skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been in roughly this situation, where the founder of a small company made grandiose claims and would say anything to get the sale, get another round of investment, get his way.

Reevaluate any promises he's made to you or any agreements you think you have with him. If you have a manager between you and him, same goes. A manager who is much closer than you to his dishonesty and is OK with it is going to act the same way to you, or claim to be on your side but, gosh, was overruled by the boss.

Now that you know you can never trust your bosses, it's time to find a new job.
WebApp Hacking: From a Dead Start
Presumably, AVG loads extra resources like images, CSS, iframes, <object>s etc. from your page. (if it didn't, it wouldn't be very good at finding malware, and be really easy to detect)
Already done:

By creating a bookmark in FireFox (best on the bookmarks toolbar) and pasting the code linked below as its location, you can highlight new comments. So, once the new bookmarklet is pressed, at top right of a HN article will show 'started tracking,' 'no new comments' or 'x new comments,' with new comments emboldened.

http://dpaste.com/hold/58840/
I wouldn't normally joke about this, but since your father is fine...

I hope I can meet him some day. Then I'll have a great new response to the "hit by a bus" concern, "Not a problem. 100% of the people I know who were ever hit by a bus are fine now."
I've never worked as a part of a software project team that had a dedicated "manager", so take this with a big grain of salt. I have worked for good and bad managers though and I have one thing to say:

Care about that you do and get stuck in with everyone else.

In my experience doing this will solve all of the worries you are hinting at above. If you are a) competent & b) only bug people when you consider it to be about something important then you can bug me whenever you want. I will put up with being interrupted when being "in the zone" etc if I have respect for you and you think it's important.

As long as you are pulling the all nighters with everyone else then you won't need to buy them beer at all, though it's unlikely to be turned down if offered!
Don't be silly. I'm picking on his blog because he is _anonymous_. Nobody knows who he is except himself. Unless you believe that I have some superhuman power to scan the Internet's tubes with my super-neuro-alien-brainprobe.

And that's the point - except in very unusual circumstances, do you read (and accept as authoritative) blogs whose authors don't reveal their identity?

I think not.
I'm not sure if it's right or wrong, but it certainly seems common. Exaggerating is part of business, and it happens in a lot of them. It's similar to lying on your resume...some people are hurt by it, some people are helped by it.

There are a lot of factors involved (in this case, can you deliver the software they want). If your company delivers what's been promised, then it probably won't be a big deal.

Legally, you probably aren't on the hook. It's unlikely that your company will agree to be audited so they probably aren't cooking their books. It's equally unlikely that they will sign contracts that contain false statements. I would rest easy if I were you - this sounds like part of the sales game. Your founders probably won't let it turn into a legal situation.
interesting! looks like a lot of potential.
-Praaal
I hate to point out the obvious, but

- I haven't read "almost all of the web 2.0 stuff out there."

- How would you know (that is personally)? Perhaps you've already done what he describes and can confirm it? If so, please post it on a blog, along with your name and your company's name. Unveil your product (not some imaginary "parking lot software").

- How would you know (that is, objectively whether what he's saying is true or BS)?

- Because "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog."
Delighting with Data
I have a friend with an AI investing system http://www.neuralinvesting.com/. He is a smart guy, too smart. I have found the smarter the person the harder it is to make money because they want to solve problems all of the time. If you are solving problems when do you stop and say "this is enough!" and just start pushing what you have made?
Rails and Seaside, Sweaters and Space suits
So Long, Bill Gates, and Thanks for the Monopoly
My fake posturing would be easy for customers to spot, but you hear over and over about multi-million-dollar companies which started as fake posturing, and no one noticed until later, and people rarely care even then.
To me, his posts can't be validated. His ideas aren't "grounded".

How many blogs do you read that have anonymous authors? Of those, how many do you consider authoritative in their field and which give advice? Of those, how many give advice truly informative and worth following?

Anonymous blogging is useful for hiding a source. Why trust anonymously-posted content, my own included?

You can waste a lot of time on the Internet reading what?
- Unbeknownst SPAM?
- Mental garbage?
- The thoughts of institutionalized programmers?
- Good advice from seasoned veterans?
- funny stories from young developers?

The answer is "All the above."

Think for yourself. Know your sources. Seek provenance before accepting advice. Beware of Greeks (and Geeks) bearing gifts.
"And it's a lot more than just the environmentalists concerned about global warming. It's reached a broad enough consensus among scientists that it's safe to say it's time to do something about it."

Check out the Oregon Petition to see just how much 'consensus' there is on the issue. Also, the book "The Deniers."
Run. This doesn't sound like a situation that's going to get better over time.
A capabilities system in Scheme was done in the 90s, though AFAIK it is now dead. Still the paper describing it is worth reading and may give you some inspiration: http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/secureos.htm
The comment you are responding to is clearly tonge-in-cheek.

On the other hand, how is compatible to be both anonymous (thus unreachable) and a spammer?

I believe what this guy says because it's also my experience. I haven't set up a company like his, but I did see niche applications and know a little about this kind of markets. What he says is nothing really new, he just says it well.
Diablo III 20 Min. Gameplay Trailer
"build, then think"

I like that. "Think by building" might be more accurate, but his version gets the point across.
according to pg feature requests don't belong on the front page. There is a separate section for that.
They DID cover "do girls fart", though. Seriously.
Most spammers are anonymous. Consider Amazon book reviews.

On most Internet social groups (e.g., reddit, HN, google, amazon) spammers are omnipresent. What an ideal medium HN is should you desire to capture the eyeballs of nerds and technoweenies: then you could sell them books, sell them ideas, direct them to other websites, sell them seminars, BS, etc.

Indeed, what communications channels are _not_ replete with spammers?

And if, as you say, he says "nothing really new", why bother? Shouldn't you be reading something else, something that is more informative to you, something that possibly contradicts your experience, surprises you and adds to your knowledge? Reading what you already "know" is a waste of time IMO.
"But the upside was enormous because the monopoly created a stable environment where entrepreneurs could develop new companies and new products around a common platform."

This is false. Multiple platforms mean porting and compatibility problems, but they evolve faster.

Right now developers are pulling their hair out trying to make things work on incompatible browsers, but who would go back to the days when Explorer had 96% market share?

The Windows monopoly didn't encourage hackers to create new companies and new products. Quite the opposite. Little of the work that hackers did reached ordinary people, because ordinary people used an OS hackers didn't use, and didn't want to write programs for.
Anyone has the article he's talking about? Scribd won't let me to consume it.
Would dropping out of Harvard and founding Microsoft land someone in the cemetery?

I think one of the biggest differences between risk takers and the cautious is simply that risk takers care less about what they risk. They know they can get by without it. By contrast, even many of those within startups, it seems, would start their own, because of the hit that they're need to take to their way of living.

Finally, luck favors the prepared mind. One of the things that Billg was great at was that, whenever he happened upon an opportunity, he pounced on it. Once the Altair came out (with no programming language), he and Paul Allen tried the audacious feat of programming one without one. He dropped out of college, moved to New Mexico, and started selling what he could. When he heard the IBM/DR-DOS deal, he scrambled to put together an operating system for them, and so how valuable retaining the rights would be.

Others just let these things drift by. But he went hunting for them, and had such a sense of a long term version that he could figure out what would fit, and what wouldn't.
> What would you do if faced with this situation?

In short, your options are:

* confront the founder
* get vocal outside of the company (customers, investors, etc)
* quit
* keep your concerns to yourself and continue working

I would strongly advise against first two options. They will automatically tag you as a troublemaker, and depending on the size of your professional circle this may cause you substantial problems further down the road. They are also not likely to change things either.

Keep in mind that the decision to twist the facts was conscious. This is in all likelihood his mode of operation, so talking about ethical concerns will probably not yield any response. It's not like he'd say - "Damn, you are right. What was i thinking ?".
China Mobile says iPhone talks scale biggest hurdle
>This hypothesis never had significant scientific support

But sadly it still got a front page scare article in "Time"
Feature Request: Anonymous Posts
When asking about sensitive issues several users create new accounts for that unique purpose. Would it not be best to allow users to submit stories anonymously?
Chad Hurley (co-founder) on the creation of YouTube
"This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users." - makes it look like a PR initiative to help counter arguments from privacy advocates that Google should be destroying or anonymizing their log files. Still an interesting read though.
It is why incongruity should give us pleasure, and why some sorts of incongruity prompt laughter and others (such as Oedipus' parenthood) do not.

Perhaps, but consider Oedipus Rex by Tom Lehrer:

There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex,
You may have heard about his odd complex.
His name appears in Freud's index
'Cause he loved his mother.

His rivals used to say quite a bit
That as a monarch he was most unfit
But still in all they had to admit
That he loved his mother.

I don't care who you are, that's funny.
"They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck."

The conclusion doesn't follow. Sharing some isn't the same as sharing all. And, even if they did share all of the measured traits, that doesn't tell us that there weren't unmeasured traits that distinguished the two groups. (Of course, if the difference is in the unmeasured traits, copying only the measured traits may not help.)
I think that you should be looking for another job; however since you are blameless in your current job, you should stay there until you are either ready or the checks start bouncing - I say this because if he truly is a scammer and not just someone who exaggerates to customers, that will happen sooner or later.

If the checks bounce, leave immediately (that day) and contact the labor board - they will get your money for you; and under no circumstances go back as an employee - if they want to pay you upfront as a consultant, and this of course is at your choice.

In any case you sound unhappy at your current job and should get another one at a company you can feel good about working for.
"(When my digicam flashes, the fulgerator has to receive that input and respond with its own flash, all before my shutter closes"

This really isn't a problem. People have been using on-camera flashes to trigger studio lighting for decades now. A flash is actually between 1/700 and 1/2500 seconds long, which is plenty of time for the electronics to react. You shutter is probably going to be open between 1/60 and 1/250 seconds (if you're on P mode).

You can see this at nearly any wedding you go to, the pro photographer might have some studio lights set up for the formals, unless he's using fancy radio triggers, his lights can be set off by guests with cameras.
You know what? I think I'm really going to miss that guy....
I distilled Taleb's quote to what was worthwhile.

Saying that some smart, hard-working risk-takers failed is not a counterexample, and that's all Taleb was doing, at least in the quoted passage. It's roughly the same as saying that starting cards in Texas holdem don't influence the outcome of the hand because AA sometimes loses. It suggests that he doesn't understand the definition of risk.

You need to know only the basics of Bayesian inference to conclude deduce that if hard work, intelligence, and willingness to accept risk are overrepresented among successful people versus the general population, those traits are probably influential to success.

Maybe being smart and working hard doesn't make you a lock or even likely to succeed. But you'd be naive to think that your chances wouldn't be better than a competitor who was dumb and lazy.
> Does anyone here actually know anyone who was ever hit by a bus?

No, but I got married. Does it qualifies?
"it was the open architecture of the Microsoft-based PC that spurred massive creativity"

IBM-based, shurely? I mean, it ran MS software, but if they'd been in the hardware business they'd probably have done what Apple did, and produced a closed platform. That's more-or-less what they did with their software, after all.
"If all that stuff worked right out of the box, we'd all be out of a job," said David Strom, an independent technology consultant and speaker in St. Louis. Strom has a speech praising Gates for, among other things, effectively guaranteeing full employment for IT people called in to make Microsoft products work properly.

This sort of thinking is exactly why hackers I respect stay as far away from Microsoft technologies as possible.
I find this technology interesting because it won't work well for an individual, you must cooperate to make it work. The heat is stored using boreholes to heat a volume of the earth underground. The surface area/volume ratio is against a single user, but becomes more favorable as the number of participants increases.
Sometimes it looks like marketers actually think like that, judging by the amount of IN YOUR FACE advertising that I can't in my right mind fantasize that it might reflect well on a brand.
"Without that standard, the computer industry in the 1990s would have resembled the web today: diverse, vibrant and flowering with abundant innovation, but also frequently broken because of the inability of disparate products to make the most basic connections with one another."

Wrong. Without Microsoft, the computer industry would have been forced to tackle the issue of interoperability far earlier and more earnestly.

If it weren't for this illegal monopoly, computers today would have a vibrant mix of operating systems and technology that would be able to share information seamlessly.
Overclocking Tool for the Mac Pro
Propagandists of all kinds come to mind.
This is SCIENCE!

Jokes aside, their experiment is quite innovative. I would have said their endeavour is impossible.
Another way of getting poor man's macros is using lambdas:

function evaluate(arg) {
return (arg instanceof Function) ? arg() : arg;
}

function sweach(tests, cases){
var ret = [];
for each (t in tests){
ret.push(evaluate(cases[t]));
}
return ret;
}

var twos = 0;
sweach([0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2], {2:function(){twos++;}});
// twos==3

It might get a bit messy though.
Looks intriguing. The more I explore this, the more I'm appreciating it. On a cursory survey, this may appear simple to do, but once you get past the initial reaction, you begin to realize how difficult and complex it is to do something like this.
Google Talk As a Social Network
too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Those things, of course, are all that pop pyschologists ever look at.
Hmm, I don't think it would be that hard to design a flexible yet efficient interface for specifying object and vtable layouts. Yes, it would create some restrictions on the clients of the GC, but I don't think they'd have to be particularly severe.
Ask YC: What web hosting service do you use?
I am wondering what web hosting service you all use.
Free Coloring Pages - BRATS Doll Character Coloring Pages
Sorry, that widget just gives that little dropdown redirecting to their site? I meant that I was going to just provide an info page where the user can still get the information on my site, just not in the same flashy page as everyone else.
No. And such use of accounts should be discouraged. This is supposed to be a community, so you should know who you're talking to. I'd rather not have 'Anonymous Coward' all over the place.
Gladwell is a good storyteller. He weaves disparate things together in a way that seems convincing and brilliant at first but dissolves on inspection. When challenged, his answer is, Oh of course I never said that anything was true.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, entertainment is fine, Gladwell is an intellectual entertainer, nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, his narratives do depend on an implicit claim to being true discoveries about how the world works; they're not nearly as valuable and interesting if they're not.

If you look up the definition of "charlatan", Gladwell is perilously close to it.
Overthinking is not to be confused with gathering relevant information.

I'm pretty sure research is still good: know as much about the subject matter as you reasonably need to or are able to, then decide quickly based on that information.

I wonder - Is this why decisions by committees are so terrible?
The hardest part about (A) is that if you aren't competent, you are not competent to judge if you are competent.
http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/sjun08.p...
A PM's job is to manage the project. If someone's falling behind, find out why and do what you can. But don't ever make the mistake of thinking that because your title is "manager" that you're in charge. Remember that you need the engineers on-side to fulfill your obligations. Remember that the demand on engineers is higher than the supply - they can easily justify working on someone else's "more important" project, then yours slips and slips and you find yourself trying to explain to your boss but you don't know why. But you can easily impress engineers by demonstrating that you are on top of all the details. You've got a plan, you know what needs to be done (and you trust the engineers for the how), you know what everyone needs, you've got all the dependencies figured out, you've chased all the external suppliers, you've chased the internal stakeholders, there is nothing stopping anyone getting right to work. In that situation, your engineers will make you look great to your boss.
I'm not necessarily for it, but the OP brings up an interesting point. If people are creating "one off" accounts for sensitive issues, there may be a need for this. Perhaps there could be an option to obfuscate the ID of the poster?
While trying to pin down what exactly Gladwell is concluding is generally difficult, you're certainly right, his gift is definitely in the story telling.

And honestly, that's good enough for me. While I believe that I am up to date on the latest in Computer Science I am not well read on the any of the recent or popular studies going on in social psychology. And Gladwell brings that research to the forefront.

Gladwell was the first to expose me to Paul Eckman's work; a man that has dedicated his life to recording and interpreting the micro-expressions that individual faces take on as different emotions escape us.

This led me to think "Oh, this would be greatly if I could interpret these expressions and use them in my weekly poker game." And sure enough Mr. Eckman offers a training CD.
http://www.paulekman.com/cds.html

Gladwell is dusting off the basement academic journals, painting them with great story telling, and shining a spotlight on the research. And that has merit.
For personal stuff I use Tektonic who are pretty good. The price is very competative, tech support exists, and they accomodate special requests with no particular hassle (e.g. please make sure my two VPSs are in different data centers).

Last time they had a problem was a few years ago (server hardware failure) and they bothered to give updates frequently and rapidly opened up new temporary hosts for customers who had backups to restore from. Pretty good service for a 'no support' plan.
It's a fascinating study, but a strange title. The substantive point is that the brain manifests decisions long before consciousness detects them. Not only does the title miss this, it replaces it with something less interesting (and a non sequitur to boot)!

By now there is a whole body of research demonstrating that consciousness doesn't work the way we experience it, and that the identity we believe in and call ourselves is largely illusory. Does anyone know of a book that provides a good survey of these findings? The ones I've run across so far have been disappointing, and the material is so compelling it seems like there ought to be an amazing book on it.
Ask HN: Good Sources of Coverage?
Hey,

I recently launched a web-app (Streetread.com) which a lot of people here provided great feedback on (thanks again). Anyway, I'm continuing my effort to get good coverage and publicity for the site. I've gotten a few good ones, especially on Webware, but I'm having trouble getting covered elsewhere. Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and the other review sites don't seem to take you seriously unless you're VC funded or your app is utterly pointless. The app is geared towards Wall Street and the financial community so I'm looking for sites either in this industry or in tech field. Any suggestions or tactics would be great.

Thanks
<a href="http://www.liquidweb.com/?RID=mikestefff">Liquidweb</a>

Yes it's an affiliate link but they are truly amazing. Prices are great and come with full support and management. Highly recommended. Have never had an easier experience.
I guess html isn't allowed...
Ex-Employee - Sprint Policy Is To Not Tell Customer About Their Phone Insurance
Q: When do you think that kind of artificially intelligent search will happen?

A: ... In terms of timing, I typically say about 200 to 300 years. I think it is probably closer to the 300th year end of it. But if it ends up being closer to the 200th year, I would not be around in any case, and I will not be able to have anyone gainsay me.
I used interland.com (bought out a while ago) and serverpronto.com, but now I use business grade Verizon FIOS in my basement with a Mac Mini on a 2 hour UPS. Uptime has been 100% over the last year (except for the reboots I did for software updates).

I used to run a lot of mailman lists and have discovered the hardest thing to do is to get a set of "clean" IP addresses. Serverpronto was tough, they were blocked a lot. Interland was ok. My Verizon address block (I get 5 static IPs) is not on any RBLs but they sit in the middle of what are generally dynamic IPs so some big sites (esa.int, notably) reject email from my system.