skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an expression of the broken window fallacy illustrated by Fredric Bastiat (I believe). You see the advantages to your company in the economy as a result of the program, but you do not see the damage to the economy that the program cost. Plus its worth noting that only priviledged groups and politically correct businesses will be getting this money (according to the fact sheet)... so it isn't even going to be allocated based on merit.

Neither of these are evidence of corruption, they are just the nature of both economics and political influence peddling and electioneering.
wow. i had no idea that doctors have access to technology that lets them predict how long people will live by looking at a few photos. last time i checked, they had a hard time predicting how long people would live even if they've done extensive tests. a friend's mom was supposed to live only six months during a battle with cancer, but she lived three years. god bless that doctor for making totally irresponsible judgment calls.

memo to self: spread the news that the doctor is a quack -- any decent doctor would have refused to speculate.
I have a very tough time figuring out how having a DSL is much different then having a huge project specific class library. You are going to have to learn project specific stuff, and DSLs flow better for me than APIs.
I doubt it, the P/E ratios of most tech companies is no way near 1999 levels. But there are some isolated examples of irrationality. I don't know anyone who seriously thinks Facebook is worth $70bn (i.e. more than Sony).

I suspect the low interest rates are pushing a lot of private capital into higher risk but 'cool' areas.
It is a freudian slip, since Amazon takes %30-%80 of the money. Apple's flat %30 is cheap compared to the Amazon Android Store, and Apple lets you set the prices (whereas Amazon controls the pricing, so they could sell your app for %90 off to promote their store.)
Or you're any of the hundreds of organizations that are known to have root or intermediate CA certificates. E.g., the former government of Tunisia.

Or any of the unknown number of intermediates who are not known.
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
Rails 3. I think I've missed a trick.
What’s the Internet? Hilarious Video of NBC’s The Today Show (1994)
Real Time Congress API
Bug prevents Watson from finding Jeopardy's Daily Double
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
Massive: 400 Lines of Data Access Happiness
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
>> Everything is a market. Any time people get together, for any purpose, trading occurs.
> The truth of that assertion hinges on us not remembering the billion other counter-examples.

It would have been nice if you'd have provided some of those counter-examples.

> people don't always gather with the intention to buy/sell

There's your problem - you think that trading only involves money. It doesn't. It's the exchange of value.

Yes, you hang around with your friends because you get more out of doing that than it costs you to do so.

Yes, someone will try to impose costs on you to affect your choices. You'll try to avoid them.
If the startups are not founded by "those people" in the ghetto, they will be unaffected by its presence.
$100 is clearly not a great bozo filter, as evidenced by the ream of poor/useless apps in the store.

Also, Apple is not doing the right thing. I bought a phone from them, I have it connected to my computer, and I have the development kit, but running my software on my phone requires me to pay them money.
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
Ask HN: Do I have to forfeit my options if I leave?
Hey, I'm an early employee at a startup. Due to various delays, I've been employed for almost ten months with no equity agreement in place, but the draft ESOP is now available to myself and the other employee. I have a few concerns, about which I was hoping to get some outside opinions, specifically this section:

---
12. Termination of Employment

(a) Subject to Section 12(b) hereof, if an Optionee’s employment with the Corporation
terminates for any reason other than Just Cause, any Option granted to but not
exercised by such Optionee shall thereupon terminate, except that each such Option,
to the extent then exercisable, may be exercised for the lesser of one (1) month from
the date of termination or the balance of such Option’s term. If any portion of an
Option has not vested by the date of termination, that portion of the Option may not
under any circumstances be exercised by the Optionee. For greater certainty, the date
upon which an Option ceases to vest and be exercisable shall be determined without
reference to a “notice period” or “severance period” or any other period after notice
of termination or dismissal is given. If an Optionee’s employment with the
Corporation terminates for Just Cause, any Option granted to but not exercised by
such Optionee shall thereupon terminate immediately.
---

I'm of the understanding that this plan is only a lightly customized version of some common template, but I'm just wondering how common this kind of lock-in is. I'm being paid (salary) about 40-50% below my market value, and this plan is supposed to represent the balance of my compensation.

I feel concerned that should I want (or need) to move on, I will be unable to, because of the substantial options I'd be walking away from. And yet, the contributions that I've made will continue to benefit the company after I was gone, if I left.

Should I be pushing back on this, or alternatively, insisting on a salary closer to what I could get elsewhere?

Thanks.
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2231730
The reason it "sounds weird" is that it's attempting to straddle two dialects. The use of "whom" is a signal for classical (Latinate) grammar, which would demand the Latinate prepositional word order, while the use of separable-prefix Germanic word order with "with" at the end is a signal to use "who" because dangling prepositions are associated with the less-Latinate trend towards discarding accusative "whom".

These modes normally don't get mixed, hence the weird sound of the title of this post.
Related:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228842

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228854

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230042

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230361

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230497

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230702

I seriously hope I never become famous.
The difference is that the scene shrugs and says "oh well, everyone knows who we are anyway" and doesn't try to bring the power of the state to bear.
"There is one Golden Rule: Don't borrow money from family or friends."

I've actually seen lots of successful projects that did just the opposite (including one famous Amazon.com). DO borrow money from family and friends, but make it clear it's a 'risky loan' and they might not see it back. If they really back you up, I'm sure they won't blink (much less create bad blood)...
Agreed, the amount of money exposed is smaller. But remember, the economy is drastically smaller as well.
Then again, maybe it was the purpose of the redesign.
You can't just equate Minsky's 'Ponzi Finance' with a 'Ponzi Scheme' just because they both have the word 'Ponzi' in them. Minsky used the idea of a Ponzi scheme in creating his own technical term to describe speculative borrowing.

Also, Minsky's theory of financial instability doesn't apply to all bubbles, it's a theory concerned with financial instability as a result of increasingly speculative debt and borrowing. You can have a bubble without debt.
I agree. Based on conversations that I've had with rails gurus (I'm in a co-work space with pivotal labs) the essay-like queries are definitely a code smell. I think the guy who has laid the relational foundation for the app I'm working on (and taught me all the rails I know to date) has done so in a non-Railsy way.
I love the smell of prescriptive grammar in the morning.
Complex patterns produced by simple set of rules? DNA->proteins->cells->organisms->societies? The only difference in my view is that DNA happens in 3-dimensional space and uses 4 "colors" instead of 2.
What about this?

Even if such files were identical to
Oracle files (which they are not),
It does not prevent it, it makes it more difficult. There is still communication between processes which could be exploitable. That being said, it certainly helps.
Okay, grammatical quibbles aside, this blog post is scary.

Harvesting that much information about your customers is creepy and dangerous. I don't care that it helps your business or that it's technically feasible, it's just wrong.
So far, there's nothing to indicate that Chinese dissidents are the target. They're probably far more interested in economic and military intelligence.
Didn't know that. Will be watching then!
Tonido on Floss Weekly
Thanks pal... we have the conference in the black it looks like... so the goal now is to have an inclusive, amazing event.

now if only i can get TechCrunch and Arrington to lift the ban of TechCrunch writers covering the event.
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110210-714816.html

"Cisco's (CSCO, $19.04, -$3.00, -13.61%) fiscal second-quarter profit declined 18% with margins sliding for a fourth consecutive quarter as the company faced increasing pricing pressure in its core products and sold less profitable consumer products. "

I'm seeing increased competition in a rough market driving profits down, not the warning bells of a pop.
The fund only backs businesses "contingent upon service to the state". Literally it is in the fact sheet that his money will go to "disadvantaged" (eg: politically connected businesses that can be counted on for electioneering) and to "clean energy", which is a category of businesses serving the political agenda.

At the next election, Obama can talk about how he gave $2B to politically correct businesses (though he won't use that term) and he'll have lots of "high tech" plants to tour where he can say "they said we couldn't, but I say we can, and we did, build this company! Making clean energy solar cells for the future!"

That's "contingent upon service to the state". He didn't say the "entire economy" was fascist, just that the fund was.
War? Nope. Just normal, run of the mill, snooping. Happens all the time, even among so-called 'friends'.
Ask HN: How to convert from amateur web app developer to professional?
This is more of a practical question on web app development and deployment process.

Here is some background information.

I use PHP for server side scripting, javascript for client side. I use Netbeans and notepad++.

I user Firefox and firebug for debugging and testing.

The process I use is very amateurish, I code something in netbeans, something in notepad++ and since there is nothing to compile, I just refresh the firefox browser and test it. This is convenient and faster compared to the Java development enviornment where you would have to atleast compile and deploy the jar files before you could run them.

I have been thinking of putting a formal process in my development and find it hard putting it together. There are so many things to do before you can deploy your final web app. I keep hearing jslint, compression, unit testing (selenium), Ant, YUI compressor etc but I am now looking for some steps that I can take to make me more organized.

For e.g I use netbeans but don't use any projects within it. I directly update the files. I don't use any source control but use my Iomega backup that saves each save into a different version and at the end of the day I backup the dev directory to my Amazon s3 account. For me development environment is just a DEV directory, TEST is my intermediate stage and PROD is the final directory that gets pushed out to the server. But all these directories are in the same apache home. I have few php scripts that just copies the needed files into the production directory. Thats about it for my development approach.

I know I am missing the following - Regression testing (manual or automated ??) - automated testing (selenium ??) - automated deployment (ANT ??) - source control (svn ??) - quality control (jslint ??)

Can someone explain what are the missing steps and how to go about filling those steps in order to have more professional approach. I am looking for tools with example tutorials in streamlining the whole development to deployment stage.

For me just getting a hang of database, server side and client side development all in synchronization was itself a huge accomplishment. And now I feel there is lot missing before you can produce quality web application.

For e.g I see lot of mention about using automated testing but how to put in use with respect to javascript and php. How to use ANT for the deployment etc.

Is this all too much for a single or two person development team? Is there a way to automate all the above so that I just keep coding in netbeans and then run a batch file that is configured once and run it everytime to produce the code in the production directory?

Lot of these information is scattered on the web and here, if someone can guide I would be happy to consolidate here.

Thank you for your patience :)
At the very least, it was a tremendous drain on their public image and wallet. Don't underestimate these effects, and if you're young you should read a bit of history to have a sense of Microsoft's trajectory and goals at the time. You should at least know what the Halloween Documents are.

http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/
The Apple II connected to a color TV set via an RF interface. When you were programming it it was usually fuzzy white-with-colored-fringes on black. Sharp green-on-black is from older terminals. The green phosphors were slower to decay, so the refresh rate could be lower. Same reason older oscilloscopes used green phosphors--so that you could see the trace.
So, you're arguing against someone claiming that people will game the system by talking about how people gamed a similar system?
Maybe tomorrow's? Today's revolutions are already organized on Facebook.
it really sucks for that guy, but this is not hacker news.
"Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously."

Isn't this exactly what "they" are after? Once that happens, there won't be any need for such armies. The end of anonymity means the end of free speech.
I will call IE a modern browser when both IE8 and IE9 don't crash on http://crashie8.com/
I don't know about isolated spots, but there are at least a few people on hn who travel the world while running their startups. Lionhearted (www.sebastianmarshall.com) is one.
What's more amazing is the USAF solicitation for bids on this kind of software. They say it's for use in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Florida.
Would you make the same comment when they turn and use their "toys" against you?
Surely it wouldn't mean much if $100 out of the last round to facebook went to operations with the remaining money cashing out employees and investors, so where's the line?

What if half the round cashes out prior investors?
Mozilla is accusing IE9 of not being a true Scotsman. It gains them some press coverage for what would otherwise be of interest mainly to the faithful.
Valid points, noted. I did mention that you should avoid the closing preposition, and you are right to acknowledge that there are cases where it is acceptable. However, I think it is safe to assert that most of the time, it is simply imprecise speech.

If "With whom am I speaking?" sounds snooty, then I guess I am a snob.
Bull. There is no credible linguist that will argue that sentence-ending prepositions are either invalid or even uncommon in English, whether spoken or written. There are some who prescribe this rule, due to nothing more than their personal aesthetic, and vilify those who violate it; but it is not a rule that competent speakers or writers of the language follow, and indeed those that propagate the so-called "rule" are typically unable to follow it consistently.

Furthermore, "the car am I driving in" is a complete red herring in this discussion; its syntactic structure is not parallel to that of the title of the post.

(My apologies to everyone else for feeding the trolls, but I can't stand to see prescriptions like this passed around as if legitimate.)
I am not going to take a position one way or the other as I know nothing about them, but I've seen this group come up as an issue on Reddit every so often: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force

see: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+jidf
It's just saying: If you end your relationship for any other reason than Just Cause, you have one month to exercise your options. This is pretty standard. Typically a grant like this (signed late into employment) will start vesting at the date of employment, with a typical one year cliff. If that's the case you have two months before you can exercise any options. After the 1 year cliff, if you decide to leave you can exercise any options that you've vested up to that point.
The second chart's legend also threw me off quite a bit.
Process isolation is a great feature but it has nothing do with page rendering. As a web developer, I'm concerned about how people will view and interact with my sites. If their browser does that correctly and quickly, that's what matters here.

If your browser has process isolation, a crazy bookmark system, skins, or an extension system those are just features for the end user and don't affect web applications running under it.
"wot car are we drivin', eh lads?"

This makes me smile :)
Is there any way to find out if prior investors are cashing out or not, and if so how much?
By that logic you could say more thought had to go into ideas in the first net bubble since the costs were higher.
You do now; I think Facebook will add more global value than Sony in the next 10 years.
Cool tip about C-x z, buuut... Playing with it a little bit, it doesn't seem to fit so well with a non-modal editor, because "last command" ends up being more like "last keystroke". E.g., if I write "I like cats" and then hit "C-x z", it enters..."s". Probably a more practical emacs equivalent is to just quickly record and replay a macro.

As for adding equivalents to E and B, sure, but what keys do you bind 'em to? Either unwieldy C-c FOO combinations, or spend the rest of forever playing whack-a-mole with various modes that happen to have already defined the keys you wanted to use. While emacs is infinitely customizable, the baseline editing functionality that everything expects is important -- otherwise you're just fighting against the grain. Though the various vim emulation modes have made a heroic effort...

It would be interesting if something like that vim keystroke competition could be expanded to include emacs as well. >:)
that'd be where they'd observe it from, or whatever other neutral ops outside of the theater of war is; not that they intend to use it against florida.
This isn't that interesting. Doesn't everyone always seek summary judgement?
> Only recently did iTunes remove DRM from their songs. The reason is because iTunes won.

The reason is because iTunes won over the record companies, yes.
Chat With Dad On Business Ethics
The idea about assertion of logical continuity is interesting.

The rise of “so,” he said via e-mail, is “another symptom that our communication and conversational lives are chopped up and discontinuous in actual fact, but that we try in several ways to sew them together in order to create a continuous experience.”

I hear it a lot in radio interviews, like..

A: And it was around that time that you discovered that 8 is greater than 7?

B: So, next we started looking into relationships between single digit numbers, which...

It's like a disguised sense of alarm that the partner in the dialogue may have ruptured the narrative (which is what interviewers are paid to do, politely) and that continuity needs to be reasserted. It's necessary with technical subjects where if you don't introduce concepts in careful sequence then the meaning completely breaks down.
That's a run-of-the-mill attempt to deny copying. However, if you look at the synopsis documents I produced (with a decompiled version of Oracle's code on the left side and the code found in the Android codebase on the right side), you can see that Google grossly overstates the importance of those differences.

Here's one example (and the others are consistent with this):
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/69702407/1-AclEntryImpl-synopsis
Double bubble: toil and trouble.

Facetwit does a face plant ... and then it's back to normal.
That was very eloquent, thanks for sharing.

I watched a series of college lectures on the history of language a couple of years ago, and that was one of the main points the lecturer made. Growing up in a traditional school system, I had never really thought about it that way.

Having said that, there is also a "high" and "low" version of most languages. The "high" version is full of obtuse rules and associated behaviors, while the "low" version is more catch-as-catch can.

So yes, you are correct: enjoy the art of your native tongue! I love screwing around with the rules. But also be aware that the culture you are in may prescribe all sorts of silly little rules, and knowing these -- and when to apply them -- can drastically affect other people's perception of your character. Whether we like that fact or not.

One of the things I wish I had more time for is the study of languages and the philosophy of languages. It has direct application in everything from AI to talking to Dolphins to programming projects. Really cool stuff.