skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saddam and the Nazis surrendered, bin Laden did not. The rules of engagement are clear, which also hold true for metro police actions, in that lethal force is authorized when the other party brandishes a weapon. If he had not had a weapon, if he had raised his hands instead of an AK then he would have faced trial but that is not how things went down.
In a vacuum?
Chad, Couldn't have said any better about startups being hard. I wish you and Paul success. You have so many things that are going right for you. Access to great mentors, being part of YC, being in the valley and having a supporting family. You just need that missing piece for which people would really pay.
As a nobody, you have not much to lose.
We will be here to cheer you on when you find that missing link.
This event promises to be excellent. We have high school from Wellington making a special trip down to present on their VERY ambitious project. Someone will show us why automating your bathtub might be a good idea. As well as some other fun surprises.

If you're in the area, you should definitely stop by! (The event is FREE, so why not?)
True, however some providers make attempts to thwart this by making it impossible for even themselves to access mail by way of encryption. I haven't looked at it in a long while, but lavabit.com was one such company, and it's a pretty good raw POP/IMAP service (at last check the web interface and spam measures were somewhat lacking).
There are a lot of smart people who worry so much about getting things perfect, or doing things in a too-general way (i.e. "architecture astronauts") that they never actually get anything useful done, or they take far too long to get things done. These people often lack pragmatic business sense.
Reposted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2498438, where discussion ensued.
Edit to include: it appears he was not shot on sight, but shot when he "resisted". This is tremendously important when you think about the order which must have been given.

Saddam's trial was about documenting his government and demonstrating the authority of the new Iraqi regime. No one ever expected it to end in anything but a hanging.

There is no similar motive to have a trial for Bin Laden.

Another factor since 2006 is a development in the United States presidential interpretation of the constitution that gives the president the authority to order the death of individuals without judicial oversight[1]. This comes as a surprise to most Americans and should be addressed, but it won't happen soon.

[1] Except for foreign officials or heads of state. Notice the gymnastics the US went through to say they were not targeting Ghadafi, but might target command centers where he might be present.
Re-reading and doing some research on the common use of "fully loaded", I think you're right.
I'm not sure your conclusion is exactly right.

If Google can access my data anyway(even though its a pain in the ass), they can still comply with US subpoena's. I would imagine its easier to just automate the process(with a backdoor of sorts) then have to mess around doing this all the time.

I don't see any details on the actual backdoor in the article, so I hesitate to jump to conclusions.
Interesting viewpoint, I'd never considered that, thank you. It certainly fits Hanlon's razor.
Well, if the US Gov suddenly invests in FaceBook, we will have an idea as to what is coming down the road for privacy.

What you are proposing is an insane privacy violation and facilitates law enforcement just being able to 'watch for the sake of watching'...
How he got an internship at Hashable (Lots of hustle.)
Even on my smaller than average 1280x1080 monitor, the top of the screen can be a long way from the current mouse position - notice that Fitts Law factors in that Distance.

(And as you've brought up Fitts Law, think about what that says about the very much smaller target provided by those Unity overlay scroll thumbs compared to a window size scrollbar.)
Is this really the standard case for SSD's? I know they have a certain number of writes, but didn't know the failure rate was this high. It seems strange that all the drives you got did not have warranties. On Newegg I'll sometimes buy parts that seem like really great deals. Eventually they will either brake/perform poorly. I haven't cheaped out on hardware since then. I just can't stand the hassle of bad hardware anymore.
It matters to customers who are themselves in the valley, like me. I know the teams behind most of the products and web services I use, and it matters that I know who to call when something doesn't work. If customers in the tech world are important to you, you should be where you can go meet them for coffee.
See peoples' feelings and worries in real time
Just made this quick little site and pushed it out this afternoon - people can add their thoughts and feelings up to 250 characters, and then they are pushed instantly to other users in real time! Tell me what you think, all comments are appreciated in this product which has literally only just been released!
I get PHP errors on their blog. Does anybody know what happened when they gave their talks?
The differentiator to me is the SuperStar will figure out how to avoid writing a lot of the code Competent guy will write cleanly. A mix of both works really well when SuperStar can gently steer Competent in the less complex direction.
You can argue that it's a matter of semantics whether "getting things done" implies "smart" if you start defining "done" to mean more than what most people assume from the word, but it's definitely not true that "smart" implies "getting things done" even if you start to stretch meanings. There are plenty of people who are really smart, but who do not get anything practical done.
This is another major ding for the Kauffman Foundation, though they were only indirectly involved. For instance, shouldn't exit size/frequency be measured? If so Heroku alone would crush the rest of the competition. Shouldn't there be some kind of rating, rather than just a ranking? Sequential ordering doesn't begin to illustrate the distance between YC/TC and the rest. You were very kind to unkill this.
Why floats suck - accurate galaxy-wide coordinates in 128 bits
Haskell: Not pure enough?
The documentation and package management are really really good. It's very nice to type:

(require (prefix-in sqlite: (planet jaymccarthy/sqlite:4)))

and then have it automatically downloaded (plus dependencies) and ready for prime time...
Well now you're nitpicking, that wasn't ever my main point. Here is an article that better captures my point: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bin-lad...
I don't think you can get around the nightingale-ish expected value of this strategy, no matter how you adjust the stakes and number of bets.
I cannot find any article that talks about how exactly did bin Laden resist. Do you have any link saying that bin Laden was armed?
The invisible hands behind Web postings
There are two main problems:

(1) Who will you learn from? Successively hiring only people equal to or less than the current skill level within the company inevitably leads to a gradual lessening of talent within the company.

(2) How will you stop the talented staff leaving? By hiring untalented people you shift more work onto the most talented. Since they also probably don't want to work in a place that is known for hiring people without talent they're going to be very likely to leave. This will exacerbate the brain drain within your company.
It's a great thing to say, because how can anyone argue about hiring the best people?

The problem is, the statement is rhetorical, there is no "best" -- a superstar in a big bureaucratic organization might be someone who "gets" process and following through on certain things. In a startup or other type of company, there are attributes separating "best" from the rest. The process superstar from MegaCorp might destroy a startup!

At the end of the day, management adds value when they take a bunch of people with a base level of knowledge and helps them deliver whatever the product is that is being developed. The trick is finding folks with good work ethics who have the base level of knowledge that you need. There's no magic.
Ever seen a TOS exclude access for shareholders of competing companies?
Well heck, getting into YC is a feat unto itself. Considering all of the others that can't even get that far, at least you have a glimmer of hope.

Edit: I'm curious - why the downvote?
Mitigating side channel timing cryptanalysis in Python
News.outlookindia.com | Osama Encounter: Life Unaffected in Kashmir
Top 15 US based accelerators ranked (TechStars, YC and Excelerate the top 3)
NEW Offshore Web Hosting Business Impacts the Web MUST SEE
Piecing information is what people do, whether they're reporters or not. Many reporters do great work, but we all need to develop the skills of detecting misinformation, rather than depending on a professional class to do it for us.
I assume that Sakes means that right now, it appears as though a coder uses this site by fulfilling requests (questions).

Currently, there are 3 requests that a coder could potentially fulfill. Sakes is asking if it is possible to offer services directly, without waiting for somebody to ask for them.
You are conflating salaries and dividends. The business doesn't pay tax on $100k salary (it's an expense) and the owner pays ordinary income tax on that. The same is true for pass-through corporations, which make up a large fraction of the profitable corporations that pay no taxes.

The business does pay tax on profits and spends after tax dollars distributing dividends to shareholders. Similarly, after tax dollars contribute to a corporate valuation which enables owners to sell shares and take capital gains.

A corporation is a person in the U.S.

The term "person" has been overloaded and you are conflating different uses of the term. A corporation is a legal person, which means they can enter contracts, file lawsuits and be sued. This provides a common interface for counterparties, nothing more.

A corporation is a set of assets, liabilities, a web of contracts governing the management of said assets/liabilities and a government guarantee of limited liability. I can't see how it makes sense to discuss whether something is unfair to my company. Similarly, it makes no sense discussing whether something is unfair to my cell phone and service contract.

I disagree that it is unfair to a stock holder to pay taxes on the dividends received or on the capital gains.

Me too.

All I said is that it's unfair to tax profits to the tune of $20k, dividends to the tune of $15k, and then pretend the owner of the corporation is only paying $15k in taxes.

If you want to discuss the taxes paid by the top 400 taxpayers in the US, include the corporate taxes paid by the companies they own.
I posted this on the reddit thread as well, but I've used some SSDs in VM hosts, and seen a pretty damn high failure rate. They're great for VM hosts for obvious reasons, but they thrash pretty hard, and I've taken to triple RAID mirroring them, across different brands.
Well, if you use POP3 - it can definitely be automatic. Client-side configuration on how long to retain messages seen on the server.
Suppose the owner pays herself $100,000 in salary and the business has, after this expense and all other expenses, $20,000 in the bank. The business then pays tax on this $20,000. Any entity that makes a profit pays tax on it (roughly speaking). This is consistent and fair.

If the business (as an entity separate from the owner) decides to pay a dividend then whoever gets the dividend pays a tax on the money. Suppose the business decides to give me a dividend of $20,000 and I have nothing to do with the business. Shouldn't I pay tax on it? There shouldn't be a distinction on who gets their dividends taxed. A dividend is a dividend.

If the owner wanted $120,000 in salary then the owner should have paid herself $120,000. If she decides to give me a $20,000 dividend then I should pay tax on that dividend. If she decides to give herself a dividend then I she should pay a tax on that dividend. A dividend to herself is no more worthy of a tax break than a dividend to me.

In the interest of consistency (fairness) the guiding principle is that an entity pay tax on money it gets after expenses. It also makes things easier.
For what it's worth, I really quickly became annoyed with the seemingly glacial transition pace of the image slider on your homescreen.
> Why doesn't Facebook just build an admin portal so that law enforcement types can register themselves and then just be able to "star" a user/group page on which they'd like information, fill out a short form for details (checkboxes, javascript date range, radio buttons, maybe a drop-down select) and submit it to the queue?

isn't your idea similar to what Assange is talking about? http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/05/02/wikileaks-founder-...

It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use.
One big point here is that PGP only works when both sender and receiver and doing it. Try sending Bank of America a PGP encrypted email about your account. See what happens.

Edit: Re-reading my response... I don't mean this in a condescending way and I agree that PGP is a good way to handle email privacy. I only meant to point out that the majority of people don't use it.
Just don't "make parsers." Make something that does something, better than some other software. Parser is just a piece of that what you make. Once you have the goal, to make the parser piece, use whatever you like, but produce the results you wanted. That's how you really learn something.
I find two-wheeled conveyances more conducive to sudden insight than either ambulatory or four-wheeled methods of locomotion. My guess is that the greater portion of conscious attention required enables more subconscious creativity.
We don't have a data-driven strategy. I wish we did, but at the moment it's anecdotal evidence driven.
Yeah, Apache is like a giant lump of clay you need to "sculpt" into something useful, whereas nginx is a fast and empty potter's wheel waiting for you to throw the clay on ;-) nginx is definitely well worth it if you don't have complex Apache-specific requirements.

Another alternative I've been playing with lately is running haproxy on port 80 and then throwing requests to different daemons (like Apache and nginx) based on the host header.
I'll be moving from Minneapolis to SF soon. Before spending significant time in the Bay Area, I thought that the noise/saturation/and "meh" were a problem, but my experience was different. It's a very supportive environment, with a lot of smart people willing to help out.

There are three problems to the Bay Area:

1. Massive competition for engineering talent. It's probably harder to hire 20 brilliant engineers in SF than in any other major city in North America.

2. Cost. Our burn is increasing by 20%-30% because we're moving.

3. Echo chamber. Ideas tend to get reinforced here. This is often good or neutral; SV will sometimes recognize the significance of something before the rest of the country will. (There are a lot of people who still think Facebook and Twitter are hype and will go bankrupt soon.) But I imagine that there are ideas that make sense in SV that are ultimately bad ideas. And there are ideas that wouldn't resonate in SV that are probably huge opportunities.

This is a little off-topic from the original article, which is fantastic. But circling back: startups are hard, and moving to SV isn't a panacea. It may help a little, but do it with eyes open - because you want to commit to the startup life, and SV is a good place to do that.
Firefox 5 Beta (Build 1) Posted
This comes up pretty often. Here's a sentiment that is often present:

I heard that to get excellent results I should do X,
but I don't see a really painless and trivial way to
do X. X doesn't seem practical.

When I work with non-coders to help them with their scripts or whatever, I commonly see all kinds of things that should be done better: simplify this, refactor that, etc. I have learned the payoffs for doing things the right way, and I try to pass some of these things on. Usually the response is "I understand. That would be a better approach." but then they go back to their old ways. They just want to get the immediate thing working and move on.

It's not at all surprising that advice from smart people with a lot of experience seems like a lot of work to those of us just trying to get today's problem solved. But take a step back and look at anyone working at the top of their field and you'll find them doing lots of things that are hard, involving doing things right rather than just getting a task crossed off the list.

"Wow, that chef keeps everything spotless and sharpens his knife a lot, and only uses the best ingredients."

"That master carpenter sure spends a lot of time caring for tools and doing a lot of other things that aren't cutting wood."

Why should hiring coders be any different, unless you believe that coders are a commodity?
That's like PETA founder saying foie-gras is bad.

I'm be more impressed/interesting if NSA/CIA director said something similar.
I went to Drexel University. There was a required introductory course, with a little bit of JavaScript programming, that weeded out many people that would immediately change majors. After that, anyone could skip the 2-3 C++ programming courses by taking placement exams, as you suggest.
Hmm, I'm afraid it's a bit late to add another project to the book (there is a Node project, but it doesn't use persistence), so how about if I write this and post it somewhere else? Would you prefer MySQL or MongoDB?
From the FAQ:

Can I post homework problems?
Absolutely!

That seems to encourage academic dishonesty? The stackoverflow community tends to self police homework, so it'll be interesting to see how explicit permission to pay for homework affects the site's community.
9/11 is an inside jobs. Watch these documentaries produced by Americans.
http://www.sprword.com/9_11.html
There may be a difference between you deleting an email from your inbox and google deleting the actual message.
Cheap is a poor word choice for your brand; it invokes bad associations for both of your audiences.

Consider something implying speed instead, which signals "inexpensive," without suggesting a shoddy product.
Only took seven years. Here's to seeing Apple v Samsung having a conclusion in 2018. :-)
Racket is simply fantastic. I use both Clojure and Racket and I have few complaints about either. Clojure's main advantages are the performance of the JVM, larger library ecosystem, and a larger community. Racket has plenty of things to be jealous of though, the efficient pattern matcher, the typed variant and the contract system are particularly cool.
Ask HN: Moving to the Bay area from SoCal
I am in the process of moving to the Bay area from SoCal (Irvine). My situation is "special" as I will be living on savings for the next 6-12 months to focus on my ventures. My moving date is set to June 1.

I do not have a job secured there (that's not why I am moving). I just need your advices on locations, apartments, and any other resources you could recommend me.

Thank you in advance for all your help!
Oh, I'm not saying this a good way to aquire all your devs. Sometimes, though, if you just need to hire one extra person to write tests or do some supplemental work for the main devs, a rockstar is overkill.
The Google Maps location that is ventured around (starting with Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487... ) is not the actual location of the compound.

There are aerial photos of the compound in the briefing obtained by ABC news:

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Graphics%20for%20backg...

Based on these photos and looking around the area, I've found the actual location of the compound, which exactly matches the photos from the briefing:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...

It's still in the area, but a bit further from the Pakistan Military Academy and in the SW direction from it (not NW, as the Telegraph map claims).
Conducting Developer Interviews - ac
I Cmd+M the ones I want to keep around but don't plan to use right now. They go in a smaller mode below a divide line on Exposé. Also I tell the Dock to "minimize into the application icon".

Document window + Application icon + Exposé can really scale up, to the point I rarely ever use Spaces (when I was an avid user of virtual desktops under Linux).
That reminds me I once came along code written like this:

function MakePrintable(nr as Int)
{
Str as string
if nr=1 then Str="1"
if nr=2 then Str="2"
if nr=3 then Str="3"
...
if nr=27 then Str="27"
if nr=28 then Str="28"
if nr=29 then Str="29"
return Str
}

This code worked in the program it was used in (it Got Things Done), but in a dumb way (lazy? ignorant?).

I admit this is a rather extreme example, but it provokes the universal feeling when you look at gravely suboptimal code: "What did the programmer think when he wrote this? Didn't he know that ...., it's so obvious!"
Academic dishonesty comes from academically dishonest students. Instead of policing each question and guessing if it's homework or not, I'm simply allowing any question.
Nevada Bill Would Pave the Road to Autonomous Cars
Peripherally related is really stretching it. The way I understood chrismealy's argument is this:

Biological essentialist arguments were previously used to explain the disparity of men and women in law and medicine. Now that we know that those arguments were critically flawed and did not reflect reality, we should be very hesitant to support similar arguments being used to explain the lack of women in STEM disciplines.
Any thoughts on bringing it to Canada? Would be great!
Looks interesting. I especially like the idea of using Bonjour. There is a missing closing tag on the "click here" anchor tag on the Get a Quote page
50 Outstanding Illustration Designs for Your Inspiration
In my example the $100,000 was salary. When you wrote:

"I said it was unfair to their owners. Consider your hypothetical business owner. Out of the $100k in profits, the business pays perhaps $20k. The business owner then pays another $15k. But then people trying to score political points complain that he is getting away with something, and paying only $15k on $80k (19%). I think that's unfair."

I thought you were talking about salary. Sorry for the confusion.

I can't think of an example where it makes sense to say, "that isn't fair to your cell phone". I can think of lots of examples where it makes sense to say, "that isn't fair to cell phone providers [companies]".
I run my own mail server with a roundcube frontend interface, for $5 a month (if that) on Amazon EC2.

What's the point of SSL in Gmail if Google has your certs?
Sure, you're right. I'm sorry if I implied smart people write perfect code, they don't either, but I'll prefer their code.