skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YC is the seller, angels at Demo Day are the buyers. Just cuz you work with someone closely doesn't mean you won't or can't try to screw them.
It is a process of journalism. He is using the story as leverage to fill in the remainder of the story. See how the Scamville story evolved.

I think Arrington has shown time and again that he places the story and public interest above all else. To even suggest or insinuate that Arrington is only publishing this story to fuel his own ego is completely wrong. He likely burnt a lot of bridges with todays story and lost a lot of sources in order to give the public a very rare view of what takes place behind closed doors.
I disagree with Eckel on this one. The reality is that most of your tests end up being a matter of testing the things that the compiler would have done for you for free and that's the kind of thing that computers should be doing, not people.

Also, tests don't have 100% coverage whereas the compiler will enforce type correctness everywhere.

I've spent days hunting down bugs in Javascript which would have been automatically caught by a type checking compiler. That's just a waste of my time, as is reproducing all the type checking that the compiler would have done in the first place.
SQL-style map/reduce programming in bash
My humble tribute to Zed Shaw : The first 50 Python scripts later
Dalton115
I find this somewhat dubious; I wasn't there, but if I was one of those guys, I'm not sure I'd continue the "evil meeting" after Michael stumbled in uninvited. If he came after the meeting ended, why weren't they all "just about to leave."

Having said that, I'm sorry if my confusion gives a way my ignorance of the subject, but are these angels selling anything to a marketplace? I thought angels invested their money. If that's the case, aren't they colluding to the terms of their buying, as a group? Or at least to loosely manage the terms of buying? If that is illegal, why does it apply to angel investing but not, say, Groupon? What I don't understand is what is their "price" that they are colluding to "fix"? I thought antitrust was for the collusion for the price asked, not price willing to pay.
It's unlikely they'd use a logo, because of the brittleness of the technique (ie, it relies on sending 304 Not Modified response due to the absence of the special tracking cookie, not due to the actual cache status).

Also, it's not clear if you get access to the actual binary data from the image as it is served, or new data generated from the image as it is displayed - hence my question as to if using the metadata would work.
Exactly! And that's just the kind of things the computer should be doing for you, not the other way around.
It's possible for sure, but definitely tough. My family came with me, but we were only together on the weekends. Without a doubt it was one of the hardest, most stretching, and most valuable experiences of my life.
I've applied Google for summer intern 2010. At that time, I was second year student and haven't taken any computer science courses. I've had a solid resume background (startup experiences/open source project/good university etc.) but I never get any feedback from Google regarding the internship. So I ended up to spend my summer in Facebook. It was a pleasant experience, and I would never consider to apply Google again.
Aaron Koblin was one of the artists at an (art) event I did in NYC a few months ago. He's super-talented.
I'm not even a medium angel.
I'm not defending the angels involved by any means; I actually think it's a great thing that this has been exposed if it is indeed what's been going on. The easy access to YC companies may in fact be what emboldened them to act in this manner in the first place. Once this all plays out, I think it's safe to assume that at least a few of the angels in question are going to have to answer for their actions. Should be interesting to hear what they have to say.
I do like, and have done, the idea. But don't you find yourself dragging in the mid-to-late afternoon at your daytime job?
I see your point. I view that as a problem with the incentives firms gave their employees.

However, think about the role of government incentives. It took decades of tax breaks and other stimuli to get the public to think that real estate prices "just go up" year after year. It was this massive blind spot about real-estate that was (I think) at the core of the failure of firms to appropriately manage systemic risk.
Think of it as a groupon for investors.
My guess is that a lot of that stuff violates local laws, but going after them would be a hassle and unpopular. Especially when they're really small-scale businesses selling things that are unlikely to cause food poisoning (mostly baked goods, rather than home-smoked pork or something), and doing so person-to-person rather than via a physical storefront.
Interesting questions... IANAL, but I imagine they're colluding to bring down the valuations of startups, therefore essentially fixing the "price" of their money, to be paid for in startup equity.

If I, and others, say your company is worth a million dollars, then I'm fixing the price of my $500,000 at 50% of your company.
Wow, right on time. Thank you HN.

And also, I wonder how HN CV tips would look like.
Agreed. It's possible they got a bit overconfident in their respective positions because of the easy access to so many well-vetted companies.
View from one entrepreneur's seat:

1. Super Angels networking is expected, allegedly sharing deal terms (convertible notes, etc.) and allegedly working together to try and lower valuations is definitely not representative of a healthy 'free' market.

2. Singling out a successful model and trying to replicate it and improve upon it isn't horrible, but allegedly singling out one entity (YC) trying to limit something inherently doing good by entrepreneurs is horrible.

3. Good or bad / legal or illegal, if this episode results in any increase of government regulation/oversight in any way for funding at this level then both sides lose.

4. This entire episode, for me, reinforces the need for start ups to go bootstrap, achieve revenue and profitability and then, if funding is proved to be needed down the road, go in with a stronger hand when you sit across the table from any funding source.
The EFF's description of this makes it sound functionally equivalent to the Chinese system. This seems like a very bad idea especially because it would legitimize internet censorship globally. Am I missing something?
This question at Quora

http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-Super-Angels-that-Michael-A...
I'm looking through all this, and one question comes to mind: you iphone users know when an app first asks if it can access your location data? Well, I'm thinking here: Does that mean it can access your location data even when you're not using that app?
I'm a beginner in programming. I think there are lot less resources in programming for beginners. Zed Shaw's Python tutorial is amazing. I will highly recommend it for anyone who starts programming regardless of Python. What are the best resources you have come across?
Did you completely quit the browser in between your visits? Because if the instance of Chrome from which you opened the incognito windows have been running between your visits, it may have retrieved these from the memory, even if you closed the incognito window after the first visit.
I'm ignorant enough to have the same question in my mind.
Disappointing at a first glance. First, it was difficult to install. I had to uninstall the Gmail 2.2.1 I had installed, and then reboot before the install from Market would take.

Then, the main thing I hoped for to be fixed was not: still no way to change the sender to one of the addresses you have confirmed for new messages. Worse, it seems to have reverted so that even replies to other addresses are changed to the main account.

I have to think this is a problem for many users. Is this somehow difficult in a way that is not apparent?
It's a great idea - grass-roots investment is very appealing - but unfortunately I think the main thing that angels bring is not money but contacts and experience.

This might work with YC-alumni, though they probably they probably don't have enough contacts/experience yet... but they definitely have quite a bit already, and it's growing, and will only continue to grow.

In fact, far from being a result of this meeting, this growing power is one of the causes of it (as noted in the article.)
They could easily use this to take down sites like Wikileaks. I don't condone piracy, but this is going way too far. As long as there is a force against it, P2P will thrive and expand.
I wasn't disputing you... as I said, I worked in a grocery store; I know exactly what you're talking about. The poor in my state get WIC and the Ohio card. WIC is a federal supplement (for Women, Infants, and Children) to any state programs (income-based for all) that exist.
But even quants are not immune to the feeling that what they're doing for a living is not adding up to anything.

Not sure about this, but isn't the quants who are responsible for developing new pricing models for some esoteric options, new algos to capture the fleeting abnormalities in the market , improving (say) the existing Gauss Copula method that so that 2007 subprime crisis could be predicted or being avoided altogether (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant) and so on.

How can you say that kind of work is unsatisfying and lacking of creativity?
WWw.NhoMaiNhe.Com - Kiếm Trong Diễn Ðàn
I wonder how good the science behind it is!

Better than anecdote according to the article.
Each developer would tell different stories. I thought I'd tell mine a bit. In my office, we're embarking a series of cleaning up the code because it's a big pile of band-aids. People were told to read "Working Effectively With Legacy Code".

While the book has been godsend, people's mentality is a different issue. Developers are an interesting bunch; they complain a lot when the code is full of band-aids but they will also back-off when management give a full-blessing to start cleaning up pieces by pieces. The only motivated people to do the task are mostly the new hire.

The software is a typical client-server that utilizes a standard/minimum WebService (WS is not as bad as you thought it would be). But here's the weird part: the server is a dumb component. Let me explain via ascii art:

Client(GUI, heavy BiznezLogic, heavy Validation) -> WebService (dumb) -> Data Access Layer (dumb) -> Stored Procedure (complex logic and validation).

Sort of good separation isn't it? Except it's hard to write unit/integration tests around heavy GUI based software and around Store Procedures. (Of course one could still write integration tests on top of the DAL layer, but we'll never achieve unit-test since we can't test per Stored Procedure).

The thing is: we can't drop everything completely and start refactoring (even if it's just a component). The train must continue.

I used to dislike consulting, but these days I've been starting to look at that direction. An added benefit of consulting is that you can meet clients and start networking: something that a maintenance developer can't do, cause he's stuck either fixing bugs or refactoring code until late night (and adding more unit-tests).

Unfortunately, most jobs are maintaining other people's code unless you're working for a startup or your own project. When you work in a startup, quality usually get pushed. Eventually when you hit year 2.5, you will deal with the same issue again and again. This vicious cycle keeps repeating over and over.

PS: Don't get me wrong, I love the whole idea of automated testing (unit and integration). I think developer should be accountable for the mess they created. I also think the business people should sit next to the developer once in a while.
it's different for me since I am also a partner at my "dayjob", so my motivation is very high for both of these projects :)

that said, I think it's normal to feel a little drag now and again - whether it's on a side project or your day job. just take a break and come back to it after a few days.
In firefox set

about:config -> dom.storage.enabled -> false

Use flashblock and also block cookies by default.

The above causes evercookie to fail for me.

No need to block javascript.
"But thanks to the Pareto principle, you find in practice that with well-factored software you need fewer tests than you'd imagine."

Thanks to the "Devs are Human" principle, you never have the test coverage you thought you'd have. I've never worked on a project where we've thought, "Wow, turns out that we needed fewer tests than we thought."

"If you have well-factored abstraction layers, each of which has good unit tests for the abstractions it expects from below and for the abstractions it promises to export to above, the likelyhood of random combinations breaking things goes way down. Sure, a random dangling pointer from one driver can scribble over random memory for anywhere else, but there are techniques for catching that type of mistake."

Well-factored abstraction layers do help. That's the only way you write 100 million line applications that run on over a billion computers with over 100,000 unique configurations. The problem is that if you have the size of dev teams you have on Windows (or presumably at Google), if a dev makes a mistake once every five years, that takes half a day to resolve, the checked-in version is ALWAYS broken. Even with great testing, abstraction layers, etc... mistakes will happen -- sometimes for a given dev even more often than once every five years.

"In fact the smaller and more rapid the integration cycle is, the less overall pain there seems to be associated with them. It isn't that you do 100 integrations with 1% of the pain each time. It is that you do 100 integrations with 0.1% of the pain each time, which means your overall integration pain is a tenth of what it used to be."

The only thing you've done here is required me to integrate 10x more often. Checking in and requiring syncing after you write each line of code doesn't fix the issue, it just makes the process a lot more tedious as we hit our eventual problem.

"I strongly believe that you are over-estimating the natural immunity that Google has to this type of problem."

Why wouldn't cloud-based services be immune to it? Your millions of lines of code run over a small set of easily testable configurations. And based on what I've seen working on other, admittedly smaller scale cloud services, this is exactly the case. It's just an easier problem. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact its a great selling point..

"For an interesting public example, look at the LLVM project. They produce critical software that OS X is dependent on, that operates in layers where each piece depends on the ones below it, that is multi-platform, and do it with developing on one branch with rapid integration."

But LLVM is a product that is largely isolated from the system, right? It reads in input from a very standard source and writes out output. gcc, Visual C++, and the Intel compiler are probably all in one branch systems.

Linux is probably a better example, as they don't sit on an abstraction layer so much as they are the abstraction layer. Is that one branch for a whole distribution? Probably not, for at least the obvious reason that many parts of a distribution aren't even created by the Linux team.
Direct3D 10/11 natively on Linux
Think of the stock market. That's certainly a marketplace. It's made up of investors seeking to earn a return on their money by investing in companies. Think of the illegalities involved in collusion to manipulate the stock market. Now think of Silicon Valley as a less formal/regulated stock market...

With Groupon nobody is asked to not buy or otherwise participate in the market unless done through Groupon. Instead, it's like a grocery store co-op; members pool their money to get more buying power. This doesn't mean they agree to refrain from shopping elsewhere, as that would be collusion/conspiring to produce a market effect. IANAL
One way to do it would be as a straight loan service to startups. I know here in Canada you have to register as an accredited investor to loan money legally (as far as I've always been told at least), which has quite ludicrous requirements for small P2P loans.

Another way would probably be for the start up to offer to sell X-percent of their company to the investment fund for a certain price. This is then broken down into shares, and individuals can buy these shares for an equivalent fraction of the offered price.

There is a third way, but I'm unsure if the start up would want it. A continual investment (IE I could put in $1,000 every month into the company for 3 years and end up with $36,000 invested) option, where people invest however much they want when they want. However, I'm unsure what this would mean for ownership of the company. I know many judges would view this as "the founders invested $50,000 into the company, but the investors put in $100,000, so the investors own 2/3 of the company", because this is how ownership is decided in most small businesses. I don't know enough about how stock options work in small business for the investments this way; I'd love to hear from someone much more knowledgeable than myself on all this, which is why I posted the suggestion.
You should also read the mesa commit message which gives some more background details:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=92617aeac10...
IANAL(E), but this scenario would seem to be more of a concern if startups in Silicon valley got together over dinner to deny deals that didn't offer similar terms and prices in dollars for securities of all startups represented at said dinner simultaneously.

As for angels fixing the "price of their money" I don't understand how antitrust applies to this anymore than it would to, say, how LIBOR is determined.

If antitrust applies to colluding on the dollar amount to be paid OUT instead of price asked for money coming in, then if I start a boycott of something (colluding to pay $0) am I guilty of violating antitrust laws?

As I understand it (not much, I admit), antitrust applies to goods and services, not cost of money. If antitrust applied to cost of money, the Federal Reserve would not exist since it's basically an extension of the member banks that make up its institutional board of directors (not board of governers). All they do is get together and fix the price of money to be printed and lent out to member banks.

Also, this whole "I stumbled in on a secret meeting of powerful men conspiring to start a revolution" thing is somewhat suspect; throughout history this gambit, if it actually happened that way, is usually either desperate grab at 15 minutes of fame (which seems unlikely given Michael's popularity), an attempt to gain instant credibility on some esoteric but useful new subject ("I was the only outsider privvy to what happened there, so you can trust me") or, unfortunately, a cynical move feigned by the men in the room to inspire hasty and possibly faulty reactionary stances by the supposed target of their "envy".

I could be wrong though. I just can't believe guys who are careful enough to get to such a position in life would all simultaneously get so careless. On the same day. In the same place.
YC is an experience mill as of itself. It's only going to be so long before it hits a sort of critical mass that the angels won't be bringing in more contacts or experience than YC is already self-networking to its start ups through the virtue of being YC.
Another reason why I give to the EFF every year. Please consider it.
Hotel ousts couple after accusing them of writing negative TripAdvisor review
I'm willing to overlook that.
One of the researchers behind the ASP.NET padding oracle attack linked this:

http://twitter.com/julianor/status/25177125717
You pull the gun. He pulls one.

Stalemate? Double homoicide? Flight? You survive but get injured? Or worse yet you injure yourself?

Have you ever been in a situation where you pulled a gun on someone in a moment of fear? Are you sure you can? Have you trained? Or do you just have a permit?

There's a very good reason why the police recommend letting the burgler get his money and leave. Macho posing about hollowpoint bullets aside, the money isn't worth anything compared to your life and your general well-being. If you haven't figured that out yet, you haven't escaped poverty yet.
It's not that it isn't interesting or creative (at times). It's that there isn't much social redeeming value. You might as well be a professional poker player, except your are hated instead of admired. Now that the status is gone, it really hits you that you are pretty much a leech on society. I say that as someone who works in this industry and has thought often about an exit strategy, but the money is still too good be to justify a the risk of a startup.
A read/write API would be nice
Apple And Facebook Talked For More Than A Year
Todd's lamentation is basically "but I'm not rich, if you have a look at my peers". After all, Todd's on a fixed salary, and there is little thrill left in his work if he's tenured, there's little bluesky left in his investments.

Sounds like he's going through a bit of a personal crisis.

Leave him alone. When he gets over this episode, he'll be fine.
To trust a co-founder I just met based solely on mutual passion for starting a company, technology, and getting rich soon.
@fookyong Do you have kids?
How can I find out where a spike in traffic came from with no HTTP referrer?
My site obviously got mentioned on a blog or in someone's twitter feed because I see a hugh increase in number of visitors today. But no http referrer is coming through on any of the requests. I searched twitter, I searched google for any blogs, nothing. Where is all the mysterious traffic coming from!? Google analytics says they are all "direct" no links, no keywoards. But I know this many people didn't just suddenly start typing in the url.
If someone told me to hack together a mini-Lisp? Sure, I'd use something different. But at the time I'm happy I used what I did. I learned just as much about C as I did about Lisp.
Him not naming names means that people will continue to give him information in the future. He'd be shooting himself in the foot by naming a source that requested anonymity.
Ask HN:Is our universe a computer simulation inside another universe?
Today i've had a discussion with my uncle about entrepreneurship and human behavior, reaching to the subject of the Soul. I believe our soul is connected with the everything(or God if you want to say), and these question came to my head. Do you believe in God? if true, why do you believe in God?
How I used Unbounce, Chargify and Wufoo to increase MRR by $1500/day
http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2010/how-i-set-up-and-sold-a-product-using-unbounce-wufoo-and-chargify/

Great blog post, on how we increased MRR by $1500/day without writing a single line of code.
Well, it's compiled using XeLaTeX, which really is necessary for the template. It also requires a bunch of LaTeX packages I had to track down through Google I think, so you'd have to do the same. Also you should get the Fontin font, or another professional font (Fontin is free though). Here's the tex file used to render my PDF resume: http://pastie.org/1173737
I have to agree. As a hiring manager and a long-time interviewer, I can say that getting a thank-you note doesn't affect things. I have only received a few, but I've never once thought something like "I wasn't going to hire Natasha, but she sent me a nice note so I suppose I will."

It can't hurt (much), but it doesn't help much either. As nhashem says, if you want to make a difference, do it in the interview itself. That's what counts, not the old school advice of a thank you note, an objective statement, or heavyweight paper.
My point was that Hitchens has an axe to grind. It makes entertaining reading, but should be taken with a hefty dose of salt.