skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't want this to be just something I learn from. I want this to be something useful to many different people and allow people to both learn and enjoy their own hobbies better. I might explain later what the idea is if it's relevant to what someone comments.
I don't think it's amoral. There are "world-shakers" in this life who aren't satisfied with how the world looks and they strive to change it. They develop an idea that provides value to others and they build a beast from nothing. With out people like this there would be no change, no progress. Founders create the world as we know it.

And, a slight adjustment to the original phrase will correct it. Founders, in general, are not 1,000 more valuable than their employees. Successful founders are 1,000,000 more valuable than their employees.
It's the interface overhaul, not features. I don't know what dark force they had to bargain with to make it work, but the workflow is perfect.

Any OO.o or LO dev should grab the trial and figure out what's improved in it so they understand what they're up against.

ETA: http://i.imgur.com/63zCP.jpg

Formatting options (things like text styles and lists) pop up when you select something formattable.
They shouldn't be allowed to ask, because some people will say yes.

And those people will be putting their friends' privacy at risk, not just their own.
I like what he said in the video, and he's right. Asking for this kind of information is just like asking a woman, "Are you pregnant?" Or, asking people to take "IQ tests" that favor whites. In fact you could write a law that simply said:

"An employer may not compel an applicant for any access to private information that may indirectly lead to a violation of existing Equal Opportunity Employment laws."

Ideally this law would amount to:

"Paying someone to do a job does not make them your fucking lifetime slave asshole."
Letting the OS free memory at process exit is a very viable approach for single-purpose tools that don't run a reasonable risk of running out of memory. (Structs over unions are also more debuggable and less prone to bugs.)

On the other hand, if you ever want to turn what you wrote into a library instead of a standalone process, not having taken more care over memory management will hurt.

For compilers, there's often a happy medium available: pool / arena-based allocation, with one pool per translation unit.
But how can I possibly close your software? I can't stop you from distributing your library in the original form that you created it in. So your software will always be free, regardless of whether or not I abide by the GPL.
Ah, there's "freedom" again, considered only from one perspective. What about the freedom of someone to make their own work available as closed source? What about when it's a derived work that adds novel new functionality? The FSF is against the freedom to do this, because it promotes other freedoms they like better. What if my important set of freedoms isn't a perfect fit with theirs? What if some random users' important set isn't a perfect match with either mine or the FSF's? If freedom is really what you're after, picking some things at the expense of others can get tricky very fast. If you really want freedom, perhaps you can give away all the rights, so that the recipient can decide what they want to do? After all, you still have the code and you can keep giving it away. This is the new BSD license, or MIT license, or ISC license. According to any non-skewed definition of "freedom" they are more free. Objectively.

But maybe you want kind of free, free in some narrow ways that preserve things important to you by putting restrictions on those who get your code so that they also have to preserve the same things you like. If so then that's fine! I totally support your right as the author to choose an appropriate license. But that's not about freedom. It's about propagating your view of how things should be. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it's not about freedom.
It seems just from your tone in the post and your comment below that you already think he's not dependable and not someone you want to work with.

If you think he brings VITAL skills to the table that your venture won't get launched without, I would consider using reverse vesting to make sure he gets out what he puts in.

For an explanation of reverse vesting: http://www.venturechoice.com/glossary/reverse-vesting.htm
I read these comments and think that this article wasn't directed at HN readers; it was directed at free software people.
It depends on who you're working for (how top-down or bottom-up the company is) and how autonomous you are. Doing things cheaply and quickly, even in a web startup is shortsighted. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Sometimes big, interesting projects take time (think IBM developing Watson). I'm not discounting agile methods — the things you choose to do should be done efficiently, but they shouldn't be done poorly.

Perhaps I don't disagree with your comment that "most" developers have to do things cheaply and quickly, but I think most anyone has ability to speak up in their environment and push for the changes they think are important. I've worked at a big, sprawling company and was still able to work against the grain and push back on requirements and things I didn't think made sense. I'm working at a company now where I can do the same things (this time with less pushback).

If you change your perspective from controlling your job or your company to controlling yourself and your career, then it makes it easier to pull back and make the decisions that make sense for you and the things you want to work on. Then the places you work at are just the vessels and opportunities to turn your ideas into reality. The onus is on you to determine your career — not your company's.
Both you and your sibling poster are claiming that individual instances of failure within the existing regime are reasons why the current regime should be abolished, which is a completely absurd reduction. I don't care how you entertain yourself. I do care if your method of entertainment, if scaled to billions of dollars, has the potential to destroy volumes of wealth for no particular reason of consequence. And I do want an agency to try to keep completely unviable quackery off the medical market.
As mkr-hn said, the UI in Office is far better. OOo has also always seemed to have perf issues for me - Office feels much snappier.
This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

No way I would let someone who wasn't interested in this sort of thing until he saw a movie take over as anything beyond coffee-maker and maybe QA monkey at first.
been there, done that :)
You say they are getting access to information about that person.

Actually, it is much worse than that. They are getting access to information about all the person's friends, including some very private information.

I might trust my friends with ages, photos, and school locations of my children, but I shouldn't have to worry about whether that same information is being given to some creepy bureaucrat working in a department of corrections office.

And to be clear, I'm not at all talking about the risk faced by a job applicant. I'm talking about the risk incurred by a friend of the person.
There are plenty of other things employers aren't allowed to ask (even if some would have given it up willingly). I'm not sure why this would be different. Under most circumstances you can't ask about religion, most everything about family, nationality, native language, age, etc. There are usually ways around these things, but some are just areas employers can't go. They are free to ask, but then set themselves up for a pretty open and shut lawsuit.
First of all, build a custom theme. Downloading a pre-built Q&A PHP script and throwing it up on your server takes virtually no skill/work and visitors can sense this lack of effort within milliseconds of the first page loading...

Also, how is your site better than the YC area of Quora, for example?
I would think that this should be obvious, but sharing your password in such a circumstance appears prohibited by the Facebook terms of service[1]. More specifically:

You will not share your password, (or in the case of developers,
your secret key), let anyone else access your account, or do anything
else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

1- http://www.facebook.com/terms.php?_fb_noscript=1
I hope they'll open in real life soon. I already plan to go to Den Haag to visit the M. Escher museum :)
Well this is timely. For anyone near San Jose, the Borders at Santana Row has "store closing" signs out today. Most things 20 to 40% off.
His exact words were something along the lines of "The Social Network made me realize I don't just want to be an employee of a big company"

I might have over-exaggerated or I might not have, but I interpreted that as "I want to work with you because I saw the Social Network."
This is a joke post, right?
JCL

It is, after all, Job Control Language.
Watch the Google TechTalk: "The Wires that Control the Public Mind":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUY9ahSCMG0

...talks about how public relation firms influence people's views.
I don't understand how someone who has overcome so much -- and knows how hard it was to do that -- can be so glib and flippant when talking about other people who have failed to rise above the same circumstances. You obviously care, since you're going out of your way to post comments dismissing those people.
Hacking the economy...

+ Carbon Tax

- Sales Tax

commit -m"Deter consumption in proportion to its harm."
"In reality, Free Software ends up being useful only for programmers, hackers, technical people,"

That is like saying that freedom of speech is only useful for journalists.

You don't have to exercise a freedom to benefit from it. You benefit from others exercising it too. Whether a journalist exposes government corruption, or a security experts independently audits OpenSSL, everyone benefits of the relevant freedom being exercised.

You don't have to be a programmer for benefiting from DeCSS. You don't have to be a hacker to benefit from Apache. You don't have to be a technical person to benefit from WordPress.

The same applies to the reversed, you don't have to be a programmer to suffer from DRM, vendor lock-in, or nag-ware.
When I was building OBsearch.net I used this book extensively. I grant you that some explanations are not so detailed. On the other hand, the explanations of the most relevant techniques are quite good. Check for instance the section that explains LSH or the explanation about Navarro's SAT.
What stops your friend from copying your facebook data and publishing it on the web?
Fumbled early Internet strategy. Amazon and B&N both had affiliate programs - Borders wanted to keep control.
Yes, egcs and xemacs (and at least partly clang/llvm I think) are shining examples of the FSF's developer-friendliness.
Wow. I can seriously relate to this article. I'm notorious among my friends for "zoning-out", going into deep thought, being easily distracted and giving a delayed response when they ask me something. I thought I might have a problem, but this really gives a new perspective.

I think that perhaps by spending so many hours in front of the computer, my mind is always in this "virtual world" state, where I think A LOT, but only to myself—and this carries over to to the "physical world." I easily distracted—but can focus really hard on one thing at a time, so I don't have issues learning (if I'm paying attention to the class). Don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.
Hybrid GPU & Multicore Matlab Processing for LU Decomposition
It takes much more than software engineering skills to start a startup. You need ambition and determination more than you need any particular engineering skills. And you need to be charismatic enough to convince other people that you are not one of the 90% of entrepreneurs who will fail, that you are exceptional.
Walmart actually has a large book section, but a small variety. Vampire romance, cooking, religion, diet, self-help, and pseudoscience relating to dietary supplements and the like. Also, a huge number of useless magazines.

Hrmm. Thinking of the impulse-buy tabloids in the checkout aisles, I wonder what would happen if they were to put a magazine of substance, a literary magazine or accessible scientific journal of some sort, amidst those tabloids. If one out of every thousand people who bought a tabloid instead opted for the better books, what would be the long-term gain of society?

If I were a dictator, I would require such experiments.
>Open Source is about the developers. Free Software is about the end users (or, it's supposed to be).

Yes, this.

This might be an unpopular view but "free software" (in the sense talked about here) is unencumbered for the users only. For developers it is encumbered (via the GPL). Open Source makes a different trade-off for the same gain.

This is the thing Stallman consistently misses; that Open Source and Free Software are simply two different solutions to a similar issue. Free Software sacrifices the freedom of developers when reusing the code. Open Source sacrifices a developers future porential ability to keep all uses of the code freely available.

He throws out the word ethical, I think, because it makes FS sound better. But the bottom line is that both ideals have underlying issues and problems; the brilliant thing is that there is a choice between the two, and we are free to pick the one that makes the trade-off we prefer.

The really great thing is that the real world is not as black and white as FS & OS; we can mix and match various aspects for our own preference :)

That is the point of freedom.

I suppose I can't fault Stallman for promoting his personal choice as best he is able.
ZEITGEIST: MOVING FORWARD
Hint: current Android numbers are 50 Million per month and that is 0.600 billion for 2001..

That market is getting hammered and does not even have a toe-hold yet..
If you want to work on it, drop me an email. What's the YC area of Quora?
This article completely glosses over the class of bootstrapped startups where the founders leave their day jobs, invests their time and money in the startup, and then start hiring people.

That's a lot of risk, so yes, for that class of startups founders should have higher ownership in the company and thus are worth more if the company is worth something.

On top of that, these boot strapped startups often pay their employees more than themselves, so on the income front, employees are worth more.

This article really underscores the weirdness of incentives that can crop up at venture backed companies. It almost makes no sense.
See barry-cotter for the general answer, but the specific is that she's also a European citizen, because my wife is Hungarian. It helps that we've spoken German at home her entire life - she doesn't speak it, but her passive knowledge is quite good and I think a good class will get her up to speed pretty quickly. So it's not entirely a dart on the world map, is what I'm saying.
It depends on how you define "open". For Stallman, one of the main goals of free software is the ability to get into your software and be able to fix bugs and port it to other platforms -- it all started with RMS getting stuck with a proprietary printer driver.

All that BSD code that's been taken, extended, modified and used in proprietary products is no longer open. You can't get into OS X and fix bugs or port it to another platform. So even if the original code is still open, other distributions of that same code are not.
Would you give a potential employer your GMail password? Hell no. Your Facebook login is not only a trove of information that employers aren't supposed to ask about, it's a login gateway to many other sites. Facebook is probably the largest delegated authentication provider on the internet, and you expect me to hand that info over?

The only person that has my Facebook login info is my wife, and she's also the only person that has my email login info. I don't care if you're the Pope, you're not getting access to any information that gives you the keys to the kingdom.
When I tell Rubyists I'm a PHP developer, I usually get a missive "oh." like I've just been relegated to the kiddy table.

This seemingly brainless blind man pounding away on a keyboard reveling in the glory of the sound it makes is what I imagine all ruby/python/lisp/node hackers think of when they think of PHPtards.

So, that's what I am; a PHP developer.

Haters gonna hate.
nothing "stops" them... it's called trust. why would a friend do that
If your dimensionality is low then I totally agree, there is a library that can help you to achieve this: http://code.google.com/p/uzaygezen/
If you are dealing with objects with intrinsic dimension >=20 then you should use other techniques.
Taxes levied on harmful activities kill two birds with one stone. They generate desperately needed revenue while discouraging behaviors whose costs greatly outweigh their benefits.

Actually, I've long been of the opinion that such taxes can lead to a "dependency on the dependency." That is, while a government may intend to discourage the "undesirable" activity it's taxing, it may in the long run grow to depend on the revenue that tax generates, which may in turn reduce incentive to discourage that activity in more effective ways, like anti-smoking or anti-drinking campaigns. After all, do you really want to discourage the activities that build up your revenue?

Now, let's consider the payroll and income taxes Mr. Frank laments for discouraging job creation and investment. While this may be true, maybe our government could develop campaigns or programs to encourage these activities, and so counter the discouraging effects of taxation. I don't know off the top of my head what such a program might look like, so I can't say how feasible it would be. If nothing else, though, the potential for even greater revenue from increasing desirable activity sounds like a fairly strong incentive to me.

I'm no economist, so maybe this "addiction to addiction" hypothesis is just another crackpot theory. I'd be interested to hear if anyone competent has actually explored this?

[slight edit for grammar]
What about distinguishing between non-free, but substantially open software (measured by ease of patch submission) vs proprietary software with the occasional code dump?
A note on US high school diplomas - that's not entirely accurate. A diploma plus an ACT score of 28 or greater, or a combined SAT math+reading comprehension of 1300 or greater, or four AP classes, or a minimum GPA of 3.0 with an academic track, all qualify you. Pretty much the same sort of thing you'd expect to get into a decent college in the US, really.

[http://www.anabin.de/Xml/xmlZeugnis.asp?ID=704&Land=124&...]
Yes, they'll be even faster; but the question is whether that performance will still be in demand in 5 years (over, time-to-market, say).

Native apps haven't been in demand on the desktop for a while, and smartphones are getting faster all the time. It seems that will be dual core, 1 GHz this year. How long before performance becomes a non-issue?
I basically agree with you. My response was more directed at the comments in this thread glorifying the intestinal fortitude of founders. Founders don't give much equity to employees because the successful ones don't have to, and the failures never have the chance. It doesn't have much to do with founders bravely trading risk for an equivalent measure of reward.
The Incredible Lost Bruce Lee Interview
There are JSON libraries for Java (which I use as a persistence / data transfer layer) and there's JSON libraries in Android specifically.
Most systems seem to develop perverse incentives given enough time.
For anyone who isn't familiar: Yugui is part of the Ruby Core team, so she knows a bit about language implementation.
The study results were interesting, but I find them hard to apply in a directed effort towards achievement. I just finished reading The Power of Full Engagement, and I find Loehr and Schwartz provide a more practical, workable model.

Their idea, strongly supported by thousands of case studies, is that to maximize success (whether in academics, tennis, the corporate world, etc.) one must practice deliberate spurts of stress followed by periods of strategic relaxation. It is easier to apply this in practice than the interesting but hardly practical content in the article. For example, for the past few hours, I've been working hard on understanding some algebraic geometry from Hartshorne, but now I'm daydreaming about neuroscience and salsa.

Thus, a perfect creative effort is a fusion of focused dedication interspersed with lackadaisical goofing around.
Link to working video:
http://www.archive.org/details/BruceLeeTheLostInterview1971
How so? OP said employees at a startup get 25% lower salary than they would at someplace more mainstream. He didn't mention founders making 25% less than they would at a day job.
The volume of books on open source tools is more a function of the number of such tools. For any given tool or language, there may be very few books in print.

Amazon has 12 books for "LLVM". [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dst...]

There are over 1500 for "Visual Studio" [http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dst...]

343 books for "Django" [includes the musician] v. 1548 for "asp.net" [includes fibers woven for catching venomous vipers]
I don't have your email... you can contact me through my site if you'd like: http://connorbaskauskas.com.

http://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator
I can't speak to any cybercrime laws (I'm simply not familiar enough with them), but the DMCA 1) only applies to mechanisms which protects copyright, and 2) has very explicit exemptions for the purpose of security research, among other things.
My concern is that "better at generating new ideas" != ("better at generating good/relevant ideas" || "better at accomplishing things")

I tend to be more creative when I'm letting myself drift, but I need to focus in order to execute. As with most things, balance is the key.
So is it only for local console authentication? There's no way to read that stuff remotely.
Where are people on the Internet getting their information that they repost on blogs and community sites? Is it from first-hand accounts and primary research, or are they just repeating what they heard from the news wires or cable news?

Propaganda is about propagation of a meme, but where does it start? And how do you distinguish fact from fiction when the self-identified news networks intermingle news with opinions masquerading as facts?
Where are you getting the 50M/month number from? The latest number reported by Google (Eric Schmidt at a MWC keynote this week) was 350k a day, which would be about 10 million a month.

(Though you are right in that given the kind of growth the smartphone market is going through, installed base is quickly going to be irrelevant and what matters is new sales).
I think there's been some serious improvement anyway. Many examples on the Internet use outdated libraries and engines, but if you use modern tools like XeTeX and Biblatex, things get better. For example, using a font with the Opentype features in Xetex and specifying another font for Chinese text is very simple, and since you can do everything in UTF8, there's no need to muck around things like inputenc anymore.

Of course, there are still some ugly corners, and the underlying code isn't always pretty. Things like Luatex sound quite promising in this regard.
While it's plausible that a government could come to depend on such revenue from undesirable acts, the act of collecting a tax from undesirable acts will decrease the level of activity. In short, the tax is effective. It kills two birds with one stone (less harmful activity, more tax revenue) as the article describes.
Should that also be the case for age, sex, orientation, religion, etc? If not, what makes those so special?