skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Employees aren't going to have the same motivation unless they get the same rewards. I've always thought it was absurd when execs would come in super pissed off that everyone wasn't pulling super long hours to ensure that the exec got his bonus. That's nice that you get a bonus Mr. Executive, but your workforce doesn't exist to sell its life away for your special benefit.

I agree with the parent. It is very important that everyone get some time off. I would be hesitant to work for anyone that was so overt about not valuing a proper work-life balance. My applications to multiple startups, including YC startups, have been stopped because they say things like "Make this the most important thing in your life."

My job / money will never be the most important thing in my life. Most important in my life is my family and nothing is going to supplant that. If you make like you aren't going to be OK with that, it's an instant deal-breaker and I'd be reluctant to continue talking to anyone that advocates such a bad situation.

We all like computers and we're all excited to build useful things, but give me a break; anyone who cares more about their startup than the general well-being of himself or his family, which well-being includes proper work-life balance, is severely misguided.

I just talked to a friend who told me who distraught he is that he spent almost every waking hour of the last two years working. He told me he felt like 23 and 24 were empty years filled with nothingness. Yes, he made a lot of money working so much, but it wasn't worth it. It never really is.
Linux is well established - the licensing terms are unlikely to change and the community understands (independant of the legal agreement, which they mostly don't) that once they contribute code it is out of their hands.

The business of Diaspora is just as green as the code of Diaspora, and requiring copyright transfer is a very sensible way of anticipating the inevitable pivots.
You're missing the context. You may see Diaspora as a great way to get visibility. I assure you, any competent software security person has much better ways of getting visibility.
I know that this was said in jest (and I think patrick has no interest in dead-treeing his blog), but I would LOVE a pre-compiled mobi version of his greatest hits to take on the road for my kindle...

Actually, I think I will try to make one.
There are two successful alternate App Stores for iPhone, and none for Android.
At first, I thought those comments were a CYA distancing from Diaspora, since their release has been so abysmal, but then I watched their presentation to Pivotal again, and it really does seem like everyone there knew about as much about Diaspora as we all did on Sep 14th.
which I think they should be doing

right - you think they should be doing. that's fine and all, but the point is you're assuming _they_ should view the world the way you do. which they clearly do not.

("they", of course, being millions of people, or at least their religious leaders. let's leave the issue of painting such a large and diverse population with the same brush for another time, shall we?")
I know someone who is 10x more productive than his entire team, I worked in a next-door department and watched the beast do his magic. Truth be told, no one liked him. We couldn't keep up with him, all our bug reports would be several releases too old. We couldn't get him to install an IM client, he doesn't carry a phone, his email response rate is ~5%, several days too late, and only responds to say he can't make it to social gatherings, etc.

We wasted weeks holding meets to architecture something he already had in place, grrrr.

He wasn't a child, but a grown man with gray hair. Not exactly a prima dona either; he will happily talk to you for ours about your build problems and give you all the help you need. He was just not very good at communication. He was a fake "yes man"; he says yes to every request and suggestion, but somehow only his more sensible ideas end up in deployment.

I don't think someone who is 10x as productive, but emits zero feedback or communication is worth the trouble of poaching from others, specially of you're a big corp. Give him 10x market rate and let him bootstrap a startup all by himself, sure, but this particular guy would suck in a team environment.

He really didn't fit any "hacker" stereo-type either. He was a fit soccer player / yogi, worked strictly 9-6, and had a taste for illicit leisure .. I think.
X Prize Winners Look Weird  With Good Reason
Zoologger: Live birth, evolving before our eyes
An interesting flip on the right-to-work laws. Those are usually targeted at union-negotiated exclusivity provisions, e.g. if a company and a union sign an agreement that the company will hire only members of that union, states with "right-to-work" laws hold any such contracts unenforceable. It'd be interesting if the principle were extended to ban any contract that interfered with the ability of two parties to come to terms, though. For example, if I have a right-to-work as a programming employee, do I also have a right-to-consult as a programming contractor, rendering any exclusivity provisions standing in the way void?

It seems to me like the principle should be similar. If a company has an exclusive-vendor agreement with an engineering-consulting firm for all its engineering services, that seems very much like the case where the company has an exclusive-hire agreement with an engineering union for all its engineering employees (just think of the union as a labor-selling firm). In both cases they've agreed to only purchase a certain category of services from a certain category of providers. I'd be somewhat amenable to banning all these kinds of exclusivity agreements (including non-compete, no-poaching, union-labor-only, exclusive-vendor, etc.).
After someone convinces me that spending a few months slaving over editing and promotion is more fun than writing software, better paying than consulting, more helpful than teaching language lessons, more impressive to a Ms. Right than time at the gym, etc.

Much like taking investment, it would be flattering but not get me anything I really want right now.
I almost got run over by a truck once after looking the wrong way last when crossing a street in Hong Kong. People do have systematic habits shaped by their culture as to looking left first or looking right first, but maybe that is most influenced, as you suggest, by which side of the street drivers drive on.
You can, and probably just about everyone on HN could do so, but the vast majority of the phone-using public can't/won't. Defaults like this become self-reinforcing and apps that prosper outside of the built-in distribution channels will be very, very rare.
I feel like a lot of the comments here are missing the point in discussing alternative app stores and the importance of side loading. The lawsuit was not filed by Motorola, arguing that they have a right to Google's app store. The allegations come from Skyhook, claiming that Google broke the law by coercing Motorola and Samsung into breaking contracts they had signed.

I'm all for Google being more discriminating in licensing their apps and app store. It would be great if they prevented crap like un-installable apps or disabling tethering as prerequisites for compliance. But here, they allegedly prevented Motorola from using a different location service, a service that in Motorola's mind was better than the one Google provided, on their phones.

Motorola could have taken a stand and forgone Google approval, but that wouldn't have really helped anything. Whatever boon Skyhook presented to Motorola wasn't worth the hassle of rolling their own app store, their own mail and calendar apps, and forgoing whatever other Google assistance comes with a "compliant" handset. So, Skyhook got left by the wayside, and Motorola's new phones are a little bit worse because Google said so.

It's true that if Google's terms become very onerous, all of these handset makers and carriers do have the ability to fork and go their own way which is important and "open". But throwing their weight around like this to prioritize their own services over competitors, especially when they stand idly by as Verizon makes the Android experience worse for their customers, smacks of hypocrisy in the face of their VP's quoted comments.

This is interesting news, worthy of good discussion. I'm disappointed that Gruber's take is the only one that made the front page, it appears people's opinion of him muddy the conversation.
It seems like the sole reason for aggregating copyright in this manner is to be able to dual-license the source code to companies. So basically the community is more than welcome to help improve Diaspora (and by releasing at such an early Alpha stage, it's all but certain that large amounts, if not the majority of the code will be written by the community), but only Diaspora has the right to make any money off of it.
Well, since 'history' is a shell builtin, the thing to do would be 'help history', which actually gives a pretty thorough explanation of it. (And it's also explained pretty fully if you look at the actual man page for bash.) What the grandparent commenter saw was in fact just the brief "you invoked this command wrong" synopsis message, since '--help' isn't a flag recognized by the 'history' command (assuming his version of bash behaves similarly to mine).

Sure, there are some more obscure, less-commonly-used commands that are poorly documented, but for the basic stuff (and yes, that includes bash), I've found man pages to generally be a pretty good source of information.
If I was this Khang guy, I'd be flattered but maybe a bit self-conscious at being so publicly fellated. I mean, really.
'Groundbreaking' worm points to a state-backed effort, say experts
Bullshit.

The code for OpenSSH and OpenBSD is secure because Theo Deraadt personally roped crazy smart people into the project to audit the entire BSD operating system line-by-line, and then set up a regime that treated all code as guilty until proven innocent. He was the first person ever to have done either of those two things.

(I had the privilege of being a semi-involved bystander while this happened; I have one or two findings from the audit and wrote their first several advisories).

Security does not just happen for open source projects. The notion that it does is one of the more harmful myths in software security. If you have any questions about this, or about the difference between a bug (blows up in your face and ruins your day, causing you to write a patch out of anger) and a security flaw (hides in the shadows waiting for an adversary to find and exploit it), just ask Wordpress, Sendmail, or BIND.

Open source makes a lot of software security problems easier, iff you care about security --- like nginx always has, and maybe Apache not so much until recently. But slapping a GPL on your codebase and pushing it to Github does not make magical unicorns poop security findings into your mailbox.
What are you doing interviewing for The Register? :)
Heh, then maybe I'm not missing much. I subscribed, noticed it was filling my inbox (and thus making my phone beep), created a gmail filter for it, and promptly forgot I subscribed. 24 hours later, reading your comment makes me not want to really open up that label.

We all started somewhere and were inexperienced, but there was a time, before Google Groups, where the ability to signup to a mailing list was a small hurdle that helped weed out some of the mailing list distraction. September never ends.
Groupon Responds: Too much of a good thing?
I too have felt its a bit strange to write down your name, phone number, maybe some other piece of contact info and submit it in order to say I want to retain my privacy and not have my contact details released to marketers.

How long until printouts of this list are found in a dumpster somewhere.
Mathematical Innovation Turns Blood Draw Into Information Gold Mine
"For someone to use this information to unlock anything, they would have to implement it in silicon -- make a computer chip," Waldrop told Fox News, and that chip would have to live on a dedicated piece of hardware -- something Intel doesn't think is likely to happen in any substantial way.

http://www.digilentinc.com/Products/Detail.cfm?Prod=NEXYS2
Less than $100 with student ID! What a deal, folks. Step right up.
And please, don't get me wrong. I love noobs. But nobody's reading the README. Nobody's reading previously filed bugs. Nobody's reading other threads on the ML. It's really, really bad.
It's really easy to change the default though. You don't have to go deep into a menu to find the setting, it prompts you when you download the app. It's no worse than any other scary warning that users have become inured to on every other platform.
Actually the AGPL doesn't prevent you from competing with a fork, as long as that fork is also open.

Also as far as the contract goes, it's only if you want to contribute code back to Diaspora project and have it become part of canonical codebase. There's nothing to prevent you from making those contributions available on your fork and have them remain open.
> "For someone to use this information to unlock anything, they would have to implement it in silicon -- make a computer chip," Waldrop told Fox News, and that chip would have to live on a dedicated piece of hardware -- something Intel doesn't think is likely to happen in any substantial way.

I'm sure thats just a PR statement, however, in most currently available products that require these keys, they are stored in flash so they can be revoked or changed in the future. Firmware these days is much more spongy than its predecessors. Hacking a legitimate firmware update for popular devices to embed new keys will soon be an automated process for anyone willing to do it. What would it take for a Chinese knockoff builder to create a BluRay player that generates a new key every time it boots and stores it RAM? That'd be nearly impossible to blacklist, since anytime you rebooted the player, it would appear to be a brand new device.

The implications of this crack are much more far reaching than dvdcss, and potentially far more economically threatening to the model they spent so much time and money on.
http://99designs.com/ is a good suggestion. I also recommend http://plasmadesign.co.uk/ -- they really understand design, are amazing to work, and produce beautiful work.
Verizon Won’t Sell Microsoft Windows Phone 7 this year
In a parser for a config file:

if (line[0] == '#') continue; // comment
Labor hasn't been losing at all. Wages haven't gone up that much, but total comp has. Companies give their workers a greater portion of their compensation in (untaxed) insurance, rather than in (taxed) wages.

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTa...

Pylab made me a nice graph of total comp (based on tables 6.2D and 6.4D from http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/SelectTable.asp?Selected...):

http://imgur.com/aDwkL
The article's spin is that designing hardware is for the super-rich, but the subtext is that anyone who tries to sell this as a hardware product is going to get sued.
If your company can only succeed if people work on weekends or work for free, you don't really have a real company.
The difference is in synchronization. If I subscribe to a Twitter feed, I get the contents of that feed no matter how I access my Twitter stream. With RSS, I have to make sure that my feeds are identical in all the browsers I use. Bookmark synchronization helps, but only for desktop browsers - I can't synchronize bookmarks (yet) between my desktop and my smartphone in a totally transparent way. Even with bookmark sync. taking care of synchronizing your subscriptions, there's still no way of synchronizing read items between instances. So items I read on my lunch break at work won't be marked as such when I get home.
Sorry, meant, "commercial fork". But you're right.
It would also be very difficult to sell in the markets where people actually buy Blu Ray disks.
Wouldn't some security holes count as bugs?
I have several friends who were writing for True/Slant when you guys launched. They all were aware and wanted you guys to drop dead as they had already gambled with this other j-startup and now there was a second one casting doubt on their original choice.

Of course 5 months later, both projects are dead and gone under less than ideal circumstances.

I actually was invited to and attended a planning meeting for True/Slant's Chicago people. They asked me to be there so I could explain how they could use Windy Citizen to promote their stuff. They seemed like good people, but I suspect their content was too earnest to really make a go of it. They had the same problem you did:

Without naked women, it's pretty hard to build eyeballs on the web.
Thanks for the feedback.

I change < to an arrow image. Thanks for pointing it out. :)

I haven't had a need to jump from one list to another in one click, but I'll definitely keep that in mind in case it becomes a problem.

I debated with myself about the colours as well. I went through several iterations, eventually I decided to focus on the tasks, while keeping the rest of the app as less distracting as possible. As a result the text for the tasks are a bit sharper and darker than the rest. The idea is to make the frequent things clear and visible, while the rarer elements hide into background.
TAOCP and the Lion's commentary? Edition 6 kernel into asm? Why?

You're working hard to sound old-school, but these are just random allusions. TAOCP is not especially relevant to OS programming, and translating _all_ of an OS into asm to make it "fit a lot into a small space" is just... plain... stupid...

You will make the code smaller (as compared to gcc -Os) in a few places; you will likely give yourself a hernia maintaining it, and you are likely to get considerably worse performance than a decent compiler will.
It's about making sure that if you build upon the work that others have made openly available, that you contribute back.

If you want to keep your code closed, then you're more than welcome to do that. Just honor the choice that others have made with their code.
Maybe I play too much poker, but I interpreted "tilt" as a sort of crazy streak. As in, here's a bunch of people going nuts about the news.
Online? Ebay? Craigslist? No, you couldn't but them at Fry's, but when have you ever been able to buy similar grey-market electronics legitimately in B&M stores?
I've done this multiple times and never once had anyone flinch at the idea... its just WHAT YOU DO when your hard drive is messed up as one of the steps.

If you don't know this, you shouldn't be on hacker news.
Aren't there provisions in the DCMA that would enable certain people to obtain such technology to use for legitimate DCMA enabled reasons?

Or is this going to be an IP issue?
The journalism experience is important because its a proxy for having that deep abiding passion for the industry that you admit you guys didn't have.

The problem wasn't that you guys didn't wake up and go to read BBC news in my opinion. The problem was that you guys didn't grow up wanting to be newspaper reporters and then start Newstilt after you went into journalism and learned that dream was endangered by the industry's collapsing business model.
Without having to get into a drawn-out series of hypotheticals let's just stipulate that pushing DRM cracks that far underground is a win condition for a content industry that just a few years ago was as open to piracy as redbook CDs.
There's some great stuff in there. I really liked this one:

// somedev1 - 6/7/02 Adding temporary tracking of Login screen
// somedev2 - 5/22/07 Temporary my ass

(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...)
Groupon started as a WordPress blog
There are exemptions to the DMCA, but in general the entire law works in exactly the opposite direction, and exists basically to prevent products like this from being brought to market.
Is it economically threatening? Really? I have my doubts about that.

As I understand it, the hardware manufacturers were peddling a fantasy to rightsholders that their hardware could protect their content from end to end. By getting rightsholders to buy into this fantasy, these hardware manufacturers got a whole lot more leverage, licensing revenue, new (i.e. forced) hardware sales, etc.

But I'm not sure it did a whole lot for the rightsholders other than try and assuage their fears of the digital dawn, a kind of snake oil, as it were. I don't think people who actually want to view content without paying for it even noticed. The people who did notice were consumers who were inconvenienced by the incompatibilities created by coordination problems being made unnecessarily difficult etc.

If anyone is the loser here, I would think it's a handful of big-brand hardware manufacturers and patent / license holders, trying to e.g. exclude cheap no-name Chinese manufacturers from competition.
You should break it down by income bracket, it looks very different.

http://yakkstr.com/posts/791-This-is-whats-wrong-with-Americ...
Yeah. As a Google fan, I think this is sad, but I don't really care. I don't intend to do business with Verizon, so they can install whatever anti-hacking devices on their phones they like. Is it harmful to users and society? Yes. Can they do it if the want to? Right now, yes.

If people care, they will vote with their wallet. If people don't care, then I guess I'm stuck on T-Mobile. (Actually, I use Sprint. But I vote T-Mobile as least-likely-to-fuck-everyone-for-no-reason.)
Can anyone provide examples or references that discuss the importance (or unimportance) of site speed for sites that aren't search engines?
Jeremy Clarkson Be Damned: My Adventures In Reasonably Priced Network Storage
I recently did a bunch of research on this for my company Fanvibe. eMarketer, a research firm, estimates fans spend $500mm on premium content about fantasy, but the Fantasy Sports Trade Assoc. estimates the economic impact is about $4bn - the difference being people gambling "under the table". Look at what Fanduel is doing with regards to managing leagues and bets, and taking a cut.
Keep a couple of buckets around
Nope. It is good that Theo is so paranoid^Wpassionate, but it isn't a whole reason. The whole reason is that so many people are involved, both on contributing and seeking design or coding flaws. Crowd-sourcing is the key.

I didn't say that opening the code makes it secure by a magic, what I said is that if the code is useful for some skilled people they will fix and improve the code, at least for themselves. Good ones will submit the patches back to the community.

So, fuck off.
Different Google logos? Has this been going on for a long time?
I'm not saying that's a bad policy necessarily, I'm just saying it isn't exactly what I would call "free" software.
I did not know about BetterTouchTool, wow thanks a lot for cluing me into that one. Just when I thought it could not get any better.

The one that was killing me was not being able to set gestures because I would love to have copy / past. I can have it now.
It doesn't really matter which side you're on, either in principle cartels are OK or they're not.
It's impossible to identify any one target as being "the one" that Stuxnet was after like the author tries to do in this article. There were tens of thousands of Stuxnet infections spread throughout the Middle East and Europe at the time it was discovered. Stuxnet is a piece of malware, it's reusable, and it was clearly a component of many successful intrusions into control system networks rather than part of a single attack.
It's not a surge of mainstream users. It's a surge of young users. People often forget that the entire internet is younger than you, and will be for the rest of your life. The average age on reddit is 21.
I can't upvote enough. People on HN really don't understand the true value of backlinks, and hence the value of the 'bad traffic' people who generate them.