skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Probably many more died because of the British Empire's policies

I don't think body counts are a useful indicator of the level of evil intent of a government or a regime.
On that basis the U.S. would fare significantly worse than Nazi Germany, based on the 10-16 million killed as a result of U.S. foreign policy since 1945 alone (see http://nottheenemy.com/index_files/Death%20Counts/Death%20Co...)
It would take a crackpot to declare the U.S more "evil" than Nazi Germany.

> The benefits that you mentioned was[sic] simply benefits of an industrial society

Not true.
China is increasingly a heavily industrialised society yet still maintains an autocratic system of government with no democracy. It doesn't follow that just because a society embraces industrialisation it implements a fair system of government or invests heavily in infrastructure programs - just look at the crumbling roads and transport in North Korea alongside their hi-tech nuclear ambitions.

> The general population in the victim countries did not share in the advantages of it

To quote Manmohan Singh (the current Prime Minister of India):

"Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day."

(see http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/jul/12spec.htm)

> Probably the worst thing that the British Empire did was large scale ethnocide

This is undeniable, and indefensible. However, unlike Nazi Germany it appears this wasn't the Raison d'être for the empire.

> People in Britain still live with the mindset that colonialism and their colonial empire was a good thing.

Not true. I don't know what evidence you are basing this opinion on, but the brutal effects of Colonialism are taught throughout the British national school curriculum and in various British museums. No punches are pulled.
(see http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zPJS4o3...)
Wow, I love this.

http://markup.io/v/d3tjg1xn1eqx
Software moves so fast that you're always doing it wrong according to someone "in the know."

The point is to have a whole bunch of tools at your disposal, the knowledge to correctly use each tool to it's maximum effect, and the courage of character to use that tool despite its unpopularity.

If you take away from this article that shipping trumps all, or COM multithreading sucks, or templates in C++ are buggy, you're missing the point entirely.
Talking to your co-founder will not help, from what you have written seems like he has a personality issue and this will take a long time to correct......you first have to get him to accept the issue is with him. My advice would be to be smart, put personal feelings and emotions aside and try to engineer a way to get him out of the company or you and the company away from him. Time is so precious, you can't waste it on someone not ready/mature enough for the start up world yet, especially when you have a family.
He's not being downvoted for being un-PC, he's being downvoted for being reflexively paranoid, in a style that resists falsification and contributes nothing to the discussion.
> The answer to online advertising isn't to hit more people, it's to hit the right people in the right way.

Still, it sounds to me like doing a carpet-bombing to eliminate one building. At least in case of non-AdWords advertisements.
I am sorry but the people pool their money way more than the lobby groups do. It is just that taxes are taken for granted and they should not be.
Probably in part due to things like SlideShare, where you can't read squat unless it's big, or you go into full-screen.

In any case, I prefer it to wall-o-text styles, where the presenter has their notecards in the ppt and just reads off the screen.
You're still very early in the project. You have paying customers, but it sounds like that's more-or-less just covering hosting costs, etc. You have a long way to go if you're going to turn this into a real business that makes you rich. A long way to go where you'll be working with this guy and splitting your profits with this guy.

Talk to him about your concerns and see if you can work something out. But if you have any doubt that he's the right cofounder for you (which it sounds like you still will after talking to him), get out now. The longer you wait, the more it'll feel like you should just stick it out because of how much work you've already done and how well it's going.

But though it may feel like things are going great right now, you really haven't invested that much time in this, and you don't want to spend 5 years with a cofounder that you don't feel is pulling his weight. If you don't think you can spend 5 years working with this guy, get out now.
Google-skynet is distributed across multiple data-centers, I'm sure.
Why not? The nice thing about these quick incremental updates is that no huge change breaks everything and makes you want to die. Right now I'm running Maverick RC and have no issues.
Isolator++ (Easy Unit Testing for C++) released
Could you potentially buy him out? Just replace him.
It might be a problem with my assumptions. Could you elaborate on the "people do want to see ads" part, please? Personally, I'm having a hard time imagining why people would (actively) want to see (on-line) adverts.
I think children themselves _are_ startups. They require a ton of effort and long hours getting started, have a growth phase, and then start to pay returns and become more self-sufficient.

In a sense, women are involved in startups when they choose to have kids.

Background info: In the past year, I've started my family (first baby) and worked on several startups as a Rails developer (FYI, I'm a man).
> Global warming is not a theory, it is a fact, enough evidence that is beyond reproach of any kind is left that we can safely conclude that this is apparently really so.

Relativity is a theory, even though it has been experimentally verified. Newtonian mechanics and the luminiferous aether are also theories.

Gravity, global warming (on any given timescale), the freezing point of water, and the presence of little green men on Mars are facts.

But in order to conclude that global warming is a true fact, you need to specify it better. "The earth was warmer at the end of 2008 than at the end of 2005" is false[1]; "the earth was warmer at the end of 2009 than at the end of 1999" is true; "the earth was warmer at the end of 2008 than at the end of 1988" depends on whether you're talking about monthly (true) or trailing-12-months (false) measurements. If you pick your date range right, you can get any truth-value you want.

[1] http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2
i agree, the modal auth prompt really turns me off. tell users what the app is about (not obvious from the name) before forcing an auth.

some screenshots, a demo, video, or even a textual description should be part of a landing page.
It is there an actual market opportunity somewhere in this problem of ageism in tech? You've got all these undervalued veteran hackers, could there be a way to provide a way for them to pool their abilities, either on a company, or a freelancing collective or LLC or the like, in order to maximize their full value?
Something like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb735305.aspx ?
Thanks for the stats. I didn't realize that AdBlock (and the like) is so unpopular (guess what happens when only people you talk to are either geeks or people who almost doesn't use computer at all :) ). Also, this report you've mentioned is... intriguing.
Agreed. Say I quit a long running job. And a menu comes up asking me ok or cancel. I want to quit the job, so I cancel, right? Oops, that cancels the quitting, not the job,
.

quit job or coninue job would mean more than ok or cancel.
2G or 3G wireless would be attached to someone's account (i.e. associated with a person).

Easily solvable with shills or shell corporations. Think about the options of the authorities in the US. Police would have to get a search warrant. Which address are they going to get a search warrant for? The shill/shell company might have nothing to do with the whole thing other than maintaining the 3G accounts.

The authorities could just access the contents of the drive to see what is on it. (though this would obviously mean infiltrating the darknet)

This might also mean infiltrating the organization to get access to the darknet. This would seem to indicate that the level of physical security I'm suggesting is commensurate to the task.

It would probably be easier to setup something like this hooked into the internet at some private business. Stick it under a desk or above the ceiling tiles and just plug it directly into the local network.

That's exactly what I'm thinking of! That would be another viable option for hosting such a device.
What issues are you having? I converted my company over a year ago to Git from CVS. The main problem we still have are people that either refuse to spend the time to learn Git properly or quasi-technical people who just aren't capable of it. For the former group, some people are just lazy and try and take the easy way out. Or, they're stubborn and think they can get by with a little knowledge.

I've found, to a person, that once they put in the work and know how to use it, it's a rewarding and fun experience to use Git. It's not easy, though.
someone left it in the comments.
Looks like it was Lawrence Lessig who first brought the method into our community (technically inclined content aficionados) with his lectures.
Run.

Been there, done that. (I didn't run soon enough)

The heart-to-heart stuff is nice and warm for about a week. If you have been having problems for a long while, trust your senses and leave before you are more heavily invested.

Remember all those books/articles/posts about how having a great co-founder is important. (Anyone got good quotes for this ?)
I still can't
People may be fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of presentation nowadays, but I don't know anybody who is fixated on the "one thing per rapidly changing slide" style of reading.
I read the emails that supposedly show fraud. There's nothing indicative that it's systemic.

Furthermore, the 'ClimateGate' emails only barely show fraud. No, I haven't read them all, but every source I saw pointed to the same exact 'trick' emails, and no one could show anything dirty in the rest.
I see you guys already have a lot going on. The best advice I think I could give to you is to invest in features that people will want. Gamers are very picky people.

Also, focus on WoW. It is definitely the cash cow of MMOs by far. I would even go as far as to create a WoW specific landing page that is optimized to attract WoW players.

Blizzcon is this month on Oct 22-23rd. If you can tie your site to Blizzcon somehow… maybe by blogging live about Blizzcon or advertising/networking while at the event, then may be able to capitalize on this once a year event.

One last thing, Cataclysm is coming in December. This means that all those inactive WoW players are starting to comes back and will need guild hosting. That means you guys have to be ready to capitalize on that surge.

Earlier this year I put together a site to try and solve the grouping issue people face in WoW. It's not uncommon for people to spend HOURS trying to put together PUG groups. I didn't get any traction so I've mainly abandoned the site. If you have any questions about it feel free to email me (email in profile).

Anyways good luck. Lately I’ve been noticing Curse gaming and ZAM buying a bunch of sites (MMOChampion, one of those shitty guild hosting sites, tankspot, etc). I heard WowHead sold for 1Mil, but not from anyone reputable.
You already have the technical aspect down. So disband the project, find a better co-founder and simply restart the same thing anew. You can be up and running in a fraction of the time.

Basically, do what Arrington did with Calacanis (with regards to running the TechCrunch conference).
I have read the article. The reference to the missing bloodbath was about Vietnam and not about Cambodia. Chomsky was right there. The missing bloodbath was in reference to the reasoning a lot of people in the US used to prolong the war. The theory was that if the US leaves everyone in the south would be massacred, so we must stay for humanitarian reasons. That was wrong, the North Vietnamese did not massacre civilians after they won. Again this has nothing to do with Cambodia.

The other stuff you have written there is just silly. Were you in Vietnam before the war? Can you really make the comparison? Are you sure that as a French colony, when most Vietnamese were either peasants or more or less slaves working on French rubber plantations, Vietnam was more prosperous than it is now? Or do you mean to say that it was just dirty and relatively poor when you saw it and therefore made you feel superior enough to dream up various theories about how it might have been so much better if they let us bomb them a little more.

A lot of that poverty is the result of the war, and I really doubt it would have been much better if the war lasted longer.
I agree that human psychology seems to pre-dispose us to being more shocked by tragic events that occur within a shorter timeframe (this has been even more amped-up since the advent of 24 hour rolling news of course). However, as I've mentioned below I don't think body counts are a useful indicator of the evil intent of a regime (it opens up a can of worms for many modern states).

In terms of the "balance sheet" for the British Empire, ultimately it's hard to argue for more good than bad in the forced imposition of power from one state on another. The legacy of territorial conflicts birthed by Britain's hasty withdrawal have not helped either.

However, my point was not to try and write a defence of British imperialism, but to try and discredit this notion that the British Empire was more evil than the Third Reich, a state that more than any other plumbed the depths of human misery. It seems strange to argue that Nazi Germany had any benefit to it.
Some good points made here, but I think the gloom and doom is a little overstated.

Facebook went through the same thing for awhile and then created facebook lite, then rolled more simplicity back into their main app.

A company like twitter is going to have a hard time pleasing everybody, and has to figure out the boundaries with its APIs as time goes on. In UI rate limits? They are probably battling spammers gaming the regular frontend like crazy, and are still hammering out the kinks for the real users.

As far as Dick Costollo goes, if there is anyone who I think would be pretty adept about balancing core ideals, while actually making money, he seems like the guy.
Google is good at hard computer-science problems, which this is. It also has an obvious market application. Even if they don't market this themselves, it'd be easy to spin it off or sell it for lots of money.
Chris Tolles and Dan Lyons have it wrong here.

Chrome stats still growing (according to w3cschools, Jan 2010 was 10.8% and Sept 2010 was 17.3%), even though I don't use it:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Logitech Revue will use Chrome:

http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Companion-Google-Keyboard-Con...

AdMob stated in April that Android passed iOS in web traffic:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/admob-android-passes-iphone...

And everything you read these days has Android being a significant competitor:

http://mashable.com/2010/07/22/android-iphone-os-stats/

More stats on iOS and Android:

http://chitika.com/research/
A brief history of self-driving cars.
One thing I find interesting is that with the ever increasing ability to telecommute and work from home, many very talented women are able to stay employed and have kids at the same time. Employment is there if you can think and work "outside the box".

Example: My father is an attorney who started hiring skilled female lawyers with young children to handle a few hours of legal calls a day from home (the business design was phone-based legal services). The structure meant these women could work reduced hours from their own homes while taking care of their kids. Best of all they earned some income while not letting their skills go to waste.

There are so many creative ways to find/create employment for those willing to think beyond traditional work structure parameters.
For people interested in the background of this letter of resignation, you might want to read this paper. The deniers of global warming are a small, well organized, and well funded group with interesting political and social connections.

http://deepclimate.org/2010/09/26/strange-scholarship-wegman... is the one-page abstract. It points at 2 PDFs: a 6-pager that has a a ToC, Executive Summary, background, and guide to reading the rest; and a 250-page Report, of which that is the first 6 pages. (The main discussion is about 25 pages, then backed by 200+ pages of
appendices.)
If you're producing the slides for a live audience, this style is superior. People can read faster than you can talk, so if what you're saying is all packed onto the slides it creates a bad audience dynamic.

If, OTOH, the slide you're producing are intended to be read, denser, more informational slides are appropriate.

As with most things in life, what to do depends on who your audience is.
You'll want to read business books and consult a lawyer. Figure out what your options are. Dissolve the company, buy him out, get bought out, etc. A lawyer can best advise you on these matters, also did you assign your IP to the company? If not as others have suggested, just change the name on the door as the code is yours (or, your employers if you didn't get that sorted out). Also, consult a lawyer as there may be implicit agreements present, or legal obligations you are unaware of.

Don't cut and run just because you are the tech guy and he is the biz guy. Figure out the business side of things and get the guy out of YOUR company. It's not going to be the first time you'll have to get someone out of your company who has equity. This is a valuable opportunity to learn how to do this.

If your site sucks, change it. I assume as tech guy you've got control of the DNS records?

Stop asking for permission, and start taking control of your life and your business.
Aren't car companies essentially all about wringing huge efficiencies out of mass production? Compare an automotive product to something requiring a similar manufacturing technique with more niche demand and there's usually a huge price difference.
The most important thing you do when optimising for low energy use is to measure how much energy your appliances actually use. For example, if you have a modern phone charger, you will find that it draws about 1W when switched on but not charging your phone: that costs (just) under £1/year.

The second most important thing is to pay attention to energy consumption when buying new appliances. If low energy use is important enough to you to justify obsessively switching things off at the wall, it's important enough to you to justify paying more up front to reduce your energy costs long term.

(Even this ignores insulation.)
Twitter CEO: We’ve “cracked the code” on advertising
If that's the case, then people will just end up using the roadways even more.

"Hey, traffic's not as bad as it used to be since the Google auto-drivers smoothed out the traffic. Let's go to the store at 5:00 today!"

Congestion will again increase to the same point of suckage as before, but then, only non-human drivers will be qualified to be on freeways.
No, I will wait a week or so, so servers don't get clogged.
Not me. I'm still on 8.04 :/
Easy, you apply a bit of game theory. A system similar to say a poker bot can make the high level decisions.
It needs an option to go back to the previous in case I overenthusiastically clicked next. Also, nexts should be deterministic so I can go forward and back in the stream at will.
The 3 Qs for Great Experience Design
Problem 1: 2 minutes for 5 lines of PHP code. Problem 2: 1 minute of Google and Google (why reinvent the wheel?). Problem 3: half a minute of brainwork, 15 minutes worth of tedious PHP snippet.

I got the impression that this particular test was not a good one for finding apt programmers. The questions and the solutions were just so very "off".
People will always push boundaries.
http://www.webpagetest.org/ - is very nice
They send out emails. They're not relying on people reading the blog.

Also, http://www.businessinsider.com/yelps-first-daily-deal-beats-...
Hey, less dying and making money!

Can't beat that.
From the sounds of it, do you even need him?
Seems like something you can get an employee to do, and for cheaper.
No, I'll stick with the LTS version a while. So far I've seen nothing compelling in 10.10 anyway. A few cosmetic changes, and maybe a few others I can upgrade individually in 10.04.
>we're talking about a field in which there are demonstrably fewer women participating than men and we're asking why

I'd like to ask why you imagine that in any field there would be equal numbers of men and women? Or indeed why there should be any reason beyond simple preference. More women like milk chocolate; more men like dark (pulled that one out my arse incidentally). Does it matter?

If you take a gender blind view then you only have to look at individuals and say - "were you discriminated against due to prejudice?" if not then no foul.

There's a natural skew I think: if both men and women equally wanted to start families then more women would normally be able to than men (artificial insemination, one-night stand, stop using birth control, decide contrary to the male to not have an abortion, whatever). This leaves more men doing startups whether they prefer that to starting a family or not.

No, I'm not saying this accounts for any discrepancy I'm just saying this seems to be a reasonable explanation as to why there might be an imbalance and that these sorts of possibilities lead me to think that should it be clear there is no discrimination then it is highly unlikely that equal numbers of any two sub-populations (male-female, blue eyes-brown eyes, ...) occupy a particular field.
no I'm still running windows 7.
You really should be talking face-to-face as much as possible and I do not understand why you are sending e-mails in the first place. It sounds like you two live and work far away from each other and in that case I believe you are doomed anyhow.

But yea just leave, a conflict like this just gets worse and worse. Specially when one of the parties in the conflict doesn't realize there is one. If you really believe in this business you could always take in outside help but I believe that is your only chance to fix the actual issue.

If you aren't prepared to do that, run.
I'll upgrade, but since I'm running 10.10 RC, it'll probably be a few minor package upgrades.
Not really. Computer cars will very likely be manufactured mainly by the existing auto giants. And those have billions of ad dollars, so the media will be very careful.
There are hundreds of these. Web clock, physical clock, phone or mobile? Need to track client hours, or just in/out times? Some combination?

At http://www.TimeForge.com we handle both software and hardware clocks, along with integration for retail / restaurants.
"The prospect of automated cars scares me because, obviously, they cannot be perfect."

They can, at least 1000 times more perfect that humans are. A computer could have and exact model of the road, and compare it to what it sees, could report bugs in an objective way, the same way computers on airplanes work, having made flying way more secure.
I'm sticking with LTS too. Seems like new kernel+x.org have some problems with non-intel graphic cards. Now Ati works, NV doesn't. I tried the RC on my notebook, didn't notice any changes.