

You are asking people to pause and think, good luck with that, even here on HN where the level is way above the rest of the net as soon as politics are mentioned the various polarizing arguments get polished up and recycled as though they were somehow new.

I think it is as much a remnant of the cold war as it is a lack of information and education.
"That isn't socialism, but boy does it feel like workers being more efficient when they seize the means of production—the compiler—rather than being coerced or exploited."

How are workers being "exploited" just based on the fact that they working for someone else? We all have choices in this world. If you feel you aren't getting paid enough, leave.

"They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential."

If I have more money than you, it instantly makes our opportunities "unequal". This is the problem with socialism. It creates "equality" by limiting everyone's success. This works well for people that aren't interested in succeeding. I think of it like those group projects in school where 2 people of 5 would get stuck doing all the work, while the rest took the same amount of credit.

"I have no idea if the folks laid off from auto-makers want to do that, but I do know that I and many of the programmers I know seem happy with the idea of working in small teams in a collaborative and egalitarian manner"

I see people talking about this every couple of years. If you really want to start something like this, don't talk about it, do it. Many people in history have tried exactly what you are proposing and this crazy thing called human nature gets in the way every time.

The idea of a group owned collaborative sounds great on paper, until you actually attempt to do it. Who decides how much each person gets paid? If it's based on performance, what kind of performance? How many widgets or made?

You mentioned a "co-operative workers' councils". How is this any different than a president/ceo of the company? These "councils" will have more power over the regular workers, so it doesn't really make everyone "equal".

I've worked at a few companies that were run by committee. Even small decisions were very painful to make.
If the US does resort to protectionism, it would put at stake the massive revenues that american companies are getting from foreign markets. For many of the top American companies, the foreign markets are the fastest growing markets and in many, they have started being more than 50% of revenues.

I don't understand how one comes to this conclusion. One only needs to look to our debt to China on federal bonds to see that the revenue is not flowing inward rather it is flowing outward. The fortune 500 mentioned do not "bring that money home" because they are now multi-national corporations that have no loyalty to "home" because they don't have one. Home for the moment is the best tax haven.

Simply put what Andy is proposing is that if you profess to be an American corp than act like it.

There is nothing wrong with muti-national corps. But we should be rewarding the American ones that take care of Americas not because of nationalistic pride but rather because like it or not, we are in the boat together and for better or worse at a certain level your interest are my interest. We should be rewarding the ones that row the boat together at every level. Naturaly when you go upward we are in the boat together with all humanity but you have to protect the small boats from the wake of the big ones because sinking one to float another does nothing to bring everyone up.

So at that level, I am all for my boat that my forefathers floated and that I worked all my life to float not be submerged to float someone else boat. It is not fair, we should be lifting everyone up but not at the expense of others.

I am all for rewarding companies that pay homage to the boat that floated them and allowed them to set sail to new waters. We can lift others up without dragging ourselves down. But it starts with sane limits. Something the "haves" call protectionism. "Greed is good" has failed, it has dragged us to hell in a hand basket.

Do you think we are better off now than we where in the 50's when a single income could provide a better standard of living that most make today with two incomes and government assistance.

We look a lot like the USSR right before the wall came down. Massive state assistance, huge social programs, job growth coming from the state sector and a broken manufacturing base. We really pissed it away.
Yes it will deter people from signing up. On the other hand it allows you to run a 'you must cancel' trial rather than one where they have to take an action to continue using.
After BlackBerry, India now wants access to Google, Skype, VPN data
Seen this here already, it sucks, it's a bad joke.
"Anyone on the East Coast thinking of applying to YC should feel free to ask him any questions they have about YC or the application process."

How? Is there an email address?

Hopefully the answer isn't obvious and I've missed it.
True, which proves that coders are lazy, and don't like typing a lot.
Narrow? No, is broad. It applies to every socialism in existence, planning and managing others resources, not your own.

A private socialism is not a socialism at all, because you need a society to comply.

Maybe you could give me a better definition.
I know economists still have soft spots in their hearts for Smith and Ricardo, but how, in 2010, could anyone honestly cite comparative advantage in support of free trade when the markets for land, labor, and capital have gone global? No nation has an inherent advantage over any other in producing a particular good or service. The idea that we should specialize in producing what we're best at producing and trade for everything else makes less sense in a world where raw materials can be mined in Africa, refined in India, and assembled into a finished product by workers in China to be sold abroad at a 98% markup by a multinational corporation. All too often the primary "comparative advantage" other nations have over us is their lax labor and environmental regulation. And even if we were to follow the tenets of free trade and specialize in what we're best at, what, again, would that be? Economists told us that high-tech jobs would replace the outgoing manufacturing ones. What will replace the high-tech jobs?

I also thought it was amusing to see Tyler suggest that we could learn something from those countries
in East Asia eating our lunch. Apparently he is unaware that those countries all have neomercantilist systems that favor exports over imports, encourage personal saving, and discourage consumption.

As for the original article, the claim that no nation ever got rich by engaging in protectionism is ridiculous. The US pursued a protectionist trade policy from its inception (The American System) up until Smoot-Hawley and even then continued to and still continues to in certain sectors (see the US Sugar Program as a prime example). Great Britain became the most powerful empire on Earth while engaging in protectionism, starting with the infamous Navigation Acts. This is not to say that America and Britain became prosperous because of protectionism, only that it is not as absolutely fatal to an economy as some suggest. Thriving European countries today engage in protectionism against us by putting a VAT on American exports.

Lastly, though this post may have seemed like a defense of protectionism, it isn't. The problem with protectionism is that its antonym is not "free trade" but "free markets." Doctors, lawyers, dentists, and many other white collar professionals enjoy immense economic protection in our system. Rather than adding even more, on behalf of engineers, why not reduce the protection of other professions? If people stopped seeing society throw engineers to the wolves of the market while guaranteeing doctors, lawyers and others comfortable, upper-middle class lifestyles, more people might go into engineering.
Not working on Leopard 10.5 either
You have to have backups on server anyway. And setting offsite backups to amazon s3 is like 30 mins of work and may be $1 per month in s3 costs. and this will backup not only your git repositories, but the whole server.
I don't think we really disagree here. Yes, you need to be smart and realistic about your capabilities. My Feynman et al. example wasn't advice for students, it was a refutation of the idea that theses aren't particularly important or indicative of future success (which is what you imply with the Einstein example).

Edit: "OP" --> "you". Sorry, I didn't realize I was talking with the author. Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Productivity tips, tricks and hacks for academics (and others)
I don't plan on ditching Dropbox, but I'm definitely interested in having a similar sort of automatic backup with diffs that I can host myself. This looks like it might be an option.

Does anyone else handle this in a different way?
yep. However no suction is necessary like in western toilets and everything works perfectly just with gravity. Thus, the squat ones do save lot of water, 1 ltr is sufficient for flush. Of course, the plumbing particularly the inclination & depth of column below, has to be done right.
> But, you raise an interesting question: if Ph.D. students aren't going to challenge the hard problems, then who will?

Tenured professors. Because they certainly aren't wasting their time teaching.
All of the data centers I have worked in or have visited have had a KVM in each rack or cluster of racks. Many servers even come with a IP based KVM built into them ...HP does this for sure. It is a good idea but I think there are other products or methods that would reduce your target market.
Really? The onus here is on you to show there is a case for hours or lines of code to set pay, not the value of the end product. Go on, link me to some comments of people advocating that. Or you will have to accept that this really is a common belief.
Neal Stephenson has been thinking about similar things for a while... as a matter of fact he launched a wiki for the Baroque Cycle that sort of went nowhere.

Like one of the earlier commentors, I'm not much for anything involving tweets and earning badges, but I think Neal is experimenting around in important unmet need:

Fans want to interact with their favorite authors. For a variety of reasons (eats up all your time, fan are boring and repetitive, authors are sometimes solitary introverts, etc.), authors don't have a (profitable, enjoyable) model of how to have these interactions. Fans create their own fan sites (including fanfic), but the interaction with the author and the monetization aren't there. So a new model is called for. This is an experiment toward finding this new model.

(Chuck Palahniuk is also experimenting in this direction in interesting ways with writing workshops.)