skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a large part of this is that people on the Left let themselves get too emotional about things and it leads to disorganization and public embarrasement.

I once spoke to a Republican strategist that told me the greatest thing Ronald Reagan ever did for this country was to get maligned by the left. Because all through his Presidency the left screamed “he’s going to get us into a nuclear war” at the top of their lungs and in the end he ended up signing huge arms reductions. That resonated with people and made the left look really bad.

Even in less successful Presidents like George W. Bush you see this. Bush didn’t lie. He really did think there were WMD in Iraq. Any rational look at the situation makes that very clear (why would he push WMD so hard if he knew they’d never be found and he’d come off looking like an idiot?). Yet rather than push the much more compelling argument that Bush simply didn’t fight the Iraq war competently you have people on the left screaming “Bush lied-People died”
That's because accrual accounting is just another way to cook the books.

http://www.toolkit.com/small_business_guide/sbg.aspx?nid=P06...

People might object to that characterization because it's so "standard". That's how you get these notions that cash flow is "better" than profit -- the language gets tortured so that profit doesn't mean profit any more because the ledger is a fantasy.

In cash method accounting, profit is profit. In accrual accounting, profit is whatever number you pencil in.

To be clear, I'm talking about money in your hands, not someone else's.
I think this highlights the importance of doing things outside of your uni work while obtaining a degree. While people don't want to have to train someone from scratch that's come out of a CS degree if you are able to say CS degree plus 3 years of contracting on the side it all becomes much easier.
Wow, Ireland is in a world of hurt. External debt is 10x GDP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_d.... The US is at 94%, but Europe is way worse. Luxembourg is 38x. Could that be correct? Where is all this money roosting? For the US it's China, Japan, and OPEC, with China way out ahead.
Does the desktop really matter, though? 2010 is clearly the Year of Linux on the Computer that Fits in your Pocket. Android's gains in smartphone share are nothing short of phenomenal. I think something like 25% of Q3 smartphone sales worldwide were Android...that's incredible. Linux is actually important in the consumer space, right now.
I've only been here for a month, and the policy has already been revised since I arrived! The 90-day timeout is new. I'm happy with it. If I got a new idea project idea that wasn't tied to alpha capture systems, I don't think there would be any issue with amending my declaration.

Before my time, there was an expansive policy that asserted ownership over everything. The old policy might not have even been enforceable in the UK. Some employees raised concerns about it, management responded. The company is small (~60 employees/~25 devs), so there tends to be a lot of flexibility.
> you are prescribed from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment.

Why isn't the employer prescribed to not compete with the employees' weekend project?

> Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright.

If you get copyright then do you also pay developers overtime for all that work? If you want to own the code you have to pay for it. Or I guess if you are multi-billion dollar corporation with fully staffed legal team, then I guess you can just take the code, yap, make sense ...

> It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset

Sometimes peoples' gut reactions to what is fair kicks in before corporate newspeak does.

> This system works.

Of course it does -- for Google.

> Googlers can work on Google equipment and during their 20% on these kinds of projects.

No problem with that. If it is Google's equipment and Google's time then Google should own the code. But if it is employees' equipment and time then it is stealing.

> That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested)

And you stole the other 25%.
I believe the argument is not that those without certifications cannot be engineers, but that engineering professions are regulated by the state (via certifications) and thus professions that do not require a state licence must not be 'true' engineering.
"From someone who has (hopefully) only lived about a quarter of their life"

Do other people feel the same way? Obviously future medical advances might change my mind on this, but I would prefer to die around 80...

I know the cliche is "you feel that now when you're young, you wait until you're my age and say that again"... but I suspect that when I do reach that age, my main reason for not euthanizing myself would be not wanting to upset people who know me, rather than because I actually want to live to be 100 years old.
quite excited about reading this, I have been hearing some excellent feedback about this book already.
If it makes you feel any better I'm not a US citizen either (I'm British, which comes with an automatic apology, for which I apologise).

Now that I've removed your geographical excuse, what have you got left? If you're up for it, I'm not quitting this thread till we have an idea worth pursuing between us :)
Why don't we just look at the distribution in the first place? Make a nice circle chart for all wind vectors and color it according to probability.
Powers of Two: Hand-Pulled Cotton-Candy ‘Round the World
It can't default because it has already received the necessary funds from ECB and IMF. My take Spain is next.

Anyways, lets not turn HN to ZeroHedge :)
Oh, my talk may sound strange because English is not my first language.
A combination of both.

When you try to do something, you'll always find yourself stuck in the middle, and that's when you'll google stuff.

And then you'll find tutorials, or blog posts, or what have you. And as you read more of those, you'll see references to books and other tutorials/posts/essays.

Start by just doing, and you'll eventually end up reading a lot.
Some times when I think about what it would be like to be stupefyingly rich, I think about all the money super rich people have given universities. And then I think the real way to make a HUGE difference would be to start a huge self-learning thing.

It would be like a university except it would really be up to the students to learn what ever and how much ever of it they wanted, and the autodidact-versity would just provide the venue and the books and the internet connection.

I also think that any certification that comes out of this process would be there only if a student wants it. And the student would decide what level of certification they care to try and get. And much like a Ph.D. thesis defence, a committee would take an adversarial position to the student and if the student successfully defends what they've learned, they would get a shiny certificate of some kind.

Or maybe all will just hinge on a student contributing something to human knowledge by publishing a scientific paper which gets cited by someone. Only if your paper got cited do get the right to call yourself a... something what ever.

Something like that.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. On the figures in the article, Facebook has an effective leading P/E worse than 20. That would be on the high side for a good investment in an established company in a vertical market, so presumably it is based on investors' assumptions about future growth and market directions.

Let's consider growth first. We're talking about Facebook. They already dominate the social network space, with an amazingly high percentage of the potential user base in many countries. There isn't a lot of growing to be done in terms of product base (i.e., number of Facebook users) in those countries. Likewise, Facebook users already seem to spend a staggering amount of time on the site. There isn't a lot of growing to be done in terms of getting people to use the site more and therefore increase the value of ads. Growing into other geographic markets might help, but they have still failed to establish dominance in places like China, so that's far from a safe bet.

In terms of market direction, though, it seems like all the most likely routes are downward. There must be at least three obvious risks of a business-threatening scale:

1. Advertisers could find a more efficient mechanism and desert Facebook en masse.

2. An alternative social network, or simply other ways to entertain yourself and keep in touch with friends, could cause users to desert Facebook en masse. (Keeping in mind that most of Facebook's power comes from its viral, highly networked nature, this is a serious risk: you only have to lose enough users that people can't rely on sending out news/invitations/whatever via Facebook and assume friends who aren't on it are weird.)

3. Privacy regulators could clamp down more than they already do as public awareness of the related issues continues to increase, underming the whole targeted advertising business model.

I suppose that's all relatively sane compared to Zynga, though, where the leading P/E isn't quite as bad but their entire business model is effectively based around the continued dominance of Facebook or a similar platform and their ability to keep people's interest in the long term.
He grew up on Earth. He is making it a better place. Why settle with just improving India? Why not the world.
His prediction was specifically about Ubuntu brand, which is mainly known for Desktop.

I really want to see the Bug #1 resolved, but I am not that optimistic.
I would say the US government is doing an awesome job of suppressing the information contained in the leaks.

They have successfully steered the conversations regarding Wikileaks towards a battle of ideals. The content of the leaks is almost a footnote in the coverage I've seen and read, that applies doubly to Hacker News.
I'm not even sure that a single helium atom can be accurately modeled, if you take in to account all of the subatomic particles and processes involved (which are still in the process of being discovered and understood).
But isn't Google a "Don't be evil" company? Such a moral stance should clearly prompt them to either stop taking code ownership from their engineers' weekend projects (I call it stealing), or they should start paying overtime for that code.

EDIT: Corrected the corporate motto from "Do no evil" to "Don't be evil".
When I was more naive than I am now, I signed the yeah-all-your-IP-belongs-to-us employment agreement as a condition of employment. This was many years ago and I am still at the same company (it is not in California)

To counteract this, for now, I only do contract work and/or work on fairly large team collaborations. My thinking is if I don't own it but the client does (since they are paying me to work on it after hours) - the day job company won't have much to go on because I didn't own the code in the first place. For the second - since I don't have full ownership/sole contributor - maybe that will make them less likely to go after me than a clean cut single owner situation.

All of these projects are done on non-company time, network, and hardware. I don't usually bring my MacBook in but when I have a client deadline, I will work on my train commute and not even charge the MacBook using (company) power - will just lock it to the desk by locking it to a cable while still in my bad - I tote around a second battery.

Am I doing something naive still? My thinking is they really won't come after me. I am nervous to talk about my side projects (get actual HR/VP approval) as I fear it will get me red-flagged in some manner. Maybe I have to.
"Now the brains switches and storage probably can't be directly equated to a processor, but presumably it is within a few orders of magnitude."

What makes you say that?

Also, what makes you think the difference is one of quantity and not of quality?
I am curious to know your reasoning. In a post in this thread I was leaning towards inflation in a few years, with the other possibility being a long recession or Japanese style stagflation. The downside would come from an austerity program hitting the middle class.
I don't have either, but I'd go with Emotiv... theirs has more sensors.
Recommended watching: http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_br...
1) Incorrect. Merchant does not get paid until the groupon in redeemed by a customer. Merchant has to input the groupon ID/code into the system (online or mobile) and a check is mailed out.

3) Sorry what? Cash flow? I don't understand.
I think there is more to it than a desire to space the releases to get better PR.

They may want to verify the authenticity of the documents to avoid fake leaks. They may also want to edit some documents to remove data that would put individual persons at risk, like they did with Cablegate.

Doing this takes time, and may not be short-circuited easily.

They can't simply encrypt the files, release them using P2P, and then edit them / check them for authenticity. I guess it would be useful as an insurance, though.
That may be true for small groups like clubs, gangs, and tribes, but I don't think you can generalize that to governments.

Or in other words, the more actively engaged the electorate is, the stronger the "public" lobby is vs. other private lobbies.

And the smaller and more local a government is, the more engaged the electorate is. Prime example, the smaller states have more independent senators, governors, etc.
By independent I mean literally (I) and not (R) or (D), not just metaphorically independent.
Quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs, just for the honesty and openness Rand writes with.
While I completely respect your opinion and believe you and only you should be allowed to make the decision about when your life ends, I have to say that I also completely can't understand your perspective.

I want to live as long as medically possible, as long as I am not a vegetable or in horrible pain.

100 years, 200 years, 500, 1,000. I just don't think I will get bored of life.
Thanks, that's all I'm asking.

And all I'm bringing up in my comment that led to this subthread is that when someone contributes code to an open source project and that person does not personally own the code themselves or have the legal authority to transfer license, then there is a serious legal issue involved that have to be taken very seriously.

With my own open source projects, people contributing need to be able to grant license on all the code they contribute. If someone came in with code owned by their employer with their employer's copyright on it and not their own, it would be absolutely critical to verify that their employer knew about it and cleared the licensing for that specific code in writing, or from some very public facing repository on the company website with explicit documentation about the license. Any sort of 'well it should be OK I think' or 'they told me it was all right' would raise red flags and require much more explicit permission.

It will be interesting now to see what the reaction of other contributors will be to the new policy that some animals are more equal than others. I have had no problem contributing to open source and having my contributions listed as "copyright by various contributors". But once one contributor gets his own name separated out in the code headers, then I want my own name in all those code headers as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if others would want the same as well.
Their service packs are typically very very big. I'm sure there'll be at least one in '11 :)
Hmm, this is very similar to an idea I've been working on for a short time. It's great to get some validation and see that something like this can work, even better to see a community of any size embracing it.
i need a flash designer/developer whos reliable for freelance work chris@justni.com
Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil". That's very different from "Do no evil."
I may have spoken un-artfully, but there is an important point here that is being missed. I bet that every civil engineer, if asked at an interview, could explain the basic design of Galloping Gertie and the flaws that caused it to fail. I bet that every architect, if asked at an interview, could explain the basic design of the Twin Towers, and discuss why it was less resilient to heavy lateral impacts than other skyscrapers. I bet that every journalist, if asked at an interview, could quote some of the advice of Strunk and White.

As a broad statement, certainly not always true, computer programmers seem to be less knowledgeable of their professional culture than other professions. There is no equivalent to <em>Architectural Digest</em> or <em>Journal of Accountancy</em> or <em>Morbidity and Mortality</em> for programmers, so programmers have to work harder to keep up with their profession. If you can demonstrate that at an interview, you have a leg up on the candidate who can't.

Do you have to know the linear solution to the maximum sum subsequence problem to get hired? Of course not. But if you know it, and the other guy doesn't, then all other things being equal, you get hired, not him.

I should also have mentioned that there must be some context to the programming questions being asked at an interview. There are probably better questions to ask a PHP web developer.

Oofabz: Bentley recounts the history of the problem. Several experienced computer scientists believed for several weeks that the O(n log n) solution was optimal. If you think the linear solution is immediately obvious, you're special.

DannoHung: It may be that I have not fully specified the problem, but an empty sequence has a sum of zero, which is the maximal sum if all elements of the sequence are negative.

Abyssknight: I've never shipped anything. I've always worked in an internal support position, never on a shipping product. But I regularly develop and install new programs for my internal customers, in addition to supporting vendor code; I guess you could say I've shipped those programs.

Goombastic: I'm not a stupid HR guy. I'm a programmer who has stopped asking this kind of programming questions because I don't think they tell me much about the candidate. But it seems other folks do ask this kind of programming questions, so I put them on my blog from time to time.

Everyone: Thanks for the discussion.
If I don't get bored of life then I would change my mind... but I think I would, and based on, for example, old aged relatives of mine, I think they would agree with me even if they either havent said it out loud or haven't realised it themselves.
Why is it so rare? If I had the choice between being the owner of and working at a company that I love and believe in while earning $x, versus earning $10x, the former sounds much more attractive.
That being sort of the whole point of VFINX... :-)
Regrettably, Flash is not a skill that I possess, and my HTML5 skills aren't yet up to a point where I would suggest replacing your Flash content with an HTML equivalent.

I occasionally work with a couple of Flash developers though, so I'll pass them your information.
Guys, if you are interested just drop me a line (email in profile) and will give client-side optimized versions of you front page and one of the content pages with explanation what was done and why for free.
But, and this is important, this isn't an alternative between "exit with fat sacks of cash" vs. "exit flat broke", for either the founder or the employees. Presumably, in the "founder drives a Porsche" scenario, the startup is not in imminent danger of collapse and the employees are not subsisting on ramen. So if the founder decides not to cash out, the employees have the "stable financial footing" of having a job that, presumably, they like and are good at. On the other hand, if the buyout was a talent buyout aiming for the founders or a shutdown buyout, if the founders decide to cash out, the employees may have some $$ in hand but are back on the job market. That's not exactly the most stable of positions.
> Software developers are thought workers ...

That is why I think it should go both ways and they should be forced to pay overtime for whenever a worker claims to have "thought" about the problem in their free time.

Imagine the scenario: you are on the beach with the family but, since you are a "thought" worker, your mind wonders so you think for 30 minutes about how to decrease the latency of that DB query. That should be 30 min of overtime billed to Google.

Wouldn't that be the other side of the "thought worker" coin ?
What the hell does that even mean? Of course the state has the right to accredit professional bodies who can then accredit professionals. It's not some deterministic whim of the state deciding who can and can't be a "", it's simple quality assurance for people who are employing the services of said professional.

Libertarians, sheesh!
This goes both ways. Things you learn on your own time benefit Google. So why does the copyright only go one way? Why is Google entitled to things it didn't pay for?
There is no such thing as “Chinese-language keyboards”.

Well there used to be some experimental prototypes designed to facilitate inputs, but they never gained any traction. Now it's all standard US keyboards.

But it would be rather easy to know the language based on keyboard input: most likely the typed string will contain more of the user's mother tongue I assume?
WikiLeaks Archive - New Hurdles for Web Site and Assange
I like this guy, he writes short pithy stuff that should be obvious if not for conventional wisdom. My favorite so far is very simple:

> If you haven’t figured out what you want from life, and what makes you happy, then you can’t solve this by adjusting the amount of time you spend at work or at home. This is because neither your time at work or home will bring happiness until you’ve figured this out. - http://danielmiessler.com/blog/forget-work-life-balance-lets...
In a similar vein: Daniel Ellsberg knew the contents of the Pentagon Papers and knew exactly what the public interest was in having that particular information leaked. Mark Felt had a thesis about the public benefit in leaking Watergate. Jeffery Wigand knew what and why he was leaking tobacco documents. Mark Klein knew what & why about NSA surveillance. Those were purposeful leaks.

These leaks are indiscriminate. Does anyone believe that Bradley Manning had any idea what he was handing off to WL? Remember, WL themselves claim to have redacted those documents to protect innocents (the belief that they couldn't possibly have done so adequately animates much of the flak they're taking). If WL had to redact them, then the actual leaker (presumed to be Manning) had to have disclosed them unredacted --- to complete strangers.
How I Created this Site in 1 Hour and Made It Get Your Attention
What we need is less politics on HN.
This is the highest-quality discussion of the issue I've seen anywhere: both the blog post and the comment thread.