skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for asking the follow-up question. What I mean is that what status people perceive from being in one occupation rather than another is one of several factors that enter into how much pay is necessary to induce people to seek entry into that occupation. A typical online discussion of why one occupation has a higher average rate of pay than another occupation will omit any mention of at least three or four of the factors already identified way back when by Adam Smith.

http://books.google.com/books?id=dDDUAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA216&#...

1. Wages will vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honorableness, or dishonorableness of the employment.
2. Wages will vary with the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning a trade.
3. Wages in different occuptions will vary with the regularity or irregularity of employment.
4. Wages will vary with the degree of trust reposed in an occupation.
5. Wages will vary according to the probability of success in the occupation.

One paradox under the "honorableness" factor that schoolteachers encounter is seeking societal respect (which I would certainly agree an effective teacher well deserves), because if societal respect for teachers goes up, then relative to all other occupations pay for schoolteaching is likely to go down. The "probability of success in the occupation" criterion has some interesting interactions with both honorableness and pay, because managerial policies regarding schoolteachers can either set up lockstep promotion schemes based on years of teaching, with tenure, a high degree of job security, or classic "at will" employment (rarely encountered among public schoolteachers after they have taught for a few years). Management being able to distinguish effective teachers from less effective teachers, reducing the job security of ineffective teachers, should result in higher pay for teachers, other things being equal. Current policies in most states of the United States strongly emphasize job security for public schoolteachers over distinguishing the most and least effective teachers.

P.S. This madness

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0513-tobar-20110513,...

I was just reading via Google News is one reason I despair when I think about current school district management practices. Work rules designed to protect job security on the basis of seniority, and qualifications for jobs in schools based on higher education credentials rather than on performance, hurt everyone in the system--including teachers.
I'm pretty sure lofty world-shattering inventions are physically and financially more difficult to create nowadays.
Then working at a startup for a first-time founder is definitely not for you, and probably not any startup. Which is OK — different people thrive in different environments and different risk/reward levels. You should be thanking this guy for helping you understand where your tolerance lies before you got snookered by somebody less candid.
awesome! we need more brain power! feel free to reach out to me or mike & between us and the rest of the south florida community, we should be able to help you out!
To waste $. Why aren't they going after the mortgage fraudsters and bankers? Dropbox is way more important than that right?
An interesting test would be showing percentile instead of total vote counts. You could still get a sense of quality questions without vote counts directly influencing voting behavior.
Or else repeat asking for the count to come back. That's what this thread is about.
Eventually it might become necessary to re-define what "the internet" is, to handle more damage. I'd prefer to do so by changing how it works :)
I've done some work on CLTV for one of the major online gaming services. Definitely agree with the segmentation by High/Med/Low as well as the deeper analytic segmentation.

One thing I like to tack onto the setup described is a survival analysis. I've done it mostly in SAS due to my clients, but it's just as easy (and free) in R. Essentially I'm using survival analysis to see what signs indicate someone who is likely to leave/downgrade/upgrade.

Can't really go into details, but essentially I was checking on: minutes played / # of friends who played the same games / freq of games purchased / freq of in-game purchases / purchase method (online vs. in-store giftcard) / plus a lot more. This was in order to predict likelihood of renewing at the next subscription term. Ostensibly this was to intervene and make an offer to retain a customer or squeeze more out of them. Can't say for sure what ultimately happened with the analysis and tools I delivered: I do know it helped someone score a new job.

I can't offer any of the original code (but I could write up some of the basic structure if there's some interest).
Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman
I used this library for internal tool at Groupon. It does a lot for you, it is very versatile, however it is not without it's problems, some special effects we had hard time doing. We really pushed it to the limit there, with interaction and some things were harder to pull off. Never had to worry about IE7 because it was internal tool and we could ask for which browser to use.
I would recommend it to build solutions that are more complex graphing.
just so everyone knows, this complaint raises old issues that we addressed in our public blog post a few weeks ago: http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=735
Here's what I don't understand...

Piracy is always going to be around. It's just easy for me to hop on my friendly neighborhood torrenting site and download a copy of a movie or album I want to watch/hear. I used to torrent like no other, until something happened. Netflix came along. I signed up for Netflix and you know what, I can honestly say I've never torrented a movie since. Why? Because I'm content paying my Netflix monthly fee to legally obtain movies without jumping through hoops and having to install adware infested DRM software and whatnot. I also subscribe to Hulu for TV shows that I can't get on Netflix or aren't all available to instant stream (yet?)

Now we have Music..... I have an iPhone so you know what, I still torrent music. Why? Well I have Grooveshark, but Apple is too stuck-up to approve their app for the app store. What's that mean? It means while I could listen to the music legally (which is still arguable when it comes to Grooveshark) Apple isn't going to let me. I'll be damned if I'm going to be forced to pay for something I already have a subscription for. I could jailbreak and get the Grooveshark app, which I'm thinking about, but we'll see.

tl;dr Music subscription site like Netflix is for Movies that works on iOS devices = dramatic decline in piracy. Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before Apple allows another company to cut into their iTunes Music Store profits.
I feel like I should point out that this article isn't about the FTC doing something, but about a private individual filing a complaint with the FTC, which anyone can do.

I like Ryan Singel. He was the first reporter to write about YC. So I can't really begrudge him the pageviews he knew he'd get from HN over this. But 'taint really news.
If only they had people like Soghoian dealing with problems in other industries...
You don't have to lie, but MUST know when to shut the hell up.
This guy is one busy grad student. Didn't realize he got the Facebook story out too.
You forgot Sun. And probably a few other dead behemoths.
Works great until the startup is successful enough to hire an executive who things that office hours are a more importamt measure of productivity than peer respect or checkins.

It's easier if you're a founder.
Guess you don't use Chrome's built-in PDF reader, or any other reader for that matter. Loading up Adobe Reader to view a simple PDF is like using Microsoft Word to open a txt file.
Limewire settlement unlikely to blunt piracy
Makes sense, actually.

>The list ranked 50 female students and in describing them, rated their body parts and used racial slurs. The teen also is being accused of printing out the list and passing it around during lunch periods at the high school on Jan. 14, the Tribune reported.

ie, creating and distributing what amounts to hate-speech. This goes much further than a hot-or-not list, rather definitively landing on the abuse side of the line. Not completely definitively, as I don't know the contents, nor the culture of the area, but it seems to be pretty clear from a legal perspective.
Survival analysis is definitely the right way to go for this.

Some good resources in R:
http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/~hiwang/teaching/10fall/R_tutori...
http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/~hiwang/teaching/10fall/R_tutori...

In particular, what it allows you to do is to estimate the future duration -- saying that your average LTV is the 6 months of average revenue from your existing customers as the article suggests is incomplete, because the portion of customers who haven't lapsed will continue to provide revenue. With survival analysis, you can estimate the full durational curve to get this right.

Future value generally doesn't matter a huge amount if you're just looking for gross differences across segments, but anything you're getting particularly precise on (like when you want to figure out allowable cost for advertising based acquisitions), needs to take this into account.

There are tons of other great lessons to apply to "regular" business from actuarial science.
I would love a password manager that supported HOTP[1] or TOTP[2] (in conjunction with something like google authenticator). My mobile is pretty much always with me, and works well as a software based dongle (with OTP generators).

[1]: HMAC-Based One-time Password

[2]: Time-based One-time Password
she emptied a chamber pot over his head, according to wikipedia.

so, yes ... i don't think he listed her as one of the reasons to not take hemlock.
SHA-512 w/ per User Salts is Not Enough
That's true, but you can't automatically assume there is a silent majority who is happy with the change just because happy people tend not to submit feedback.

There's no need to assume in either direction anyway since pg posted a poll on this a month ago, and the "bring back the comment score display" side "won" the poll.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039

Still no return of comment scores, though, which is fine because hacker news isn't a democracy, but there are many people out there (including me) that would like to see the point total display returned.
Show HN: Chrome extension to alter page width
Just scratching an itch...
A very simple extension to alter the width of a web page's body dynamically with a slider.
I love reading articles on the web, but find it uncomfortable when then line lengths of the text are excessively long. This little extension aims to help with that.

My first venture into chrome extensions. Please feel free to offer constructive criticism for improvements etc.

Some example sites that it will work on:
http://terzza.com/example.html
http://placr.co.uk/blog/2011/05/why-train-departure-information-is-not-currently-open-data/
http://antirez.com/post/an-update-on-redis-and-lua.html
Audio is always a tricky topic because things like timing are so much more sensitive then the standard render-centric run loop. Audio control tends to fall outside the event based models that work so well for GUIs.
I wouldn't be surprised if they merely broke even with the lawyer bills with that $100 mil win.
Calligra Suite vs. LibreOffice (or Future of free software office suites)
Fallacy of the excluded middle.
Musica de Arcangel
Intentionally/knowingly leaving someone with the wrong impression is dishonest however...
People have asked why Dropbox servers need to decrypt user data. The reason is many of the most popular Dropbox features — like accessing your files from the website, creating file previews, and sharing files with other people — would either not be possible or would be much more cumbersome without this capability.

Accessing files from the website and file previews can use a key that I give you when I login. The only one where you need to have a key is if I share the file with someone. Can't you throw up a prompt when I elect to share a file that says, "This file will now be accessible to person XYZ. In order to do this DropBox will re-encrypt with our own private key"?

I suspect a lot of people don't share most/all of their files with anyone. It would be nice to have privacy by default and then opt-out when they decide to share it.
Just scratching an itch...
A very simple extension to alter the width of a web page's body dynamically with a slider.
I love reading articles on the web, but find it uncomfortable when then line lengths of the text are excessively long. This little extension aims to help with that.

My first venture into chrome extensions. Please feel free to offer constructive criticism for improvements etc.

Some example sites that it'll work on:
http://terzza.com/example.html
http://placr.co.uk/blog/2011/05/why-train-departure-informat...
http://antirez.com/post/an-update-on-redis-and-lua.html
I'd take a 6 MP hit (down from 12 MP to 6 MP) for an extra two stops in speed. I have a D90 with an 18-200mm VR lens. It's tremendously versitile, and the VR helps shooth handheld at long focal lenghts in less than favorable light, but indoors, I either have to crank up the ISO or mount a prime.

Newer DSLRs have even better low light performance than my camera, but at ISO 800, the noise and artifacts begin to bother me. I'd happily trade a few MP to get ISO 200 image quality at ISO 800.
Can anyone explain to me how the article or even title of the article would make someone think the FTC was doing something and then require such a statement from pg?

It is referenced in both as a complaint and is news for wired readers, not necessarily here (though the FTC complaint being filed here is new).
1 point.

Easy solution, just mark your comment score at the top of your comment, and when you come back later to check for replies edit your comment to show your current score.

We'll work on the honour system for now, but if it catches on maybe some sort of computer program could be used tally the scores and display them with our comments, to save us doing it manually.
999 points.

Sounds like a great idea to me.
Callas tweeted on April 19: “I deleted my Dropbox account. It turns out that they lied and don’t actually encrypt your files and will hand them over to anyone who asks.”

That's actually a lie too. Dropbox does encrypt your files, it's just that, naturally, they hold the key. If I ask Dropbox for another users files, guess what? They don't hand them over.

If your info is really that sensitive then for heavens sake don't outsource encryption and key management to a third party you have no supervision over. Encrypt your super sensitive files with Truecrypt and then share/sync them with Dropbox.
I'd really like to see an NTSB/FAA-style post-mortem analysis of bugs like these, along with suggested process improvements that will prevent such errors from occurring in the future.

Our industry could really benefit from a body of analysis on programming bugs that rivaled the body of analysis we have on plane crashes.
The fireside chat also was quite interesting but isn't available yet. I will add it to the list as soon as it gets on youtube.
It's all relative. The problem was somewhat (unintentionally?) misleading marketing and disclosure, not their actual architecture, at least for most uses of dropbox.

Dropbox seems to have decent transport security, which is more than 99% of apps. Keeping files in dropbox might also keep unencrypted and out of date copies from persisting on local drives, random USB thumb drives, borrowed computers, computers at the print shop, etc.

Yes, someone who compromises dropbox, or a rogue high-level dropbox employee, or a law enforcement officer with a warrant, could get access to your files on disk at dropbox. Dropbox is probably not the weak link, though.

For a normal user (individual or corporate), trusting dropbox is not any worse than trusting gmail or anyone else who has your data and has market, legal, and other reasons to keep it safe for you. I've met with a bunch of top-tier attorneys in the past couple weeks, and none of them want to mess with PGP; they trust that if gmail or an outsourced exchange provider were snooping on their messages, there would be legal recourse; sure, it's an issue if there's no way to prove it, but generally they are pretty trusting of major service providers.

I personally don't use dropbox for anything except "public" files, because I try to constrain long-term storage of my data to my own infrastructure, or something encrypted end to end and fully under my control. However, dropbox is probably a cut above the effective level of security most organizations or individuals have in practice.

I'd sure prefer if dropbox did client-side encryption and never had access to the keys, but then you'd also need to trust that the dropbox binary doesn't secretly send your password to Russia, and that no future version of the dropbox binary that you use has the send-to-Russia feature added. And, you'd need to trust that none of the devices from which you access dropbox has been keyloggered, trojaned, etc.

Of course, dropbox seems pretty robust in terms of availability; I just lost an SSD which didn't have timely backups of certain files, something which is going to ruin my weekend and which would have been avoided had I been less paranoid and used dropbox more.

(and, I'm working on solving the issues with trusting remote services, actually...)
In that case I say keep the scores hidden and instead introduce a 'report spam' link or something to that effect.
$10 Million Tricorder X-Prize
Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439965
Yup, I gathered that when I read "Crush It!". Great book!
Trolled: iOS Developers Threatened With Patent Lawsuits
That was my fault. I originally wrote the hed as "FTC Complaint: Dropbox Lied to Users about Data Security", which I thought would get around people reading just the "Dropbox Lied To Users" part. PG changed it to the hed from the article, I suppose to make sure nobody thought the complaint originated from the FTC.
Added email info to my username... I thought it was already there.
Feel free to contact me.
One place (perhaps the only place) where I find points valuable is when people offer more fact-oriented comments rather than opinions and anecdotes.

For example, in a discussion on some aspect of law (I don't come to HN for law advice, but nonetheless sometimes there are interesting tidbits to consider), it would help to have comment scores to know whether a given piece of "fact" is strongly or weakly corroborated by the community.

Another example might be peoples' experiences with cloud storage - I don't know anything about cloud storage, so if a thread goes into a discussion on pros and cons of specific providers, I would be interested to know how many others have had the same experience. (I guess this is an anecdote too; but one on matters for which there could be a "right answer" in contrast to peoples' opinions of TSA screening practices.)

This usually works fairly well on stackoverflow; answers are usually (certainly not all the time!) voted based on their technical merit.

Slashdot does a similar thing: comments are rated based on a category. An upvote for "+5 funny" in the HN world could carry less weight than "+5 insightful", because it is the latter that we want to bubble to the top.
Show HN: My new startup forum
Hello HN!

I decided to finally do something with one of my domains, Startup2.com & ended up turning it into a forum. Just launched it a few minutes ago! I'd love to receive some feedback/criticism. It's not really alive yet due to just launching - hopefully this is something that will change soon but I have to be patient.

http://www.startup2.com

Thanks in advance for any tips/feedback!

Sam
Weirdly, this seems to be on the front page twice for me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2545331
Encrypt with Truecrypt, share with Dropbox. Problem solved.
I liked reading it, and I can't help but root for the guy.

That said, startups don't need people who like them so much as they need people who trust them. As an investor, customer, or employee, I do need to know that the founder can tell what problems are on the horizon, and is brutally honest about which ones will be challenging. But I also need to know that he'll take care of them, or if not, that he'll hire someone who will (or, if an employee, he'll tell me to do it).

But founders aren't superhuman, and the money involved in successful acquisitions is so high that there are a lot of "companies" working on marginal ideas---ideas that might be big, or they might not, often depending on factors beyond founder knowledge. And at this point I think VC's have to own the responsibility for investing in a high-risk industry.
>If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless.

Clearly they have a clue. They realize that it's perfectly feasible to deploy large-scale applications using only the Microsoft stack. There's even a lot of evidence it might be the most efficient way to do it.

Personally, I try to avoid using Microsoft technologies - but I wouldn't be surprised if, making the switch, life suddenly became a lot simpler.
@ryankearney i'm using whatever standard plugin comes with firefox. i'm open to suggestions if there's a better way (with firefox)
I would love to keep the keys on my computers if all it meant is I couldn't use the public sharing/web interface features. Using TrueCrypt is a PITA.
Does a product have to always be superior to its competitors in order to exist?
Except then you can't use those files on mobile devices or from the web UI, both of which are useful (my primary interest in dropbox, and the one thing I can't trivially accomplish on my own, is the iOS device support. The alternative is just to use Apple's iDisk, which has exactly the same risks as Dropbox, minus the cross-platform capabilities.)
How to solve the problem of digital bullying
Drew,

I use dropbox and I appreciate it, but I find communications from you and Arash to be strangely borderline ... off.

A discussion from three weeks ago is not "an old issue." That these issues made it to the FTC in three weeks is probably a remarkable benchmark.

As Arash did several weeks ago, wrt to the password and key issue, you seem to miss the point and almost intentionally dismiss the issue by detailing it as "old issues."

These issues are anything but old, even in internet time.

I would value Dropbox much more than I do if I found that you and Arash could speak with the integrity I find from so many other entrepreneurs.
Nutrient Timing and How to Make and Use Legal Steroids
It's worth noting that one of his actual investors doesn't look pissed off at all, but is understanding and pleased with Ben's self awareness:

http://bijansabet.com/post/5452994900/but-i-have-zero-experi...
What's the difference between a person handing out printed pages and a server handing out data?
True. I'm assuming other things are equal.
I am definitely interested in this, do you have any website up yet? Any possible way to get onto that private alpha? ;-)
The guy who filed this complaint is quite the troublemaker:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1206/technology-chris-sogh...
Sorry about that. It's linked later in this thread, but still, here it is.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
"President Obama Personally Executed Bin Laden, HN Comment to CIA Alleges."

Seriously, who cares where the "complaint" was sent? Either it's a valid argument or it's not. Where it was sent should have no bearing.

The argument that Dropbox did this to save money is transparently bogus too. That's in there to make it seem like the FTC has grounds for getting involved.
Dropbox clearly chose to store keys themselves so they could offer core features like web/pubic sharing.