skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the love of God, YC companies-to-be stop posting ambiguous job description
I am so frustrated because I am one of those potential candidates that you all YC companies that are seeking - the important first hire but this is the one thousand four hundred and seventy-forth time that I see posting that just wasted 20 seconds of my life reading and got no freaking clue what I signing up for.

If you can't say what your company actually does, I'm sure you can say things like you will be working on solving monetization issues for the laundry machines.

I want to give props to some that are doing it right and here's one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877677

Here's one that I'm not really interested in what they have to say.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2878738

I've built cool stuff and awesome systems so I don't need fluff.
In this case the weasel words are "has not been shown to" which of course is not the same as doesn't.
I fully agree - I've used Chrome exclusively since it appeared on the Mac, but Safari 5.1 on a new MacBook Air has made me switch. The gestures and little added features (shift + click a link to send it to the "reading list) really are incredibly useful to the extent that I don't mind losing Chrome's syncing and awesomebar capabilities. When they presented some of these things during the keynote, I rolled my eyes, but all of the gestures (and their animations) are incredibly useful. Once you've double tapped to zoom in on a video, going back to Flash's full-screen functionality feels clumsy. The animations that happen when you swipe to go back/forward in your history are really essential.

An underhyped but incredibly well implemented feature: in an article webpage, Option + Escape launches reader mode and immediately reads the complete article text using OSX's Text-To-Speech.
>but are you doing anything fun or interesting by it?//

140 comments here would imply that it is at least interesting.
Do you have Github for this project? I'm interested in building my own QrCode encoder in JavaScript, what resources do you recommend to get me started?
Wouldn't it be better to use a JavaScript face detector? Like http://liuliu.me/detect/detect.html

I don't know the details about this algorithm though, no idea if you can get the proper position for the mustache.
I equate the downvotes as "disliking" this argument, however I still think my question is valid: What exactly was Jonathan setting out to learn (other than that the world is full of untrustworthy people.)
Loved it. Of course I'm biased since I'm in the 'gamification' space. I'm definitely horrible at this game, but every time I was about to quit I just had to click try again to prove that I could actually get one right.

I finally got up to about 800 points :)
Buffett: 'The Lower Things Go, the More I Buy'
This study is nearly a year old. Even at that, it is not an example of the first eidence that ADHD is a genetic disorder. There's at least one other study from 2009 (http://www.research.chop.edu/publications/press/?ID=475) that had similar evidence.
How is it not (for developers), when competing networks make less than half in revenue than adsense and are provably much less safe (the excuse they used for the ban). For your second question, users are harmed when they are disallowed from doing things they want to. The fact that they are the only ones in the world doing that makes it evil (to me).

You may think that kicking the other drivers out of the race is a valid way to win an F1 game, but that's evil.
So, what's the business model? You pay for "cloudy" backup space, but otherwise it's free?
(To clarify)
80k/yr total overhead for 18mo per employee, counting facilities, health care, direct and indirect costs, etc. You don't necessarily have to spend it, but I think it would be irresponsible to hire someone on a non-founder basis without having that kind of money available to back it up. If someone's willing to take a subsistence or below market salary, fine, but it should be explicit.

I'd also be reluctant to hire any permanent employee without having at least 12mo of salary in the bank to pay him; 6mo might be ok if you disclose this to someone and let him make his own choice. It would suck to have a choice between startup and facebook, take the startup, then get laid off in six months. That is the kind of risk a founder should take, but not regular employees. If you can't cover salary, then contractor status makes more sense I think.
This is not directly correlated to PicPlum, which sounds like a really cool idea by the way, but from my perspective and what I'm seeing in terms of internet privacy--It wouldn't surprise me if people started taking a step back in terms of what they share on the internet and that includes photos. If that does happen I could see print copies coming back and speaking as a person who really doesn't have any prints of my own, there's something truly amazing about sitting around a home and passing around old pictures--you don't get that with facebook.
Then the space would be "the obeisance to the stupid website piece". Note that the entropy of "correct horse battery staple" is only one bit more than "correcthorsebatterystaple".
There's no winning, only balance
David Friedman.
I'm not saying the article is credible, I'm saying Daring Fireball isn't.

I think it's sad what Marco's rooting interest are here. It's not enough that the iPad succeed. It's competitors have to fail for him to be happy.

If the tablet really is the future of personal computing then there will be more than 1 successful platform. If not, then maybe not. Right now Best Buy is betting their business on the former. If you walk into a Best Buy they have a section for tablets equal to their section of laptops (and larger than their 1 row of desktops). Maybe Best Buy is wrong and they'll go back to a big area of laptops again. Or maybe Marco, Gruber, etc. will find a new data point that they can point to as being all-important.
Then you don't see the value in comparing comparable markets from the history of computing to a modern market; you don't think history in any way resembles itself. Which is fine, but I think that perspective is a bit of an outlier.
>They have better things to do than //

Better things to do than steal coffees from wealthy Americans in order to feed starving people ...

The internet drama is being created by others.

I see this as a really interesting, surprising outcome of the experiment, not a "subversion" of it. FWIW people in his sphere of influence appear to have added more money on than the worth he subtracted.

Edit: that->than
Fixing capacitive buttons
Concrete Alternative Could Make For Stronger Buildings
Yes we do! We want to make it super easy to get your photos into Picplum. Stay tuned.
These Teens Know Tech
yuppies buying each other coffee: a goodwill fund.
The first product launched by a company is sometimes intended mostly a way to gain initial traction and a loyal group of users to learn from, before launching the "real" product(s). That may be the idea here (if it's not, I would agree at least in my case - my mum doesn't want prints of her granddaughter, she wants the files).
1) No, I would not feel better. I have an intense hatred of people who anonymously abuse TOR to torrent movies for their own personal use. Not knowing who did it doesn't make it better.

2) It was not his to give. The money was put forth by other people for the express purpose of being used by others for coffee.

3) No, the statement is not correct. "You should be doing charity instead" is a poor philosophy because it does not recognize the needs of individuals that need to be fulfilled by themselves. This philosophy cannot be universalized because it expects too much of people.

reasonable statement:

"*I* should be doing charity instead"

unreasonable statement:

"*You* should be doing charity instead"
You make a good point, but PS1, PS2, and PS3 had different developer and third party ecosystems, and iPhone 2/3/4 do not, to the same extent. There's a confounding happening here to be sure, but it would not be accurate to square iPhone 4 off against PS3, iPhone 3G/3GS against PS2, etc.
This is not at all similar. It would be highly surprising to me to find that long-term exposure to ritalin leads to deletions and copy number variations in someone's DNA. Furthermore, it is improbable that a drug causing DNA changes would cause the same changes across a population in a statistically significant way. Can you point me to any research that shows this to be the case?
I've used Perl at a few startups (currently do, in fact) and have no trouble writing and deploying great code and staying busy. Except for Pygame and NLTK, Python has no advantages over Perl in my experience.
Yeah we are looking at refactoring some of the face detection stuff out of the server and into the extension.

We wrote the code in a single hour this afternoon so it's not the most optimized piece of software and we are feeling it right now!
Glad to know my post resonated with someone! I still struggle almost daily with ADD-related complications, but getting on the treatment bandwagon was a huge step forward.
I appreciate that. You have no idea how much productivity this competition has killed for our startup. It's most definitely a popularity contest and the tactics most companies are using make you feel like you're back in highschool voting for Prom Queen. Unfortunately it's out of our control. Within the next hour we'll find out if we make it into the top 4.
More threads sharing the same data gives rise to all kinds of difficult to track synchronization bugs.

The share-nothing multi-process approach Python encourages feels good enough for me.
Why not?

Care to give your definition of goodwill? Or are you just going to repeat things and not justify your apparent condescension?
But at the same time, if Jonathan knew that the card could be misused, he either should have attempted to provide some security or disclosed that problem up front to the community, to let them make an informed choice.
Thanks! The name actually came from one of the proudn00b readers, John Speno, @speno on twitter. I was playing around with a few ideas but he was the one that came up with Housefed while we were chatting one day
You just need to select "Print Only" and then no email is requested.
Indian Government wants to monitor Facebook and Twitter
Awesome thanks! Oh IActionable.com is very interesting. Gamifying Salesforce sounds like a great idea! I'll check this out too.
I've lived in Vietnam and can confirm this is still policy. All over the country, every area (say, 6-8 city blocks from what I could tell) has a "Block warden" who's in charge of making sure everyone's political views are in line within their sphere. Most of these guys drive mercedes-benzes now and their kids spend most of the day playing videogames and blasting bad music off oversized speakers from the middle of the block warden's compound -- which itself is usually a large modern house with very high walls. No one sees what goes on in there, but the music starts blasting off those speakers at 6:30 AM sharp, six days a week, and if you're Vietnamese your ass is out of bed and washing the street in front of your shop by 7.

Google is trying to establish an online version of this kind of total collective obedience. And this, right after they admit to the German gov't that they've shared European data collected off their cloud servers with the US intelligence services? Seriously? Screw them to hell.
Listen to Marco's podcast sometime when he talks about the support burden for Instapaper owing to older iPhones. Sure, you can't bring an iPhone 1 up to iOS 4, but he can't cut loose all the old iPhones either.

Aren't phones effectively on a 2-3 year subsidized schedule anyways? I know a minority of people do buy unsubsidized phones at full price, but that minority is tiny.

(Finally, remember we're talking iPads here, not iPhones. Two very different markets.)
We did small 2x2 flyers to promote our Android music player at GoogleIO and SF MusicHackDay.

On the back we had a QR code with our URL on each side and our logo in the middle:

http://cloudtv.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/promoflyers.png
Needs access to all my data on all websites. No thanks.
I have a problem with not allowing integration. That requires no link. That would mean that if I play an mmorpg on Facebook and Google+, I can't use my same character.
Facebook Status Update With XFBML Injection ~ THN
Most notably, the technologically unfamiliar (grandma and grandpa)...

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the strongest driver in motivating older people to learn about computers was the single use-case of viewing photos of grandchildren on facebook.
Infinite scrolling makes me nauseous. I literally feel sick to my stomach when the bottom of the page is always yanked out of my grasp, Sisyphus-style.
PyPy also has a plan to get rid of the GIL: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/06/global-interpreter-lock...
Couldn't agree with you more.

If you're a mechanic, you don't brag about calling the AA to home-start your wheels. You would be pretty shocked to see a mechanic post a story about his home-start on a hobby enthusiasts news site and see the community there voting the story up.
> 2) I need two external screens. A Laptop Screen + an external Screen is again not ergonomical, pains my eyes to look from a decent 24" into the Macbook Display with its insane pixel density. I like same pixel density on both screens, and same size

Have you taken a look at USB2 DisplayLink devices? I bought one for $75 2 years ago and it's been holding up like a champ for a dual-22" monitor setup at work (similar @home)... I don't even use my laptop screen (which could give me a 3rd screen)... all of this running on a USB hub with keyboard, mouse, etc with no hiccups.

It does fine unless you try HD video on it or playing games - it does great for coding, browsing and writing.
One important implication is more consume.
If people get from A to B per car without paying attention on the road, they can consume more entertainment, do more google searches, spend more time on the web.

Capacity utilization and efficiency is just a fall-out. We already sleep way too much, you cannot do anything about that, but the 'Googles' cannot tolerate users (customers) driving around 1-2 hours a day doing nothing but starring on the street.
Hey, just wanted to say thank you.
I say we hang 'im... then we kill 'im! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVKsd8z6scw#t=102

Seriously tho, it seems like this backlash is getting a bit out of hand. There was a silly, whimsical social experiment, and this guy had a silly, whimsical hack on it, now people are calling to destroy his business and run him out of town on a rail. So it wasn't the best decision, so what? Let's keep things in perspective here, friends.
The problem is that in general people don't really know sales, except in limited instances. The main one being when stores can't keep items on the shelves so sales to consumers equals shipments (approximately). That's why MS knew how many Kinects sold over the holidays.

But in general there's no way for OEMs to know exactly how many Android tablets are in consumer hands.
Nice creative idea here. I think its pretty fun.

A few things:

1. Sometimes I have no idea what an image is showing. Text would be really helpful.

2. What is the purpose of hints? I know people could just google search, but why make it so easy?
BTW, your website (http://mattdeboard.net) appears to be down. (Just FYI)
Why don't you ask him?
No, you donated to a commons. You expected it to be used in a specific way, but it was used in a different way.
That genuinely is great, but whose brothers are going to pay into @Jonathanscard to cover the results of posting the exploitative code used to fund iPads that enables laypeople to do so on their own?
5-10 years is a long ways to be projecting, especially online. I don't think I could even go 2-3 years out the way things are currently going. But I'll give it a go.

Within 5 years:

- Infrastructure will improve significantly. If the economy doesn't tank so badly, we will see rapid expansion of bandwidth "to the curb". We're already seeing the beginning of this in unlicensed spectrum being leveraged to provide rural "high speed" wireless. And Google is lighting up dead-fiber like it's money is burning a hole in it's pocket.

- The cloud will be more federated. Instead of having two or three main incumbents in the IaaS arena, tools will gradually be released to allow individuals more authority to maintain their own part of the Internet.

- Data will be personal again. Projects like diaspora, The Locker Project, and others will force the API paradigm to shift toward individual users. Instead of a centralized API, a P2P network of individually managed APIs will allow web apps to get data where it (authoritatively) lives without users worrying about 3rd parties doing the right thing with their data.

Within 10 years:

- Traditional government will fragment. The existing government as we know it will change rapidly. Today's government paradigms worked for getting things done for the last century. I think it's clear that there are more efficient ways of how government could work given today's technology. I think many people will try to bring their own ideas of government forward. This will happen in a way that allows people to subscribe to the parts of government ideology that they agree with and opt-out of the parts that don't benefit them. Fragmented governments will not exist in the real world, but will be logical groups of people who self-organize online with the objective of specific benefits for their group. Traditional government will be forced to accept these "2.0" governments or will be shuttled gradually into obscurity.

- The singularity will be a lot more real and a LOT more pervasive than ever. While it will likely not happen in the next decade, we will start seeing nano-tech that we will use to improve parts of our biology. Within 20 years, bio-tech will be in the up-swing of a huge market growth that will easily be in the multi-billions. Mobile will no longer mean "cell phones", Mobile will mean "you".

- Pharma as we know it will die. (This is my own personal wish and completely unrelated to Internet/Mobile.)

Thoughts?
It would actually be clever if they are both for the same job and that company is just split testing their job descriptions.
1. My previous post: "there is no contradictory license statement on that page".

First thing I did was dl it to check the license given in the book after I noticed there was none given on the web page other than "completely free".

He muddies the water further in your quote, "free to copy, distribute and display the book. However, I ask that you always attribute the book to me, Karl Seguin, do not use it for commercial purposes". So I can't use it at work but I can sell it. Of course that wasn't what he meant to say but that's what he did say. So which license applies "completely free", "NC use, but otherwise free" or NC-BY-SA?

2. As I understand it a DMCA take down notice is only effective if it is unchallenged, if there are some grounds to challenge it then there is no need by the receiver to take down the material. Lawyers then earn money arguing the legal niceties and a judge decides and if necessary injuncts the service provider to remove the material.

Amazon may of course choose independently to take the material down but I don't think they are obliged too. If they were then any challenge, even one that was clearly bogus would require material to be taken down.

Do you think these reasons are reasons for me not to have posted? Downvotes should be used to show that a comment isn't furthering the conversation or adding to it any way.

Did I not, by pointing out potential problems with licensing, further the conversation.

It's kinda orthogonal to the discussion but I think Amazon and "Amazon Digital Services" have acted very poorly, just in case you felt my comments endorsed them in some way.
Wouldn't be surprised if Skyping with their grandchildren is stronger. ;)
You can write games for iPhone, therefore it is a gaming platform.

A valid point, and I think when you're talking about today's hand-held gaming devices vs today's mobile phones, you've got a meaningful comparison because the consumer can reasonably substitute a phone for a PSP or similar, but I'm not sure what is meaningful about comparing the lifetime of Apple's work in the mobile sector to one or two iterations of various gaming consoles across various timeframes.

Also AFAIK the four generations of iPhones can all run the same software

Not true in many cases. Consider that the first two iPhone models can't even run fully featured firmware because of hardware limitations.
I agree wholeheartedly - OP, I am sorry this is happening to you, but I am so glad that you wrote this book. It takes a lot to make me want to stand up and cheer after reading a book! :)
If volatility and risk (dissent in political terms) suppressed, black swans come
Thinking out load. Here's an idea. Uniquely link individual starving children with facebook profiles. Only accept donations for that child from the one facebook profile. If the child dies, assign another child. Allow friends to inform friends that they have a child and only they can donate. Remove the "oh someone else will take care of them" excuse.
Nahhh. I think it has more to do with people being dead poor in their own countries and is why they immigrated to America (Occam's Razor), better opportunities. It is still the reason why people come to America today. Also, too many people want to use disorders as an excuse for their lack of success. "See, is not me, I'm actually pretty smart, is this damn disorder that is holding me back. Not my fault."
It wouldn't be too far off - for example the PS2 can play PS1 games, and PS3 could play PS2 games (for a short while). But the first iPhone came out after the PS3 was released, and there have been no new standalone console generations since. (There were several Nintendos however, so those comparisons hold.)

Comparing portables to standalone consoles is problematic anyway, for various reasons. Not least, more than one person can play on a standalone at once...
Most of the comments here are scolding the person for it. Similarly, if a prominent YC alum broke into our local hackerspace and stole some of our tools, there would probably be a lot of comments scolding them for it.

That doesn't mean the breakin itself is interesting.

(What I meant was that the "hack" wasn't interesting)
Thanks misuse! We are debating text over here. Text would make it easier to bot I think. Please don't bot this fellow HNers just because I mentioned this! :) Please! So a way to fix the bot problem here, is to force the optical character recognition to be the way to have to crack it. And Text descriptions would thwart that. So the purpose of hints is basically so you don't have to have text descriptions but still have a way of going over to the site to see prices. It's not perfect of course. Maybe the hint could be made a bit harder, like we send you to a search for "Macbook Pro" instead of the exact item. Thanks for the feedback on this and checking it out.
"Better things to do that steal coffees from wealthy Americans in order to feed starving people ..."

Why stop at coffee? Steal their cars too. Evict them from their homes and set up shelters in them. Kidnap their children and hold them for ransom.

"see this as a really interesting, surprising outcome of the experiment, not a "subversion" of it."

The Stanford Prison Experiment was invalidated by people acting grossly out of what is reasonably expected from people. As a result, the scientific value of the experiment was completely lost. That is what Sam Odio appears to have attempted to cause here. He didn't want to participate, he wanted to destroy the experiment because he found the very notion of such an experiment to be offensive.
Awesome'r!
Could be fun, but needs titles of the products with the pictures or half the time you don't even know what you're looking at and touching "hint" goes to the website.