skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(cross-posting and expanding from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4296416 because that thread got dead'd and I crave more attention).

We've reached a dangerous point. Everybody in the world joining the internet combined with a lack of knowledge about how things work means the unwashed masses gravitate towards centralized services. Instead of building distributed competitive services on top of a distributed fault-tolerant bi-directional network, we have rampant mass centralization. Protocols and interoperability are dead.

People aren't building billion dollar companies on top of application level protocols because open protocols would invite competition. Why compete when you can do a land grab for average people mindshare and lock 'em in forever?

We are fighting pressure of hundreds of millions of new pocketputers being sold every year. Our tiny idealistic cries of "more decentralization, no ads, and open data!" have the importance of a fish farting in the ocean. The teenagers and moms want to access their monkeysphere gossip. Their only care about technology is if somebody they find attractive is using it.

We can now almost legitimately say "The Internet is down!" when AWS goes tits up. People can't get news from their favorite boy bands when mysql hoses twitter (for the 7,000th time). Apple is centralizing document and data structure storage. Google could reproduce the thought patterns of a billion people if they cared enough. Distributed openness lost about five years ago.

I forgot my point. Anyway, go read http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...
They are not doing much of a job of disrupting the tv part of the deal. $120/mo with Comcast gets you the same channels, Internet, dvr, and telephone service with no contract. They also have customer service. When you call Comcast about a service outage, they prorate it every single time.

The real disruption here is free Internet. And for that I tip my hat to google.

Disruption to cable would be a la carte channel selection in any market.
Having version 2 as in-app purchase means your version 2 app has to include version 1 in it. Good luck with implementing that. What if my version 2 is a major rewrite and I change software architecture or want to use new features. Can you imaging writing an application with 2 different interfaces, database formats and feature sets, just to make it possible to upgrade with in-app purchase? No, thank you.
Populist counter-viewpoint: Twitter is literally nothing without the users. No content, no revenue, no value. They owe their users everything.

edit: I deserved that. :)
Again it's very hard to read the small grey text on white background.
Zynga Killed The Baker
Ask HN: Advice on being hired by a startup
Hey all, I've created a throwaway account as to preserve my anonymity.

Here's my scenario: I've just had a job offer from a small startup. I've been in various discussions with them, been through a sort of technical interview and talked at length with the founder.

I've never worked at, or had a job offer from, a startup so I'm not sure on best practice. The salary offered was about what i expected and it also included a percentage of equity in the company, to be vested over time. This all sounds great as I've always wanted to work at a startup, but I have a few concerns that I'm hoping you guys might assist with, and perhaps help with my deliberation.

The startup itself is based quite a distance from where I'm currently located, and would require me to relocate. I'm not averse to this but it just means I want to be extra cautious before I make any decision.

So my questions are:

What is a reasonable percentage to be offered in terms of equity? I would be employee number 4 or 5. Is it advisable to speak to a lawyer about these things? Is there anything to be careful/mindful of?

Finally, whilst there's bound to be an element of risk with a startup, what due diligence should I undertake to ensure any decision I make is right one? Is it reasonable to ask to see their earnings, for example (please don't shout me down if I'm way off base here!)? How might I roughly gauge their likelihood to be successful?

Thanks in advance.
The CSS is actually using "dimGrey" for text. DIM! Ironic
These articles have made me want to buy a new monitor at home, but the 7 year-old 24" Dell monitor that I have still works perfectly fine. It's more than bright enough and there are no defective pixels. The $800 or whatever it cost back then seems like a lot, but what other 7-year-old computer part does anyone still use today? (My mouse and HHKB are getting there...)
You misconstrue my concern. I am happy to allow anyone who is willing to risk losing everything, give their money to some entrepreneur in the hopes of a big payday. It is exactly like going to Vegas with your funds and throwing it away.

My concern is that the exact argument was used with 'sub prime' mortgages as well, which was that plenty of people who couldn't qualify with the existing rules were perfectly capable of paying a mortgage. And they did. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who did not qualify under the 'old' rules but could get in under the 'new' looser rules. More money was unlocked for mortgages, more mortgages were written, unscrupulous people exploited than and herded that money into a giant pool of risk and when the balloon went up, blam! We took a big hit which we are collectively paying off through a stagnant economy.

That exact mechanism (to my way of thinking, happy to find someone who can show me why I shouldn't worry) is going to be enabled by the combination of the JOBS Act and stuff like this. Unscrupulous people will convince folks to invest in startups. There will be LOTs of money chasing few startups, valuations will skyrocket as the money tries to find a place to land which will on paper present illusory massive returns (on paper).

This is exactly analogous that the sub-prime rule changes allowed more people to buy houses, but the supply of houses didn't suddenly go up so the price per house when up instead. That raised house valuations which allowed for 'flipping' and some quick gains which people exploited which drove a bubble in real estate.

There aren't that many more startups, and startups that can't get funded today suddenly have access to funds that lets them get funded. So now you, with your 100K$ of 'mad money' to invest get less equity for your investment and your risk is increased because there are more places out there which are bad investments, getting funded anyway and creating noise in the system.

We showed quite clearly in the 90's that when 'retail investors' aka people with money they really can't afford to lose but seeking returns that aren't defensible by economic reasoning, get involved, the sharks come out and fleece them. After the fact a few of the more egregious offenders get prosecuted but the cost is huge.

We should know better. We should find a way to let you invest where you have to make some sort of binding personal responsibility oath which says "I will never ever ask anyone else to cover my losses by this activity even if those losses are the direct result of being swindled by a smooth talking tool of a salesguy."

If you're willing to sign such an affadavit, then more power to you.
So true.
Reading books about marketing is good but they are too 'vague'.
From my experience, executing marketing / selling is much harder (and more fun) than you think and the only way to learn it. Just get out of the building and start embarrassing yourself (literally).
Thanks glimcat..that was pretty helpful
Conway's Game of Life emulated in Conway's Game of Life
> On the one hand paid upgrades can produce the wrong incentive on the developer

The incentive to continue development?

> ... Steam ...

You can't compare traditional software to games. A game is finished at some point. There are only bug fixes to come.

Traditional software is expected to get feature updates. If you want to see what happens when software gets to the "finished" status take a look at the outcry Sparrow created. They halted development of new features and people went crazy.

As a developer I'm perfectly fine with no paid upgrades but then don't expect updates for your already bought software - you got what you paid for.
I'd be interested to compare the "seek time" though. Platter drive seek times can be pretty nasty, but I'd be interested to see if Dropbox or some competitor could serve up better with network latency involved.
5 Deadly Mistakes You Might Be Making On Your Photography Website @MediaNovak
The 9999 who go "ugh, there are no good apps on the Mac" because they were all removed from the app store.
A long post on the topic of CNC, printing firearms, and more from a few months back:

http://www.popehat.com/2011/10/06/the-third-wave-cnc-stereol...
>Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around.

This is something I have very little knowledge of... I have a (perhaps irrational and unjustified) generally low opinion of marketing people, and little contact with that world, but I thought that adwords/seo people were usually mediocre programmers.

> (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)

so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over? Clearly you are good at this sort of thing, you are a reasonable programmer, and on top of that, you are a good writer, and have a bit of fame. (I am convinced that being able to write well is one of those skills that, while nearly useless on it's own, dramatically multiplies the value of any other skills you obtain.)

I mean, I'm not saying you are wrong... just that it's more complicated than that. Marketing fluff, I mean, selling something for money that is pure marketing and nothing else is harder than it looks. And actually providing a service to a large number of users is also harder than it looks.

There is always that choice of "do I spend my time improving the product?" or "do I spend my time on marketing?" - the more time you spend on the latter, the harder the former becomes. The more time you spend on the former, the easier the latter becomes.

This is my current problem; I can't add users much faster than I am without degrading the service for existing customers. Marketing, right now, is mostly a 'for fun' thing.
It looks interesting. Thanks for the info. Just watched. :D
That doesn't include (at least transparently): actually running the fiber to your house, getting permits to run the fiber through various properties along the way, installing and maintaining switches routers amplifiers etc to give you the service, etc.
Heh, well, the private sector is immensely corrupt, too. Witness the news from Wall Street on just about any given day. It's not fair to point to one thing the government screwed up and say that government is wholly corrupt. It is imperfect but we're supposed to be working towards a "more perfect union," not that we had achieved it already.

The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA, and we can scare politicians into doing the right thing if necessary. If government corruption was as bad as you seem to think, Solyndra would still be getting paid and none of us would know about it.
I looked up price bashing (using Google, haha) and didn't get satisfactory results. Can you provide a link that gives a good explanation?
I started as a developer, coded the first version of Visual Website Optimizer myself, but quickly discovered the importance of marketing. I agree to the OP's assessment that marketing is every bit as juicy as coding. Discovering a channel, executing a successful marketing campaign and crunching out hard ROI from it, seeing 10 customers because of it is as exciting (if not more) as learning the wonderful node.js and implementing a chat server on your own.

That said, I'd say after a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do both: a) coding; and b) marketing. There's so much to do in both fields that you cannot do justice to both _at the same time_. So you have to eventually build a team and decide between coding or marketing (but the great part is that by that time you can afford to do this).
Didn't identi.ca the attempt to do just that, through AtomPub and OStatus? The OStatus page even mentions PubSubHubbub as a future plan.

http://status.net/wiki/OStatus

Sadly, it seems like the Twitter compatible API gets much more love...
I generally agree, our web is increasingly made of huge corporations, silos and less and less made of small indie websites which would guarantee that no one is ever powerful enough to decide for everybody else.
Yet, I'm not as pessimistic as you seem to be. We can make things better: we just have to do it.
A lot of software can't be sandboxed, full stop. So they joined the App Store before sandboxing even existed, but Apple won't approve any more updates so they will have to be sold outside the store.
I have to agree that seems a little petty.

Facebook is a top 2 website on the internet, with ~845 million users last I checked. Do you really think that it had to be a 'backroom deal' for a technology company to want to integrate with the second largest internet company in the world? (First largest if you ignore direct competitors) Does it really surprise you that they would integrate in such a way?

To put it bluntly, it shouldn't.
I have experienced everything you said as true in most places where I have lived. But I did also live in a place where Time Warner, Verizon and Comcast all competed with each other. And guess what? Service was great and prices were low!

Yes, thank God Google is entering some markets, but we wouldn't need Google if only local governments had not succumbed to lobbying to kill competition.
If it's not a load issue and neither some intended limitation to prevent load issues, somebody pulled it on purpose. ...which I actually included in not being able to handle HN. ;)
> You can have multiple competitors in one space with comparatively limited infrastructure investment on their part.

Spectrum and tower licensing is off the hook, and it's unlikely that more than a handful of companies will have the business acumen, capital, and regulatory skill to build up a network of significance. Any 'gigabit wireless' scheme will likely look the same it does today: a handful of key players with reciprocal data roaming agreements, and a few MVNOs which piggyback off the big guys. Wireless infrastructure is so expensive that carriers don't even have full coverage: they share. You're not always on 'Verizon's network,' sometimes you're on Sprint's network shared to Verizon. For CDMA, these are sent to the phone via PRL lists[1].

The MVNO scheme happens in DSL where it is called a CLEC[2], where the local telco is required by law[3] to allow other companies to lease its lines. This is how companies like Sonic.net exist. If I understand correctly, the same forced-lease agreement is not in place with cable, which is why people are talking about a 'cable monopoly' here. There is no such thing as Sonic.net for cable, and DSL is physically limited to about 20down/1up. Thus, there is no competitive high-bandwidth pipe to the home until fiber comes into play. Note that DOCSIS3 can easily push 300Mbps down 100Mbps up[4]. You already have this capability if you have cable, it's simply not turned on. If you were a cable company, why would you?

"In the UK, broadband provider Virgin Media announced on 20 April 2011 an intention to start trials with download speeds of 1.5 Gbit/s and upload of 150 Mbit/s based on DOCSIS3.0.[4]" <---- this is with literally the same kind of coax and modem in your home right now.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_Roaming_List

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carr...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS
Recline.js - data applications in pure Javascript and HTML
Well I imagine you'd only ever need to move to the App Store because of an upgrade which required it (because certain features are only available to App Store-distributed applications). So Apple would get their cut of the upgrade fee, and future upgrade fees as well. Obviously it's not as much as the full app immediately, but ideally over time it would add up for them with paid upgrades.
And lose any app store rankings in the process. A bit similar to launching a new site every time you release a new version of your product.
> Had it been released in 2011, it would be a viable twitter alternative.

It was a viable twitter alternative when it was released. One of the reasons they closed shop (acquired) was that they couldn't compete with Twitter. How would they do better in 2011 when Twitter was so entrenched in internet culture?
You are right, Ostatus is an excellent stack. However, as you pointed, developer decided to go with the "sexier" looking Twitter. Needless to say that they eventually all got rejected by the cutie.
Huh? What apps are you installing? I've never seen an app use an increasing upgrade cycle or attempt to make arbitrary changes to my system (or toolbars).

I guess I'm just used to Mac being a professional platform.
I'm actually somewhat content with my broadband options. No, I'm not ecstatic and am glad this is happening but PLEASE someone disrupt the damn cell phone business. My ISP doesn't install software on my computer, doesn't hit me with mystery fees, and doesn't tell MS or Apple what to do, but cell carriers do all these things and more.

>and endless efforts to further "monetize" me through harassing phone calls trying to sell me more stuff,

Never happened to me, but all carriers text subscribers "deals" and other marketing garbage.

> intrusive DNS systems that redirect me to their crappy web sites, etc.

Never noticed and if I did its trivial to change DNS.

Cell phones on the other hand do all these things. I mean, Verizon just told google that its Wallet NFC stuff simply isn't allowed. Imagine if Comcast said "You can't install LibreOffice on your computer because we're thinking of entering the office game." I won't even go into uninstallable carrier apps, commercial spying, mystery charges, and billing fraud.

Maybe Google Fiber will the the backend for a future wireless roll out. One can hope.
مسلسل فرقة ناجي عطا الله الحلقة 8 
مسلسل فرقة ناجي عطا الله الحلقة 8

فرقة ,ناجي, عطا, الله , الحلقة 8

http://tube.sbayaa.com/1295
I'm surprised Ctrl-C is a problem for you, especially since you come from a nix background. I'm super ok with it, especially since Cmd-C is the copy command.

Mouse acceleration does suck. It's directly led to a big decrease in the number of amusing photoshops I make; on the plus side, I've started using the keyboard much more.

I haven't had any issues showing hidden files; I just always show them. Going to a specific folder is as simple as either Cmd-Shift-G or typing "open /Some/Folder/Name" in terminal.

You make a lot of good points. I hated OS X at first, but I got used to it; I could probably move to a nix machine, but there would definitely be a long and painful adjustment period, much as there was for you. And as far as the cost, I'm paying for the OS X design, not the hardware - something not everyone agrees with.
I was in your shoes a few years ago, and I ended up going with an MBA. I could give you a boilerplate response like "you need to align your education with your goals" but the truth is that if you are struggling to choose between these two areas, then you probably aren't too sure what your long term goals are. If that is the case, I would probably recommend going with an MBA. A lot of people will tell you that MBAs are a dime a dozen, the subject matter is trivial, and you are just setting yourself up for middle management. But, I don't think any of those apply. MBAs with a technical undergraduate are not at all common. And most technical people would benefit greatly from taking MBA courses. For me, prior to getting an MBA, I had a really hard time communicating with non-technical people. And, I saw everything from a specific perspective. Taking communications, accounting, negotiations, and other business courses opened my eyes to how people on the business side of the fence think. And, this gave me a much better sense of how to communicate with them. In the end, I ended up choosing to not go into management and head down the User Experience career path.
> And yet, Unix/Linux had and has a much larger portion of the Internet-connected server market share but without the constant stream of critical vulnerabilities that Windows servers endured in the early 2000s.

A couple of things...

1. I really don't know what the Linux server market share was in 2000 in comparison to NT server. Nor what the break-down of kernel vs user-space patches and vulnerabilities are. It also makes things much more complicated when you consider that the two were used pretty much in different situations and for different purposes.

2. That quote was in relation to the desktop/home-user market.

So I'm not going to go there as I don't want to compare apples to oranges, and on limited knowledge.

> By your logic, Windows should have been a safer server choice because Unix servers were constantly falling to new attacks.

How you're getting that from what I said makes no sense to me.
Sorry for that, however I can't reproduce your issue. Can you help me by describing what exactly happens after which action?
Did Stuxnet open 'pandora's box': Global Cyberwar?  
While there is a danger in opening Pandora’s box, one has to ask the counterfactual question of what would have happened if Obama had exercised restraint or stopped the program. I suspect that technology would have escaped in some form sooner or later, and that the Iranian nuclear situation would be even worse than it is.
Open-source currencies on the rise in Greece
"malware just isn't a concern." - beg to differ. The fiasco over Path (of which I continue to be an avid user) shows that Malware is an issue even in the iOS store. Sandboxing, and absolute limitations over what data any given application has access to, is the future for OS X applications.
Oh, but it's much easier with the passive, as the classics of the genre attest. That doesn't mean the passive voice isn't sometimes to be preferred, which is all that the Language Log people are saying.
In my opinion Humble Bundle have managed to build a solid reputation and following, I hope this plays out well for them.
I'm eager to see how this experiment will work out for the organizers and the artists.
I have some doubts about the viability of such a drastic change in direction, time will tell if their audience will bite and make this bundle a success.