skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with this actually, for several reasons! You're speaking about the Facebook of yesterday. Within the last year, they have introduced several features which remove the control of your privacy, and distribute the information gathering to your connections.

But first, in regards to the Facebook of yesterday, you will find many resources that describe how few people actually change their privacy settings or even understand them. This has improved over time, but I know plenty of intelligent people who don't understand many of the settings that have been introduced over the years. The product that they signed up for isn't the same as it is today.

In regards to the reduced control over your own privacy, it's important to note that your friends can volunteer information about you indirectly by using "smart lists". You can tell facebook what city someone is in, what university, whether they are in your family, or if they are a close friend. You can add geographic information to other peoples' photos. Also, because of the different levels of update subscriptions, Facebook has made it favorable for people to use the "Life Stories" feature of their profiles/timeslines because they don't know which friends have unsubscribed from seeing "all updates" ("most important" updates most likely implies Life Stories).

Also, certain features still have no privacy. Answers to all Facebook Questions are public on your profile. Even as intimate with the privacy settings that I am, I didn't know this! So you either have to not use the feature (which would require knowing about the privacy setting before using it), or deleting these answers after making them.

Edit: I forgot to mention that so many people make public posts on Facebook, that you can't comment on any of those without your comments also being public. Most people don't care. So the network is becoming more public, with less opportunity to stay private. And remember that when you comment on those public posts, your comment is shown in the ticker and newsfeeds of your friends (which, in my opinion, is a violation of my privacy. Just because I comment on something doesn't mean I want it notified to my friends). These two actions of public posts have no privacy options... the only thing you can do is avoid commenting on public posts.
The experimenters want the test subjects to believe that the die roll is truly private and therefore that the subjects can, individually, get away with a lie. An easy way to do that is to actually make the die roll private.

Maybe you could devise equipment that would convince subjects that roll was private even though it really wasn't. Ideas on how to do that? Hidden wireless/infrared camera in the cup?
I put my facebook account on hold awhile back; but if I decide to reactivate it and if I'm ever job hunting again during that time, I'll probably either just make a fake facebook account or I'll have two separate accounts: one for inappropriate shenanigans/goofing off with friends... and another for serious business, completely devoid of anything that could possibly be deemed inappropriate.

Although, I kind of doubt it would ever get to that point as I prefer to be my own boss, but I'm curious as to what those of you on HN might have to say about this hack(;))/idea. I'm sure it isn't new.
Hooray, been hacking on the upstream PouchDB myself, glad to hear you've got it far along!
I thought a hidden camera scenario would be fairly easy. Two way mirror, hidden camera, etc.

If Justin Bieber is allowed hidden cameras, surely science is, too.

Also interesting: the experimenters are testing lying but refuse to lie themselves in order to properly carry out the experiment. I feel like there's some special irony in there somewhere.
FYI: neither of those fragments used the passive voice.
I agree...I don't use Rails for production work (yet); however, I dig what is going on here and I've also donated. The Rails community definitely takes care of business and seems to have a much more entrepreneurial spirit than most (if not all) other dev communities that I've witnessed. I'll have some of that please!
That's strange. I created a fake account some years ago, to contact some old friends whose email I had lost. I used the account for almost one week. To this day I still get a facebook email every 4-5 days. If nobody invites me to a group (!?) or posts new photos in their gallery, then it's facebook itself who wants to remind me that it's been a long time since the last time I logged in, and my friends are waiting to hear from me!
The "Old" refers to the medium of distribution.

I have no idea what "Fast Company" is, but according to wikipedia it's a printed magazine.
An instance of a common practice is a minor decision, in my opinion. You may be adding fuel to the fire, but the proportion is insignificant.
Get advice on YC from alums
Does anyone know what language the previous JSON parser was written in...Erlang?
Wow, did not know! Thank you!
Facebook provides a low friction way to stay in contact with people. If I were getting a daily status update email from each of my 100 friends, I'd go crazy. Checking FB while waiting for the subway is easy. Similarly, I can publish updates without worrying too much that I'm secretly infuriating my friends who have more important things to be reading. I can post interesting links without imposing the expectation that you read them (as would happen if I emailed a cool story around). I don't mean to sell something you don't want to buy, but a semi-private microblogging platform is a wholly different connection experience than email.
Which I realize, which is why I wasn't asking what's he coded lately, but the more broad sense of what he's done. As I posted to skore, much of what he's done of late has been acts of pettiness and divisiveness that have served to do little more than to push users and developers away from the FSF and GPL. A good leader understands the politics of their actions, and RMS has been doing an increasingly poor job of that.
This is one example of statistical sloppiness in reporting, comprising:
(a) sloppiness about the quantity or proportion being asserted (e.g. "many" rather than "at least 4000" or "10%" or "24"), and (b) sloppiness about the confidence interval.

I'd love to see a sidebar to articles asserting trends providing both a clear quantity estimate and the confidence interval around it. I'd even settle, in early articles on a supposed trend, for something like "We're asserting that this has happened more than N times." where N might be as small as 0.

I'm aware that my proposed standard could even be applied to this comment:), so I'm simply asserting that this sloppiness exists. Here's one exemplary takedown:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/contentmakers/2010/03/27/did-the-...
We invited a few YC alums to answer questions on Askolo - ask them about experiences going through the YC application and interview process, what YC is like from a founders point of view, and anything else you'd like to know. They are not speaking on behalf of YC, but rather to offer personal thoughts and perspectives.
Do you have a source for where you find these interview puzzles? I would like to take a few and see how they are set up.
White House ask: Tell us your startup story (Startup Visa)
If you are interested in Couch-like magic in the mobile context, we've got an active mailing list for TouchDB and other mobile projects here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase
Aging HIV/AIDS Survivors Create New Class of Patients
In the interest of discussion I up voted you, not sure who is down voting.

Just out of curiosity, where in the bill does it suggest they could, by virtue of this bill, monitor anyone's connection. To me the bill seems to be about the sharing of information, not the collection of it. I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.
Reason Number 0: Because your users have decided they aren't THAT into signing up with you, after all.

It may sound like a conflation of the other reasons that were listed (just lower the barrier and people will care enough to sign up), but it's more important than that. I have to tell this to my clients (website developers) over and over again - No matter how much you tweak your signup form, the single and best asset you can have in enticing signups is something that the user really, really wants to sign up for.

Put differently - There surely is some wiggle room in pushing a couple of percentage points out of your signup statistics, but that often ranges with the margin of statistical error.

No optimization will ever make up for asking users to sign up for something they don't actually want or need.

While blog posts like this one are nice for people who obsess about optimization, I have seen them do a lot of damage - for instance, I still get people who are convinced that the one thing that is holding back their business is having a four page signup (membership selection, registration details, confirmation, checkout) instead of a three page setup. Some even go so far as to demand that everything should be on a single page.

In my experience, there is a clear, inversely proportional relation between the obsession over signup optimization and the value that the website offers to customers.

If your website gives out free gourmet food and massages, you can literally require people to fill out ten page forms and ask for confirmation via standard mail - your signup form will still convert users like crazy. At the opposite end of that scale, there are forms like the recent April Fools joke 'Google Nigeria' - the simplest possible form: Enter your Credit Card details and be done.

Sorry about the rant, but this (pardon my french) wanking about optimization has produced a lot of endless, annoying discussions with clients who burn up all their time on optimization - time that they should have rather put into having a sound business idea that people would actually care about.

(And yes, I know that #5 and #8 go in the same direction as this rant, but they just range in a completely different category and all this just triggered my rage mode.)
PEPFAR's Second Phase
Awesome GIFs
These awesomely cool animated GIFs were made out of images from the Library of Congress. Any fans of Monty Python or artists Cyriak or Gilliam will certainly see their influences on these amazing works of art.
Thanks. Reading through the changelog, you all have done some tremendous work.
Every year we’re throwing more and more JS on top of the web, dooming our best intended semantic thoughts to suffocation in the Turing tar pit. JS libraries are the “fuck it, we’ll do it live!” of the web.

Still waiting for someone to invent the thing that lets you write server-side code and client-side code in the same language in the same file, and magically handles the execution of what where (and the secure transmission of stuff between the two) on the server.

I can imagine something like Parse where in addition to sending them data and stuff to store, you can send them a block of code to run on the server. They would of course cache compiled versions of those blocks for speed, but the idea of blocks (as in Obj-C) is an attractive one.
I see privacy, but how do you give up free speech?
> Some people just like camp

And that, my friend, is the tyranny of the majority. It is the people who just like things the way they are who opt willfully to take the side of the-way-is. You attacked, wrote a comment, preserving the status quo simply because you happen to find yourself with that preference, rather than considering the much more existential plight of the minority.
I also do this on a very regular basis.
But anyway, the thing is X client/server architecture allows a lot of flexibility. It is a very very strange idea to remove modularity from a system. (Especially when it was introduced decades ago.)
Josh Linker, author of the Fast Company piece, responded in the comments:

"Hi Chris. Josh Linkner here, the author of this piece @ Fast Company.
I owe you a HUGE apology!! 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. As an author,
VC, and entrepreneur I hold myself to the highest standards
and I'm deeply sorry this happened. Will correct and cite
you ASAP. Again, honest mistake and I'm sorry it happened.
Happy to chat further if you'd like - www.JoshLinkner.com"
Why stop at puzzle games? Otoy is leveraging this technology to disrupt Hollywood and so can you! I'd love to build something like this that also integrated http://kevinkarsch.com/publications/sa11.html and http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webgl/jsartoolkit_web... for photorealistic augmented reality.
It looks like a version of one of the most popular drupal themes, Rubik.
as far as I'm concerned every official, elected or not, of every country in the world is a useless nuisance (some would call them a necessary evil, that's up for debate).

I'll split the difference with you, they are useless evil.
I have a genuine fondness for lisp, but this article lost my interest pretty quickly with the thought experiment. "Adding object orientation to C" doesn't require "the programming chops of Bjarne Stroustrup"; you can write object-oriented code in unmodified C (indeed, there are people who do exactly that). Nor is C++ the only way to extend the language to add convenience to doing so. Objective-C, for example, takes a completely different and much simpler approach. C++ doesn't even satisfy the stated requirement of "keeping them backward-compatible with the original languages, modulo some edge cases", unless "some edge cases" means "large parts of the language" (semantics of storage class specifiers and type qualifiers, what is and isn't an lvalue, rules for implicit type conversion, ...)

From a certain perspective, these are silly little details, but if you don't understand the silly little details of the other languages you write about, why should I listen to what you have to say about the virtues of lisp?
Vesting is a hack
Arguments against the Real Name policy are valid if all your thoughts, opinions, and actions all funnel through that one social network. In reality, however, there are many alternate forums for expressing your views with varying levels of anonymity, and I think that's a good thing! The freedom to choose anonymity between forums is great. I'm glad that certain networks stick to a real name policy.
White House response to "Repeal the Patriot Act" petition on WethePeople
Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
despite my statistical uncertainty, I think it is a lot easier to show a subject that they're not being tricked if they aren't. People are REALLY good at picking up being tricked or not from very slight nonverbal communication and environmental clues.
Basic quantum mechanics should be a high-school subject. The way physicists teach it currently, based on its historical development instead of on the modern understanding, is tragic. It just makes everyone repeat that nonsense quote, that nobody understands quantum physics.

Teaching angular momentum and Clebsch-Gordan coefficients seems pointless. There should be a standard class on probability theory and statistics. Quantum theory should be introduced as a generalization of probability theory. This is the right foundation for the field, not some vague and basically meaningless statements like particles are both particles and waves.
There's a partial of list exemptions here:

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

I was wrong, by the way: it turns out that it's the librarian of congress and not the executive branch that has the power to do this regulation. That's probably more stable and less likely to be walked back, which is good.

My read is that a simple backup is not exempted though. You need to be breaking the CSS encryption for the purpose of making a fair use distribution. Obviously IANAL, you should read the law, yada yada yada.
Amazing Abstract Algebra: Groups and Rotations
Appreciated! :)
I agree with you completely. QuickLisp does a damn fine job of solving some major problems. Honestly, looking through QuickLisp while writing up my post has made me consider moving from scheme back to CL for the first time in a long time.

My comment about asdf mostly comes from my experiences back in 2005 when I repeatedly heard that Common Lisp had NO problems and that asdf was so superior to CPAN or rubygems that there was no need to implement a new package system. In the same way, I often heard that we didn't have an issue with insufficient libraries, since UFFI (or was it CFFI?) has solved all of that. I wouldn't have been surprised if those same commentators would today declare that QuickLisp has solved everything.

However, those conversation that I had back in 2005 were not with you and I apologize for putting words in your mouth.
It took me more than four months after college to find my first job as an intern. Six months later, I got offered a better job so I quit. However during the transition I was offered some well paid freelance gigs so I didn't end up taking the second job. After 4 years of freelancing and moving out of a big city, I got tired of working alone so I joined a small team in a non-tech company. Six month later, I was getting bored so I looked for work in a major city. I found one startup that did something that sounded interesting, so I sent them an email even though they weren't advertising opened positions. An hour later I got a response, and two weeks later I was working for them. The past 3 months, I got offered 2 jobs and Facebook contacted me for the second time.

This isn't even the Silicon Valley -- I live in Europe. Sometimes I wonder if I'm smart or not. I know I probably wouldn't be able to answer all of these trick questions I hear about. I think I'm much better at abstracting concepts and seeing the whole picture. I love programming, but so far I haven't found a place where I can have as much fun as when I am creating software on my own, free of constraints and in control of everything. When I work on my own, every now and then I stop coding, sometimes for days, thinking, sketching, until I know exactly what I'm going to do and can explain why in plain English.

Anyways, I think younger programmers might enjoy taking time answering these kinds of question, but I'm the kind of person that wishes he didn't have to sleep so he could spend more time working on his own projects, so I don't bother. If you want me to be interested, you'd have to find a way to convince me that I would be working in an environment that feels like I'm working on my own project. I want to work with motivated people that care more about their product than getting funded. I don't want to work in an environment where the number of closed tickets is a metric for productivity.
You tried camping and it was awesome. It was fun getting a group together and having a lot of interaction with them. Working on projects together, sharing gossip at meals and in tents, going on day trips and coming back with pictures and stories. Great stuff. People who spend time camping together share a bond and become potential lifelong friends.

When camping was new, relatively few people went camping. The most exciting, adventurous and challenging way to camp is, of course, to bring your own food and gear and rough it, just you and nature.

Some businesses saw an opportunity to introduce a lot more people to camping and make some money. They'd build some cabins around a lake and do some marketing. It's not the same, but most people weren't going to rough it in the woods anyway, right?

A Harvard kid announced a new camp one day for other Harvard kids. Everyone who was anyone started going to Mark's camp. If you knew people going to this camp, and you wanted to really connect with them, you had to go to Mark's camp to do it. Sure, there were other ways to connect with them, but Mark's camp is where people are spending a lot of their time and Mark's campfire is where they share their stories. In fact, over a tenth the population of planet Earth has made Mark's camp their hangout.

You still love camping as much as you ever did, and you want to connect and share stuff with all your family and friends. But it really grates on you that you have to walk through Mark's gate and live by Mark's rules in order to do that. Isn't there some way you could round up a crew, leave Mark's camp behind, and strike out into the wild somewhere, just you and your friends, to do some real camping?
I don't think there is any existential plight in not signing up for Facebook. You just don't sign up for it. Also, sharing your opinion about whether or not something is a problem is not an "attack".
Hmm, that's true, but it may differ by field. For example Goldman recruits much more heavily at Harvard than Stanford, but small startups recruit more at Stanford. I think my problem is I don't know what I want to do yet - still split between finance or entrepreneurship, or even pure research :P
As a kid I was bullied for using my computer to talk to people. Now I'm bullied for not using my computer (facebook) to talk to people. The bullies never die.
There is something to be said for the novelty probably getting more interest, but I think that giving puzzles around the real work the hire will perform tells them as much about your company and the problems they can help you solve, as it tells you about the candidates ability to do so. A win/win as they say.

I already ask about 10 technical questions in each of the interviews I conduct, and having a problem online for each candidate to hack on would be really useful.

Now that I think about it, I may even consider using something like this to drive internal improvement projects. Some people just love the challenge, and the 'a' people always step up, you just have to ask.
Any package for Mac in the works?
Old media in general does not cite its sources adequately. Most articles that report on research fail to cite the publications they are reporting on and, in most cases, butchering quite badly. This is probably a hold-over from a time when such publications were beyond easy reach of the average reader, but that has changed. Even if the article is behind a journal's pay-wall, pre-prints are usually available through sites such as arXiv. New media does a far better job of linking to sources and I thank them for it.
"Corollary: Virtuous cycles in the social dimension will augment the technical power of any language by an order of magnitude."

To wit: Java, Go, C++,....
What about a venture bootstrapped company? ala Atlassian.
FathomDB (YC W08) introduces PlatformLayer: XaaS
I had it for a long time (about 2 months probably) by default already.
Apologizing to Chris Dixon - This is How It's Done.
I'm sorry that my comments come off as harsh, but the original line struck me as so completely basic it's like something you would tell someone who had never worked in IT. They clarified later that they had tried to plan ahead but came up a little short, which I can understand; no estimation is perfect.

I have no idea how many users Sportsline had but it was a bunch. Peaks of 64k hits per second on the dynamic layer, up to 8 gigabits sustained traffic in one datacenter... it was pretty ugly on firefighting days. I don't mean to poop on them, but if they're as big as they seem to be I hold them to a higher standard than a 6 month old start-up fresh out of college.

I agree it's hard. The fact that they were able to handle the traffic they did with only a small amount of downtime is a testament to the fact that they did have their shit together (as well they should with the number of users they had already).