skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously. The maitre d' isn't a public official in charge of a public or legal duty - this isn't a building inspector we're talking about.

I suspect any bad feelings around tipping the maitre d' for a table come from lack of knowledge of the custom - someone who doesn't go to good restaurants regularly or is from another country where customs are different.
Responsibilities: Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform. (Valve)
> Arguably, the most important function of human
> language is to protect the smart from the strong.

I understand what he means, though when defined like this, "the smart" include Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin and a bunch of others, none of whom could have won a fist fight with their strongest soldiers. Yet the soldiers remained loyal to the rulers.

I was just reading a book about the fall of Berlin in 1945. One thing I've wondered about in the past is why the German soldiers kept fighting when it was clear that the war was lost. And one thing I just read was that any soldier that tried to desert, and was caught, was tortured and then killed. So the soldiers kept fighting since quitting seemed even more dangerous than fighting. Thus a hopeless cause was prolonged for several months.

Anyone who knows anything about World War I knows that a lot of very smart people died in the fighting. And language was used by all sides to rally people and get them excited about the war. So one function of language is to rally smart people into clusters where they can be killed in large numbers. If language really protected the smart from the strong then the Battle Of The Somme would never have happened.
I'm talking about the actual term, not raganwald's views (and incidentally, my own).

In a Libertarian Socialist society, there would be no external authority. The state doesn't exist. You couldn't own land, but your computer and your farm equipment are possessions, which they make distinct from 'private property.'
Hacking Twitter @Anywhere's authentication
Gmail prioritization
Previously submitted ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=873059

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872759

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871721
It may appear nowhere in the constitution, but that doesn't mean it isn't constitutionally protected.

The substantive due process protections of the 14th Amendment extend heightened protection to a number of rights. Privacy is one of them. Marriage is another. There are plenty more.

In addition the 4th Amendment has its own privacy implications.
Of course, the labor theory of value is false.

I can expend enormous amounts of energy engaging in the labor of banging pots and pans together. At the end of the day, I am left only with dented pots and pans. No wealth has been created; in fact, some total wealth may have been lost, as the value of the cutlery has been diminished by damage.

Wealth is created by the transformation of inputs - whether material or not - into an more useful set of outputs. Human labor may or may not be the means by which this transformation is accomplished. But the nature of the transformation can only be defined by human intelligence, and the evolution of technology seems to be shifting the weight of importance even further away from labor and further toward ideas.
I'd be interested in hearing Grove's thoughts on the H1B in light of his recent comments on the decline of tech in the US.

It's easy to be cynical about Grove and the other people who supported this program, but one thing I realize early was that the H1B looks incredibly different depending on who is using it. Intel probably just figured it was a way to hire people out of Stanford and Berkeley's engineering grad schools, and why on earth wouldn't you let someone do that? Other people, the ones who saw the body shops at work (or were part of those heavily coerced "knowledge transfer" programs) couldn't understand why anyone was defending the program at all.

Honestly, I do think that this program played a substantial role in the erosion of interest in graduate level science and engineering people who grew up in the US - not because it allowed talented people to come here (that is a good thing), but because it was expanded to such a scale that it allowed companies to hire people at all levels of the talent spectrum at wages that weren't competitive with other options outside tech (law, medicine, MBA).

I think it was difficult to detect this at first, because there was of course some inertia (older Americans still in the field, takes a while for younger Americans to change their behavior and start avoiding sci/eng grad programs). The problem is, there is inertia on the other side - if wages do improve, it'll take a long time for young Americans to respond the new market signals.

I hate this, because I had so many good friends in grad school who were from overseas, but it really disturbed me that kids who had grown up in California (or even the US) were almost totally absent from graduate engineering in a school called "The University of California"). The presence of international students is a great thing, but not when the levels of US citizens starts to drop to dangerous lows. And while Grove and others described this as a kind of crisis, they never really connected it with wage erosion or potential displacement from the visa programs.

I think this is a hidden factor that will become far more pronounced when demand for engineers from Asia increases. It's already happening, of course, but the US still gets to keep a lot of the talent that came here for grad school.

I think we should compete for this talent, of course, but I also think we should realize that will will not be a top tech power if we don't produce and sustain a healthy flow of engineering and science talent from our own population. So far, this isn't controversial - the disagreement comes from the extent to which visa programs add rather than displace.
That's how front-of-house restaurant employees are predominantly paid in America.
Neoview and Teradata are OLAP databases. OLTP is a different problem.
Facebook rumored to hit $2 billion revenue in 2010
Haunting comment from Reddit thread yesterday:

"On the grand scale of things, these are about a "3" on a scale of 1-10. Start looking at everything you eat, drink or breathe in an average day under a microscope and besides being obsessive, you'll realize there are a lot of things that should best not be looked at under magnification. The only harm these will do is psychological."
Bingo! You're completely right.

I cringe whenever I see someone drag out Ricardo's comparative advantage BS, dating from the 1800's. Economics, as it is taught in the schools, opposed to the real world of business, is mostly fiction.

Sure, you can demonstrate the validity of comparative advantage on paper using a simple matrix of Guns & Butter, and because it's so simple we get all these Randroids who believe they understand how the world truly works through the lens of basic freshman level math.

But these Macroecon textbooks are also wearing the kid gloves for the benefit of innumerate undergrads in order to pass off an illusion as scientific fact. (Econ is the dismal science after all).

Instead, let's scale the Guns & Butter matrix up to 1,000,000 variables, which is still embarassingly low compared to the complexity of real life, and let's add a time dimension too. Now just try to find the fucking comparative advantage! Good luck even finding the eigenvalues of that matrix before the heat death of the Universe. And if you happen to get lucky and find some minimum, you won't be able to know if it's global or if you're going to be wandering around in a false local minimum for eternity. Faced with this kind of uncertainty, your smartest evolutionary move is to grab whatever you can buy or sell and defend it within your territory. Period.

Ricardo's theorem is to economics as play-dough is to architecture.

I often amuse myself by wondering this: what if our entire idea that our post-modern global society has transitioned to free trade and free markets is a delusion, a folie a deux, a cynical ploy by the rich & powerful to control everyone, and in fact historical mercantilism is still the basis of global political economy? Just look at the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve sometime and ask yourself if hoarding currency is still the primary determinant of a nation's wealth?

Sure, we've changed the language we use to describe it, we've changed the playing field itself, added incomparable technology, and re-shuffled the boundaries and identities of nations through a few world wars, all underneath an expanding teleological architectonic of democracy and freedom around the world, but ultimately everything is still the same basic pattern being played out across the nations. Hoard currency! Perhaps mercantilism & protectionism is the only Game theoretic dominant economic strategy for any nation or collective group?
'"Fair share"? As if each person deserves to be served?'

Everyone does deserve to be served. Why? Is it because it's an immutable ethical truth? No. It's because that's our culture. The US is a pretty egalitarian society. It isn't perfect but it's still in our cultural DNA.

A lot of the objection is the issue of slipping the seater a $100. If it was an open auction at the door and everybody had to bid for seats, that would just be the way it is, but in America the act of slipping someone $100 to be seated is basically sneaking out of the egalitarian society into a society of privilege, and the egalitarian among us find that offensive. If you want to buy privilege, which is a perfectly valid thing to do, buy it on the open market, not with bribery.

If everybody engages in bribery, and everybody knows it, the sneaky cheating aspect goes away, though I tend to agree with other posters that this creates a moral hazard. Not being a cultural relativist, I am free to say I believe the egalitarian culture here produces superior results to a culture that accepts bribery routinely. It really does lead fairly directly to things like paying off inspectors to not do the inspections, in a non-trivial percentage of the population.
Well, remember we are dealing with a 1.3" HD, and those are nowhere near 1TB in capacity.
The business is a solution to crowded inboxes.

Currently it's an extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

My co-founder is moving on because he thinks "Priority Inbox" is too big a threat. I can put him in touch with you if you like.

I don't. I think we can build our solution into outlook, lotus notes, and Apple Mail.

if you want more details send me an email at: niccolo.pantucci@gmail.com
If you aren't an iTunes user, then it certainly won't offer you much--I'd be surprised it it would work at all without an iTunes account activation.

Roku is interesting, but their stream from iTunes option is not great:

"MP3tunes on Roku is the newest, most affordable way to listen to your iTunes library all around the house, as well as on mobile devices and in the car. No longer are you tied to your computer or an iPod–instead, MP3tunes syncs your library (10GB FREE for Roku customers) to ‘the cloud’, and from there, you can stream to any Roku."
No, it's the snappy uniforms!

Our brains can only superimpose our romantic fantasies over reality for so long. One romantic fantasy would be "I'm cool because I work at Apple". I can't see a talented person working somewhere for more than a year or two unless they genuinely were satisfied with the job and environment. Money isn't the only thing that motivates people.
Thanks. I'm asking because I thought about doing an event in the Dallas area. Problem is, I have nothing to talk about :)
Acne Home Treatment
I was recently at a conference reception where each person was given two drink tickets. My friend and I went up for our first drink and my friend tipped the bar tender well. The rest of the night that same guy just kept handing him his tickets back...
I tried 6 products I had at hand, no match for any of them...
If you think about it, it is economically rational behavior for a barista/bartender to do this for regular customers. After all, she gives you a drink that is free to her and gets back real money as a tip. The only loser is the coffee shop or bar, who has trouble tracking the number of drinks served.

My friend runs a bar and this is a huge problem for him that he calls a "bribe back". The only solution he found is hiring good people, as monitoring the bartenders makes him look like he doesn't trust or respect them.
Google has a $146b market cap. Google brought in 23 BILLION in revenue last year.

You think FB is making 23 billion? I don't.
Except the maitre'd isn't the restaurant, and what he's selling technically isn't his to sell. So as such it's more of a black market for stolen goods. If the restaurant had a stated policy where tables where auctioned off at busy times then that would be different.
It's great that there will be a serious competitor with Apple TV from the very start. Very much looking forward to the Boxee Box.
Well, in some ideal technical world, they wouldn't care what people think of their company, and they wouldn't care about their salary either. They'd just work at the place with the most interesting stuff going on. But most people do care at least a bit about those external factors, whether it's money or social prestige.
Anyone use anything else to track fitness? I'm looking at Nike+ for running. Anyone with experience using it?
Windows Phone 7 goes gold master, begins rolling out to partners
Young women earn *more* than their male counterparts
http://searchyc.com/submissions/software+die?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637968

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635094

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552821

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99568

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43842
Their Facebook Factsheet (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet) says they have "1400+" employees, though it doesn't break it down into job descriptions.
Twisted Network Programming colophon: a ball of snakes
OK, what about if you employed someone to tender contracts for you and one of the tenderers took this person out for an extravagant lunch in the expectation of influencing the bidding process? Wouldn't that be immoral?
It does make me wonder whether Gen X and Millenials will become pro-inflation. After all, that is one way for a group to get out of paying a debt. Most debts are fixed in nominal terms, and the burden of debt could therefore be reduced, in real terms, with a bout of inflation. The Boomers tended to be anti-inflation because they remember the hyper-inflation of the 1970s, but neither Gen X nor Millenials remember the 1970s.

For the most part, a bout of strong of inflation could be regarded as a form of cheating, a form of welching on a debt. The public (at least in the US) hasn't favored that kind of policy, partly because I think a lot of people feel it would be unethical to get out of a debt that way. But then, avoiding unethical behavior depends on a notion of fairness, and that goes both ways. The Gen Xers and the Millenials might ask themselves, "Was it fair for the Boomers to run up a few trillion in debt and then leave it to us?" If a substantial portion of those generations come to believe that the debt was unfairly incurred, then they may think it is fair to use unfair tactics to get out of paying the unfair debt.
with the iOS event today and the numbers that apple disclosed today I guess is to be seen how microsoft can leverage the mobile space. as a mobile entrepreneur I start to think how much it will take for them to start making a dent in the mobile space...

I hope to see zune hardware to be making the rounds as well, ipod + iphone pretty much rulz the mobile space regardless of how android is playing right now

what do u guys think?
I've come to believe that efficiency itself is moral. A system that perfectly adheres to all the nice-sounding deontological principles you can name, but leaves everyone in poverty, is less moral than a system with a few dashes of violence and injustice that leaves nearly everyone much better off.
there's http://flattr.com, which is gaining popularity, or a paypal donate button.

I run ads on my blog http://puremango.co.uk. I don't think ads have to be ugly or obtrusive. I like to think my ads are subtle and not annoying.

So, I wonder why are you against a few simple ads?
My .emacs, which is commented, is located at http://github.com/zck/emacs/blob/master/.emacs . I need to update it and move it over to bitbucket, though.

Specifically, my favorite things are show-paren-mode, ido-mode, and rebinding C-, and C-. to move back and forward between windows.
Great article but I wanted to discuss how the link is to the print page where there is no navigation, ads or ability to see other content. I suggest the ?printable=true be removed from the url out of respect for the content providers.

A lot of time and money goes into creating content. This is clearly a well written and interesting article since it's on top of hacker news right now. Why screw the website out of the extra traffic to it's other pages and possible ad revenue by linking to the printable version?

I can understand not liking ads but this site isn't a content farm with tons of ads. There is only a tiny, handful of ads on the right with plenty of room for the content.

Sure, people on hacker news know enough to change the url if they want to explore the rest of the site but articles that become popular here also get picked up by other services with less savvy users.
How We Made over $100k doing Tech Events
I hereby declare the new AppleTV the 'iPod TV.'

Another device in which Apple's anti-Flash stance keeps me from pressing the 'Buy now' button. These days, video = streaming and like it or not, a large portion of streaming video that streams through the web is one over Flash. This won't change anytime soon.

I hate having to fire up my desktop to watch streams for sports or recent TV episodes on the network's homepage. I think about it, and I would have gladly paid apple twice as much for such a device but doubt I'd shell out as much for a dedicated Boxee device.
Dear god yes. Buying a new TV recently was a right pain since basically everybody insist on making them as ugly as possible with the most horrendous shiny plastic they can find.
I have to say that I also have never encountered this (aside from my mom who prefers I work for companies she's heard of so she can tell her friends, but that's not common).

I've seen people treat founders the way you would a 12 year-old with a science fair project, but never in a negative way.
BankSimple Raises A Big Round
This post is gold for anyone doing events, especially for the first time. I'm announcing Work2Conference tomorrow and asked Noah some tips for promoting events due to his experience. Some of the tips here are also good for overall customer acquisition. Replace attendee with customer/user.
someone posts this every six or eight months it seems. And every time it scores the poster hundreds of points. Still a good read. :-)
Data Mining Algorithms In R - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks
The same reasoning refutes the moral argument as well.

If the new wealth created is the difference between the value of the inputs and the value of the outputs, then the key factors that determine whether or not wealth is created are the definition of the output, the definition of process by which the inputs are transformed into outputs, and the allocation of resources (including the assumption of risk) necessary to initiate that process. These functions are undertaken by "capitalists" rather than "laborers".

Labor is an essential input, but in your model, it is not at all responsible for the creation of wealth.
Carmack bumped from Apple keynote
I think you're supposed to start here:

http://www.google.com/jobs
Not sure if I follow this. The hack is "log in, then extract your own token and you can use it to access your own account"?
The site could easily prevent deep-links to print versions if they cared. If they don't care, why should we?
I thought the line "Bribing, it turns out, has as much effect on the briber as it does on the bribee" was particularly telling. I mean, bribing someone (successfully) touches on everything: a sense of exclusivity, an appearance of prominence, a seemingly meaningful interpersonal connection, and it streamlines the whole process. No wonder if feels so good...
While, it does cast a certain perspective. I would be hesitant to call the NYT a right wing publication. Most, in fact accuse it of a leftward bias.
Modern VMs use some techniques for optimizing runtime dispatch, or for security, or for dynamic loading of code, etc... techniques which are newer.

Sun did research on Self, and Strongtalk which they've bought was heavily influenced by Self, which later became Hotspot.

So Oracle might own really relevant IP to modern implementation techniques for a VM ... for which there might NOT be prior-art. And some of those techniques are really not trivial.

This is just speculation btw, without a careful analysis of their patents. But if I'm right, Oracle can nuke all modern VM implementations.
I'm not implying any of those things. My point is that the labor theory of value is quite well established in itself, independently from socialism. E.g., Adam Smith was one of its key proponents, and his thought is rather associated with free markets and "invisible hand" capitalism.
Without actual data, this remains just a hypothesis. I find top aligned labels clunky because it makes me less sure about the field/name association.
This post is conflating two issues. (1) It requires extra cognitive load to figure out which label belongs to which controls (2) The extra eye movement thing.

I bet the effect would be a lot less pronounced if the label/control entities had a box with some subtle shading behind them to indicate a relationship. I suspect that would wipe out most of the difference in effectiveness between the two layouts (though some effect might remain- I'm not sure)
This also shows that reddit's size has doubled in the past year.
I'd certainly agree that I have fairly utilitarian leanings. I _used_ to be super hardcore minarchist Libertarian. Maximizing everyone's happiness is a worthy goal.

I'm just not 100% sure what the best way to get there is. I don't think that just because the system kind of works okay now means that it will forever.
A side note:

> You can also break the form up into multiple pages to make each part of the form shorter

I dread the 'next' button on multi-page forms, especially when there's no indication of how many pages there are or how long the questions will be.
Does anyone have a link to some numbers supporting this? The article says "Top aligned labels have proven to be faster and easier to fill out than left or right aligned labels" without a citation.
GM Seed for iOS 4.1 and SDK available for Download (Need to have Dev Account)
Yes! Maybe the startup bootcamp organizers can snatch him as a speaker as well, or at least at the H&F meetup that evening. I'm officially offering a ride in exchange for some roadtrip company/advice giving
Congratulations to Josh, Shamir, and Alex on the successful fundraising!