skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blackmail means threatening to reveal someone's secrets unless they do what you want them to do. I see nothing in anything the article alleges, or in anything I've read elsewhere, that even hints that Twitter has blackmailed any government, or blackmailed any non-goverment for that matter.
I wonder what would Facebook's valuation be now. It would probably be a lot closer to reality than it used to be.
While I agree with your assertion that CS is math (I've upset many people by stating that computer science is fundamentally a subset of mathematics), I disagree with equating those with weaker math skills with those who are incapable of creating elegant code and meeting deadlines.

We have a variety of tools and abstractions in Computer Science which allow us to view what is fundamentally mathematics from a more abstract and 'natural' standpoint. I've known many people with a poor grasp of higher level math who had an innate ability to understand logic and hierarchies, making them extremely skillful at solving business problems.

I assert that something on the order of less than one in ten programmers need to have significant command of mathematics proper. I'll take nine programmers with solid domain knowledge who can write clear, concise code on a schedule, who are self-aware and will defer to the one research guy, over a team of nine research guys. ;-)
Cuban is referring to when Wall Street aggregates investors' money and gives it to growing companies. Trying to grow by "producing more than you consume and saving the difference" is called reinvesting the cash flow, aka bootstrapping in the startup world. But sometimes companies see a growth opportunity that takes more capital than they can get through cash flow which is when they turn to investors. In Silicon Valley they turn to VCs, but Wall Street is the only place companies can turn to raise the really big money up to billions of dollars.
No Starch also does this. I've paid significantly more to purchase the book straight from them verses amazon, $60 vs $100, to get the ebook.
But in general, yes, the Democrats do envision a larger
government role in society (excepting defense/security)
than Republicans do.

How can you just toss "excepting defense/security" in a parenthetical like that?

I'll never understand how some people can be discussing the size of size of government and then essentially ignore military spending (of which much has little to do with defense or security) and governmental abuses of power for the sake of security theater.

NPR? Big government.

PBS? Big government.

Rendition and torture? Not so much. Belongs in a parenthetical.
Yup, every last one of them :)

I doubt you really stand behind that. Maybe you really mean, for example, that a majority of the YC startups make things that aren't useful to you.
深山含笑
great idea! count me in
They aren't blue at all, they are 2700K - and this is a big part of the reason they are 57.8 lm/w. The remote phosphor, while creating a very uniform photometric distribution, reduces the overall light output by filtering the very monochromatic blue light into warm white light.
I get the impression I am missing some "in" joke. :-/
It's definitely not user serviceable. Indeed, the SMPS circuitry at the base of the bulb is going to fail before the LEDs do, and that stuff is all encapsulated in epoxy.
Is it just me or does Coverhound and Leaky just look like lipstick on a pig? It's backed by big names like YC, but in the end what distinguishes them from "thin affiliate" sites that get penalized by Google? Ok, so they both have slightly better web designs than the average affiliate site, what else? I'm not saying these sites aren't useful, but if you're gonna punish thin affiliates, you might as well penalize these guys too if you don't want to be hypocritical
I collect all of them each week in my newsletter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com.
Yes, total and complete fail, after going through what seems like a pretty standard 2-driver use case.

There's no sort of progress meter, so I don't know how long I have to wait, and after the N/A quotes there's still a spinner running, so I'm unsure as to whether I should wait, or what.

Idea: great. Execution: really sub-par.
Philips updates the technology in the Rebel LEDs several times a year. In fact, they have on several occasions demonstrated record-breaking output in this form factor up until earlier this year.

The reason that flashlights are updated so much more frequently than light bulbs is that flashlights don't require any consumer safety ratings. Where a company can release a battery-powered flashlight with no safety testing, a light bulb running on line voltage has to be brought through a rigorous UL, CSA and FCC standards compliance testing.
The fundamental problem is that the police are not free to use the force necessary to put down the riot. If rioters knew they would be shot on sight, they would stop rioting.

As it is, police are afraid to crack down for fear that they'll be brought up on charges of "police brutality".

Ultimately it will only end when the military is called in and can brandish actual firearms.

EDIT: Amazed that someone downvoted this. Just proves the point that those who would actually use force to restore order will be called out as "committing police brutality."
but THEY have permission...clearly lifting another companies design w/out permission is illegal and should be frowned upon
AFAIK the blue LEDs used in these remote phosphor applications is 550 nm "royal blue" monochromatic chip; you can buy these chips on their own, and they are some of the highest energy output chips available on the market.
Aren't they encrypted somehow? What was the thing in Saudi Arabia (might have been different middle east country) where the gov't banned blackberry because they couldn't snoop?
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Had I known last week, I would've saved myself 40%.
Khronos OpenGL 4.2 core profile with changes marked [pdf]
It is a plastic resin that has been blended to a precise dosage with YAG phosphor. You can buy YAG phosphor easily from wholesalers, for example, phosphortech, a Georgia company, sells a variety of colors of phosphor. However, the trick is to precisely and uniformly blend it in with the plastic resin - the reason that it takes so much time and development money to make a light bulb like this.
I disagree, by definition in most jurisdictions, being an Engineer is being accredited by the local Engineering body. In Canada the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board [1] accredits undergraduate programs that teach the field of Software Engineering. I attend such a program at the University of Waterloo [2][3]. After I graduate I can write the exams offered by Professional Engineers Ontario [4]. I think this makes Software Engineering a field of Engineering.

In regards to what is taught at universities, my program involves courses on Engineering Design, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, but it also has classes on what constitutes Object-Oriented design, HCI, etc. I think those courses are more than enough to teach students on the basic principles of software construction.

Also, what do you define the "basic principles of software construction" to be?

[1] http://www.engineerscanada.ca/e/index.cfm
[2] http://uwaterloo.ca/
[3] http://www.softeng.uwaterloo.ca/
[4] http://www.peo.on.ca/
The Rebel LEDs can't be hand soldered or wave soldered. They are reflow soldered. You can do this with a toaster oven.
Ultimately it will only end when the military is called in and can brandish actual firearms.

My ex was career military. I don't know about the UK, but he always said "You really don't want to bring in the military (for stuff like this). Police are trained to wound and bring them in alive. We are trained to shoot to kill."
The city of London has it's own police force called the Meltropolitan Police (the Met). This is a different organisation to the normal English police. I think the Met carry guns but the normal police don't.

Rome has a similar thing with the Carabinieri, I understand these guys are part of the military.
Stealing doesn't create capital. It moves it. Your points 3 and 4 also indicate you don't seem to understand the difference between creating capital and moving it.

As for buying and selling stuff for a profit, you may not be producing stuff with your own hands, but you are enabling more production to occur.
I think in the week leading up to demo day pg would probably have better things to do than make website tweaks. I'm not bashing your suggestion, just putting it in context.
There's no in joke (I don't know helwr). My first sentence was meant to be sarcastic. I was encouraging helwr to explain his/her opinion, since saying "YC startups suck" without any further explanation doesn't really contribute anything.
More here http://www.opengl.org/registry/
Neo4j is limited to the ram available on a single machine. Cassandra can scale across many machines. You won't get nearly the same performance though as you would with neo4j.
Everyone in Canada is an immigrant of some type - unless you are native
I really enjoyed reading that letter. His point boils down to "You can teach how in a clear way, but you're not teaching the 'why'". I had never thought about that before, but it seems obvious now.

Charlie Munger speaks of taking the big ideas from various disciplines and building a latticework of mental models so that you can use all your knowledge to solve problems. A Khan Academy devotee will learn lots of math and science, and other things, but will he or she understand how it relates to real life, and how to apply those ideas to other disciplines?
weird, I HNsearched it http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=apps.ycombi... and didn't find that thread.
"Qualified dividends" are taxed as long-term capital gains, or not taxed at all if you're in the 15% or 10% bracket: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_dividend. Although apparently the reduced rates will expire in 2012 unless they're extended again.
Because using force to restore order has worked so well for Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Syria? Or are you implying that London citizens are pussies and will stand down where the other countries' citizens didn't/aren't? I highly doubt escalating will solve anything, but who knows.

Ed: Wrote this too quickly without thinking enough on it. I don't think violent response is the answer, but given the nature of the situation I'll shift my position to thinking it'd probably work in this case.
Does it cover Python 3? I cannot tell from reading http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ - maybe I missed something.
Here's my response from the HN discussion a year ago [0]:

-----

If Mark Cuban thinks the market is now all about exotic derivatives rather than buying stock in companies you believe in, he's listening to the wrong people. Commission-based brokers talk about exotic derivatives; Warren Buffet still talks about buy-and-hold.

The biggest wins and losses in day trading will come from exotic derivatives simply by their nature: they're highly leveraged bets. Those firms that create the vehicles to make those bets aren't "hackers", they're "Vegas". You ask for a bet against the housing market or for cattle, they set up a structure to let you make that bet, and you play the odds -- and you might beat the other betters in the market over the short term, but it's the house (taking its percentage off the top) that always wins long term. Mark Cuban is right to be uncomfortable playing that game.

Meanwhile, people like Warren Buffet continue to look for healthy companies that are underpriced and buy into them for the long term. Day-to-day the market might be driven by short-term bets, but over the course of 3 decades it's still driven by the fundamental health of companies. If anything, those who care about "the performance of specific companies and their returns" benefit from the fact that occasionally, as a result of day traders' bets, healthy companies' stocks get sold at bargain prices.

If you try to play Vegas' game, you'll probably get burned. But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns.
-----

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332422
Saskatchewan is not only flat enough for you to watch your dog run away for three days, but also to have long-range wireless broadband. My high school in Florida had that around 2000, but it's not practical around hills (like much of the rural US) and it's lower bandwidth than 4G iirc.
You're right to be suspicious of the whole system. As a stockholder you are basically last in line to get compensation from a bankruptcy proceeding. The bondholders will get paid well before you will.

Investing without a dividend is just speculation.
They have quite high karma (as in "they are on the leader board") but their profile states nothing about them. I was assuming you knew something about them from their comment history. (I am sort of guessing they either were funded by YC or applied and got rejected or some such, but I don't really feel like doing some massive search of the site or combing through all their comments/posts to confirm my hunch.)
Software patents have been a topic of interest on HN for as long as I've been reading it. The recent surge of interest started with Oracle suing Google over Davlik but really took off when Lodsys went after Jesus phone developers. Microsoft's pursuit of license fees from Android hardware manufacturer's threw fuel on the fire by proving that only the evil patent their work. Google getting outbid on the Nortel suite and their subsequent claims that implied they only pursued the portfolio for the benefit of OSS kept it alive.

On a meta level, the patent issue is so interesting because it creates such internal contradictions for the libertarians who comprise a significant fraction of vocal HN'ers. On the one hand, patents as the something belonging to the creative individual to dispose of as they see fit certainly resonates with the general philosophy of many people inclined toward libertarianism. However, the mechanism for granting patents is solely in the purvue of the government and must therefore be assumed to be part of a flawed process which harms business according to standard dogma.

In many ways the current drama unfolds according to one of the subtexts of HN - Silicon Valley v the Rest of the World. It's those plucky Silicon Valley startups like Google and Apple [sarcasm] who are suffering at the foreign hands of Nortel and Microsoft, e.g. nobody talks about Intel's and HP's patent portfolios.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots#The_riot...

"The riots, beginning in the evening after the verdicts, peaked in intensity over the next two days, but ultimately continued for several days. A curfew and deployment of the National Guard began to control the situation; eventually U.S. Army soldiers and United States Marines were ordered to the city to quell disorder as well."
By that "logic" the only way to produce capital is to print money. Everything else is moving it.
He also seems to miss the point that if it is more difficult to invest in value companies, it's because the market is doing a better job of value investing.

I.e., once upon a time, Promising Tech, Inc. might have been a great value play. This means that the stock price of PT was too low. In today's market, the stock price of PT is set at a level where you don't know whether to buy or short - that is to say, the stock price of PT is just right. PT is getting exactly as much money as they deserve.

Sounds like Cuban is just annoyed that Wall St. is doing a better job than he is.
The difference between Wall Street today and a century ago is the availability of capital. A century ago capital was much more scarce and was mostly held by wealthy private (mostly European) individuals. The stock market was one of the few ways for American companies connect with those people and fund expansion.

Capital is anything but scarce today. Where a century ago the vast majority of people bought savings bonds, if they were wealthy enough to save anything, today the majority of adults need to own stock to fund their retirement. (Itself a novel concept) In addition, vast amounts of capital are held by private equity groups, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc - all chasing the few opportunities for outsized returns.

At some point we reached an inflection point where the need of capital to obtain a return exceeded the demand for capital. Since then the overriding goal of the financial industry has been to obtain those returns by taking them from another player. The original function of providing capital for corporate expansion is almost irrelevant.
Oliver Reed parodied for the win.
5 Steps to Creating a Lead Gen Machine
Good point, we can both find cases where violent response "works" or "doesn't work".
> Or are you implying that London citizens are pussies and will stand down where the other countries' citizens didn't/aren't?

I'm not going to respond directly to this.

Rather, I'll point out that force is used because it is often effective.

There are innumerable instances of riots where the subsequent police/military crackdown actually suppressed the population.

The real question here is what makes London like Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, or Syria today rather than like all those countries in the past where rebellions were quelled?
Dive Into the Deep
In Africa and the Middle East, the riots were heavily motivated - the rioters had strong political reasons to be there. In London, it's just some socially disaffected youths and looting opportunists. So I don't think they are all that comparable.
I just got one of these spam emails too. Gordon L. Hempton, I believe you are promoting your business in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act. Please stop.
Mass WordPress hijack poisons Google Image well
"and everything else is the same or less risky than that."

Did you mean /more/ risky?
Isn't DSL constrained by the distance to the CO?

We live inside Ottawa's city limits (the capital for non-Canadians!) so could scarely be considered the middle of nowhere and yet don't have a hardwired broadband connection option.
the thrill of chaos and action, of the power of mindless destruction.

I find that really hard to relate to, although I do see this in some people. I wonder if these people have ever had the thrill of creation--birthing something beautiful and unique into the world? That's quite a rush, too. Are riots ultimately a symptom of a failure to educate, to guide, to nurture?
The Two Faces of Hacking
Apple releases tool to create external Lion recovery drives
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There was a popular Bay Area band called Primus that used 'Primus sucks' as their catchphrase for a while.

Perhaps it's a reference.
I uploaded couple of pictures and it said that they are being processed. When I clicked on the "Dashboard" button to see the progress, it took me to the welcome page again.
The Met is responsible for Greater London (where all the riots seem to be so far). The City of London Police is responsible for the Square Mile (the actual City) in the centre.

The City of London police don't especially carry firearms. That said, you may see more of the specially armed police in the City, simply because of a high terrorist threat
Do you think something has changed that makes it worth revisiting this post? Or do you think its just a good post to revisit regularly?

I had not read it for a while and enjoyed reading it again. There were definitely somethings I forgot but I am wondering if something has changed/happened that should change my reading of the thread.
Yep, and we've been there before, quite recently actually. See Bloody Sunday on wikipedia. Paratroopers killed 13 people at peaceful demo when they mistakenly thought they had come under fire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
Yeah man I really liked IE 3 at the time.
The simplified version:

Stock gives you a share of current and future profits (via dividends) as well as a share of the liquidation value of the company. If a company continues to acquire assets, this increases its liquidation value; some companies do this rather than paying dividends because it's more tax-efficient for investors.

One of Warren Buffett's investment strategies is to look for companies that are stable but whose stock is trading at below liquidation value.
Google Authenticator isn't tied to a Google account, and developing for it involves implementing a single algorithm.
The whole branch of this comment thread was based on:

"Why would they need permission?"

That's what I've been replying to.
I searched for "apps.ycombinator.com" instead of "apps.ycombinator"

- "apps.ycombinator.com" (64 results): http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=apps.ycombi...

- "apps.ycombinator" (2 results): http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=apps.ycombi...

I don't understand why there is such a big difference. Perhaps the search engine parses the domains in a special way.
Based on what they showed on UK news this evening, much of the police aren't well-prepared.
Internet-Based Political Movement Aims To Put Presidential Ticket On Ballots
Essay Writing Company
An essay writing company is usually an online firm that works via a website. The website contains an online form for customers to fill and place an order with the company.
If I'm going to be handing over my personal information to someone, I don't want it to be to some fly-by-night operation. I'm not saying you guys are but you need to eliminate all appearances of it:

1. Hide the About Us page, or make it less specific (instead of "four guys", call it a "team of entrepreneurs". A grainy cell phone picture of the team playing video games in lawn chairs with a messy coffee table doesn't lend any more confidence to the average consumer.

2. Get rid of the "design credit goes to Square until we can hire a designer". The average consumer will wonder why you haven't hired a designer yet and will be turned off by whatever answer you give them.

3. This one is more for the nerds than the average consumer (though the average person might spot that something is wrong even if they can't pinpoint it): that iPad on the homepage is badly photoshopped (it's extra wide and the Safari toolbar doesn't extend the width of the screen).

4. The word leaky has a negative connotation. Your product offers a positive outcome (saving money on car insurance), so you need to come up with a more positive name for your business.