skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's very important that readers and contributors of this site scrutinize their emotional response to this article. Moral criticism is very hard to swallow. When it is leveled against a community, it is natural for the community to close ranks and lick its wounds. If you prick us, do we not bleed? etc. So you should expect to find eloquent and moving defenses of the current state of the vocation, and you should expect to find them compelling. But I think a far more useful response to this article is to do a bit of soul-searching.

The amounts of money pouring into the industry are staggering. There are extremely powerful incentives for us to avert our attention from the warping influence it has had on our values. Many of us -- myself included -- consider ourselves very lucky to be shielded from the economic chaos and instability that is destroying so many lives in other industries, and the thought of forfeiting this safety is exactly as terrifying as the thought that it is rightfully ours is seductive.

There is a lot in this article I disagree with, but like the author I am also scandalized that so much talent is squandered in pursuit of an IPO. There is so many astonishingly brilliant and creative people on this site whose time would be much better spent on problems of real social and intellectual significance, problems of lasting significance for the well-being of our species.

In a free society people have a right to choose in which direction they spend their energies. But we cannot, in the name of individual choice, ignore the enormous shaping influence of social forces on the course of human life. Much of our behavior over these past few years has been driven by the fact that money is the surest measure of success in our industry, and I would bet a kidney that a lot of people here are nagged by a suspicious that there is something deeply perverse about this. And if you're one of these people, I'd like to propose to you that one way to change things is to start having more honest discussions about this with colleagues, and to be a little more courageous about recognizing success when its measure is lives bettered rather than money raised.

I've been a complete coward about this, and I feel gross about myself as a result. But I'm committed to changing.
ISP Data-Retention Bill Rankles Privacy Advocates
Ah, now I see. It makes perfect sense. Think of it this way.

1. People who pioneer the use of alternative browsers always have high intelligence.

2. However, some browsers lack the ability to appeal to anyone beyond that initial market.

So know the graph is just saying things we already knew. Opera has a tiny fanclub, but the browser doesn't appeal to many people, or Opera fans are just bad at evangelizing to their friends. Meanwhile Chrome and Firefox have a much greater mainstream presence, and hence an attenuated average IQ.

So Opera's concentration among intelligent users isn't an indication of quality, but rather, some problem in their marketing approach.
At least Carr is straightforward enough to get the get into the underlying discussion, being in my opinion if current "web 2.0 OMG croudsourcing community-building" technologies are really better for the people, or only better for investors.

I'm amazed this point is raised so clearly by a rather trollish and old fashioned media outlet as TC, and mostly avoided by most HN users, who seem more concerned about discussing PR and fingerpointing.
May I ask why on earth you are here? This is HN, which used to be called Startup News and is run by a noted venture capitalist who works with startups night and day.

You can join the startup crowd yourself or not, as you prefer, but if you're going to voluntarily hang out in their space please refrain from trolling them.
A nice read if you've got some extra time to spend on the toilet. If you get sick of Angry Birds, of course.
Sorry, let me tighten up what I said. When I said "air can be perfectly still" I didn't mean to imply no downward force was generated. That was obvious to me so I didn't add that bit. What I mean is that the air that a wing traverses through doesn't have to be moving already, aka wind or air current. The power of the engine pushes the wing through the medium, and the action of this of courses causes downward air movement and thus elevates the wing.
For all the non-criminals out there who actually think they are entitled to privacy this is another good use case for Social Fortress[1][2].

[1] Disclaimer: I'm involved with Social Fortress

[2] Social Fortress protects messages and photos with transparent client side encryption directly within services such as Facebook, Google+, Outlook and others. It can be had for free from https://www.socialfortress.com
For those who are interested in continuous deployment, there is a recent talk from Flickr: http://sna-projects.com/blog/2011/06/continuous-deployment-f...
Facebook managed to reach critical mass, which MySpace could never do.
Guice is configuration heavy? That's the first time I've heard about that. The last time I used Spring, I only have to provide one applicationContext.xml file that contains the XML header (XSD stuff) and 1 line of configuration to inject _every_single_injection_required_for_my_app_

Things changed.

Perhaps I was misusing the word "back-end".

When I refer to app-developers, I'm pointing toward people who build web-apps using Struts, Spring, JEE, EJB (I see where you think that back-end means completely EJB/Service/Hibernate).

The non-app-developers seem to keen on building infrastructure around the Java ecosystems:

Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, ZooKeeper, custom server using Netty or Apache Mina. Or even building platforms such as GWT, Android.
Buying Canadian dollars and gold.
Big disclaimer: I live in Canada.
I have very mixed feelings about this column. On the one hand, Paul Carr is a brilliant writer and I'm a huge fan of his work. I also agree with him on a lot of his argument.

On the other hand, I respect Paul Graham a lot more than I do Michael Arrington. He loses me at this paragraph:

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story. Their ludicrous wail of protest: AIRBNB IS RUN BY NICE GUYS! IT’S NOT FAIR TO CALL THEM OUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP!
I think that was Palish's point?
Is there a certain language you'd like to see the code challenge completed in?
> "The law on child pornography is that it's only an offense to produce an image"

In the UK, "simple possession of indecent photographs of children" is a criminal offense [0]. US law is fairly similar [1].

[0] http://www.rogerdarlington.co.uk/sexonnet.html#UKlaw -- see Criminal Justice Act of 1988
[1] http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?L... -- part (b) of the first cited law
Internet lynch mob is scary? what about real-life mob? Apparently it is today's norm.
not familiar with Paul Carr, so i'm glad you brought this up, thanks.
But i don't think he was lynching AirBnB for lack of accountability. Rather, he said that it was cold blooded for a co-founder to call and ask her to stop giving them a bad name right before a funding round. (i've also read somewhere else that he was trying to ask her to put a positive twist).
Thanks, but I guess I didn't get across how much I still hate Java. ;) I feel it has 95% of the problems of C++, without the advantages (predictable speed, mostly). I'm sure your platform will be useful for anyone porting J2SE code to Android, but that's not me. And it doesn't look like you're supporting iPhone? That's a huge chunk of the market still.

I know that middleware providers will step in to fill in the gaps, but it's just annoying to be non-native on ALL platforms. And there are already a lot of options.

http://www.batterypoweredgames.com/batterytech is one that I know that's low level, for instance -- it gives you events, OpenGL and sound on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. It's pretty bare-bones, though, as far as I know.

There are also stacks that allow you to write in JavaScript [1][2], 3d engines [3][4][5], and one that I just found out about one that sounds really awesome, though I haven't used it yet called Moai [6]. Moai is Lua-based, open source, supports iPhone and Android, and has a Lua-based cloud server component, so you can write in the same language for your game and for the server side in multiplayer games.

If I haven't been clear, I think Lua IS an awesome language, especially now that LuaJIT 2.0 works on Android (and at least partly on iPhone), and so I'm strongly considering using Moai for my next game.

I actually already use Lua on the server side, though I'm using a different stack than Moai (they're on Mongrel2/Tir, and I'm using Nginx with lua-nginx).

[1] http://www.sencha.com/
[2] http://www.phonegap.com/
[3] http://www.stonetrip.com/
[4] http://unity3d.com/
[5] http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37235
[6] http://getmoai.com/
Thank you for writing this.

I think the Airbnb story itself is getting kind of stale, but it's continuing to garner discussion on this site and elsewhere because of the underlining issue, namely that valuations and revenues shouldn't over cede just treating people well. And that we should try to resolve an issue not just because our company will take a PR hit if we don't, but because it's the right thing to do. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

If we don't do this then we're no better than the slimiest corporations because we're chasing a dollar and nothing else.
Short fragments are fine (if brusque) for instructions, but can be maddening to read if it's trying to put forward a complex argument. It's a bunch of disconnected arguments, all being barked out at once; which is fine if you can easily follow the thread (in the case of simple instructions). But otherwise you have to wonder if and how they are connected in the speaker's head.

As for being rude, telling people what to do and how to do it is something I find rude. But that's something that a boss can get away with.

I like the original more than the polite version, though. It gets the point across loud and clear. I guess that's not really important if everyone is already on the same page, but if they aren't then it's essential in a workplace.
Expand I will.

>I doubt that there are many arbitration companies siding with someone just to get repeat business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Leigh_Jones

ctrl-F arbitration
Maybe a slow night on HN, but still you were on top of all the answers, so it was worth it to me to get your take. Thanks for the answer.

When talking about edge cases I could come up with ones that don't involve the cloud. And in those cases maybe I don't need to replicate a server, but instead I just need to represent a very small amount of data in an encrypted form that can be operated on homomorphically.

While I don't have a fleshed out idea on how to apply it, the one area that I'm interested in thinking about homomorphic encryption being applied is POS financial transactions. My gut (and this is just a gut, not backed by in depth thought by any means) is that homomorphic encryption as a building a block could allow you to design a secure and significantly better replacement for the existing credit card (or even chip and pin) system.
The UK doesn't quite have a concept of freedom of speech, legally speaking. Freedom of expression is guaranteed by their Human Rights Act, but it has lots of limitations (incitement to racial/religious hatred, defamation), and there is illegal literature (mostly stuff relating to terrorism, but also "material that tend to deprave and corrupt those reading or viewing it")[1].

Therefor, I suspect that your mentions of legality may be specific to the USA; of course, if I'm wrong, I would love to be enlightened.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#Un...
You would think so, but technical arguments seem to get ignored in these matters. For example, so-called "deep linking". Controlling direct access to Web resources is a solved technical problem, and if someone has a URL that responds to a basic GET then, hey, it must be intended for that; that's how it works. Yet it still ends up as fodder for endless legal manuevers.
But isn't this true of every point in time? I'm in no way claiming their observations are incorrect, but what about now is so different from the past, when IBM (for example) employed massive numbers of such brilliant and creative people for their economic gain? Or how governments have and continue to employ brilliant people to build better weapons? What evidence is there that there are fewer altruists out there now, or fewer "cool" people?

This article isn't about how this is and always has been. It's about how it wasn't, and how it is now, and how we need to "get back to the good old days". There's no question that selling out for profit is "uncool", but that isn't the central point of the article.
This guy it seems trying to say that Android's APIs were developed by (talented) engineers for engineers (skilled programmers) on the go, while Apple just adopted mature libraries from OSX which are providing set of hight-level abstractions and APIs understandable by any mediocre coder (the way of 'easy/cool' java/php frameworks).

But one should remember that too high-level APIs and abstractions has its cost in terms of performance and bloatedness of required runtime (J2EE/Spring/Hibernate way) especially on resource-limited (lack of FPU, etc) platforms.
Loopt has invalid SSL cert?
I was reading about Sam Altman & Loopt, and I wanted to learn more. So I typed "loopt.com" into my browser (Safari 4.1.3 OSX 10.4.11).

Looks like that's setup to automatically redirect to "https://www.loopt.com" (note the auto addition of https AND www).

But then I get an alert screen that "Safari can't verify the identity of the website 'www.loopt.com' . . . Need to click on the Continue button to reach the site.

I took a screenshot but did not know how to post it here. This happened earlier this afternoon, and it just happened again a couple minutes ago.

Hopefully somebody here can notify the appropriate parties & get everything back on track.
I'm going to go with yes you are being too pedantic. No one really knows what to call programmers so we make up things to say. I write code for my company so I'm the guy who makes things happen to some and to others I perform some sort of dark arts.

I'm pretty good at making things work and bringing a lot of knowledge to any situation requiring my skills.

Does that make me an engineer? Does my lack of degree disqualify me?
"Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story."

How the hell is he getting that from the article linked there? It's a long rant about PG posting something on HN claiming how the article it was a comment on is inaccurate. In no way is that "investors ... lean[ing] on publications ... to stop reporting the story."
Not fond of C# or Unity, really, but there are plenty of cross platform game engines at this point; see my other post. [1]

Java is still annoying to me, even JITed. It's most of the cruft of C++/OOP without the speed. I'm a Lua fan, and a conversation here isn't likely to sway me. ;)

And it's not just mistakes; it's huge areas of the APIs that are missing or confusing or just plain poorly designed. I've developed for a lot of consoles (not current gen, but XBox/PS2 and older), so I know what you mean about docs being WRONG. But for the most part they let you do what you needed. Android just doesn't in some cases.

Try to do low-latency (or even reliable latency!) audio on Android and get back to me, for an example that Google is basically ignoring.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827513
A farm in the middle of a big city
Can't post the screenshot directly to HN. However, you may be able to contact Loopt on their support page: http://loopt.zendesk.com/forums or via there twitter @loopt
Given that Section One of I-9 is done by the employee, I fail to see how this form (or the W-4) is a case that would force you to enforce any "standards on [y]our users [...] because [you] have to exactly match what the government records contain". It still seems like, when asking for other peoples' names, you can still go with "full name" and not run into any problems when filling out government forms related to that user.
It's kind of an interesting thing to try and think through. I think emily37's post above brings up one of the more motivating usecases that's going to be much more forgiving when it comes to practicality, which is allowing someone who doesn't want to reveal how they do math on the data and someone else who doesn't want to reveal the data get together and make answers.

As for POS systems, I feel like public key is going to be far more applicable than homomorphic is for the usecases that make sense there. But I definitely could be missing something. :)
I, too, looked at the challenge and originally had the same thought. However, upon a second reading, it seems that there is a lot of room to misunderstand the requirement, which is almost certainly where the difficulty appears.

For example:

1. "Your task..." is not directly correlated to the outputs requested.
2. Item 3 in the SS ranking isn't clear. Specifically, "besides 1" could mean "besides 1" literally, or "besides 1" - where "1" means "one of the above," or even something else.

I was about to attempt to do it, just for fun, but then decided against it because the challenge itself had too much ambiguity in the requirements. That's very likely intentional - but since I'm not looking for a job, didn't need to waste my time playing "a game!" Maybe the successful answer rests in seeking/understanding the real requirements???
Flame from Bill Gates Re: Windows Usability
Since I have your attention temporarily, I figure you should also know about this: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/6732

I had errors when I ran `brew update`. Looks like it might hit most people who have installed it recently, so possibly all new clean-install Lion users (I haven't checked the commit history to see when it might have started, and it could be related to a version of Git anyway).

edit: and thanks for the write-up! I found a few things I didn't know about :)
I'm not sure how one's interest in staying hotels necessitates a vested interest in seeing AirBnB fail. I'm pretty sure there are people in the "hotel industry" that have also used services like VRBO or AirBnB for lodging.

Personally, I read Paul's article more in the sense that technology isn't important, remembering the human component in all this. If one is a company founder, your users are more than just data points. Disclaimer - like Paul, I actually enjoy using a fountain pen.

Specifically to the AirBnB fiasco? I don't know who or what is right here, it is an issue between an individual and a company that will require the two of them working together to resolve the situation. I've used AirBnB a few times (as someone staying somewhere) and plan on using them in the future. That said, I use as much caution as I can in booking a place -- reviews are important.

This particular story being turned into a YC/HN vs TC issue is silly. News is useful, but again AirBnB and EJ need to resolve this between themselves.
Definitely this. I live in the Boston area, and there are way, way more job openings for Python programmers right than there are qualified applicants. We3 have been trying to find good candidates in the area for months at my work, and I get a couple emails each week asking if I am interested in interviewing for other Python jobs.
This all reminds me of Mark Twain's essay, "The Awful German Language"; he holds a very different view of the German language as lighter and more playful than English.
Buying Bitcoins.

Haha, but seriously. Not much, and if/when it happens, it's not like the world will implode, or the value of US dollars will go to zero overnight. If it really looks like it's all going to go up in flames, there's more than enough at-hand to barter with to leave the country. My laptop is worth a short plane flight.
Oh please, TechCrunch thrives on this kind of controversy.
Rubbish. The reason CFS hasn't seen more mainstream research is a chicken-and-egg problem of having no specific angle to research, therefore research isn't done, therefore there's no specific angle to research. When the XMRV stuff broke the research community did swing into action. Scientists haven't decided not to study CFS because someone on the internet hurt their feelings. Medicine isn't omniscient. Blaming extremely sick people for the lack of research into their predicament is absurd.
ยิ่งลักษณ์ เมิน สมศักดิ์ ทำนาย รัฐบาลอยู่แค่ 6 เดือน
เยอรมัน เลิกห้าม ทักษิณ เข้าประเทศ หลังเพื่อไทยชนะเลือกตั้ง
Really? Is this so hard? The argument in a nutshell: technology is wonderful but the initial promise of "web 2.0" has encouraged corporate greed and unethical behavior instead of empowering users as many of us had hoped. Specific recent cases of this phenomenon were cited in support of the argument.

Help yourself to some rants here:
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/classic/classicrants/classi...
Bill's email is at the bottom. Hooray for top-posting!
If AirBnb were to bail her out, it would set a send signal that any future/past cases like this would be met with a similar reaction (hello US GOV!). I don't think this is a road they want to go down.

in that vein:

If EJ were to bail them out(alter her blog as they requested), it would send a signal that any future/past cases like this would be met with a similar reaction(hello nuclear waste site!). I don't think this is a road she wants to go down.

What happened to EJ was horrible but predictable. The fact that AirBnb has no response plan for such a situation is amazing, like dynamite factory without a ban on open flame or smoking while in the factory amazing.
Scoble speaks sense.
Depends on "affordable". Current bulk prices are about $5000 per genome though the coverage can vary.

Here's the price per genome for the last decade: http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

and an explanation: http://singularityhub.com/2011/03/05/costs-of-dna-sequencing...
It sounds like "find the story of someone who personifies what you want to accomplish, figure out how they accomplished what they did, then base your process on their approach" is just one more roadblock to progress you can use to divert yourself and continue procrastinating. It's another "I simply MUST do this before I do the thing I want to do."

It makes sense in my brain (evolutionary procrastination, etc), but it would certainly keep me from getting things done.