skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find this "it's up to keep the stock market running" meme completely ridiculous. As far as I'm aware, the entire theory was based on the fact that it was the first website in Egypt people found that was still up, and the exchange had 4 different providers.

Also, the stock market in Egypt is (obviously) indefinitely closed because of the protests, and probably also because all of the companies listed are completely off-line.
I do not attend MIT but I am a big fan of OCW videos and I still regret being rejected (probably will for life). I would love to be taught by Demaine, Leiserson et al.

I am not sure you can survive that rigorous a coursework and graduate with less-than-average skills in at least theory, systems, compilers / prog. languages (dunno if everyone there does other stuff like ML, Advanced theory courses etc).
IIRC that's called a decoy strategy. You put the decoy there to make the other choices look better by comparison. It gives you justification for making the choice and forces their decision. I read this book in college: http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine... It goes through a bunch of different tactics used in marketing/advertising/sales such as foot in the door, door in the face, etc etc. Once I read it, it really gave me a new perspective on how often people are trying to manipulate our choices.
On the contrary, within a few days of the Netflix prize challenge being launched, a guy put up a detailed blog post with a simple linear algebra method that could beat Netflix's system at the time (link below). It didn't come anywhere near the 10% improvement threshold, but it beat Netflix's system with a handful of lines of C code, and it ran off his laptop. Sounds like he would have made an excellent hire.

http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html
The average duration between incident and report of the incident is 2.5 YEARS. That's a long time, long enough to make effective investigation difficult -- memories fade, evidence goes stale or missing. EFF estimates that there are as many as 40,000 violations.

You also need to ask: what prompts the report of a routine activity in an investigation 30 months after the activity takes place?

Most scary to me:

"almost one-fifth involved an FBI violation of the Constitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or other laws governing criminal investigations or intelligence gathering activities"

"From 2001 to 2008, the FBI engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations, including: submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoena, accessing password protected documents without a warrant"

These are serious issues -- this isn't like the local police getting free lunch or looking the other way. You're talking about an FBI agent lying to a grand jury or a Federal judge. Both are serious felonies. Another thing that is disturbing is that it looks like the FBI isn't following its own procedures internally. So the people who are supposedly running the agency have no clue what is happening.

I'm not trying to say that the FBI is like the KGB or is inherently evil. I'd be willing to bet that 98% of the people working there have the best of intentions. But you have a situation where these good people are in highly compartmentalized, secretive units within this massive bureaucracy with this important mission. The middle management is driven to deliver results, but not accountable for their actions.

That combination of mission, drive and unaccountability is a recipe for systematic abuses of power.
I noticed that too. Everyone likes hearing speculation...and then disagreeing with it ;P
I've worked 80+ hour weeks on an emotional roller-coaster knowing I would certainly fail. I definitely hated it.

The difference is that this was at BigCo. Does this mean that I'm not cut out for a startup?

(EDIT: Am I a fool for believing that I can escape from 80-hour work weeks and emotional roller coasters by working at a startup?)
The Corporation: A Thing of Power and Beauty
The fact that the leading unofficial Facebook iPad app is just a nice shell around Facebook's mobile web leads me to believe that they are developing interesting things in house or are keeping a watch on what independent developers do. Presumably if you do something cool that they really like (think along the lines of what CoverFlow brought to iTunes?), FB will acquire your company to acquire your staff (even if it is just you).
Maternity is a ridiculous thing for insurance to cover, since it's an event entirely under the control of the insured. Similarly, you can't buy life insurance which covers suicide or fire insurance which covers arson committed by you.

Extremely expensive pregnancies are an insurable risk, but standard pregnancy is not.
Litt's Lua Laboratory
I personally don't have an MBA but I think it's important to at least pick up a few books and become a pseudo expert. Accounting is also extremely important to be familiar with (if you plan on becoming a business owner).
It seems that you are paying for two things with your bill, the ubiquity of the network, and the marginal amount of data you use. It seems reasonable that the capital build out be paid for with a fixed monthly bill, while the marginal amount of data usage be metered on top. They don't necessarily have to lose their margins on voice, just build that into the fixed monthly cost.
I must say. The design has improved significantly.
Ask HN: What should you know before contracting with a Hong Kong firm?
For example, I am considering an agreement between my firm and a large Hong Kong corporation. The agreement however states the following:

"The construction, validity, performance and enforcement of this Agreement and the rights and obligations of the parties hereto shall be governed in all respects by the laws of the Hong Kong SAR. The parties hereto hereby agree to irrevocably submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the Courts of the Hong Kong SAR."

What exactly does this mean? That if a Hong Kong court says my firm acted outside the agreement, that we'd have to high tail it over there, or what? I've not done business outside the states before, and I suppose a good lawyer should read this, but I was wondering if anyone had any practical advice to start with.
Sorry for missing the point but this all seems like a lot of money for email. 100K/day outgoing is nothing that should tax a dual core CPU w/ SCSI disks and 100Mbps connectivity.

Are we talking about emails that aren't 100% legit? If so then what does SG offer other than an ever changing set of geographically disperse outbound MXs?
What a lot of people fail to realize is that a fair amount of Google's products are defensive in nature. Google didn't launch Android to make money: they launched it to protect themselves from the threat that having a closed single-vendor provider of mobile OSes would have near-complete control in directing users to search engines. And viewed that way, Android is a roaring success: it has successfully left the mobile gateway open as a flourishing competitive market between platforms, guaranteeing that search doesn't get whacked by someone in complete control.

Similarly, this is why Google funded Firefox for a long time, and then finally waded in themselves with Chrome. If IE had dominated, they were in potential trouble that Msft (ignoring antitrust issues) could down them with an MSN-search default.

And so comes in Chrome-OS: to ensure that yet another platform remains neutral so that search isn't a casualty of hold-up. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-up_problem)

It's okay to be a one-trick pony if the one-trick is a massive need for loads of users and is nice and profitable. I don't call Arcelor-Mittal a one trick pony because they only make steel, or Boeing a one trick pony because they only make planes. Search is enough. The rest is defense.
Download wallet.dat with 50 bitcoins. First come, first served.
Where did you get the 800 over 10 years? The page says indications of upwards of 40,000 in 9 years.

Given this, why should we presume there is proper discipline?
Totally thought this was about the macbook air.
That's because it's difficult to evaluate anything in an absolute way. You make decisions relative to each other, based on the information you have at the time. In your example, of selling three products, they usually price the middle product higher to make the third option more attractive by comparison and without the middle product people are more likely to go with the cheaper option. The middle option is the decoy. They don't expect anyone to buy it and they don't really want anyone to, it's just there to give the buyer a reason to make the choice.
The Smartest Guys in the Room - about Enron
Here's an article about places that offer benefits to part-time employees:
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2008/12/22/companies-that-give-...

Could be handy to have health insurance as well as some extra time to program.
From the bottom of the article: Philip Delves Broughton is the author of “What They Teach you at Harvard Business School” and a Harvard MBA.
I think they had to have switched the keys by accident.
>>Way to read the "10 day MBA" and write an article about it.

The author has a Harvard MBA.
i should stop myself because i'm not a big proponent of potential. i like progress. probably should have used that word instead.

fair to say you can gauge potential based on progress?
At least...
One is owned by the entity (associated with an EIN), while the personal account is owned by an individual (and associated with an SSN).
Your reply is grossly ignorant. Facebook has "adult supervision" in the form of it's COO, a Harvard MBA.

Many of the people who run high-powered tech companies have MBAs and you don't know it, simply because they don't announce that fact.

You're buying into a myth when you claim MBAs don't start something, aren't original and don't create value.

Your reply says much about yourself, and your ignorant rush to judgment... but it says nothing about MBAs.
I think that they must have transposed the labels. The graph must mean that a student who goes into Harvard leaves an $80,000 a year salary and after two years gets a $115,000 a year salary. That doesn't tell us all that much unless we know how much that same person would be making if he or she stayed in the workforce for those two years.
A dictatorship is most important when it comes to design, which incorporates some element of artistry and stylistic vision. It also helps enforce the ideas of a single-form across all divisions, and creates the consistency between products that Apple is so famous for.

There is no evidence that Google needs this. Yes, Google's scorn for design is often mocked by designers, but I see no evidence that Google+good design would be better than what Google is right now. And let's not forget all the downsides of dictatorships, while we're at it...
Hot girl Sài Gòn rạng rỡ du xuân
That's an interesting analogy, but I don't think it's fully applicable in this case.

At least in developed nations, the demographics and characteristics of the average driver won't shift as much over the next two decades as those of the average e-mail user have over the past two decades.

If the adoption rates of a given technology don't change dramatically, then any shift is like to be more reflective of general societal trends. So in nations that are currently considered third world, but won't be in twenty years, then I think it's much more ripe for the kind of shift you're talking about.

Another possibility, though, is that the Boomers will start hitting that age where their ability to drive safely diminishes relatively quickly, and will desire to keep their current mobility. If mass transit doesn't improve much (and it probably won't, given the distances Americans tend to cover and the relatively low population density), that could be just the kind force needed to create an emerging market.

Then again, we Americans are pretty lousy at learning to actually drive well, and seem to love anything that makes driving easier for the unskilled (see the recent rash of parallel parking assists), so I could be completely underestimating a technology that would prevent anyone from ever having to learn to do anything well, ever.
All of your points are valid. But, for an individual who want to increase their perceived worth, and make more money, (even it's with a boring mature company) an MBA from a good school can't hurt, and is bound to teach some useful management skills.

MBA's from mediocre or unknown schools aren't going to get one a highfalutin job with some bank or the upper echelons of the S&P500, but they might teach some useful management skills and decisions making skills that could be useful to techie's and others who want to run their own companies.
Agreed that HN has a stated topic bias. I'm suggesting changing it.

The TSA stuff very definitely affects tech entrepeneurs who have to travel as part of their business. So yes, especially given Paul's quote about the dangers of discussing civil liberties, I do see them as related.

> why are you so set on making this the place for all civil liberty discussions?

We'll only start to recover civil liberties in the US when enough people start doing something about it, so I discuss the topic wherever I hang out. Just as Slashdot used to be, HN's a great opportunity to reach a lot of people who believe in civil liberties but aren't currently engaged in the battle.
If Facebook really wanted to "relieve" itself of the burden of maintaining native apps on everything from Blackberry to WinMo, they would open source the apps. Of course, this would require giving the public dev community access to internal Facebook/hidden APIs. There could be some really interesting apps if they weren't sandboxed into the restrictions of Facebook's public APIs. Giving more access cedes control and gives arms to spammers and hackers.

Since a vocal minority will cry foul and presumably rally support (create a Facebook fan page) if an existing native app like WinMo was dropped, it is a smart long-term strategy to converge to HTML5.

Google's strategy is to get more people using their apps, period. There must be an order of magnitude (or more) difference in how many people play Angry Birds instead of Google Mobile version 0.7.3.5675
Exactly what I was thinking.

It's also striking that while France is virtually empty (except for Paris), its neighbouring northern and eastern countries are a stark contrast.
Might be, but at least its a pretty darn good trick.
The EFF report talks about how they got to 40,000 on page 12. That estimate makes several assumptions whose validity is tough to validate. I agree that it is probably inflated.

The 768 number is based on one release of documents, which only lists reported incidents. The FBI Inspector General estimated 6,400 violations between 2003 and 2006 based on a statistical sample.

Say the actual number is alot lower -- 10,000 for the period from 2001 to present. That would mean that like 98% of NSLs (about 40,000 are issued annually) were proper and consistent with the rules. But that 2% still means that there was probably 2,000 incidents where serious violations of constitutional rights were committed by people sworn to protect and defend the constitution.
This statement can be true if you don't have an RDBMS. But generally isn't.

For instance with Google App Engine there is no way to say, My columns are foo and bar then have it tell you that you've done something wrong when you try to insert something into column baz.
"Apple, which recently usurped Microsoft as the world’s largest technology firm (by market capitalisation), has hardly any MBAs among its top ranks."

Tim Cook has an MBA from Fuqua, one of the top MBA programs in the US. Was that really that hard to fact-check?
Actually, most of his points are completely invalid, and based solely on gross ignorance, and an obvious lack of understanding as to how many MBAs work in the valley, and how much they do.

Honestly... how can you refer to it as 'valid' when he claims that MBAs don't start businesses, create value, etc... those are just idiotic, incorrect, obviously false blanket statements.

<sigh> it's pathetic that you have to pretend he made valid statements to avoid getting [dead]d.
It's a popular cola that's sweetened with sucrose.
link doesn't work :(
Will Eric Schmidt Become Apple CEO?
Heart disease and diabetes can be cured by Almonds
Art & Copy - similar to Helvetica and Objectified. Good documentary about advertising and design's power, effect, and influence.
I have lived my life without any outstanding accomplishments. What I have done so far, isn't something anyone gets recognized for.
- Self-taught stuff like PS and PHP.
- Learned English at school, its quite a major deal for someone who is not born speaking the language.
- Started to cook an year ago.
- I sort-of learned to learn from defeat through Chess. In my view, if you can play a game, lose and decide to improve yourself rather than give up, that is a great quality to have.
- Create a system to automate download of anime torrents and upload the files to Megaupload. It helps people find the newest episodes of the animes.
- Last semester, took 5 CS classes, and got 3 A and 2 A-. Not unique, but sure makes me feel good about myself.
Finally a great article saying how it really is. We only see the huge successes and failures in the blog and PR world.
This is true in some cases, but very not true in others. If you have a great product that people want and the skills to implement it, you have a great product that somebody else also has the skills to implement. If they're willing to push theirs on people, they'll take the market. This is especially bad if you're making a product that benefits from a large audience (e.g. anything with social features, things whose production can carry an economy of scale). You could become the Borders to their Amazon.
Ad Words/Ad Sense is very successful.

So I'd say 2 1/2 tracks (with Gmail as the 1/2).
There are eight hundred recorded cases. Where they got forty thousand from is the mystery. If anyone solves it please let me know.
I have a top-5 MBA. In hindsight, I am torn.

A big part of me believes "you don't need an MBA to be successful in tech" (etc etc etc).

However, every week I use tools & skills that I picked up during my MBA. Yes, sometimes it has to do with modelling and such stereotypical MBA skills. Many other times my MBA has a much larger impact - recalling the themes that were incessantly driven into me in my Managerial Leadership class, or enforcing the rigor that my Marketing prof required of his students when writing positioning statements.

I believe my MBA has increased the likelihood of me being successful. That's what matters to me. I agree that it's not for everyone.
I really hate the global web proxy at my university (RWTH Aachen).

(1, MALWARE, Phishing, Domain has unusually high traffic volume for a very recent registration. Identified as a phishing or spam-related site., BLOCK-MALWARE, 0x0b216460, 1296449561.941, QAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAG/8ACP8AAAD/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=, http://githacking.com/)
"What society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil" (1994)
Clickable http://debate-zone.com
I'm wondering why there are so few comments on this post. It's hard to land a job at a startup?
Perhaps you could use this for yourself positively, as an example of why agreements in writing are necessary. One co-founder should not be able to decide to take a site down (not technically, but legally).

Documentation is a pain, but it is like backups. You hope to never need it, but it is absolutely necessary if you do.
I think the big difference is in the outcome. That situation at BigCo won't make you better, I think it only drains you. That type of work at a startup though transforms you for the good. The main reason has to do with ownership.
As the guy in charge of fighting webspam, maybe this will help you find or improve upon some algorithmic means of detecting when lots of unrelated wikis start to get exploited to feed up advertisements.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=73045.0

Apparently, for a short time (until the admins fixed it), a wiki for a game I play was hijacked to spam Google. Actually, said wiki (magmawiki.com) is under attack right now from spam user accounts. I don't run the place, but I thought I'd pass the information along because it might give you something to examine and because I have to imagine that anything that helps Google identify spam-hijacked wikis would be helpful to everyone.
Article is pretty skimpy on details and plays fast and loose with facts. Apple has hardly any MBAs, but it does have some, notably Tim Cook, who many claim singlehandedly turned Apple around. Also telling is that the dollar figures for salaries exclude bonuses. I know several executives who have base salaries less then some engineers, doesn't really mean anything without the bonus figures.

The value of an MBA will be what you yourself put into it. It was never the case that you could just sign a check for tuition and get a high dollar figure salary.

The fact is, that short of a start up with traction, getting an MBA is the best way to get exposed to a wide variety of business challenges, from operations to sales to organizational behavior, and yes, even finance for entrepreneurs and fund raising.

MBAs aren't going anywhere, and they have been evolving with the business climate over the past 100 years. They certainly aren't for everyone, but I don't think this article does much to accurately paint the pros and cons to help someone decide if it's right for them.
A Neighborhood of Infinity: Quine Central
optimize for the user
I didn't. I said that a socialist country would have freedom restrictions in place. I didn't try and describe socialism as a construct, I described a country with a socialist government which referred to itself as such. I repeat, Norway is not a socialist country.

I'm happy to be given an example of a socialist country in which you're free to leave and own private property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries

The joke here is that China and Vietnam are anything but socialist nowadays. China even has a property bubble, which must be turning old Mao around in his grave. But look down the list and you'll see a real who's who of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. And not many startup hotbeds.
Not sure if this has been posted already: Ask Entrepreneurs: Productivity tips for a chronic procrastinator?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579979
Avoid CDs for now. The interest rates they pay don't justify the commitment. You can easily compare the interest rates of savings/checking/CDs here:

https://www.google.com/comparisonads/ussavings?s=1&kw=sa...

Right now it looks like AmEx's "High-Yield Savings" is leading the pack w/ 1.30% APY.
You mean that most countries don't pay per gigabyte? I live in New Zealand, and there's only one company with an unlimited broadband package, and that's only with a two-year contract.

The norm in New Zealand is to pay for say, 20GB per month, and if you exceed that then you drop down to dial-up speed (or pay for more).

With all due respect to the Canadians here, it's not really that bad at all. Life goes on, and it actually seems to be a pretty good life too.
It is call sarcasm. People on the internet use it all the time.
Maybe ISP's in Egypt did, but they probably didn't have a choice in the matter! It's hard to argue with an armed police or a soldier or a regime who'll do anything to stay in power.

Also, when the government has a free hand to create legislation that allows them to do such a thing, it's hard not to comply without loosing one's business or life. Vodafone's been quoted as saying something to that affect:

"Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it ... "

From: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/08dbe398-2abb-11e0-a2f3-00144feab4...
The point is in those countries it is not involuntary servitude; it is part of the social contract, just like taxes are not "the stealing of personal property at the barrel of a gun" as I seem to hear said around here.