skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I talk about shares/options, I am serious. I am not trying to con you to be a low-paid slave. I want to share our prosperity and success with you when the time comes.

I never take the offer of equity as a con. I see it for what it is: a high-risk investment because the founder does not have enough capital to pay. The main point here is that when the time comes should really be if the time comes.

If you are a founder in this situation, realize what you are asking for is a hybrid worker/investor. And you shouldn't be surprised when this narrows the pool of available workers interested in the opportunity.
"Learning Lisp is for the programmer what meditation is for the Buddhist monk ..."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4724/learning-lisp-why/27...
I quite agree with you (and Fisher) that the Social Security system's problems are solvable (you might have confused me with winestock). My point was that SS is a distraction–Medicare dwarfs the other entitlement liabilities–and it will take more than rolling back the Bush tax cuts to bring about budget surpluses.
And do we realize that some may, at that point, turn to crime?
I like how he tosses that out there as something other lawyers have said, and then says that he would only compare it to leaving your keys in your car. As though that negates his sensationalism.

I also wonder what his opinion is on wireless networks that are "secured" by not broadcasting an SSID, or by using WEP, which even the slowest computer can crack in less time than it takes to torrent a movie. Is that still negligent?

Furthermore, if he's in the business of actually making contributory negligence claims, why can't he cite a successful example, instead of relying on analogous case law from the 1930s, involving physical property instead of intellectual property? (The opposing viewpoint cites the Supreme court on the issues of contributory and vicarious infringement, and the 9th Circuit on a more recent case.)
Now throw untenable amounts of debt, peak oil, declining demographics, etc. into the mix.

It's really chaotic. On one hand you have fossil fuel depletion and upwards demand pressure on other natural resources having this massively inflationary effect on the cost of energy and raw materials. On other other hand you have the massively deflationary effect of technology: IT making tons of human jobs obsolete, rapid prototyping, robotics, manufacturing automation, cheap multifunction devices that do everything, etc.
Given the choice between the same subject matter presented by CS or NDT, I'll take NDT. I doubt I'm the only one despite the iconic stature that CS has.
???

I saw no mention of the wave function or its complex conjugate...
I've no idea, sorry.
Ah... "They don't deserve my respect" would be the conventional way to get that across.
Promises are meaningless in business. This great UX guy shouldn't take your low pay for a second. He's probably a great UX guy because he's focused on UX and not investing. He needs to be paid well or he won't be able to focus on UX 110%

Remember, not being an investor if your business doesn't pan out it's much harder on him than a guy who has a portfolio to fall back on.

He'll also likely resent you. This resentment can come back to affect his work when crunch-time comes. Employees that want more money, deserve more money, but took low pay on the hope of success tend slowly develop resentment towards the business. Especially the longer they wait for the promised success.
When I saw the snitch list, I assumed it was a message to any would-be snitches that know anything about Lulsec.
I don't buy his arguments even though they are common. I don't think there is anything virtuous about using only a few kilobyte of memory when it would be better to just use the couple houndred MB that would make your program simpler.

Likewise I don't think that frameworks are an issue, they just speed up dev time and you need to understand how they work at some point anyway (properly when the abstractions break down).
I wasn't denying that NATO passed Article 5 for the first and only time in its history after the 9/11 attacks, and I wasn't denying that the US supported it. I was referring to the arm's length at which the Bush Administration held our NATO allies during the early stages of the Afghan war. The resulting hard feelings made it more difficult for Bush to get cooperation from those same allies during the run up to the Iraq War. This is a fact and was a common talking point at the time among liberals and others critical of Bush's foreign policy.

Fred Kaplan:

"Aside from letting a handful of NATO's AWACS radar planes come help patrol American skies, Bush's response was a shockingly terse: Thanks, but no thanks; we'll handle it by ourselves. Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, later admitted to the Washington Times that the United States initially 'blew off' the allies. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said that the United States, in the Times' words, 'was so busy developing its [Afghanistan] war plans that it did not have time to focus on coordinating Europe's military role.'

"The effect, of course, was to alienate the allies just as they were rediscovering their affections. As London's conservative Financial Times later put it, 'A disdainful refusal even to respond to a genuine offer of support from close allies, at the time of America's most serious crisis in decades, spoke volumes about its attitude to the alliance.'"

http://www.slate.com/id/2088113/pagenum/all/

(The similarity between the "thanks but no thanks" phrase used by Kaplan and the one used by me is a complete coincidence. I found this article this afternoon when googling for something to support a rebuttal.)
The bonds will be paid, but future Congresses can decide at any time to cut benefits to recipients. That's the conflict. Perhaps analogous to lending your boss a large amount of money-- he now has the incentive to cut your wages so that he can more easily pay back the loan.
Yes, Your last link certainly bears reading...

The US was happy to allow China to produce the elements in hazardous conditions just as its happy to allow Chinese to "recycle" circuit boards in villages where they take them apart by bare hand.

But when China begins restricting the export of these elements, then it is a scandal.

And no, I am not any kind of fan of China...
Most people are going to says lulzsec is doing something illegal and immoral here. Consider a different example:

A bank robber robs a bank, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, then proceeds to hand out the money to anyone who wants it. Who are you more mad at? The bank robber who figured out a way to steal the money, or the bank who has no clue how the money was stolen?
OP: You're one of the good ones, as far as I can tell. Please stay in the game.

The real issue, I think, is that your job forces you to motivate people to take risks on your behalf and it feels like you're over-promising. A lot of success in business relies on motivating people (employees, clients, users) to help you succeed by promising what you'll be able to deliver if everything goes right... selling a vision, in other words. But your workers buy into that vision: they're willing to take mediocre (or even abysmal) compensation in return for the opportunity to be part of something great.

You shouldn't feel bad about paying them poorly. If they wanted high-paying jobs, they'd take them. You should feel bad if you downgrade or abuse their loyalty, if you intentionally break your implicit promises to them (if you bust your ass and do the right thing and still fail, that's not an intentional breach). But you seem considerate enough that I don't see you doing that.

As for investors and the low salaries they expect employees to take, that's a gnarly issue. It's a completely fucked system when the people who are risking more (their careers and opportunity cost) and putting more on the line (their time and work) are second-class citizens compared to the investors, who are just putting up money (that might not even be theirs, in the case of institutional agents). The real investors in any company are the founders and early employees who are doing the actual work. The money given by financial investors ought to be respected (it's a loan, not a gift) and they should certainly have enough say to ensure this, but it shouldn't give them the clout it does.

It's one of those decrepit old systems whereby favor has more value than labor. It's not worth taking personally, and your employees don't resent you for being on the losing end of it.

Also, as for what keeps that system in place, I think there's a bit of unacknowledged resentment of entrepreneurs by VCs. The VCs have the well-paid, cushy, powerful and easy jobs and are pretty much guaranteed by their path-of-low-resistance career track to be rich... but their jobs are a bit boring from a day-to-day perspective... lots of meetings and reviewing prospectuses (prospectii?) and shit like that. The entrepreneurs, as they see it, deserve less respect because they have the fun jobs.
THere is a simple solution to the Social Security "crisis". Right now only income up to 100,000 is subject to social security taxes. Anything over 100,000 is not taxed for social security. If we raised taxable income to 150,000 or 200,000 even we'd have plenty of money.
Square Mobile Credit Card Reader App Makes a Great Simple Money Launderer
Thanks. Its been fixed.
By "hold securely in one hand", I meant with the thumb on one side of the tablet and 3 finger on the other side. You must have very big and strong hands if you can hold an iPad that way without quickly getting tired.

P.S. video of a chick holding an iPad and a 7-inch Galaxy Tab: at 0:50 in http://www.g4tv.com/videos/50269/Samsung-Galaxy-Tab-Review/
Nice customer service, but your HR department sucks
This is one of the things that bothers me about HN. 'silly debate about semantics'. The meaning of words are important. Especially here on HN and on the internet in general where the meaning of words is all we have.

The religion v science dichotomy is quite prevalent here. Your suggestion that 'science' isn't belief in the mythological might not hold up so well given that 'science' today means expecting what comes from 'scientists' and bears little resemblance to classical science where anyone could reproduce the results.

Science has become so specialized, so expensive that you have to accept on faith that studies are true, or accept on faith the studies supporting the original or refuting it. Almost no one has the actual means to verify what we call science now.

If religion is based on faith, then it is hard to argue that science hasn't become a religion.
Mitch Altman's Hacker Passport
I understood what you meant. That said, there are good reasons for why most contemporary religious scholars don't use the word that way. Besides the political reasons I mentioned, it also prevents one from understanding the majority of the world's religious traditions and modern religious movements. To think about the word the wrong way leads one to completely misunderstand (or worse, ignore) large swaths of the human experience, and some very important parts at that. (E.g. rock concerts, festival culture, entheogenic drug use, etc.)

I know you can get away with it on HN because most people don't actually care, but there legitimate reasons for why it actually matters.
Keyboard is ideal for entering data, but GUI is superior to console for data output and visualization.

It would be perfect solution if all OS/applications would have command line but with visual output. Instead of "menu" at the top, just command line.

There some good modern approaches to this problem, for example gleeBox for control of internet browser is nice way of integration of console style control to GUI application.
> The 'price goes down, yield goes up' generally refers to secondary markets.

No. It also refers to the bidding process when the US Govt goes to initiate the sale of bonds.

Regarding the rest: Yes, that is why I included "more or less" in my original post. The bidding for new bonds and the pricing of old bonds is quite close in most circumstances. (If they are not close, then there is usually trouble.)

> With a credit rating downgrade, there will be a lot fewer bidders, hence higher interest rates.

Regardless of the details above, we both get to the same place.
Well I use my pseudonym wherever I can. I would like to have it on my passport etc, but I cannot without legally changing it. I guess legal ID is less important than most people think, as I am able to use my pseudonym reasonably well.

And as far as I am concerned, I have changed my name, that is why I use the term "real" name rather than pseudonym. To me the legal name is actually more "pseudo" than the name I chose.

I have contacted those in charge of passports and birth certificates etc, and let them know that I have changed my name, and offered them the chance to correct the mistake in their files, but they have decided not to do so, which is up to them I guess.

I may undergo the legal process of "changing my name", making it official, at some stage, but to me that is like me paying to help someone else correct a mistake in their files. Also there isn't really any pressing need to. It may even be advantageous to have my real name, which gets used everywhere, and which I am known by, but the government knows me by a different one.

Heh you know I shouldn't even be talking about the government as if it were a single entity. I just checked my tax stuff, and it is all my chosen name there. Not sure how that happened.
Isn't reducing the conflict of interest a small price to pay for slightly higher risk? Currently, Congress can "save" money by cutting benefits to Social Security receipients and use that money to pay off the bonds owed to Social Security.
HTML5's Microdata, Search, and the Collaboration of the Search Giants
Y Combinator Fund Up 30x- Best Performing Fund ever?
320 YC Companies X $30k/Company = ~$10M Investment

Dropbox Return=~3% Share X $10BN Valuation=$300M

30X return for the entire fund even without accounting for companies such as AirBnB, Heroku etc.

I have heard of 30x/100x returns on specific investments e.g. Skype/Google/Facebook etc...

But for the entire fund itself- wouldn't that be a record?
I was questioning that same statistic. I was under the impression that China had been buying up rare earth mines in South America and though mines do exist in China, that they do not possess the largest volume of rare earth minerals.

However, this bbc article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14114107 quotes that china 'supplies 97%' of the worlds rare earth minerals. I think China has managed to essentially corner the market.
I have mixed feelings about Neil. He certainly have the credentials and I like him, although he's never serious enough for me. I just watched the Youtube video that you pointed to, and there he sounds like a religious preacher. I found very weak points in his arguments, easily refutable.

I hope that the sequel also targets a sophisticated audience: those of us that loved the original when we were kids and have continued evolving our brains for decades.
> US government doesnt sell bonds to fund operations

Yes it does.

> It sells bonds to remove dollars from the system.

No. The Fed is in charge of the money supply, and when they sell bonds, dollars are removed from the system.

The US Govt selling bonds actually increases various measures of the money supply.
How is any of this Facebooks problem let alone responsibility to sort out for you?
I met him in NYC at the Union Square Barnes and Noble when he was promoting his book. He has a more whimsical tone to his charisma than Sagan. Sagan's was more reflective and focused. Both passionate about science and Cosmology.

I think Sagan's approach was fitting. I only worry that Neil's wit could be misinterpreted as arrogance by those who could benefit from a deeper appreciation of science and existence. Either way, I look forward to an updated reflection on what we've learned and seek to learn in the very near future.
out of curiousity, does MPD/ncmpcpp make use of the shell? if it doesn't then i can't see how it'd be advantageous over a gui music player like rhythmbox
Frictional unemployment is a good way to handwave away the discovery, or not, of new jobs. You just wiped out that whole -type- of job, replaced it with (much lower employment) error checking.

If you assume that for a portion of the people in the transcribing job, that the transcribing job was the best marginal fit, then some of them don't re-enter the job market. Others have to take a worse job. If they could have been in a better job, they likely would have been. So their employment has gotten worse. May be quality, may be compensation, may be available time. Something's worse for them.
No, I mean if the gear can't be recovered you tell it to self-destruct.
Tea Party is aware that it has a bazooka,and it’s itching to pull the trigger
I would hate you and your site if you put my photos and info in there without my consent..
While I can understand why probability textbooks present Bayes' Theorem as

P(A|B) = [ P(B|A) * P(A) ] / P(B),

I've always thought the following rewrite makes more sense when the probabilities represent degrees of belief:

P(A|B) = P(A) * [ P(B|A) / P(B) ]

In other words:

(posterior belief) = (prior belief) * (evidence adjustment)

Also, while Bayes' Theorem follows from probability axioms, Bayes' Rule for updating beliefs in light of new evidence (which has the same formulation) is justified by Cox's Theorem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxs_theorem
I was with them until the snitch list. These aren't exactly people abusing power (AFAIK). If there was one particular person among the snitch list that was interesting, they should've just cited that one. Releasing the entire list can seriously endanger some innocent people.

Overall I still like that they're trying to wrest power from those who abuse it, but I think it hurts their stance to cause collateral damage like that.
> but unfortunately that isn't possible.

You know information is never truly destroyed. Bringing Dr. Sagan back will probably remain too difficult for a couple generations, but, eventually, we'll figure that one out.

And I can imagine the look on his face.
I sympathize with your post. But if it's a reasonable approximation of reality, I have a problem with this:

"The problem for the elites is that these are not sustainable political or economic policies because eventually unemployment will reach unacceptable levels and the right leader will come along and tell the real story to the American people."

How are the American people supposed to recognize this unique truth and distinguish it from the "truth" that all current and former leaders and politicians have been telling to date?

If the American people are the lawn, how do we know when to trust the lawnmower when it says "this time it will be different?"
Ask HN: What should I do with WhatIsTheUSCreditRating.com?
Hey HN,

Yesterday I bought the domain http://whatistheuscreditrating.com because I had big dreams of making it go viral. My initial attempt at putting together a joke site didn't go anywhere last night. So now I'm thinking I would like to use the domain for truly educational purposes and try and contribute in some small way to getting people informed on the United State's financial situation and what can be done about it. I have some ideas but I'm looking for some additional ideas on what could be done with a domain like this.

Obviously the financial problem is a huge one and decisions need to be made from the top down but I still believe there must be things that we as citizens can do to work towards a long term solution.

I'll take the feedback I get and try and put something simple together tomorrow.

Thanks
Dropbox's GUI does need some work for presentation, which is why me and a friend built an app on top of Dropbox precisely for that: views.fm Actually just released a new slideshow feature to present photos!
It's common for bar and club owners to hire models to hang out in newly opened establishments to attract people. I'd do something similar.
This is my opinion, too.

I see a lot of Bitcoin users go off on the Federal Reserve, printing money, and how people shouldn't use the dollar for that reason.
Yeah, I know. I get mixed up sometimes going from one blog to another. Is this system really easier that just going straight HTML?
This was a great tutorial. There's a long discussion on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/iviw3/whats_a_c...
It's a web server that hands off to a queue. What do you think it's doing besides serialization?
I don't know the answer, but I can see it as being something like:

In 1100's europe, there was land that was cleared for cultivation and forest. Most land holdings had areas of wilderness. They cleared it as the population increased. If the landholder could have instantly increased the population, he would have put the new people to work clearing land and planting crops (probably via leasing it to them as a landlord, or some kind of serfdom, but the mechanics of that don't matter here). So, the number of 'jobs' available on a given landholders property might have been 5000, while the population at the time was 400. There were more job openings than there were people.

Later, factories pulled population away from farms and improved farming allowed the land to feed more people than actually lived on it. This reduced the number of farmers needed as a proportion of the population, so if the population were the same as in 1100, the 5000 jobs we had before might have dropped, perhaps to 2000 jobs, or rather, food prices would have dropped so that lots of people no longer saw farming as the best idea. However, the population had increased greatly. My hypothesis here is that the number of jobs that could have been productively filled was still higher than the population.

This process can't continue forever. Sooner or later, the number of jobs simply crosses over the number of people looking for work. In history, I can imagine a leader, seeing lots of able bodied, desperate, and incredibly cheap manpower seeing an opportunity to raise an army and attempting to expand their own wealth by expanding their lands. That was a natural brake on the population line. Today, thankfully, we don't have any mechanisms that drastically reduce the population whenever people get desperate, there isn't wide areas of undeveloped land that can absorb as many people as we have over above the jobs line, and technology continues to increase productivity at a respectable rate.

So that is how I explain why the jobs line can cross over the population line now, and why we may now be in a situation where we might expect to have less jobs than people who want jobs for a long time.
I had this as well, stating that my password or an application required me to change it.

I thought it was phishing first, but it was legit.

I've never logged in with twitter to anywhere weird, and any apps are fairly normal (twitpic, timely). It also only happened on one of my accounts (non-business).
I recon that Sophie's World is much better than Zen
There are phone numbers in that list of people who aren't on Facebook, and given Facebook's relationship with law enforcement, I'd rather they not have them. I understood the Facebook app to be syncing information with people who were already on Facebook, not my entire phone book.