skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Idea: Government (Obama Admin.) "Social" Website?
Tell me why this is or is not a good idea:

I keep seeing across sites like HN, Reddit, Digg, that they want to see something of a "social" news site for the upcoming Obama administration. Perhaps RSS feeds of current and upcoming bills in Congress, a list of Administration/Cabinet Officials... perhaps editors writing analysis on upcoming bills and how they think they'll play out in the political atmosphere.

Would a site like what I just described not attract several thousand visitors that want to keep a tab on the Obama Administration? I keep hearing talk about "We put him there, let's make sure he does his job!"... Well, this is how we do that.

Yes/No?
By the by, this is absolutely a two-second thought, so I haven't thought through anything else other than "Why don't we?"
MySpace Affecting our Teens | TechJaws
I went to a public high school in New Hampshire and graduated two years ago, and find these tests intriguing.

So much of what was taught in my school was a waste of time, so I'm really happy to see the education officials actively trying to solve that problem.

However, I'm skeptical about how useful these tests will actually be. The article says: "Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year." If students who do well on the test still have to stick around for two years more years, what was the point in taking the tests?

To me it seems like the tests are a way to give diplomas to capable students who otherwise would have dropped out. That might work out really well -- all of my friends who dropped out of high school were perfectly capable of graduating, but they wouldn't have learned anything more and they didn't feel like putting up with the education system any longer.
BumpTop. http://bumptop.com a 3D desktop yo.
I'm not sure I would discuss it unless it really gets in the way. He may have picked you for a bright team member who can handle it-- and maybe you can. When and if it starts to be a problem, that is, when you actually are sure you are not learning what you feel you should be from him and the project is suffering, then broach the subject with the CEO. Perhaps the guy will come back when a need is demonstrated.

If this business is a good opportunity for you, just hang tight. The other guy could have the bigger problem anyway: Your proximity to the CEO is going to make you very valuable to him if you end up being a reliable player. The CTO may find himself out of the loop.
I think it boils down to: do you want an employee for "your" (singular) start-up, whom you will pay (at first) in shares, or do you want a co-founder for "your" (plural) start-up?

I think either choice is valid, if you can find the right person. But you should decide how much control you want to keep for yourself, and what that implies for the other person's motivation and initiative.
Geek Hero Comic - Delusions of a new programmer
Please forgive my ignorance, but...can't you tell from the bloody smile on his face?
FYI, I found working retail more satisfying than high school. It makes you feel important, you feel like your actually getting something done, your getting paid, and if your one of rare people who actually would stick around in those environments, you'll get into management quick with a $30'000 annual job. I could see how it would be tempting for some people fed up with high school.
And private schools tend to pay less than the public system, unfortunately.
Fixing HN: Explicitly ending the comments page
That would be the second worst. The worst would be if it called 411 when you dialled 911.
"experts" you mean.
It's worth pointing out where Gladwell is wrong about overnight successes and why.

While it's true that in a field where continued effort is required for continued success (like acting, to continue the theme of his 'American Idol' remarks), software (web software in particular) can be a different kind of beast. For sites that derive value from the network effect, your work can taper off once the network size reaches a certain point. (Witness Markus Frind of PlentyOfFish.com.)

Furthermore, while times are tight now, the 'get bought' method of internet riches, where/when available, has to qualify as an 'overnight' success.*

*Not to say that this is the most likely or desirable case, just that it qualifies as a counterexample.
Microsoft's monopoly in all areas is deteriorating due to the free market. For example, the browser market is now more of an oligopoly. Microsoft only maintains a majority market share because Firefox forced it to really put some work into IE 7.

Monopolies do exist in free markets, but they tend to be unstable and relatively short-lived. Things like AT&T's 100-year monopoly definitely require some government intervention.
The "if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide" argument in another disguise.

You're the one (as much as) arguing in favour of expending effort, adding code and complexity to restrict my root access, the burden is on you to justify doing so, not on me to refute it.
Possibly. Why doesn't somebody go away and find all the twittering directors on all the boards of all the tech companies in the country, make a list, and submit it? Maybe somebody will upvote that.

It must also be said that at this point Al Gore's twitter is extremely boring. The only "celebrity twitterer" I'm following at the moment is Steven Fry, who is currently tweeting several times a day about his experiences in Madagascar chasing lemurs for the Last Chance To See documentary. Now _that_'s interesting twittering.
Apple leapfrogs RIM for #2 slot on smartphone sales list
Al Gore doesn't need PR.

Oh, I don't know. His real moment in the sun was a couple of years ago, and if he doesn't watch out he'll fade into irrelevance. Maybe he can finagle himself a position in the Obama administration, maybe he can't, but that's no guarantee that people will pay attention to him.
Sheesh. Enough already!
It's not that programmer time is worth more than any idea. The issue is that an equity agreement requires a lot of trust that both of you will put a lot of work into this venture. Too often equity-for-programming deals are offered by an MBA type who doesn't have the ability or desire to add value to a business themselves, but still wants to be a founder. If you can't prove that you're not going to abandon the project in a month, you're going to have a hard time convincing people to put any value on your equity. Providing some cash is one way you can prove you are serious. Another is to actually do a big chunk of the work yourself.

I recommend that you find an idea that is simpler and less "meta", put some work into it, and then try to attract more developers.
OpenID QA Interview with Google's Eric Sachs
Ahhh, right, that explains it.

However, while I haven't watched every episode of Lost I think it'd be a lot more noticeable if gravity there was 4.815162 times regular Earth gravity. Everybody would be crawling around, for starters.
Obama (was) to require 100 hours of community service a year by college students
1) Obama's campaign used the Internet as a resource skillfully.
2) Obama winning is a historic event (demographically).
3) ... techcrunch deadline ...
4) "Obama would not have won without the internet"

No point in discussing validity.
Papert is a Logo interpreter written in JavaScript -- http://logo.twentygototen.org/
Sounds like this idea predates your partner, but more generally, the skepticism he encountered would be a feature of science, not a bug. Scientists are paid to be skeptical.

(I know that you probably know this, but I think most people would take your comment to mean that establishment scientists are all incompetent curmudgeons, irrationally resistant to "outsider" ideas.)
Give Lessig the job.
This might be crazy, but if you are afraid to bring it up, you could pull a Seinfeld-style maneuver and say, it's really important that we all be in the same place, and suggest that if the CTO doesn't want to ever move back, then maybe the whole company should move to San Diego. At least it's a way to get it out there.
I think he's trying too hard to sell his new onyx venture.

But the idea has merits, so let it be. It'd be nice if it wasn't just for games though.
From Bush's inauguration in 2001 to late 2007, the Dow rose from 10,000ish to 14,000ish. It's only dropped in the last year, and in particular in the last few months, as it became more and more likely (based on approval ratings and polls) that the next President was going to be a Democrat.

It wasn't until a month before the election that the Dow crashed back below the 10,500 mark which it was at when George W Bush took office in 2001.

OK, now I don't believe that's really the only thing going on, obviously there's a zillion other factors which are more important than just Republicans vs Democrats. But you asked how you could explain the "huge drop under Bush" despite traders being more confident when the administration is Republican, and I gave you an explanation.
Having a highly skilled and productive co-founder is a huge asset. Nobody is perfect and living 3000 miles away doesn't seem like a deal-breaker (not even close).

Effort (and appearances) are not the same thing as results. It's possible you are mixing these up to some degree. Consider: face-time, "earning" vacation and lack of clear policies/directions are all prized in big corporations.

Oh, and I second (or third) the idea that you just move to San Diego. Seriously.
I'm not sure I like the sound of "require"... it sounds a lot like "draft".
US defence procurement woes
These are going to be a wild four years...
Require? What are they going to do to people who don't do it?

What paperwork are you going to have to fill out to get your open source project certified as community service, so you don't have to spend the time picking up trash along the road instead?
I still can't believe we voted him into office...2 years of political experience...the least of it.

united states of china soon
Ballmer Swipes At, Then Praises Open Source Competition
From the wording, it sounds like the "requirement" will only extend to high school and college students, not citizens of all ages.

I agree that this sounds onerous, but I suspect that the requirement will only extend to students at government-funded institutions. I seriously doubt that a requirement for all private citizens to give their time would stand up under judicial scrutiny.

The rest of this article is just baseless conjecture about what will and will not qualify as community service.
Yeah, there are some people who do that. But I really doubt a lot of them ARE doing so because they want to, but because given multiple factors (family, past history, school..life in general, really) that it's very difficult to get a good post-HS education with the budget and resources they have for a career they want. Loans, grants and scholarships are hard to come across especially with the way the economy is now..and like I said, I dropped out of HS to go to a community college. My tuition costs less than my textbooks, and in total as a full time student with a 12 unit courseload now I'm paying less than $1000 for classes+books+materials+parking permits and all that this semester. But some of my classmates are struggling with financial aid and jobs because they can't even afford to pay for the classes alone and they are residents, not students paying insanely high out-of-state rates.

For what it's worth, I have considered entering the foodservice industry, but as an owner/operator and not a minimum-wage employee. In the right location with the right food, there's a killing to be made and it could leave me a fair amount of time to work on what I want (code code code ;) ). But again like you point out, it's a different situation. Most high school dropouts wouldn't be considering that.

On a related tangent, what's interesting to note is just how much of those units I'm taking now can transfer to the schools I'm applying to. Almost all of my classes transfer to UC (I'm in a california CC), which means for the same as one year's tuition at a UC like UCLA or UC Berkeley, I could spend a couple years at a CC taking the same classes, possibly even pay rent on an apartment and gas for the car, and then transfer. I'm seeing more and more students go this route because they're short on money even to go to a UC. Like I said, mine this semester is under $1000 and I could probably make a fair amount of that back by selling my textbooks, this academic year at UCLA is just under $10,000 for undergrad.
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tuition is rising because the colleges can charge more. why can colleges charge more? because a big chunk of the tuition is paid for by the government.
price is set by supply and demand. supply in this case is inelastic, and when the government helps people pay for college a larger number attend, hence demand increases.
He took a very long time before he got to it. The point the top 50% makes it a pretty good one. There's a real race to the bottom going on on the App Store.. :(
The Peter Thiel Principle
You forget, Woz liked his job at HP before Apple and was reluctant to leave. Jobs had to get all Woz's family and friends to talk to him before he went and quit HP.
I imagine that public schools would be forced to add a community service requirement for graduating and that's about it.

Oh no! The horror! What a commie!

NOTE: Sarcasm not directed at previous comment.
Flagged.

The smear campaign from the catastrophically failed US far-right is starting. Comparing slavery and the plan on compulsory social work is disgusting.

And no, US far-right conservatives are NOT capitalists in the Adam Smith kind of way. If he were still around they'd smear him as socialist or some other idiocy.

This article could've been written by Ann Coulter.
Peter had a pretty amazing sequence of insights a year ago -

1) Financial institutions are in trouble

2) The ones that will do the worst can be predicted by looking at their campaign contributions
http://change.gov/agenda/education/ says: "Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of community service."

So is actually required, or do you just miss out on $4k if you don't do it? If the latter, that actually doesn't sound completely unreasonable. If the former, I don't see this passing muster with Congress let alone the Supreme Court.

There's nothing about a tax credit for the high school version, but plenty of high schools already require service hours to graduate and I haven't heard of the legality of that being challenged. I do disagree with the idea of the federal government micromanaging public schools in general, but that's a trend that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, given that even Republicans favor it.
Nanny state needs your help! What a surprise
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"Government-funded institutions" includes all but a very few universities in the U.S., because research grants and federal student aid are considered government funding.
"Obama and Biden will establish a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year."

Apparently, if you refuse, you don't get a tax break.
Are you guys not reading the document? It basically gives $4000 and up to 2/3's of tuition to every college student. the only requirement is 100 hrs of community service. If you dont want the money, you dont have to do it... It is a requirement for funding, not for being a student...gosh
It seems to me this is more about an effort to expand existing volunteer programs and add new ones while encouraging and rewarding people for community service than it is about slavery.

Then again, I'M NOT FUCKING INSANE. Flagged.
JX - Object Oriented jQuery Extension
Iran invests $2.5b in stem cell research
It doesn't actually solve the problem.

We already know the solution: a technology cheaper than coal to generate electricity and a technology cheaper than gasoline for energy storage and transport.

Helping third world nations is great. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.
Wow, McCains statements that Obama is a socialist were understated. This is communism!
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It is actually pretty horrible, as it stands.

For the kind of students who party their way through college, it would merely be a big waste of time. (Yes, waste. Forced community service always ends up going into lame make-work projects.) But for more earnest college students it would be a disaster. For the kids working their way through college, it would be a crushing burden to lose 2 1/2 weeks of fulltime work every year to government mandated projects. And for students who already spend their time on genuinely public minded projects, like open source, it would mean either (a) filling out a lot of paperwork to get the project certified, or (b) being yanked away from it for 100 hours a year, which is a large fraction of the time a college student can afford to spare for side projects.
Pray tell, why would far-right conservatives smear Adam Smith as a socialist? The guy practically wrote the free trade bible.
How To Do a Pitch
While I generally agree with your post, I just wanted to clarify that GM has actually lost about $18 billion (or $25 billion with today's figure) since 2004.

The rest of the 'loss' was simply a change in the accounting rules regarding how they valued pension and healthcare liabilities. So if you consider that $40-billion-or-so accounting change to be a loss, it was actually an accrued loss over a long period of time that was simply reported all at once.

On the more general topic: I'm not a fan of bailing out companies either, but one has to be pragmatic and consider whether letting such a huge part of the nation's workforce become unemployed in an already-bad economy is wise.

I think the better solution would be to let the companies go bankrupt, then create a massive program to retrain and re-employ the workers elsewhere (with unemployment pay contingent on showing up at training). The companies would eventually emerge from bankruptcy much smaller and healthier. This would allow them to focus on their electric car initiatives, and it would also allow them to fail without such dire consequences should they do so in the future.
I think it's pretty damn reasonable. An incredibly good deal, even.
Few degree programs are tailored to an individual. School is a place of babysitting of students, giving them time to figure out how to learn and work with others. And it's designed so that if a student hands in assignments and shows up to class, they will finish with some kind of a degree. Otherwise, or in conjunction with this effort, students are free to do as they please--they may try to start a business, join the honors program, start a club, join a sport, and/or do anything else. This means that a degree and grades are not necessarily proof of competence or a judgement of one's skill, but show the degree holder has been exposed to an environment where they had to learn and get along with others. The piece of paper after four to five years is just the minimum notification they have to give to kick a student out into the real world--it is up to the student himself to have become functional enough in that time to know to avoid a mind-sucking career.
For one thing, he supported progressive taxation, which is what all the Joe the Plumber smears were about.
Creating Filesystems with Ruby and FUSE
I know loads of people who aren't techies by any means but use or are considering using Firefox or Apple or Ubuntu. I can easily imagine Firefox getting 30% market share.
For the last month of the campaign, McCain's campaign attacked progressive taxation as redistributionist "socialism"... the OP is saying that Adam Smith supported progressive taxation, so that's why conservatives "would" smear Adam Smith.

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

"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.[16]"
This idea comes from Rahm Emanuel. Few years ago I picked up his book, "The Plan: Big Ideas for America", at an airport and read it on a flight back home. In it, him and his coauthor Bruce Reed, discuss all kinds of interesting ideas. The idea of 'mandatory youth service' has a whole chapter devoted to it. Rahm, who used to be a dual-Israeli citizen and spent some time in Israel, was clearly influenced by the ideas behind 'kibbutzim' which Wikipedia defines as "... a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture. The kibbutz is a form of communal living that combines socialism and Zionism." Kibbutzim has been largely a failure and the number of people actually participating in them has been declining for a long time.

I doubt this idea will get much traction since it will have hard time passing the Constitutionality smell test. They'll need to heavily incentivize students into signing to something like this (forgiving some student loans?!) if it has any chance of getting any traction.
Title should be "Someone uses a Mac near Obama". ;-)
They're changing this page as we're commenting on it. The stuff about tax credits wasn't there the last time I looked. They've also changed the wording about "requiring" certain numbers of hours.

They seem to be making this stuff up on the fly...
If (as other parts of the website seem to suggest) the policy is actually that you $4k tax credit if you choose to do the service, this isn't such a huge problem. If you have a job that pays more than $40/hr, don't quit it to do the service. If you don't have such a job, then figure out what your options for service are and decide whether $40/hr is sufficient motivation to get you to do them.
When I graduated from high school, I would not have been able to go to college if not for lots of help from the gov't in the form of grants and loans. After graduating, I personally felt that I should spend a year "giving back" to the country by participating in AmeriCorps. Ironically, I ended up learning way more from the experienced than I actually contributed during my year of service. Ask anyone who participated in either AmeriCorps or Peace Corps and they'll likely tell you the same thing.

So, as someone who voluntarily went through basically this exact program, it absolutely worked for me in terms of getting both a formal and non-formal educational experiences.
It sounds to me like an offer of $40 an hour for 100 hours of work. If I was a student, I'd probably consider this a good deal. If I was an American taxpayer, less so.
The stuff about the tax credit wasn't there till a couple minutes ago. That changes everything, of course. Then it becomes just one of those make-work projects like e.g. Boston organizes during the summer to keep unemployable teenagers busy till school starts again.
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