skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's in a good position to do this. Connections and fame aside, he has the perfect avenue to give exposure to the startups he invests in. I think this is critical. Part of the reason why many tech startups "go big" is because they're given broad exposure and are shown in a good light from the beginning. For example, Y Combinator has Hacker News to promote their investments.

I've said before that without HN you probably wouldn't hear about very many YC companies. (I think I said something along the lines of "you simply don't front-page stories about every YC company on Reddit.") Michael Arrington will have TechCrunch to promote his investments and I think he will be able to give them a good chance for success if he promotes them well. You might also say that Arrington has TechCrunch and Hacker News given how easily TC front-pages around here.
I don't think anyone with a modicum of ability to read between the lines needed these chat logs to form a reasonably accurate assessment of Lamo.
That's a meaningless statement. The US holds debts denominated in dollars. If it can print money at will, by definition it cannot default.

You would be correct if they held debts denominated in other currencies, like virtually every other country in the planet.
This argument is fallacious (not that its not kicked around a lot).

The point is that the US treasury will pay its debt. The value of the dollar simply a different question.

By your argument (and apparently, some of the rating agencies'), a supposedly necessary downgrading of treasure bonds would require the downgrade of every existing dollar denominated bond in the world - ie, nearly every AAA bond. Oddly enough, Moody's isn't threatening to do this.
Client work is an excellent way to subsidized research costs. ;-)
No you are not being too picky. Answering that one question somewhere in the cover letter will not be a big deal to someone who is actually interested in the job.
"it's but a tiny fraction of what goes into making an actual drug"

I think it's the other way around. To make drugs you have to know chemistry and biology (not to mention the dependence on various tools and techniques which have their origins in various materials sciences, electronics, math, statistics, etc), sciences which were and still are almost entirely based on and advanced by basic research. Without this knowledge, these tools, and these techniques the pharmacutical industry would be nowhere. Furthermore, many commercial drugs are based directly on discoveries made by researchers working in university settings and funded by the US government.

Of course, after all of that, the drug companies still do their own research and pay various fees to get the drugs on the market. So it's not like they contribute nothing to the process -- and obviously the process is still very expensive. But it doesn't erase the fact that the entire pharmaceutical industry is still effectively heavily subsidized by the US government.
Can we subtract 1-2 points from Grooveshark for their questionable legal tactics?

Awesome comparison, Chris. This should be the go to page used to respond to any question about these services.
It's funny because it's unethical. With any luck, he'll get greedy and push the "reporting on companies I invest in" needle so far that it gets too noisey we stop reading (and posting everything he does on HN).
This is not bad for everyone. Such blatant abuse of data capping rules is excellent ammunition for net neutrality advocates.
>It's farming, versus hunting and gathering.

I like that. Another way to frame it is that it's single vs multi-tasking. I remember reading that contemporary research found that those who multi-task are worse at everything they are doing. It's essentially what's described by this article - http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6417.ars but applied to business models instead of teenagers.
JRubyConf 2011 Needs YOU
Backbone.js on Rails (a book by Thoughbot)
Court Rejects Challenge to Airport Body Scanners
The interface is nice and big. Perfect for a younger crowd and something I don't think you should change.

- Your initial age/sex question should probably be on a landing page geared toward parents who are bringing their kids to the webpage. On this landing page, you should include information about what the site is for and why a parent might appreciate the content there.

- After selecting age/sex, it will direct parents to the portal their kids would interact with. This portal would be opened fullscreen (javascript) and not include the bottom nav or other distractions which kids wouldn't care able (like changing their sex or age at the top). Maybe make the page "bookmarkable" so they take the URL and always get back to the portal for Boys aged 0-3 instead of having to select that each time (allowing a way to bypass the parent's landing page mentioned above).

- If this isn't really intended for kids to interact with, maybe you should consider providing a "kid-friendly" version where they can navigate and explore the content on their own. There are few decent solutions which let kids "learn" to use the internet inside a sandbox.

Overall, I think this site is great! Sent a link to my better half to use with our toddlers. ;)
I think there are some differences, but regardless within the context of this article the author states:

"it wasn’t an excess of greed ..., but rather an excess of overcaution"

I disagree with this statement, and clearly, based on your definition here, this can't be true either. Unless, saying "is wasn't greed it was greed" actually makes sense. Obviously I don't think you believe that, I'm just pointing out a major issue with the article as a whole.
That's cool. I felt I did, but that's subjective. But this is exactly the kind of thing I would like to have seen. Absolutely leave jobs when you feel you need to, but work with your employer if you can to make the transition easier. Fulfilling your ambitions does not need to be damaging to anyone else. As you state, good employers should make this environment the norm. But the discussions I read here about quitting and joining startups don't deal with this side of the equation. They seem to mostly emphasize quitting as a defiant act or a personal milestone (which to me implies not caring about what state you leave things in).

BTW, did your employer notice that you were unhappy and bring it up to you before you told them?
I wanted to rate them for their features but yea I guess I should mention that Grooveshark could just disappear one day with all your playlists.
I didn't bother reading the rest of the article.

The rest of the article has support for the reason you object to. You're papering over a lot of reasoning by just saying he "doesn't make a convincing argument." In what way is it not convincing?
I was not talking about the 50s in America for two reasons: firstly because I was talking about cultures in general, and second because I was talking about long-term multi-generational survival and time periods. The 50s, a decade, is not long enough for a society to go extinct because its culture subjugated its women.
I don't know everything about the 50s and probably less than you do. I was born in the late 80s and my family is from Pakistan, although I grew up mostly in Texas. However, from what I know about the 50s in America and the decades leading up to today, I can say that women were getting mixed signals. The culturally right thing to do was to be a stay-at-home mom, have a nice house in the suburbs, with well-behaved children, to cook and have everything spotless clean. And yet it was at the same time not a glamorous thing to do. Let me explain: even when people said it is glamorous to be a mom at home, people also said, it is really cool to be CEO, president, or an astronaut. And when they talked about CEOs, presidents, and astronauts, they were much more excited and much more sincere in their admiration and respect for them than when they would talk about stay-at-home moms.
When you decide to use your hair dryer, you don't have to wonder if it's going to cost you $0.15 or $15.00.

If you are a commercial customer, you actually might. Often times big consumers will have tiered rates based on time of day or caps that trigger punitive rates when they are exceeded.
EC-Council Academy Hacked by GaySec (Malaysian hackers)
Comcast's primary goal right now is to prevent a raising of the debt ceiling. Once this is done it will be much easier for the FCC to be eviscerated and destroyed -- or at the very least, maimed. With that pesky FCC out of the way, Comcast will then be free to take a deep breath and expand its belly, unrolling that flab of inefficiency even further, stifling and suffocating as many sources of potential innovation and competition as possible.

With no viable threats (as Comcast will be both the Gatekeeper and the traffic police), its ability to dictate who can drive in the fast lane and the slow lane and who is even allowed to drive on the road at all will spill over from the highways to the suburbs to the rural country roads.

http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2011/07/white-house...
Why do consumers need such a thing?
If you killed someone, I want them to win the case against you.
One big issue (fear?) with caps that I have, when companies switch to capped pricing and get comfortable with it, they will be extremely opposed to the idea of increasing the cap at a future date. As the internet has grown over the years so has our consumption of bandwidth.
I have seen many monopolistic behaviours of the ISP's over the years and it seems that this will just be another tool to inflate the cost of the internet. It almost seems that we are slowly moving towards a bandwith model where only the rich will be able to fully utilize the internet, which is somewhat sad seeing as how libirating of a tool it can be.
I homeschooled my sons because they are both "twice exceptional": gifted and learning disabled/otherwise handicapped. They didn't fit into the school system and they won't fit in well in most environments. There is an old, out of date website where I talk some about parenting and homeschooling them if your curiosity requires more than a two sentence explanation to satisfy: http://www.kidslikemine.com/ I don't mind talking about it. I just haven't been sleeping well this week and I'm quite tired.
Actually, yeah...stability of the company for a service where you have to put a lot of work in to have a good experience might as well be a rating.
Seen a lot of interesting uses of the term "mathematically" in this thread. Is there some theorem that proves a certain portion of issued debt must be risky? It seems unlikely to me.
Why You Should Ditch PayPal and Use These Other Services to Send People Money
An example of why not all AAA debt is truly AAA grade:

"As it turned out, triple-A-rated mortgage bonds stuffed with bad subprime mortgages were considered very low risk"
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/sheila-bairs-exit...
The documentary "Inside Job" covers why and how the "grading on a curve" happened. I'd recommend it if you're at all interested in this stuff.
I'm in mixed minds about this.

For as long as I remember, Australian linux users have been able to download isos from their ISPs own mirrors, without it counting against their cap. Which makes total sense, because it's internal to the ISPs network, so it costs them zero in peering fees.

It's hard to argue that this is a bad idea.

Now Shaw do the same thing, and it's .. awkward. It smells anticompetitive & self-serving. But it's essentially the same thing.
Please read again. I said:

"Firefox doesn’t actually issue a warning, which would have made my job tracking this issue down much easier. Moreover, functions declared within a block before being called work just fine, so it's not that function declarations can't by used as statements so much as SpiderMonkey won't bother to hoist them before executing any other code in that block."

As I said, the grammar in the ECMA-262 spec only allows Statements within Blocks, and a FunctionDeclaration isn't a Statement.

None of the browsers adhere to the spec, but I suspect they're just trying to play nicely with legacy content. Firefox just happens to play differently to all the other browsers.
Hey folks - Jason from thoughtbot here. We're aiming for a very collaborative format here, giving collab access on GitHub as we write the book using Scott Chacon's git-scribe [1]. I'm hoping to solicit feedback as we go, and make the book content the best it can be.

What do you think of this approach?

1: https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe
Chart of the Day: iTunes App Downloads Overtake Songs
In slightly more finished-product news, the PeepCode on Backbone.js came out this morning:

https://peepcode.com/products/backbone-js

Part one in a three part series. For folks wanting a quick way to get up and running, it's a great foundation.
The author's premise is wrong. I don't get faster connections because I want to download more data than I could on a slower connection. I get faster connections so that I don't have to wait as long for my downloads to complete.
I have to say, Rapportive is the biggest change to my emailing experience since I got Gmail, and it's due to this sidebar.

The major difference is that I can see the face of the other person (this works maybe 80% of the time). In practically ever use case I have for email, showing me the other perons's face helps me out, whether I've met the person or not.

- open source mailing lists become more human (and improves the aggressive arguing that can often occur there)

- I "put a name to a face" for professional colleagues

- I know something about people who email me out of the blue (VCs, founders who want something, coders with patches or queries about an OSS project)

- makes my emails to others more human

I encourage anybody who is technical and uses email to use Rapportive.
I'm surprised he didn't do it sooner.

That said it just screams of me too, jumping on the bandwagon to cash in before it's too late
Of course, given the massive up-front infrastructure investment, such competition is unlikely to materialize.

I thought it was more that cities (I think it's at that level, anyway) tend to sell exclusive rights to do that so wired competition beyond 1 cableco + 1 phoneco is largely illegal?
Yes, the request has been made repeatedly. See https://plus.google.com/116872576248355504859/posts/gn3uQfCF... for proof that thousands of other people want it.
Spotify’s US Launch and Pandora’s Problem
"And how were the British kicked out of India? Well, by none other than some pacifist self-sacrificing guy named Mohandas Gandhi."

Eh, no - Gandhi had little to do with the actual 'end game' of Indian independence. The main drivers were unrest within the Indian army and a lack of focus and drive of the British empire to spend money and effort on keeping control of India after the very taxing second World War. It's unclear what real effects, if any, Gandhi's action in the decades before the 1940's really had.
not really...the new Techcrunch is putting up a ton more stories...so the TC coverage won't be as useful, since it'll hit the 2nd page within a few hours.
These are all regularly espoused reasons, but compared to the article in question they seem rather weak. Some of the tone in your comment seems to suggest that I'm making a political argument. Let me be very clear here and now that I am not. Nothing I say here insinuates morality of any form. I'm simply trying to understand why.

I get the bi-sexuality aspect of this, but homosexuality is much more than simply not being selective in who you have sex with. There are significant traits and brain changes in people that identify as homosexual that shouldn't be present if all homosexuality is simply the result of permissiveness in our ancestors.

While the effects of evolution can be observed on a macro scale, they are always the result of selfish genes. In other words, I'm not sure I completely buy the idea of kin selection, especially with humans. That being said it's not something I've deeply versed in.
It essentially looks up the contact on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, and shows your a short profile about them. Handy if someone you don't know emails you out of nowhere.
My angst with the typo, is that I work on CDMA and GSM networks all day. Now, I know that it really should mean CSMA, but can you imagine someone from a different context reading this and wondering how CDMA and Ethernet tie together?

Regardless - less of an issue on a blog post, but Ars normally sets a really high bar for copy editing - odd they let that one get by them.
Sure but that has conflict of interest all over it, and while Arrington can be as conflicted as he likes...

...a) people don't have to read TC and as the level of conflictedness for that site increases more and more people will stop reading it

...b) the conflict is at odds with Aol's wider aspiration to be a respected media outlet (Arriana Huffington, etc). At some point such 'exposure for self interest' will cross a line even Aol won't go - esp if they don't have some/any upside in the CrunchFund venture.

The worse situation is that you end up with Arrington as an investor and TC can't write about you because Aol decides it really is too much of a conflict. And other outlets won't write about you or they give you shit because they still perceive Arrington as a competitor. Worst of both worlds.
I just started playing around with spotify and the one major feature missing is something akin to itunes genius. I wonder if anything like this is in the works?
I think C++ is possibly the worst language still mainstream. It's just horrible, in so many ways.

I really hope people will stop doing such silly things, but realistically, it's unlikely to change too soon.
let me guess, the author's wife is Japanese?
otherwise there is no way he would stay in Japan that long. He will always be looked at as a foreigner and never fit in.
"Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that> I chose not to choose life; I chose something else."
Unless the US version of Spotify is drastically different from the European version, discovery on Spotify is excellent in my opinion. The Radio feature does exist (although it's not one of Spotify's strongest features) and when you're on an artist page there is a tab to view related artists. There is even an radio tab on the artist's page which will play music from related artists.
Yeah, the PeepCode is awesome. Love their consistently high level of quality, and I'm a big customer. +1 to this recommendation.

We're aiming a bit above the level of their part 1, and assuming folks have read the Backbone docs, and recommending things like that PeepCode. I'm really looking forward to their follow-on content in parts 2 & 3, too.
WebOS is still closed-source. If it weren't I'd jump at it right now.
Pardus 2011.1: Turkish Delight
I don't understand the furore over unlimited data. Over here, in Greece, our Internet plans are unlimited at 24 mbps and nobody has so much as hinted towards capping, ever.
It's true that they have a high volume of stories but those stories are:

1) Shown to a huge number of people. Their traffic, I'm sure, dwarfs HN's traffic.

2) They have an enormous amount of people subscribed via RSS who will be able to read the news at their leisure.

3) Their stories are also shared via Facebook, Google+, Twitter, you name it.

4) TC articles make their way to HN and Reddit as well, providing additional exposure.

The second page of TechCrunch will still provide you with more than enough eye balls.
Email/Newsletter Marketing Redefined
Technology is the hottest filed in the field of Email Marketing followed by Entertainment. So it is recommended to do market research on your industry before taking the decision of email marketing.
This reminds me of Glen Beck telling his audience to invest in gold.
This is profoundly naive.

Consider, for a moment, that a woman may not want to be a mother, or more realistically, that's not all she wants to be.

Many Asian cultures are notoriously sexist. And, no, I wouldn't say being a mother is glamorous in those cultures... being a mother is expected and a woman is honored, briefly, when she fulfills those expectations, but it's not glamorous. Society's expectation, even Western society, is precisely that motherhood is something to be valued by women. There's nothing to fix there. However, the broken part, and the part feminism addresses, is that is should not be the only thing valued in women.

You're naive. In the real world, plenty of misery lasts. Saying a culture cannot survive with misery is something you invented. It's not like we're removing limbs here -- a woman can live with decreased expectations and limitations without killing the culture that oppresses her. Often the coping techniques include (surprise!) investing all her energy into making her children accomplish by proxy (speaking of asian cultures, sound familiar?) what she could not.
Awesome post Jason.

One of my favorite videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BirIEDYrw0Y
5 Best Books to Improve Your Writing Skills
While I think the exposure would be great for startups, but his attitude and approach on things just seems to be toxic. I'm all for not beating around the bush on things, but I'm not sure I'd like someone like Arrington providing guidance (or even associated with me).
It wouldn't be that difficult if he wanted to sticky a post.
CrunchFund.com registered
Traffic from the network you are currently connected to is much, much cheaper for the ISP.

That's not always true. Eyeball networks are often spectrum-constrained and congested on the last mile. When a DOCSIS network becomes congested, the most common relief is a node-split, and those are very expensive.
Thanks for that very well reasoned and enlightening comment.
brass == ammunition.

When Y2K was rolling around, some of my tinfoil hat coworkers would talk openly about all the supplies they had stocked up. They asked me what I had stockpiled. "Only brass, mostly 5,56. But, thanks for letting me know where I can come and get perishable goods if needed."

I'm all for diversification, and do truthfully have some investments in precious metals, but not for some end-of-days kind of scenario.
Which raises an interesting and valid point; I believe many people are confusing VALUE for WORTH, whereas worth is self-determined.
I’m afraid this demonstrates how ad-hoc the definition of net neutrality is. No packets are being blocked; none are being slowed down. The ISP is not charging any content provider a special rate.

(If having the content “homed” on the ISP’s network is a problem, then any CDN would be a problem.)

I am not saying that the ISP isn’t taking advantage for their own benefit. I am not saying it’s not shady.

I am saying that the behavior is not a violation of any previous technical definition of neutrality – maybe the “spirit” of it, but technologists don’t believe in spirits, one hopes.
Time to kiss Arrington's ass! haha
Ruby 1.9.2-p290 is released
The radio feature is not available in the US.

"The lack of a radio feature for the time being is a factor of licensing agreements with the rights holders but it will eventually be available." http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/radio_mode_missing...
This looks interesting and would have helped us out tremendously 8 months ago. But, hey, better late than never.

One thing that looks like it's lacking is how to integrate ui libraries; specifically jquery-ui. Coordinating re-rendering of your views from updates from your models or events from other views isn't easy. A FSM for backbone would really help, come to think of it.