skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm involved in a similar scheme in NZ, though ours isn't nearly as well supported. I hold a music degree so am eligible for a thing called Pathway to Arts and Cultural Employment. Basically it's the Unemployment Benefit made less annoying and "get-a-job-like" and more positive, "sort-yourself-out-then-go-do-it"ish.

It's been great for me this year. After graduating uni the jobmarket for my other degree was beyond uninspiring (Marketing and Comms, double degrees are quite common here), so having had a few friends go through the program I decided to look into it. I also met some guys from a local tech startup community who provided me, free of charge, with an office and internet.

It's been great. I will never, ever regret this choice. I'm about to launch a start-up (admittedly, this is not my govt. sanctioned business, though they do know about it - the scheme is more designed to help you survive as a contractor/small business operator) and am now set up and comfortable to go and earn money as both a contractor and a businessman. I'm also encouraging all my friends who are eligible to try and do this instead of finding a job. I'm now smarter, more savvy and far more useful to society and myself than if I'd spent a year in a boring entry-level job.

These types of schemes are great for people like myself who get bored easily and always need to be challenged with learning new stuff, however my experience would not have been the same had I not also been involved with the startup group. I think for them to work well they need to be deeply connected to business groups like this, otherwise you're just doing it by yourself and likely to lose motivation. I guess it's really the ultimate private/public deal in someways. The public sector is very good at dispensing money to support the welfare of its people, but not very good at teaching them how to be good business people. If you can create a combination of this then schemes like this should be a cheap win for societies looking to produce a more entrepreneurial and confident population.
I have a little professional experience dealing with outsourcing operations in a few countries.

You probably grew up in a Western democracy where racial discrimination was illegal and socially radioactive for most of your life. There are people who do not share that experience. Assume you had grown up in a hypothetical totally-not-India nation where government was known to be pervasively corrupt and where discrimination happened as a matter of course, and you knew in dealing with foreign countries that you were not in a position of strength vis-a-vis your negotiating partner. Would you necessarily expect them to treat you fairly?

Story time, with particulars elided: Japanese companies often pay employees in a fashion determined by an algorithm. It came to the attention of a supervisor of an Indian employee that information relevant to the employee's salary had not been communicated to the company and, as a consequence, he was not being paid his expected wages and had not been in some time. The employee was unaware of this and the error was in the company's favor. The company was totally blameless for the error happening.

The supervisor immediately went to the employee, apologized, and informed him that he would be paid appropriately going forward. He then asked the employee to wait for a few minutes while they figured out what to do about the six months of wages. The employee said it was OK, he understood that the company would not pay him.

Not five minutes later, the supervisor came back with the division chief and the head of HR. All three repeatedly apologized to the employee. They then presented him with an envelope: six months of the difference, in cash, accurate to the yen. It had been drawn from the petty cash drawer, and I have it on good authority that if the petty cash had been insufficient the division chief would have made good on it from his personal accounts within the hour.

The Indian employee was flabbergasted. I was mildly surprised. But this totally makes sense in a particular mindset here. The Indian was totally ready to believe he would be cheated out of wages -- it wouldn't have been the first time. I was ready to believe the company or HR would drag its feet. From the perspective of a particular brand of Japnaese megacorp, though, both those expectations are not just wrong but so outlandishly outside the realm of possibility that they wouldn't even occur to anyone.
Alex...the problem I have with his shtick, is not that he gives you upfront what you will get. Or that he is abrasive.

It is this notion that, if you like the way he leads, then you are the best. If you don't, then you are 'normal'. i.e. bad, and you don't what to succeed.

That's a false dichotomy and it's highly annoying to hear him re-iterate many, many times.

If he just said, working for me is hell. But, you will get these benefits (all of which might be very valuable in their own right - I am not degrading the quality of his network, and his ability to convince other angels to invest in your next venture).

It's just this 'I am better than everyone' aura that he espouses - in public anyway.

And as I said in my post, I don't think he has earned the right to be like that.

Steve Jobs has. Bill Gates has. Bezos has. Larry & Sergey have. But I am yet to see any of them acting like that. I am sure that all of those guys demand the most out of their employees and push them to give more than they give.

It's just the abrasive - "I am the best entrepreneur in the Valley" attitude that I am talking about here.

It's about time we call a spade a spade.
Lazyscope updated tonight (cool Twitter client that uses RSS
Yes. When I had mine done, it took 10 minutes at most, and there were 15-20 other patients scheduled for the same day.
> obsession with inanimate copies of the evidence.

If a search reveals a video of your child being abused at day camp on the internet, would you want censorship of that video?
The Humane Interface. An amazing book.
For an alternate and very different explanation, see mine at http://www.mail-archive.com/boston-pm@mail.pm.org/msg02716.h.... It does it in 3 steps.
An obvious technical one: The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. That might have saved me a lot of time to read in early adolescence. (Or maybe it was better to have to figure things out in my own half-assed way. Time travel is tricky.)

But something like Francis Bacon’s Essays might be more important. Seeing that lively and methodical a mind right at the horizon of easy readability would have been a powerful clue about how people think and how far afield it’s useful to look for interesting things.
So basically this is Apple Store fun. Try:
Open terminal, open screen,
sleep 3000; while true; say "hilarious thing you want the Mac to say"; done
Close terminal.
Don, I am assuming this is Don Dodge, I won't debate that he can teach you a lot, and be a great mentor and possibly an awesome angel.

It's the attitude that he has - which we could excuse if his accomplishments were as big as he makes them seem like they are.

I am not diminishing the fact that he built a company from scratch and sold it to AOL for $30M. That's not a small feat, so don't get me wrong.

But, that happens almost every day in many industries. There are countless stories like that, and we don't see all of those CEOs acting like they are God's gift to technology. Jason acts like that, and quite frankly, when you compare him to his peers (the YouTube guys, Andreesen, Joshua Schacter, Max Levchin, etc.) - he comes up short.

As has been said so many times, the only people that I think has the right to act like that are Jobs, Gates, Bezos, etc. And they don't.
The parent post talked about the distribution of child porn not stopping all child abuse which is why I think you're beating on a straw man.
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-...
The article you are pointing to does not currently cite roads as an example of a public good, but it does give the definition I used above: non-excludable and non-rival. I didn't edit it. Tollbooths, roadblocks, and gated communities are a manifestation of the excludability of roads; traffic, traffic accidents involving more than one vehicle, and potholes are manifestations of their rivalrousness, to which we have responses such as traffic laws, road maintenance, gasoline taxes, rearview mirrors, and seatbelts.

In short, every aspect of how we interact with roads and cars is pervasively shaped by the rivalrous nature of roads, and their excludability profoundly affects many social institutions. Only in the most rural areas are roads even approximately non-excludable or non-rival.
You can shift-slow-effect on other effects too. Try shift-dashboard and -expose.

Even more useful - turn on "developer dashboard" (a hidden preference), and drag a widget & close the dashboard at the same time. You'll get the widget on the desktop (floating). Put it back similarly.
I'm not a programmer but I do spend a good amount of time staring at computer screens. I did my lasik around 1 year ago and there wasn't any issue for me.

Choose a good surgeon wisely and all the best! It'll be worth it!
No. I don't believe in censoring the Internet.

jrockway's post below is basically my position as well.
I liked 'Master Foo and the Script Kiddie' more... http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/script-kiddie.html
The Tao of Pooh

the timeless lessons of the Toa Te Ching in a very accessible presentation
Stock Trader's Almanac 2010
+ Hacker Ethic by Steven Levy

+ Masters of Doom by David Kushner

+ The Millionaire Mind by Dr. Thomas Stanley

+ The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham

+ The Essays of Warren Buffet by Lawrence Cunningham

+ Buffet by Roger Lowenstein

+ The Knack by Norm Brodsky

+ Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein

+ The Return of the Great Depression by Vox Day

+ Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

+ Road to Serfdom by Hayek

+ Iacocca:An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca
Probably How to Win Friends and influence people. I could have done with being nicer to people much earlier in my life, probably around 12 or so.

I'm surprised by the number of tech books on this list, I found I had an appetite for finding them myself pretty much when I was ready for each of them.
Eiger Dreams, when I was about 16. I'd have gone a whole different direction with my life, for better or worse.
Allpay.net -- Recommended for U.K. Only
BidPay.com -- Out Of Business 2 Years
CertaPay -- Recommended for CANADA Only
Checkfree -- NOT RECOMMENDED
HyperWALLET -- NOT RECOMMENDED
Moneybookers -- Recommended for ALL
Nochex -- Recommended for U.K. Residents and Certain Others
Ozpay.biz -- Out Of Business 3+ Years
Paymate -- Recommended for Australia & New Zealand
ProPay -- Recommended for U.S. Sellers
Xoom -- NOT RECOMMENDED
Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser
My younger self had the right books. But I'd take away his Asimov. That was about fifty novels worth of time that could have been better spent.
I think another big problem with ICAAN and our DNS is the TLD. The fact that somebody who wants to represent their self on the internet might not be able to do so in a manner of their choosing because the domain they want is "owned" across all major and minor TLDs is very anti-internet-philosophy.

Top-Level is anti-web, because the web is not meant to be a top-down system. To me, this is a fundamentally flawed implementation. And why not? In terms of mass web, it was the first. When are first iterations ever correct?

Destinations are IP addresses. We all have em. What you want to call yours should be up to you. Ever since there was a postal service, people could be reached at the address they had. Even phone numbers weren't top-down (area codes), so that you could reach a local address, even it was the same as one in another county, without pre-(or post-) fix. I don't have the solution, but it wouldn't hurt for the public to learn and understand their IP address same as they do their home one.

Google alone, or with the help of other major "linkers", could go a long way in changing our DNS structure, by indexing different systems.

Decentralization is every nerd's dream, aint it? Eventually the serving capacity of consumer devices should be adequate to resolve standardized requests.

I think this holds promise: telehash.org
Your statement is completely wrong, from beginning to end.

(I am going to do my readers the honor of assuming they know what a public good is. If not, I suggest they look it up.)

Science is a public good. Lots of science is funded by governments, but lots of science is done without government funding, too.

Recorded music and books are now public goods, now that it is so cheap to copy them and to find instances to copy. Only a small fraction of them are provided by governments. Many of them are provided by individuals rather than institutions of any kind.

TV and radio broadcasts are a public good. In some countries, they are mostly provided by governments, but in almost all countries, they are at least partly provided by private parties who fund them with advertising. In the US, many "public TV stations" are actually funded mostly by public subscription, using "pledge drives" in which viewers receive an item of nominal value in exchange for pledging to donate to the station if enough other people do so; this is a variety of the dominant assurance contract.

Views of fireworks that go more than a few meters high are a public good. Here in Buenos Aires, they are provided almost exclusively by private individuals. At Christmas and New Year's, the sky over the entire city is filled with amazing displays. In countries with less freedom, such displays are sometimes provided exclusively by governments, but that is far from invariable.

Lighthouses were public goods. Palacio Barolo, the lighthouse six blocks from my house, is now only operational as a lighthouse one night a month, and in any case it's been obsoleted by radio systems and impeded by the building of other, taller buildings between it and the river, but it was constructed by a wealthy businessman.

Many public goods, including TV broadcasts, lighthouses, views of fireworks, and recorded music, are definitely not needed.

In conclusion, you don't need anybody to provide public goods; entities that are not institutions often provide public goods; many public goods can be provided worldwide, rather than within particular regions; even in cases where public goods are provided by institutions, the institutions are often not governments or government-supported; and even in cases where public goods are provided by governments, those same public goods are also often provided by non-government institutions as well.

I am not taking any position here on whether or not governments are necessary.
Startups in Japan (Tokyo)?
I'm in Tokyo until the 15th, and I've been looking around trying to see if there are any interesting startups here. I've managed to find one or two really small stealth ones (and it's entirely possible that I'm an idiot and just missing these companies completely).

Figured I'd ask and see if anyone here knows what's in Tokyo. Not necessarily expecting it to be the same count as the US, mind you.
A clever use of RSS without explaining to the users that this is driven by RSS. Very nice but the software is proprietary... maybe alternatives will pop up.
Most attendees will probably seek out the slides on the conference site, yes.
I agree it's probably a strategic error, but I don't think it's actually very easy to distinguish governmental secrets from corporate ones, especially if you have to be somewhat opportunist in what secrets come across your desk. For example, what if you were interested in exposing the web of corruption that is the African oil and gas industry? Leaking documents on the subject from major multinational oil companies is probably the best route. You could try to only go after it from the governmental side, leaking documents from corrupt regimes that take bribes and rig auctions, but if you're a mainly western-based organization like Wikileaks, you might have easier access to internal documents from Exxon versus internal documents from the Nigerian government. The Nigerian government may have also been more careful about whether any of that ever got written down, so Exxon's side might actually have the best documentation.
I know it's a lame choice, given that we're on HN, but it's true: I'd give Paul Graham's startup essays to myself 10 years ago (5 years early).

I had already started small businesses and knew I wanted to do a web software company, but I just didn't have a mental framework to work from.

Paul Graham's startup essays (and later many other sources) gave me an idea of how to go about making a startup work.
Atlas Shrugged. It would have fired me up to start something.
Ask HN: Best cross-browser testing service?
I'm starting to get more in to polished web apps and find cross-browser testing a nightmare to say the least. What services of setup do you use for testing?

Bonus question: Do you test for IE 6, or have you finally crossed that off your list of supported browsers?
There is no single book which adequately describes my thinking. Rather, I would encourage him to read more in general, whatever he was curious about. Only through understanding a wide variety of classics and perspectives does one become educated. There were quite a few years where I did not read much at all, and I regret that, because I'm stupider for it.

I would also give him the practical limitations of only trying to read one book at a time, to take his time with it, and to start a new one not long after finishing. Then again, I'm not sure I should mess with the space-time continuum.
Nope, sorry, your method of analysis is a logical fallacy (circumstantial ad hominem).

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/circumstantial-ad-h...
Programmer, 26, had it done less than a year ago. Great experience, had no issues and no touch-up needed. I had night time halos but they would go away after a few minutes of my eyes adjusting. I saw halos for a few months but as my eyes healed they eventually went away. During the day I never had any issues. Glad I did it.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by proprietary?
Even issuing debt (i.e. loans) still falls under the securities regulation just like equity.
Maybe he/she is referring to the fact that this is running on Adobe AIR?
I think I read Paul Graham's essays when I was 18. I can't imagine diving into startup world any earlier than that. After all, had to enjoy my teen life!

Any way, if I really must, I would have given back 'Founders at Work' to my 18 self. I only got to read it once I was 21.
If anyone's still reading this thread and looking for resources, I found another site from Japan that sells what seems to be quality green tea (haven't ordered from them yet, though):

http://www.o-cha.com/
What about a Kickstarter community of only Accredited Investors? Sure, this would be very tough given the requirements... but not impossible.
The new changes are solid. While I understand the reason behind using Air, I share Scoble's opinion that this becomes a lot more useful when I can use it in a tablet or mobile environment as that's where I do most of my content consumption right now.

With that said, I've been a Lazyscope user for a while and it currently handles my desktop consumption needs adequately. Kudos to the team on the update!
Any math books would have been nice. Shame to discover math now, when I'm in college. I overestimated the complexity of college math; there was a lot of handwaving in highschool about how demanding college will be, turns out it was all bull, all it served to do was discourage me from learning something. My own fault for listening, even half-heartedly, to high school people.
I discovered this book very late on, but it has been invaluable. In addition to this my own two personal favourites are:

- The e-Myth Revisited
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I've found these very useful in terms of how money works and also about the value of passive income
Atlas Shrugged. I'm not a Rand groupie but seeing some of the core ideas of what I always felt but never could quite articulate literally changed me as a person.
A friend likes his Ortho-K lenses very much. He got used to them pretty quickly. The worst experience he's had was losing a lens on a red-eye flight -- he spent a few days with deteriorating vision before returning home to get a replacement lens.
You must support IE6 as bugs in IE6 got workarounds in all and every js code. Unfortunately still 50% of the web is IE6. If you ignore, you'll probably alienate most of corporate users.

I don't use a service, I self check against all browsers. I have each open in their own window or VM.

However there is one self service where you submit the url and they will render it on all known browser permutations.
http://browsershots.org/
One of the cool things that Google provided during their SearchWiki experiment was the [x] button. An option to remove a site from further search results.

This could easily give some power back to the users to not get hassled by such spammy site, as well as give Google some inputs to take action against such sites.

Bring the [x] button back, Google :)
The hungry, hungry caterpillar. Best book ever!
Ask HN: Best startup accounting software?
I'm looking for some great web-based accounting software and am coming up empty. Sure, there's Outright, InDinero and other "accounting" services, but they don't have anywhere near the functionality for real, QuickBooks-killing, accounting software. I'm talking about software a real accountant wouldn't sneeze at.

Specifically, I need non-cash accounts to track loans/debt from investors. All the web software I find are trying to make accounting trivial by removing 95% of the functionality, leaving only checking account expense tracking. This is great for some I'm sure, but I need true "QuickBooks online that doesn't suck" type of software.

I'm not saying online accounting software needs to be complicated, but in order to disrupt QuickBooks, it needs that functionality.
Have you tried odesk?
But then he will have to move to US! I would have been impressed if $90K offer was meant for a position based out of India. With purchasing power parity of 5X, it would have meant close to $450K of actual US-equivalent salary here in India.
Well I think 50% is a bit of an exaggeration... but I see your point. We had an onsite customer demo and cringed as she opened IE6. It wasn't pretty.

I'm on a Mac. I can't imagine the time I'd have to invest to setup VM's (or buy separate machines?) for each IE6, IE7, IE8 and soon IE9, because you know they don't play nice together :)

If you're on a PC, how do you run a Mac VM for testing Mac versions?
Truth? Quickbooks desktop edition would be just fine at your size, and has a huge number of consultants that can come help once a month.

We're currently using Quickbooks online, and its also flexible enough to account for convertible notes and loans.

Alternative: Try LessAccounting - they may let you enter in a loan from investors too. Don't know this for sure.
> Why wouldn't you want the $15 rebate, though?

It's not that I don't want the rebate, it's that I don't want to hand over the personal information I'm required to give in order to collect it because I know it will be used to spam me.

> how would you confirm the UPC code was valid prior to the buyer sending their money over?

Having thought about this a bit more, I think the right way to do this is not to have an exchange service, but to redeem the rebates directly. Then when you (the company) get the money, the person submitting the rebate gets their cut via paper check sent through the mail. Kind of like those services that will sell things for you on EBay. It would be a labor intensive business, but I still think it could be done profitably if you get the process right.
Another side note: How do you deal with testing the ever-increasing number of pages in a web app? If I do a site re-design, there's hundreds of page "templates" that I have to make sure look good. What about true cross-browser regression testing?