skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find myself in a weird situation, in that I find this writer's writing intriguing exactly because of how much I vehemently disagree with almost all of it. It's like somehow it manages to push all the wrong buttons, in a very precise way. Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me, but for some reason almost this entire blog does. The controversy this blog always digs up on really minor topics makes me think I'm not the only one.

I think what always strikes me in her writing is the lack of any empathy in any of the rants/complaints. When I read credible arguments, I always feel like there's a bit of understanding involved, as in "these people think this, for certain reasons we've actually bothered to explore and will treat fairly, but it turns out this other thing is the case because.."

The problem is, if you don't bother to look into the other side of things, you can't have real understanding. I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did, only some really petulant complaints and vague innuendo about "rogue contractors". I got the same impression from other posts, like where she accused ruby programmers of being "hipsters", because, you know, obviously you can just do everything in C++ so why bother to learn something new?
Hahaha. Very funny man. LOLCATZ, Cheezburger Catz!

You know I meant "United States" when I said "please don't start another war".

We have a big difference in the way we think. I think if someone CHOOSES to work in a factory under semi-inhumane conditions so their children can have better lives, they are fucking heroes.

You think they are victims. Your Western brothers (including the clown who got his post deleted) think they are somehow less than them.

Whatever. Lets check back in 20 years,
1080p video played via XBMC on Raspberry Pi
No true scotsman rears its ugly head. So because she actually cares to be fairly compensated, she's not right for Google? I think that says more about Google than her.
I wouldn't go so far as to call Google "evil" for reducing perks, but the microkitchens were a lot better before. They used to be overflowing with goodies, many perishable. After the bean-counter moment it was all dry cereal and prepackaged snacks.

For me it was just a "shrug, whatever" moment. I realized that as a growing public company Google wanted to control costs more.

And I might be weird, but excessive perks creep me out a little. I worry about it warping my mind too much. One day during my time at Google, I was in a grocery store and felt mild outrage at the thought that they were going to charge me for food.

Once you're used to a perk, it's another fishhook the company has embedded into your flesh.
Earlier on, PG experimented with an upvote only scheme and later discarded it. I don't recall if any public reason was given for why the experiment failed, but downvotes were found to be of sufficient value to be worth retaining.
I am not Google's tax accountant, but the meals are not compensation based on the IRS' published guidelines.

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2011_pu...

Tax tip going way back to Learned Hand: you don't have to feel guilty about structuring your affairs to take advantage of every legitimate opportunity to decrease your tax burden.

Here's a related example: US tax law allows you to deduct 50% of meals incurred on business trips. I travel internationally for a significant portion of every year, on business trips. There are two ways to calculate how much you spend on meals: 1) Actual cost 2) An approximation method which takes a per-diem rate supplied by the US government based on your location and adds one or two wrinkles not relevant here. Either is acceptable to the IRS. I keep appropriate records of business expenses, so running both the exact cost and the approximation method was trivial. The approximation overstates my actual cost on meals by several thousand dollars -- using it as the basis for my deduction saves me about a thousand bucks. That's totally kosher.

P.S. You know those beating-the-system-is-worth-bonus-points neuroreceptors that most of us hackers have? Doing taxes gives you the opportunity for that sort of thing in spades. (Though I'd probably still suggest getting someone competent to do yours -- advice which I will be taking for myself from next year on.)
Well, he's dead now, which I'm pretty sure is what raldi was getting at :-)
The article misses a broad obvious point..

The entry level workers for those factories in China are not what would fund Middle class.

Its the workers who design and fabricate the factory automation equipment..ie Japan's Middle class..

The article author needs to get a clue.
Ask: Gamespy helpers and other Community Features
A few years ago (6 maybe) I was very a active player of Age of Empire using gamespy. It was great, and among the many things I liked there were the Game Helpers. These guys were players, much like myself, that the Gamespy team approached and offered them to join their team of Administrator and moderator, as volunteers of course. Read more about this here:
http://www.gamespyvolunteers.com/app.html

I can't seem to find much information about this initiative of Gamespy, so:

First question, does any of you remember this? Was any of you a helper, or volunteer of some sort?

Second question, do you know of any other initiative similar to that of gamespy on other platforms? Would you join this?

I am building a simple MMOG based on html5 and I am trying to apply these features which made my stay back on Gamespy the great fun it was.
Oh c'mon. I know and read that message too. How many people else did? Not many.

It is not like someone like dpp doesn't know how to get the right audience for his issues.

Additionally this wouldn't have been a solution as the domain still remained in his possession.
This is mostly ad hominem. The 10% bump happened in January 2011. From her post, it sounds like she started in the fall of 2006. It's not clear when the food started disappearing, or when she left, but it's entirely believable that she did experience the food perk loss and not the salary bump. And this happened at the same time Google was colluding with other major Silicon Valley employers to depress the wages of top talent.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.3

Good luck Engineers!
Apple Just Incentivized Every College Kid To Get An iPad. As For High Schoolers
This is absolutely wrong.

Feudalism died because people joined debate societies, talked about enlightenment ideas, fought hard and took over the government to fight the oppressive nature of the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Honorable people started this endeavor and then radicals took it over. But the French Revolution wasn't an easy or pretty process.

You don't have to centrally plan the creative destruction of Hollywood. This is like arguing we can't cut overseas military spending because think of the jobs we will lose.

What would you replace slavery with? What about internal combustion engines? Replacing these things aren't easy, more people will suffer in the short-term. But guess what? People are suffering now, and society as a whole rots because we squander the opportunity to use TV and film to enliven people's minds, instead we just want to empty their pocketbooks by any means possible.

I worked as an executive in Hollywood. The culture and cartel-like nature encourages people to be mean and unethical. It's not about creating art or entertaining people, it's about controlling a market and creating profit regardless of who you destroy.

You are confused by nice people and their charm. Show me a list of GOOD people in Hollywood. Do you even know the history or mechanics of film finance?

Do you think the euphemism "Hollywood accounting" is justified? The entire system is a scam and deserves to be creatively destroyed. And they do need to be destroyed, especially after threatening to cut off funding for Obama just because the White House won't blindly support the predatory and foolish laws the industry puts out.

It's over. The industry's model is dying.
Not really.

Look at google + mocality: it's easy to understand why the contractors where doing what they were: it helped them sell something or hit quota.

Compare to Google contractors + open street map: what incentive does a contractor have to go screw up their data? In the first case I see directly why unethical people would do what they did. What exactly is the motive here? Just griefing? It makes me wonder.
Austria. Yes, I agree: you'll need to establish a rapport, but, they will only be following rules. So you'd just need to find out those rules. I doubt they'd notice you anyhow if you just take a snap here or there unless you have a guilty conscience, which you shouldn't. It might be easier to do a travel film, around the world in 80 days, and get 80 travel stories (of either best, worst, most interesting or standout trip) from 80 travellers. If you have a website up beforehand, you can point travellers at it whilst at the airport on your laptop, and they can decide if they want the interview. You could ask people for some photos they could send you.

Now that I think about it, you could look at the Sartorialist but restrict it to airports as an inspiration: http://www.thesartorialist.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sartorialist : what you want is real people with real stories that can elicit discussion.

I have domains orbit8 and orbitsquare if interested.
Quite cool, but why does the 'pick a color system' area (which lists the actual values) only have three colors, rather than all five?
Scroll to the bottom for the best comment of the lot.
Thank you for the reply. I felt it was important to address so that myself and others would be more confident with going ahead and pledging.

Thanks for taking the lead here and actually shipping something.
"A solution is for the Internet industry to start giving free advertising to political campaigns on our own new media assets... assets like YouTube that are rapidly displacing television. Imagine if every political candidate had free access (under some kind of "equal time" rule) to enough advertising inventory on the Internet to run a respectable campaign."

From the second sentence, it seemed to me that he was talking about companies directly giving advertising inventory directly to candidates. But now reading it again, it is a bit ambiguous.

The PAC intermediary you describe would work legally, but it wouldn't be able to allocate much ad inventory to each candidate, since the most a PAC can give to each candidate is $5,000 aggregate per election cycle.
Zynga expands sales of virtual goods for a cause
Internet is still vulnerable to cyber-criminals
CloudFlare startup on fast track to thwart hackers
This dataset is indeed with very low quality - I spotted multiple duplicates, empty lines and logins without emails.

I estimate that there are actually ~80k of unique accounts there. And really not sure whether any of these works.
I bet Google loves these SuperPAC Ad Buys
I view the mention by Technology Review and the paper of gas-pump price changes as just giving an example and context that most readers will understand or at least believe they understand. If the assumption is that the cartel-like behavior is coordinated, then that a model that is clearly not coordinated exhibits similar qualitative behavior should give pause to that assumption.

I agree that it's not an actual explanation or a model of any actual market. How both the article and paper are worded is a bit ambiguous on that point most likely for purposes of attracting a bit of attention and grant money. But if you look closely, there's no outright claim in either.

As for seemingly ignoring existing literature in another field, it's kind of par for the course. A lot of "discoveries" made early on in complexity research on sandpiles were already well-documented in civil engineering.
How can family sysadmins make a safe Internet playground for kids?
Redmond campaigns for gay marriage rights
Intel chieftain outlines broad tablet, smartphone blitz
Use iBooks Author, only Apple can ever publish the result
>In this way what you are calling natural poverty is actually a creation of civilization. The natural state of a human is that he may live off the land. Civilization has broken this connection in favor of the state and so the state has an obligation to the human to provide him with a fair chance.

No, actually. Civilization is what is necessary to avoid periodic famines. There's a reason the hunter-gather existence fell out of favor. It's only an idyllic lifestyle to people who haven't really thought about it.

On the subject of the state having an obligation to provide a "fair chance", well, a fair chance isn't handouts, no matter how much other people may have. We have a system in which you can apply your talents to accumulate resources. It works very well.

>Note that the superrich or even the middle class are not born in poverty. Rather they are born with silver spoons in their mouth. How is that justice?

Is it justice that some people are better looking than others, or have better health? Is it justice that some people find a compatible mate and others don't? It's not the state's job to dispense "justice" - if it was I'd have a hot girlfriend. Even the court system isn't there to dispense justice - it's there to carry out the law.

>These wealthy families then engage in nepotism to ensure the wealth of their offspring at the expense of the poor.

Nepotism doesn't mean what you think it means. The wealthy families invest their money in an effort to stay wealthy, that much is true. But the side effect is poor people get wealthier, not poorer.

>This is deeply unmeritocratic and is injustice. For these upper classes to then turn around and tell the poor to be enslaved or die is the height of evil.

That's a little hyperbolic. "Enslaved"? Who's enslaved? A job is a free exchange - you get money for the work you do. If you don't like it do something else. That's not slavery, that's just life.
I imagine her main gripe would be that the free food was treated as a component of her compensation, and then withdrawn for the perfectly rational (but unrelated) reason of cutting costs.If someone did that to my salary (and it's happened a few times, for various reasons), that would generate a certain amount of ill-will.
Allowing non-employees on company transportation would threaten to make furnishing the transportation to employees a taxable event. See the same link that I posted on a sibling comment about food, just search for "transportation".
This is the civil rights battle of the 21st century
The new avant-garde is made of hackers, amateurs, makers, DIYers and entrepreneurs. If only we all knew how revolutionary and politically charged what we do really is.
And if the company isn't doing so hot? It's a lot more trouble to lower salaries than it is to cut food. Hence I'd rather not sit down and assume I'm making $5000 more. Plus it puts you in the position of feeling like you need to make 100% use of your perks, or you're getting shortchanged. After all, you're not really gaining $5000 in value, if you don't eat all your meals at the office. Or take advantage of every company-sponsored event. Unnecessarily fixing values to things is a stressful way to live.

Slightly off-topic, I rather like the opportunity to get out of the office to eat lunch. That's a perk in and of itself (for me, at least). How would you value that? I could argue that it's worth the hour we spent eating out, which is surely more than the value of some catered food (unless it's some seriously fancy stuff). And you could argue back that since I'm salaried, it doesn't count... In any case, it's just not a worthwhile endeavor for me to try and conjure up numbers, when I can just reap the emotional value instead.
Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist?

This is a pointless ad-hominem attack. Suppose, hypothetically, that rachelbythebay believes engineers are all sexist and google is evil. So what?

You could make your post clearer and more useful by removing the first sentence.
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Congrats Steve! Having been there myself, all I can say is hold on tight, it'll be an interesting time to say the least.

While every situation is unique, I'd say expect to be playing the supporting role for mom and baby. Getting used to certain paradigm shifts are also very interesting. For example, once the baby's here, you're Dad first and Steve second.

Expect the on-the-side startup to suffer, at least for the first 4 months. Babies are particularly fragile at till about 4 months old. Even a minor cold can turn into something very serious. So, it's a good think that you work from home. That'll at least spare you from passing out in the middle of the day in a company meeting while the speaker is directly addressing you.

I can't emphasize the supporting role enough. If mom can breastfeed the baby, encourage her to do so long as she can (within reason of course, anywhere from 6mo~8mo should be good). Breastfed babies are generally less susceptible to disease, have better brain development and a whole lot more. There's a huge push from formula companies to get the baby on formula ASAP, resist this if you're able to (it's a lot easier on the wallet too). However, this process takes quite a toll on mom. So, expect to dedicate some energy dealing with all the hormonal changes. Keep an eye out for postpartum depression (for both of you, it can affect dads too).

Warnings and worries aside. You're probably going to be in for the time of your life. Enjoy the baby. Watching them grow is by far one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I can say for sure that I've learned and grown a in that time as well. I look forward to coming home every day. It's given me a whole new outlook on my extended family, community etc. It's been a big motivator and creativity booster as well.

Again, congratulations and best wishes.
She wanted to take the deal; she just needed them to give her a reason.

It seems disingenuous for her to complain about it later.
Time for robots to get real
There are plenty of complex systems with complex problems but deceptively simple solutions. Those solutions might be difficult to implement, and might have nasty little details, but they're still simple enough to sum up in one sentence. For example, back in 1911, the problem was "monopolies", and the answer was "regulate the maximum size of a corporate entity."

I'm not saying that this particular problem has a simple solution. I'm saying that we shouldn't throw out ideas because they seem too simple. And, of course, the more angles we have on the problem, the better.
Everybody forgot about it.

Yea, I guess they won't be doing that again, for all it got 'em.
Check out http://ckrack.github.com/fbootstrapp/
>The superrich acquired their wealth through illegitimate means: nepotism, cronyism, bribery, monopoly, oligopoly, war-mongering, and all sorts of predatory scams.

Again, this is an assertion for which I see scant evidence outside a few specific cases. Most of "the superrich" own pieces of companies that do things like make toilet paper or provide insurance. Their money is invested in concerns that provide me with products and services, and I don't begrudge them a profit.

>China is a slave state dominated by unmeritorious Party cronies and their nepotism. Chinese workers are slaves.

Oh bullshit. Chinese people are not slaves. They may not have all the political freedoms we do, but work is a voluntary association just like it is in the US. In terms of the party, well, you'll never have a large organisation of people without power imbalances. It's neither the worst government in the world nor as bad as it was just a few decades ago.

>When CEOs award themselves $100million salaries and golden parachutes they are engaging in cronyism and oligopoly. The free market no longer holds sway and this is immoral. Money gained through these methods is not private property, it is stolen goods.

CEOs do not pay themselves. Where did you get this idea? CEOs are paid by the shareholders, ultimately, and if you're not a shareholder in that company, why do you care what the CEO makes?
I did -- and I agree with you. I didn't say they had deep understanding. I said they picked out the absurdities of the process.

This is what Jon Stewart does. Some people say that the Daily Show is the only real news, but my counterpoint is that no, it may feel like it's coming from the right place, one of intelligent skepticism. But they aren't going out and getting fresh information about topics, they are just commenting on the lameness of existing coverage.
You could just look at her post history to find out. For example, the post immediately before this one.
>Over 40 years, you'd hope for a little more than "considerably".

No, actually, that's about the best you can hope for. It goes both directions, unfortunately.
I think the idea should be to put complete force behind passing some legislation which in a meaningful way restricts the influence corporations can have over congress.
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That was her fault. She acknowledges her naïveté in accepting this as part of her salary negotiation, but strangely clings to her outrage as well.
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Anyone know why it renders poorly on Windows Chrome? Looks beautiful in IE9.
Honestly, that's probably right. I have no data, but I'd predict the number of C++11 programmers on Windows to dwarf C99 programmers.
What scares me regarding humanoid robots would be that they'll be more powerful than humans and time comes that they will want more power. This reminds me of the "I, robot" movie.

Nevertheless, change is good and who knows robots might be a good change for human civilization.
Google is located in an area where there aren't many restaurants close by. By offering on-site lunches, they keep the employees on campus. So instead of wasting, say, 1.5 hours getting to MtView, hunting for parking, waiting at a restaurant, eating, getting back into your car, etc., the employees just walk over to the cafe, still in work mode; or even better, take the lunch back to their offices.

Even if Google gets 1 hour of work per employee per day out of this arrangement, the lunch more than pays for itself.

So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart; it's because it makes fiscal sense to keep employees on campus, working.
That's true. I'd say that time is pretty much the only thing that can heal outrage about such things, though.
Scary snippet, really. Besides requiring you to stop and think about its implications, division is historically slow. On the various x86 CPUs of the past ~20 years, it's taken anywhere from 15 to 80 cycles.

Compares are reliably cheap (1-2 cycles), jumps are usually similar.

If the code is structured right, the simple two comparison mechanism is no worse than the division, and at best may be an order of magnitude faster.

A sufficiently smart JIT might end up deconstructing that division into the double-compare, but at that point, again, you're no better off.

So, Mr. Bray is setting an example that's probably slower, and definitely less intuitive, for no apparent gain.