skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you follow the first link on the page you linked to there ("I don't use it") there is a brief discussion of his view of Gmail and Google+:

"As for Facebook and Google+, I reject them on principle because they require people to give their 'real names'. I am proud to identify myself when stating my views; I can afford to do that because I am in a fairly safe position. There are people who rationally fear reprisals (from employers, gangsters, bullies, or the state) if they state their views. For their sake, let's reject any social networking site which insists on being told a user's real name... Google+ says it will offer to hide the user's real name, but demands people prove an 'established identity' or provide ID. I am suspicious of this requirement, but not sure what it will mean in practice..."

"People sometimes ask me to recommend an email service. The two ethical issues for an email service are (1) whether you can use it without running any nonfree software (including nonfree Javascript code from the site), and (2) whether it respects your privacy... Last I heard, Gmail was satisfactory on issue 1, and probably so are many others. On issue 2, I have no way to verify that any email service is satisfactory. Therefore, I have no recommendation to offer... However, I can suggest that it may be wise to use an email service that is not connected with your search engine. That way you can be almost sure that your email contents don't influence your search results. You shouldn't identify yourself to your search engine in any case."
What? He/she wasn't relating it to oppressive camps at all. Perhaps re-read the comment.

I think that Facebook is relatively oppressive and authoritarian in the context of online services and social software in general. Extending the analogy to another context (death camps?) is... well, I don't know how to describe the irrelevance.
FTA: I don't know what Chris was referring to exactly, but as an angel investor this statement resonates with me right now. I've been seeing some really high valuations floating around.

Don't get me wrong -- there is nothing inherently wrong with high valuations if everyone is aligned in exit expectations. The problem is I don't think the alignment is there in many cases.

Keynes' quote is appropos: Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally.

Many of the insane valuation is herding instinct. When the market crashed in 2000-2, lots of shrugs and expressions of "Hoocoodanode?"
This is great.

I'm going to apply for and get a job at a company advertising for "ninjas," then not let my boss know when I'm taking vacation or a sick day - just so when he calls to ask where I am, I can reply with "Well, you did say you wanted a ninja programmer..."
weirdly, I get weekly updates from them even though I'm not on it, because someone signed me onto a corporate account. I get the constant linkedin "you might know Joe" emails too, so I though that was a reasonable assumption.

BTW @ the guy who called me a sociopath: Not all relationships are black and white. There's such a thing as being polite to someone at parties and still not wanting to know every detail of their life.
So, the open web should be more like WPF?

I agree with what he is actually saying. However, I am not that excited about building UIs with XML anymore though. I think we should have components that you can edit and layout with graphical designers.
Weekend Project: Bug Out with Entomologist
Ad hominems never help your argument but do degrade the discussion. Please avoid them.

The idea of "giving away" a right is not that simple--for example, I think there are certain rights you cannot legally waive. Even if what Facebook is doing is legal (which it probably is), this same principle can reasonably be extended to condemn what they are doing from an ethical standpoint.

Additionally, Facebook does not only affect the people using it. Information about people without accounts (provided by people with accounts) is still archived and searchable, potentially by unsavory entities. For these people, a certain right to privacy is basically taken away, and certainly not given away.
You've clearly never been to Southern California.
I don't know whether i should be happy that there is a camp for people who like facebook so they don't roam free everywhere else.
UN would be a better idea.

And while we're at it, let's remove/cancel(? - what's the right word?) the `veto` right too, so that no country can `veto` the decisions made by the whole world (attacking Iraq, Saving a murderous regime like Syria, etc.)
The only real difference for getting a job today with a Harvard vs Stanford job is that you might actually have to look for employers versus the employers coming to you. Obviously nobody knows what the job market will be like in 4 years.
If I'd submitted this, I'd use this quote as the title:

"What would it mean to be able to subclass an HTML Element?"

And then copy Alex's "platform manifesto" (from http://infrequently.org/2012/04/one-for-dave-and-david/) as the TL;DR:

"The network is our bottleneck and markup is our lingua-franca. To deny these facts is to design for failure. Because the network is our bottleneck, there is incredible power in growing the platform to cover our common use cases. To the extent possible, we should attempt to grow the platform through markup first, as that provides the most value to the most authors and provides a coherent way to describe behavior to JS.

As markup begets JS objects via a parser. DOM, therefore, is merely the largest built-in JS library.

Any place where you cannot draw a line from browser-provided behavior from a tag to the JS API which describes it is magical. The job of Web API designers is first to introduce new power through markup and second to banish magic, replacing it with understanding. There may continue to be things which exist outside of our understanding, but that is a challenge to be met by cataloging and describing them in our language, not an excuse for why we cannot or should not."

And then finally sum it up with this quote:

"It is high time we started designing low-level stuff for the web in idiomatic JS …"
I’m kind of embarrassed to call myself a Venture Capitalist.

In fact, most of us who call ourselves VCs should be too.

Why? Because MOST of us are hypocrites, and have NO idea what we’re doing.

how many VCs are there that have successfully grown from a few partners into BIG, HUGE companies with HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of people operating all over the world? where is the Google of VC firms? the Facebook of VC firms? the Apple of VC firms? why hasn’t this happened yet? why aren’t there VCs that invest in HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of companies every year?

and yet: the modern venture capital model has been around for perhaps 30-50 years, but we still haven’t quite seen the Henry Ford of venture capital.

we can do better.

Dave you're hilarious as usual.
In the US, architectural designs can be protected by copyright, but it is uncommon.

On the other hand, architectural drawings(aka "blueprints") are automatically protected by copyright as soon as they are published.
Can we say this is very un-pythonic?
That's nice.

What's Buenos Aires like, Josh Strike?
This should not be a surprise.

When I saw that Obama picked Biden as VP I knew that something this would happen. He has been a friend of Hollywood's for a very, very long time.

Furthermore he and Obama agreed to the Carter/Mondale model of how to run the VP office, where the VP is in the white house, in every meeting with the President and is the last man in the room. That gives Biden zero visibility..and a finger in every decision. Hence real power. (As opposed to the way that Reagan/Bush reportedly did things, where Bush's job consisted of checking each day that Reagan was still alive, and then taking the rest of the day off.)
Video: Demystifying Conducting
I'm not talking about contrarianism, or a compulsive desire to come to the opposite conclusion as others. I'm talking about critical thinking: The ability to maintain an unpopular view, after due diligence, and particularly the ability to do so in the face of social pressure.
PARIS scenery 2.0 - X-Plane.Org Forum
The easiest way of understanding quantum computing is to have a play with Oemer's QCL: http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/qcl.html
Managing development and business development in start-ups
You're taking it far too literal.

I'm aware of parents who have 6 year olds and 10 year olds using Facebook so that they have access to games and family. The Facebook UI/UX does do nasty tricks to coerce people into providing more information than they prefer.

Did you know that other users can volunteer your information? Someone else can register themselves as your family member, close friend, or classmate at a specific institution, without your consent. They can volunteer your location (city) as well. This was not possible in the past, before the "smart lists" feature. They're literally getting people to fill in the information of friends so that they can be targeted ads even if they chose not to provide that information to facebook. I don't think many people know this.
"Old Media"!?

It was launched in November 1995. To many thats old, but to most I would think thats not "Old Media" in the usual sense of the word.
That is one scary prospect. I think there are a bunch of people that would fall for such an offering. Look at how alot of the perks are already set up to comp you a drink or other such thing based on how long you have been playing. If you were to say the longer you play continuously, the better your odds,I think you would take every dollar an addicted gambler could scrounge. Sad.
Does anyone know if they have CouchDB on iOS, Android, or even on the browser? Last I checked, they didn't, and only had experimental builds on each.

To me, that'd be a much more compelling reason to use CouchDB, since syncing between server and client is a pain, and having CouchDB on both servers and client would make development life much easier for me.

If not, then publish the replication protocol. I tried looking for it once, and only found scant information on the mailing lists and documentation.
When software developers tape iPhones to Automatic Nerf Guns.
Actually this issue is important enough for me that I would.

I'm curious who is going to run as the Republican candidate for Senator this year in California. Because if they manage to pick a relative moderate (like Meg Whitman, but not Carly Fiorina), I'll be voting Republican.
I think he's saying that the open web needs to be designed from the viewpoint that JavaScript is the lowest level of abstraction (not C++), and that HTML is the highest level of abstraction.

In other words, design the entire platform from the point of view of web developers, not browser developers.
Hypegram Is a Simple, Beautiful Desktop Player for The Hype Machine
You are waaaaay overthinking this. Nobody thinks that a Facebook "friend" is the same as what you or I would call a friend in real life. For me, it means, "I know and like this person well enough". So I just accept most requests, as long as I have met the person and like them well enough.

Also, there is no "reject", there is only "ignore" (i.e., the person does not receive a "rejected" message, they'll just never get an "approved" message). And if someone doesn't respond to my friend request: who cares? It's just Facebook. It's not the be-all end-all social network manager; it's just a communication medium.
I really wish people would stop citing the Paradox of Choice. The studies are not reproducible, and meta-analysis reveals extra choices have basically zero impact on consumers. We've apparently somehow learned to cope, which is probably why a chain of supermarkets specializing in choice-free shopping has yet to take off.

See Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R. & Todd, P. M. (2010). Can There Ever be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 409-425.

You can download it here:
http://www.scheibehenne.de/ScheibehenneGreifenederTodd2010.p...
Tag Heuer
Cases like this confirm my opinion that SOPA/PIPA would actually be a good thing helping creatives protect their work.

We must not forget that the most vocal anti-SOPA/PIPA evangelists are passive consumers who just want stuff(tm) for free and don't care for much else.
also a much broader audience, currently its almost developers/gamers only who of course have up to date browsers.
No one is being punished for being wrong.

From the article, the problem with the leaders was in how they handled the management of the team and the publicity of the announcement. You know there are problems when many of the collaborators asked to be left off of the paper; insufficient experimental checks were done (according to some team members); some of the team members heard about the results from the press release rather than from their colleagues; and so on.

The team also did not ask them to step down. The internal vote of 16-13 was insufficient to have them removed (2/3 majority required). So they really did step down on their own.

And in the end, "science" worked.
Just took a look at QuickLisp and that's a big improvement over the last time I looked at Common Lisp. On the other hand, there's a couple of points to make.

1) While quick lisp does have an amazing array of packages, there's still some simple, yet glaring deficiencies. For instance, there's no package to talk over a serial port. If I go to Google, the top link is a stack overflow post with some code on how to do that on Windows. The next few posts links are either people being told to use the FFI or raw writing to /dev/stty with the unix command line being used to set the tty parameters.

Comparatively, the first link Google returns for python is for PySerial, which will handle all the serial port settings on its own.

I was originally going to use this as an example of contrasting documentation, since I assumed that both languages would at least have a serial library.

2) If I want to send an e-mail, quicklisp offers cl-smtp and smtp4cl, while python mostly just offers smtplib. On the other hand, the documentation for smtplib (http://docs.python.org/library/smtplib.html) is readily available, while cl-smtp is limited to the (admittedly clear) README file.

---

I happen to love the lisp aesthetic (though I'll admit to preferring scheme over CL). Still, the main thrust of the article is that Lisp is cursed with a disorganized array of unsupported, poorly documented, incomplete solutions. QuickLisp has only solved the disorganized part of that. If there's a bug in smtplib, I can feel pretty secure that it will get fixed. Honestly, I bet I'd have the same luck with cl-smtp, but what about smtp4cl?

I don't believe that it's a curse and I do think that it can be solved. However, this is a cultural problem in the lisp community and ignoring it. To put it differently, if we'd had this discussion four years ago, someone would have brought up asdf and said that that solved all the problems. However, we now have QuickLisp because asdf wasn't solving all the problems. It's great and things are better than they were, but we're not done yet.
I remember reading Chris Dixon's original post. I even popped the question to a friend... "Pop Quiz.. Name one game other than Angry Birds that Rovio had produced".

He named three... all of them being Angry Birds update releases. lol.

MG Siegler has had multiple rants about mainstream news outlets not attributing him for scoops and releases.

http://tinyurl.com/mgsieglerrant

"The Wallstreet Journal is Fucking Bullshit"

http://parislemon.com/post/18182094905/the-wall-street-journ...
> A lot of people walked around with heads up displays attached to their glasses.

No they did not. You make it sound like this was a popular trend. Wearing an awkward head-mounted display connected to a crappy laptop was something only a few super-geeks with disposable money did.
n=76 also seems low to me for this type of experiment. There was a great New Yorker article titled "THE TRUTH WEARS OFF", which if I remember correctly, discussed the difficulties of reproducing scientific experiments because we underestimate the occurrences of statistical anomalies. Good time to read that article again.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...
Signing a petition is a symbolic act that causes you to commit to yourself the idea "I am the sort of person who cares about this issue".

Or let you believe you've actually done something, so now you can direct your attention to other things.

Is there any evidence to show that signing a petition makes a person more inclined to take additional practical action?
Obviously the Fast Company blogger (Josh Linker) should have cited (at the least!) Chris Dixon. And his explanation doesn't really hold water: "A friend of mine sent me that excerpt and I had no idea it was yours or anyone else's so I didn't attribute it when I wrote my post."

But, speaking as a former reporter, it's a fallacy to tar every medium (or even "old media") for the f-up of a Fast Company blogger. The responsibility belongs to that writer and publication; other outlets do not bear collective guilt for a competitor's screwup.

See http://xkcd.com/385/ -- the same argument properly applies to generalizations about newsgathering organizations (or in this case, blogs hosted by magazines started in the first dot-com era).
Also the conversation a few weeks back where free software enthusiasts who developed non-free software at their jobs were talking with him...

http://lunduke.com/?p=2273

> You see, I make software for most of my living. And I talked with Stallman (in email) before the show, about how I would love to get any ideas he has on how a developer, of proprietary software, can move that software to a Free and Open license… while still keeping food on the table for his family. From a practical standpoint.

> This is a topic that has come up time and again. And I really wanted to get Stallman’s thoughts on the matter.

> So, near the beginning of the interview, I ask him about that. How does someone like me make the move to working on only Free Software and still support his family?

> The end result was that he feels that all developers and businesses of proprietary software should fail. And that it is more important for there to not be proprietary software… than it is to be able to feed your children.

> I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not putting words in his mouth. I even asked him, point blank, to verify his stance.

> He did not say that having Free Software is more important than kids having food to eat. I repeat: He said that it was more important that non-free software be gone… than for you to be able to feed your kids. That’s how evil he thinks non-free software is. Evil enough to justify causing significant harm to your family to do away with a small amount of it. (Of course this isn’t the first time Stallman has been anti-children.)
At this point we don't know that they do anything. The blue light could be just for effect for all we know. It might just be a way to hype the product before they have a functional prototype.

I think if we want them to demo the actual product and show us what it really does, we should start telling Brin and the rest that we don't believe there is a real product.

Why should we believe that anyway unless they demo what it can do? That marketing video doesn't prove anything. It probably isn't anything like that actually.
Original: The of course principle of design
By the same token, saying that one wants to block bad foreign websites is not the same thing as "voicing support for SOPA"--which is the connection the linked petition tries to make. And no surprise, since the SOPA protest was so huge. I expect every single IP-related issue to be called "SOPA" for the next couple years as a result. It has become a power word.
I am very sure they do not have such a button. Primarily because they do not think about those consequences. To the contrary: Their social graph is so valuable I am sure they will do anything to protect it from being destroyed.

And how do you know your government has turned oppressive? It won't be as visible as with the NSDAP the next time. Some would argue its already under way.
I think a potential lesson, maybe a good one, is to try very hard to have all your collaborators on board with a very surprising result before you publish.
Sending video fast: an engineer’s perspective
There are already quite a few games made using this Brigade path tracer, which is open-source by the way. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3M-cuCgS1k

Get the Brigade sources from here: http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker/
That is indeed annoying. As a work around, if you use a browser or browser extension that lets you modify the DOM on the fly, you can disable the paste blocking. For instance, in Safari, use "Inspect Element" on the password field, find the onpaste="..." attribute, double click the onpaste and change it to something that isn't a valid event name.

You can then paste in the password field.

It should be reasonably possible to make a bookmarklet that goes through all form elements on a page and does this automatically to all that have onpaste handlers, so you don't have to bust open the inspector and dick around every time you want to log in.
MyGengo has built a fantastically useful tool which has saved me a ton of time and money. I don't know anything about the addressable market size, but they have <i>nailed</i> the product.
Excluding a group is not inclusive, nor is focusing on a particular subset. Inclusion means everyone.

This is creating a positive effect for women, but having a negative effect on men by excluding them from the ability to qualify for their grants. That is not a solution, it does not solve the problem, it is a reversal of the problem which shifts the negativity to the other end of the spectrum.

A proper solution would be to remove the negativity altogether, perhaps by initiating societal reforms that don't shoehorn men and women into a particular role at a young age.
whose apparent sense of inadequacy and misunderstanding of the nature of personal relationships are written large across every aspect of that system

I believe the contrary is true. Facebook is successful because Zuckerberg et al understand social ties to the point where they have locked people into their system, got them to interact more, provide all their private information, and then profit off them by serving them all intrusive advertising.

I don't think it would be at all possible if they didn't understand social relationships. They know them intimately enough to skew our idea of privacy and social communication to the point of profit.

I say kudos to them for their brilliance. But I also think they are one of the most evil corporations in existence.
After reading it I was going to say the same thing. What I don't understand is why they compared it to the statistical average rather than just recording what they rolled. It would have been fairly trivial to eliminate that particular statistical variability from the experiment.
What´s next? Chalkdrawing on Pioneer Way? Airplane Banners? Telegrams? Microcopters flying into the Y Combinator offices? Big band? Self-invitation? Roses?

I´m curious for the next ideas. It might be just natural that a platform made by hackers for hackers shows examples of how people try to hack the system. The recent examples might not be the myth creators but the YC partners know better about funny application stories. They might just be afraid to share too many stories as they will create new “expectations of expectations” on side of the applicants.

Beyond the recommendation system and some metrics, I´m convinced that Y Combinator is always reaching out for new circles and creatives. Just because 6 degrees of separation (recommendation) can bite into your neck too.

(Read Levi Strauss on hot+cold societies and the meaning of artefacts and cultural institutions. This might sound farfetched but I think it´s worth reading in this context. )