skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may be mistaken...but a "sounding board" doesn't seem like a great role in a company. If he's not technical, not a designer, not marketing, not providing cash...what's he really going to be doing?

Towards the end of your post you say he'll be managing employees, yet it sounds like you don't have any, and he doesn't have any experience managing staff anyway. Managing people isn't something that you just pick up on the job.

To be honest, it sounds like you're looking to get a mate involved...just because he's your mate. Don't get me wrong, that CAN work (my co-founder is a friend, but he's also the designer "ying" to my developer "yang"). I'd just be concerned that your mate doesn't appear to have any relevant skills to your business beyond being good with money a being good listener. These may be important things in the long run, but when you're trying to get a product to market, you need your co-founder doing everything that you can't.

I don't mean to be an alarmist, and I may be making some incorrect assumptions...but I wouldn't be offering any equity to someone who isn't going to CREATE equity.
Live long enough, and everything comes around.

There may have been little reason for HTML to exist - dozens of "document standards" existed at the time, yes including links, anchor points etc.
Remember this? https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

It's important
Even this may become obsolete. Even management may become automated. Ever try to argue with an automated phone support system? Eventually our boss may be one of those.
You know, if you wanted to implement a Canon Cat, you could probably do it pretty easily and on a reasonable budget with a modern 16-bit or 32-bit microcontroller, an SRAM chip, an SD card, an LCD, the keyboard of your choice, and Lua instead of Forth. Or you could hack up Emacs or something to support LEAP keys and whatnot (maybe you can relabel the Windows key on your keyboard), although that wouldn't give you the instant-turn-on ability. Most of the detailed specs were available on the web for a while under the name "The Humane Environment".
> methodology has all the rigor of reading chicken bones and goat entrails

SEO is supposed to be about the natural movement of the website by throwing things into the soup to make it taste better and as such move up in an organic fashion. The proof is in tracking the keywords or phrases you are hoping that will move up... I have been using AuthorityLabs.com for about a month now to track rankings and it has been working pretty well. It is a service worth paying for.
For those who didn't know

"black box" reverse engineering - systems are observed without examining internal structure.

"white box" reverse engineering - the inner workings of the system are inspected.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188

http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/
I am not entering a contest to determine which one is worse, but, as far as dictators go, Pinochet was a very, very bad one.

IIRC, he was responsible for the death of about 3000 dissidents and the imprisonment and torture of 10 times as many.
It's even easier to do all of this to yourself.
Drivers are IP. When a company goes tits that usually the last asset to be sold.
And thus ends yet another well-orchestrated publicity stunt.
Planet Wars: Common Lisp Starter Package (Google AI Challenge)
Duct tape works too.
I don't get it. He starts bashing ePub and then states that HTML5 is the solution. Does he not realize that ePub is just normal XHTML, which can use HTML5 features in supporting rendering engines? ePub is a perfectly decent e-book format.
It is very difficult to develop your own philosophy from scratch, which is what it took back then to come to correct conclusions. In fact, doing this took nothing less than a genius in the field, and these are very rare.
There's about a day left on the js1k competition deadline, so there's still time to knock an entry together :D
Thats exactly what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't clear. I was trying to say that we are leaning toward government protection over personal freedoms. So, yes I agree.
I am no lawyer, but along the lines of your question: by asserting editorial control of the pages they host, is Rackspace abandoning the safe-harbor protections of the DMCA?
Sorry you're wrong. Back in the day the tables had hundreds not thousands of elements. This was part of a code review. You're too grouchy.
Alan Kay & Danny Hillis discuss cloud computing (1994)
The advice is great on both fronts wish I read it about 10 years ago. Really bad work places and a really bad relationship, it works even better when you're doing both at the same time. Lesson learned, you can't save the world, shitty people and shitty companies will always be so, the key is to move on and surround yourself with great people both in business and in life.

It's really the same effect in both cases, they always threaten to fire you / leave and when you say OK, they beg you to stay. The crazy part is how effective it really is. I think the article really best describes sociopathic behavior. At least it only really takes about a year to recover from it all.

http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
I think the most important part of that kind of education would be to awaken the masses to the fact that they're being manipulated every single day by everything around them, whether someone has constructed the manipulation on purpose or not.

I'm a grad student in English lit at the University of Arizona, and based on my experience teaching freshmen comp and listening to various other teachers and so on, I'd guess that the world is not particularly interested in being awoken, never has been, and probably will never will be.

A small segment, yes, but definitely not "the masses."

* If we weren't so poorly (on purpose) educated on rhetoric and debate,*

I think this is highly improbable: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance, incompetence, and randomness.
He _should_ change his name to "Rank." ;)
That's a good idea, thanks. We'll add something along those lines...
If you're like me and a fat sysadmin, I'd recommend moving somewhere with a pool, and forcing yourself to swim 2 hours every morning. It does wonders for your productivity, body, and personal life
Talk to HACU about their HNIP program - that's http://hacu.net/ and http://hnip.net/

I interned in Seattle via that program with the US Forest Service - speaking as an intern, they provided a good helping hand (set up my housing, took rent out of my paychecks).

Although most interns will be Hispanic, not all are (like me). About half or so come from Puerto Rico. I was generally impressed with most interns I met.

During my internship, I was able to write a useful program (a front end in Python for a framework written in Python to help automate running multiple instances with different settings), as well as work on web pages (in PHP). It was an excellent chance for me to get to do work I wouldn't have gotten otherwise (I'm 35 and have plenty of tech experience, but I'm back in college working on a Computer Science degree, looking to break into programming).

I think the nice thing about HACU is that they have experience in finding good students and helping take care of the administrivia.

While we're on topic - what are the chances you work with Python and/or PHP? ;-)
You are aware that book-burning is mentioned in the Bible?

Acts 19:19 "A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas." (NIV translation)
I haven't finished listening to the full podcast yet, but I think one of the most interesting things about this interview is that it shows aggressive behavior in a woman is very well received among many VCs.

A lot of the discussions about women in the workplace (tech and otherwise) have shown that women who make demands aren't taken as seriously as aggressive, blunt men since it goes against people's beliefs about what a woman should be.

(http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/12/can_nice_girls_negotiate.htm...)

What we have here is a female entrepreneur who raised funds without mincing words. It's pretty inspiring.
Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.
Apple's App Store Guidelines Don't Change Anything
Stop making horseshit, start building something fun. It's possible. It's just a little bit harder.

For what it's worth, that's exactly what I'm planning on doing :)
What are some outlets that technically-skilled people can partake in to get experience in the "persuasion coursework" he describes? I'm a CS undergrad and dabble in probably half of his list in my downtime, but would like to get more experience with sales, economics, and general persuasiveness. Dabbling in groups like Toastmasters comes to mind, but what are some others?
so you don't have a backup of any of your data?
I totally agree, I find it very condescending, and I'm not in what one generally considers flyover country.

I'm in Seattle, I guess you would fly over here if you were going from Boise, ID to Forks, WA.
It reads as if my ex girlfriend wrote it, every single bit. :) I consider me lucky to be here being able to write this.
Well I guess I won't be doing anymore business with Rackspace, since their idiot executives who cleared this decision clearly do not respect the rights given by the American constitution, nor understand the point of net neutrality, nor any of the rights they themselves benefit from as a common carrier. It's tragic that the FCC does not have the authority nor the clear legislative framework to prosecute violations of net neutrality.

This is absolutely outrageous coming from one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. They are supposed to lead by example here. Rackspace has no business censoring any of their customers content just because the don't like what it says, and are scared others won't like it. And who the fuck cares about their TOS/AUS—more than half of it goes well outside the boundaries of what any court would allow to be legally binding. If I put in my TOS that "I can revoke your account anytime because I don't like you", I cannot legally get away with it. At least in circumstances and for business contracts that matter—perhaps not web hosting.

No laws were broken. No law enforcement or court orders were submitted requesting the site be taken offline. Rackspace pulled the plug just because they didn't like their customer's content and feared backlash by association.

The entire reason this matters is because it leads to a slippery slope that becomes the exact opposite of the Constitutional principles upon which America was founded. Where does the slippery slope stop? Can the electric company shut off this pastor's account because they don't want to be known as "his electricity provider"? Can his bank cancel his home loan too? Why stop there—can every entity he does business with in the public market do likewise, and turn this man into a true outcast and force him to live off the grid? Is that what the American constitution says can happen with freedom of speech? No, it doesn't.

First they came for the religious holy book burners, next they came for..., then they came for me etc, etc.

So the line must be drawn somewhere, and online public speech is a pretty damned good and early enough spot to draw it.
Bede's was not a history of a homogeneous socio-political people, and Arthur, if he was any kind of early mediaeval king, was certainly not King of all Britain. The island was politically fragmented. Record keeping was poor. The very exceptionality of Bede's history would be one reason for its incompleteness. And wikipedia, at the time, was notoriously unreliable.
Still, everyone is at least entitled to an advanced notice from their host that they're getting shut down, to avoid any downtime.

In this case, it seemed like keeping the website offline was Rackspace's goal, not "refusing service", which is very lame.
Ok, I read too much into your comment, so I apologize for the "selfish" remark.

I've composed a few half-responses, but I'm wrestling with what I'm trying to articulate.

I think what it comes down to is that the issues you cite will never be fully fixed. Second, but more importantly, the amount of money required to support cultural projects is tiny compared to, say, infrastructure upgrades.

So, I object to the idea that we can't do any of that (with tax dollars) until these other things are done. In reality, if we adopt that attitude, it'll be too easy for fear-mongers to kill any cultural project.

There is the thorny issue of the government using tax dollars to fund art work that I hate, or that offends me, but one of the cultural goods I value is a tolerance of that. I.e. I don't like that, but I'm glad to live in a society that could produce it, alongside the stuff I do like.
Sounds more like an advisor than a cofounder. I'd look into typical advisor compensation and go at it from that angle.
Kind of deceptive because it shows months of improvements in Firefox against a current snapshot of other browsers. If you looked at the trajectory of other browsers, you'd see that they too are getting faster and more performant in JS, which means that Firefox is not catching up as fast as the impression this article gives.
It's classic second-mover advantage business. Not only do you know what works and what doesn't, you get the benefits that the technology is cheaper and easier and better now than it was years ago.

I've often thought of all of the slow-moving entrenched companies that could just have everything taken out from under them by a good hungry team using modern tools and techniques. As long as you're not actively producing new legacy code, you should be able to catch up in terms of product sophistication pretty quickly.

That's not to say one could build FarmVille in a regular weekend, it would have to be a 3-day weekend.
To be partially responsible for something, there must be something one could have done that may have prevented it. Please tell me as an American, what I could have done that could have possibly prevented the Iraq war. I'm not asking for monumental results, but at least what would have withdrawn my alleged contribution to the war?

I did read the article, and all of its prescriptions presume that the Greek people are indebted to their government. Is it not possible that the informal economy grows, the government goes bankrupt, but the society (held together by local structures) continues on?
Should PZ Meyers's hosting provider have pulled his site for desecrating a communion wafer? (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/the_great_desecra...)
The response on this thread shows just how hypocritical people are. If they had yanked a Planned Parenthood site (there have been numerous cases of violence regarding abortion), or a site promoting being gay (there are plenty of examples of violence against gays), HN would be condemning them. But because they are yanking a site that people on HN disagree with, not a peep.
Yes, what they did was perfectly legal. That does not make it right.
Not sure about that. Bing has far less traffic, scaling should actually be easier for them. And Microsoft certainly has resources.
Couldn't you just list all the countries you support in the app description?
I guess it comes down to how you think about it...

For example: I use a variety of synonyms and phrase combinations when writing copy not to trick SE's but to help people who are searching realize that my content will answer their question or solve their problem.

At the end of the day, I truly believe that it is about content. If I create, distribute, optimize (etc), the best content, that has a huge positive effect. People recommend my content, trust that I'm a valuable source, etc. All things that are important in our new social internet.

About.com, Mahalo, etc rely on the lowest common denominator of content and spreading as much as quickly as they can. It's working right now, but I'm quite confidant that won't work for long.
The value in Zynga is that it beat those 300 other companies.

That's Zynga's value to Zynga. Not Zynga's value to anyone else.
Yes the worst 'offenders' are the Boy Scouts, Army, Veterans associations and Fire Depts.

See USCODE Section 175(k), Chapter 1, Title 4
No, he is not given the same respect as Muhammad. If he were, Muslims would be grossly offended by the images of Jesus in every church and Christian store in the world, like they are when images of Muhammad are drawn.
Or the CIA, explaining how to prevent a political revolution.
My issue is I almost always search from the address bar of chrome, or the search box of any other browser, so I never see the "instant" effect. I can't remember the last time I actually went to google.com except when linked to see a cool logo design.
There's also a lot of python-specific new developer knowledge out there, like the python version of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/).
Disclosure: I'm one of the people listed in the ranking factors report, I've known Rand for many years and I'm an occasional speaker at industry events (I decided to take a couple of years off, am returning 2011).

That said, the SEOmoz guides and resources are awesome, as well as the community in general. Ditto SEObook, and the vast wealth of knowledge in the community at large. I'd say start with SEOmoz, and then if you've got any questions, feel free to ping me an email. I'm not hard to find around the web, and I spend time each week offering advice free of charge to people getting in to the industry. It's my way of paying back those who helped me, many years ago.
>but turns into a feel-good hippie tract about love being nice towards the end

Only in the Sequel, and sequels are never as good as the original (except the Godfather).

Nice to know that their God speaks C16 English as well.
Scott McNeally was the funny one.

I would love if he decided to start a company solely dedicated to making fun of Microsoft.
Nitpick: Nitpicking the historical accuracy of a reference to a '50s musical is a little nitpickier than average. (Next you're going to tell me the Jellicle Cats aren't really coming out tonight…!)

But yes, point taken. :)
> but carriers in other countries even built out new GSM networks just for the iPhone

Most of the world was already GSM well before the iPhone. I am not aware of a carrier that decided they should build a GSM network for a handset.
I could give you more case studies than I can shake a stick at. Ditto the guys at SEOmoz, Distilled, Bronco, Ayima, SEO Gadget, Verve, Outspoken Media...

Disclosure: I know most of the guys at those companies. That aside, their work and expertise speaks for itself.
This sounds too much like life in academia as a post-graduate student. It hit too close to home... too close.
"Cheerleaders Gone Wild" Clickjacking Scam Targets Facebook Users
I found it interesting that the pundits on NPR are claiming that this change may be intended to blunt competition from Android by keeping developers on iOS, as well as suggesting that this change may have been in response to FTC concerns. I love how one can view both closing and opening the license as hurting the competition. Doublethink is alive and well.
Microsoft Live Labs is kind of doing this with Volta.
Yay for ReviewBoard!
I think it's because they're risk averse and afraid to fail, and think they're saving face by eliminating themselves privately instead of being rejected publicly.
Disclosure: I've known Rand a fair while and have used the tools a lot.

They're the only paid toolset that I use (for SEO). That's about as good a recommendation as I can give.

That said, if you're not running a fairly serious site, I'd give it a miss. It's not a toolset for just playing around with (hence the price).
But a lot less ability!
This is so good.

I'm sure if you just push yourself a little harder you can get past this current crisis and everything will be ok.
You seem to have figured this out already: A new product is probably the easiest for them (because there's less ramp-up learning your code) and for you (because you don't have to deal with their crap code if you don't want to). Similar to this would be a simple orthogonal feature loosely coupled with your own code.

First, sit down and define what sort of new product/feature you want, and determine how long it should take. Then hire enough interns that it'll get done within the time frame you need, and be generous. If it goes well, you'll have that many people you can easily hire later who won't need as much training, plus a new product on the side. If you don't hire enough people, you're just wasting everyone's time, because they'll be too frustrated and lost to do well, they won't want to come back, you won't want them back, and you won't even get that new feature you want.

Career centers are good, as are online communities like github and hacker news. Of course, they're only an option if you can pay well enough to have people travel to you, or are willing to consider remote work (this usually is very difficult, try not to need it).
Or canvas substitute. SVG/VML is the technology that actually augments HTML documents. Canvas is just super-slow Flash/Silverlight-like pixel renderer, a “box on a page”, as you said.
I wouldn't consider uploading a photo trivial yet.
The internet that Google doesn't search is almost always not the internet you want to find. :)
I'm impressed that Apple has maintained such consistency across the desktop/mobile operating systems. That is an interesting advantage of iOS that I pretty rarely see mentioned. Thanks for your thoughts.
I did find that until very recently, spectrum rights were non-transferable. And they are still single use; a central planning commission decides which parts of the spectrum will be used for which purposes, and the owners of the spectrum aren't allowed to deviate from this. The central planning commission has a long history of snubbing new uses of the spectrum in response to lobbying from existing companies (ex. TV companies used the FCC to torment FM radio startups in the 40s, pushing back its adoption).
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft when someone said - 'That's weird, have you tried google today?'

I assume some of the ajaxy Google logos have been leading up to this - especially the one that coloured in the letters as you typed.
I would still love to get a good layman’s explanation of how Google and other search engines can be so fast. I’m not a developer but I know a few basic concepts. Sorting makes searching fast – but that fast?

I can imagine that if I’m searching for “ball” Google already has the PageRank sorted results somewhere on its servers. That seems easy enough. But what about arbitrary search terms? Searching for “tango durlast 1978” (a soccer ball) gives me results just as fast, does Google have all of that pre-computed somewhere?

If they did that (to pick an arbitrary number) for search terms up to 100 characters (say all 26 letters, ten digits and space) that would mean that they would have to have something like 37^100=6.6e+156 pre-computed lists of results somewhere on their servers.

That can’t be what they are doing. If they were to use only one byte per possible search term (to pick another arbitrary and completely ridiculous number) they would still need to store 6.6e+144 terabyte. Which seems kinda impossible.
Our company is exactly at this point right now where we are looking to raise an angle round and this is a super useful pod-cast. Fundraising info starts around 25:00.
We are all miserable, as we tend to focus on what's wrong in our lives. The rich simply have a less desperate set issues to deal with. This has a desensitizing effect on how they relate to the reality of peoples real pain. The less you relate, and empathize with others, the more of a prick you seem.

So yeah, they would naturally give less to charity, and treat others more rudely to get what they want. There whole world is focused on experience and consumption, and not getting those concert tickets is as much of a psychological blow to them as me not being able to pay my rent.