skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Independent Contractors on Death Star
http://www.whysanity.net/monos/clerks5.html
Will Cisco, IBM, Salesforce, or Amazon buy Gnip?
Analysis on the Boulder, Colorado based company Gnip, who provides a web 2.0 API quality of service optimization platform.
Fear and the Availability Heuristic
Did I read this article right... that he feels injustice for not receiving his bonus?
Will Xobni Help BlackBerry Take On the iPhone?
I was fortunate enough to attend this ILC session last night. Some people here are reading way too much into what Gerry Sussman said. I don't think Lispers should castigate Gerry for MIT's decision to use Python in its new introductory EECS curriculum, nor should Pythonistas praise him for giving in to "practical" concerns.

It's not evident from Andy Wingo's blog post, but just to clarify, Gerry didn't choose Python over Scheme: a committee did. Gerry said that when they had their revelation about the state of computer programming in 1997, he and Hal Abelson decided to stop teaching 6.001, and they eventually stepped away from the course altogether. (I believe Gerry returned to teach the class for the final term it was offered, but he didn't get into that last night; I could be wrong.)

Gerry went on to say that 6.001 essentially languished until sometime around 2007, when a committee got together and redesigned the introductory EECS curriculum to be what is now 6.0[012]. He didn't say whether he was on that committee, but I got the impression he was not. He appeared to be speculating when he offered the reason why Python was chosen. It was an offhand remark, something to the effect of (and I'm paraphrasing here), "And why Python? I suppose there were already good libraries for controlling these robots."

It sounded like Gerry explicitly chose not to fight any battles at all on this issue, and simply walked away resigned to the fact that computer programming, and engineering in general, are much different now than they were when he, Hal and Julie wrote SICP.

Two more things:

* I don't recall Gerry using the word "practical" even once while reciting his short anecdote.

* Gerry continues to teach with Scheme, not Python, in 6.945, his advanced topics course.
He kept his job for a salary of $1.00, rather than go and enjoy a year with his family.

I have no idea why they would have structured the compensation that way though...the result is kind of predictable.
Nothing, but some things establish a reason not to be at Stanford.
I wonder what his salary was during the boom years. My guess it was probably in the millions. He may not have been directly involved in selling credit default swaps, but profit from that division probably helped pay his salary.
I can't speak for ankhmoop, but what bothers me here is the whiney letter.

I already knew that ridiculously overpaid jobs exist and that you usually get them by being born into the right family - or with an unusual amount of luck. I don't like that part of reality but I can't change it.

So, this guy has one of these jobs. Fine, someone has to do the dirty work after all!

But is there really a need to whine in public about his bonus troubles?

Especially in the current situation where many people reading his drivel have slightly bigger problems than figuring out whether to invest or donate their next million?
Oh, what a saint! unbelievable. i hope everyone sees this sniffling wretch for what he is. PITTY??? you want our PITTY?? the freaking nerve.
The Hidden Gems of Venture Capital
I was a TA for 6.01 two years ago. 6.01 and 6.02 (Intro to EECS II, may have replaced 6.001 and 6.002, but their purposes are fundamentally different, as someone else mentioned earlier. They're now both introductions to a wide range of CS topics--6.01 covers not just software engineering, but feedback and control, circuits, and probability and planning; 6.02 covers things like signal processing, digital logic, and networking. Good computer scientists nowadays need to (or at least should) know so much more than how to write good, clean, modular code. As the 6.01 FAQ says, they still teach software abstraction ideas including functional programming, higher-order
functions, and object-oriented programming. They chose Python mostly because Python is easily approachable. But most of 'modernizing' 6.001 isn't about moving from scheme to Python--it's focusing on learning how to modularize/abstract and model/analyze across a variety of different contexts (not just software, but linear systems, circuits, and AI).

Also, 6.01 actually assumes that you have some programming experience already. When I TAed, at least, we assumed working knowledge of basic Python from week 1 and told people to go read a Python tutorial/book if they didn't have such. If you don't know how to program at all, you're supposed to take 6.00 first, which is the real 'Introduction to Programming' course. Except that most people skip it because they already know how to program or think they can learn on their own (and because it's kind of seen as a remedial course, which is especially unfortunate for people who really don't know how to program already--6.01 is pretty harsh if you've never programmed before).
Amazon Web Services Blog: New AWS Toolkit for Eclipse
Learning to Make Your Own Reality
Storyworld Game - Balance of Power: 21st Century
Browser Notifications and Flow
EXACTLY!!!

Commodities and equities were leveraged as well at AIG. Leveraging that the CDS business provided capital to finance. It's all connected. I think this guy is choosing facts to put himself and his team in the best light. There are probably a lot of people over there dressing down the CDS guys for being incredibly irresponsible, and the CDS guys were, I'm not trying to deny that. That said, the other business lines were more than willing to leverage off of that irresponsibility when the bets were going the right way.

I think it is time for ALL of us to admit our complicity in the current disaster. Wall Street was incredibly irresponsible. Regulators didn't regulate. And WE the American people, bought a lot of stuff we could not afford, and didn't save nearly as much as we should. Consider this, do you work for a company that exists solely due to the presence of investment capital? If so, do you feel a burning need to leave your position and go to work for a company that actually sells real things, to real people or companies, for real money?

I am not denigrating anyone here. My only point is that the sooner everyone owns up to their part, the sooner we can do what we need to move on. We should stop trying to hang it all on Bush, or regulators, or bankers, or Republican Congressmen like Phil Gramm, or Democratic Congressmen like Chris Dodd. Or on the guy down the hall, as the guy in the article is trying to do. They all played a role, but it was a team effort.

We all contributed to this crisis. Now it is true that some contributed more than others. But for a guy who works at AIGFP to claim to be blameless, is fanciful if counter productive at best, and potentially divisive in the style of Marie Antoinette at worst. Probably somewhere in between like most of these things.
Let's not throw around speculation but analyze it for what it is. It's just some insight into his perspective and his current situation. He is forfeiting it all. The real problem I see is that this demonstrates that there is no way AIG can recover if the people that can bring it back together all leave.
His reaction to life's failings -- not his position of success -- demonstrates a remarkably ill-developed sense of decorum and tact in light of his financial position, the failure of AIG, and subsequent taxpayer bail-out.
SAT score alone is not factor of meritocracy, the whole application counts.
> But stop whining. All over the USA, people who work hard, who get great reviews from bosses, customers and peers, who were promised bonuses and profit sharing, are seeing instead slashed pay and benefits. That is, if they are lucky, and not getting RIFed.

Most of them are not the subject of congressional investigations.
> If you worked anywhere besides the financial industry at a company in AIG's shape, you wouldn't be getting a bonus, not because of politics, but because there wouldn't be any money to pay one.

No, but he'd get a salary. Which he did not at AIG (according to his account).

> People in your line of work compensated themselves as if they were founders and early investors in F500 companies, while holding positions that would barely command six figure salaries in other industries.

Yes, that's more or less what he said in the article.

> I'm sure most readers here on HN would like to be in the position to write a 750k check to charity in the face of a depression.

Yes, that's more or less what he said in the article.

> That $100 million a year in equity and commodity trading? How much of that was on the back of the tech and housing bubble, and exploding oil prices? Sans the games the guys down the hall were playing with CDS and CDOs, would your returns even have been so high?

Perhaps your job also depends on the bubble economy. We'll know by this time next year.
Quest For Immortality Through Architecture Hits Financial Snag
I strongly disagree. He didn't make those risky bets. He honored his end of his agreement, and so should be compensated accordingly.

Perhaps you'd feel differently if your boss asked you to work for the next year, promised you a big lump sum, but then at the end of the year said 'sorry, but the money we borrowed from the gov't means it's not politically expedient for us to honor our agreement'.

Emotions aside, it sounds like he's getting a raw deal (and it doesn't matter if he's already worth millions - his net worth should have no bearing on whether or not the contract should have been honored).
No, you read it completely wrong. He did recieve his bonus, and feels injustice at being pressured to return it when the financial crisis is nothing to do with him. So he's giving it to charity rather than return it to AIG.
So far, the tally includes:

* Hardware-assisted hypervisors

* PCI Option ROMs in video cards

* PCI Option ROMs for PXE boot

* 80386 System Management Mode

* and now BIOS backdoors

Isn't PC security fun?
By this logic, anyone who bought a house in the last 5 years is a rain drop.
Updating your resume
Thank you. A noble and risky thing to do, giving the money to the charity of your own choice rather than give in to the witchhunters and blackmailers. I hope you're hired into a position of real influence in your next financial institution soon.
You're right - that should have happened.
It didn't of course, because the company(-ies) that started the DV issuance didn't want to go back and fix it.
As well as that, if the browser/OS people did 'downgrade' the DV certs, millions of customers by that point would be affected. Assuming they cared about the customers and not the heavy pressure to do nothing from....larger CAs.... ;)
We all contributed to this crisis.

I take issue with this. I certainly didn't contribute to the crisis - I'm a student and have been since kindergarten. The vast majority of Americans didn't contribute to the crisis. I'd say that even the majority of people on Wall St. didn't contribute to the crisis. Those who are responsible should own up, but playing the "everyone say sorry" game is pointless if not disingenuous.
They did cost thousands, but the monopoly is no longer and you can get certs for $10 if you hunt.
EV ones can cost up to $1000 again, but they genuniely do cost more to issue.

And no, I'm not saying they don't have large costs.
You can become a webhost with a couple of co-lo boxes for relatively little cost.
You can't do that with a CA.
What he's complaining about is that he's been made a scapegoat for something that isn't his fault, been pressured to return all his payment (but $1.00) for a year of hard work, and has state AGs threatening to announce his name publicly as one of the evil AIG execs. I think his being upset is pretty reasonable.
Not sure why this straw man is getting so many up votes. He's not saying he had minimal impact. He's saying it was nothing to do with him and he never profited from it at all.
"Sure, he can afford it, and he was a senior vp at AIG, so I am sure there is a lot more he could have done."

Being a vice-president at a financial institution does not mean one has much executive power. For instance, a couple of years ago Goldman Sachs had over 300 vice-presidents. I don't know if AIG has the same hierarchy as Wall Street banks have (or had, since some have gone bust), but if such is the case, then a VP is not exactly a top dog, so to say.

"This is basically turning into a witch hunt"

It sure is! The politicians (mainly the democrats but also the republicans) have realized that the American people's sentiment is, all of a sudden, strongly against the financial institutions, and they're positioning themselves so they can profit politically from other people's misery. Politicians have no values, only re-election dreams.
Ah, I see. But if we ever manage to get everyone behaving properly at the IPv4 level (i.e no spoofing), it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for managing attacks, especially DDOS floods: at the very least, ISPs would be able to notify each other of attacks originating within their networks, possibly even with some automation over a secure protocol, to automatically block packets at the source. But I could be missing something, seeing as it's 3 in the morning... and this needs to be modeled to see if it's actually viable.
Boston Venture Firm Seeks Entrepreneurial Spark
"Stanford says it admits the brightest students regardless of their ability to pay. Yet only 12 percent of Stanford's 6,759 undergraduates receive Pell Grants, a yardstick used to measure how many low-income students such as Scott are enrolled."

I think this has a lot more to do with the low quality of education in the United States (especially for low income families) that leads up to higher education, and a lot less to do with who Stanford decides to admit.
I have been trying out Redis (http://code.google.com/p/redis/) which is also quite good.
Yes, and according to the article, he runs a Tor exit node.
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Indeed, but I think that's the point.
I'm a CS master's student at Stanford, which means I don't get funding automatically. But with a 20 hr/week assistantship (TA or RA) I get my tuition refunded, which is about $8200, and a roughly $7000 stipend. That's for one quarter (quarters are Sep-Dec, Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun). It's enough to cover housing, food, and a little extra...but it's certainly frugal living.
Why wouldn't irresponsible home buyers be considered complicit?
Not sure which CA you went with, but we re-validate each time you renew.

I don't know about the premiums or your figures - could be right. The same figures could well apply to many hosting companies though, and they don't have the insurance. Just an example.

I don't believe it's a rip-off anymore. Yes, you can still pay $1000 for a cert.
You can also pay $100.
Is $100 too much? For something you couldn't make for yourself without several million dollars or 'just' a few hundred thousand and 5+ year wait before being able to use it?
LG KM710 Black Unlocked
LG Electronics showcase their new high end music phone LG KM710.LG KM710 features a 3.2 Megapixel camera with video, high-end speakers, Music player with Equalizer, stereo Bluetooth, a QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) TFT display with 256K colors.
I TAed my first course at Stanford this quarter, and I was surprised at the quality of work some people turn in. I mentioned this to a couple friends who were undergrads here and they both told me the same thing - Stanford undergrads are often not 99th percentile academically, but have done something impressive. For example, one person told me he had a guy in his freshman dorm who was the #1 (or 2 or 3?) model airplane builder in the US. Admittance to Stanford is not solely based upon scores/grades.

Don't ask me to explain or justify this admissions system - I'm just a student, and a grad student at that, so I've neither effected nor been affected by it.
One point: Jake is clearly trying to portray himself as the self-made, hard-working, humble American. In my opinion, he would've been better off not publishing this article in the NY Times. From my point of view, it seems he is searching for the spotlight by providing his letter of resignation to the Times. A good read for sure, but I am forced to consider this when I dig deep down in my stomach to find pity for him.
India's Tata Motors unveils the world's cheapest car
The company should have gone bankrupt (and certainly would have, without US government intervention), in which case none of these people would have seen any bonuses at all. he should be grateful for the $1 :-)
Overall, I like the idea. I won't dwell on the price thing for too long, other than to say I agree that it is too expensive and that I'd much rather pay a monthly fee for an appropriate level of service than pay per message. Something I don't see mentioned a lot (here, and at messagepub.com) is the escalation feature. It is really cool to be able to call your api once and know that one way or another my user will get the message. Also, I was pretty annoyed that signing up resulted in 2 emails in my inbox.
I don't think comatose_kid ever said they shouldn't be. I think he just implied that not all home buyers are complicit.
Learning to play guitar | internet guitar lesson
This is not really a song for beginning guitar players as the first few chords are a little difficult, but it is pretty playable when you are somewhat comfortable with bar chords and partial bar chords.
The Hoc programming language
ISPs can already do that. I think you're underestimating how frequent these attacks are; hundreds per week. Nobody can staff against that.
Ignoring wages, hosting, DR site maintenance, general business costs etc, the other maintenance costs I can see over other SaaS/webhosting/domain businesses (which are similar).

mid $xxxxx/mo for CDN hosting
mid $xxxxx startup for the hardware (you can't store keys on disk)
mid $xxxxx anually for audit (thats the simple cost to get it done, nothing to do with performing it - manpower, expenses, recification of any issues)
[Sometimes multiplied for various other compliancies/audits around the world]

It's like this:
Webhosting - you can pay $100 a year for mid-to-low-end hosting.
You could probably do it yourself from your ADSL line, or a cheap co-lo, right? Save a few bucks.

SSL - you can pay $100 a year.
Or, unlike hosting/SaaS, even becoming your own domain-reg...you're looking at the above costs, plus waiting with your thumbs up your ass for 5+ years before you can do anything. Still paying, too.
You could bypass the wait, shell out for the hardware and then pay 6-7 figures to get a subCA and issue immediately.
Rip-off? Not as clearly as you think.
So should we promise irresponsible homeowners a lump sum for a years' worth of their work and then at the end of the year not pay them?
> What establishes a right to be at Stanford?

Stanford does.
> Compare a four year degree to two years of travel and two years work experience in your chosen field. Which do you think has the edge?

With the right school, you can do all 3.
If the e-mail author earned an income remotely commensurate with individual value produced rather than taking gross advantage of market inefficiencies while attempting to sidle all culpability when the market (somewhat) corrected, the implication's point would be valid.
Win-control: Watir like library for Scheme
Google invests in e-commerce start-up Pixazza
I just want a blank white page to appear when I open a new tab.

And the awesome bar isn't awesome. It's just distracting. (Yes, I know how to disable it.)

By throwing everything and the kitchen sink into Firefox, they are making it worse instead of better.
Do you realize what the consequences of letting AIG go bust could be? Do you realize that bailing out crippled financial institutions is entirely different from bailing out Motown's idiot car companies? Do you realize that AIG has various divisions and only one of them was trading the toxic financial products that destroyed the company?

Your comment sounds like demagogy.
He probably wrote this letter in response to all the death threats and irate callers AIG FP is getting.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03...
Wow, awesome! I hope PhoneGap continues expanding the SDK!

Sucks that Apple is so uptight about this though.
Reminds me of the clueless FaceBook staff that rejected most of my ad buys but then a week later I see an influx of ads that are similar if not worse (irrelevant/shady)!

To quote Kotaku, "...the phone itself might be developer friendly, but Apple is not".
( http://kotaku.com/5181471/apple-putting-the-squeeze-on-iphon... )
So it's his fault the government intervened, then? Imagine for a moment that logic crept into this train-wreck of a thread:

All I see is
some guy
who
took no salary for a year
on the promise that
he'd get a bonus at the end

The situation became politicized, so his bonus was rescinded. For all those people accusing him of whining, I hope you never complain about politics at your workplace.
I remember seeing a wearable system from MIT Media lab in 1996 or so. They estimated $2,000 or so to build one and had a sort of HUD/video goggles, sort of like today's VR920. I think network connection was handled with GPRS...I think.
To commiserate is to share misery, the word you are looking for is commensurate.

Your comment seems somewhat tangential to the argument. Are you saying that the financial crisis was in no way caused by consumer attitudes towards real estate?
Completing your analogy, I assume the entity responsible for hiring the homeowners has failed due to their own market failure, and government intervention has occurred solely (supposedly) for the purpose of preventing collapse of the world's financial markets?
"Do you realize that AIG has various divisions and only one of them was trading the toxic financial products that destroyed the company?"

Most companies that go bankrupt do have some divisions that performed well and didn't "destroy the company". Weak argument.
According to the article, only wikileaks was mentioned during the raid, police asked for passwords to the wikileaks.de domain, and police asked him to shut wikileaks.de down. So while there isn't much information available right now, the raid looks like it does not have to do with him running a Tor exit node.
I have a hard time understanding why on a board that purports to attract entrepreneurs, we have so many people on this thread who are bashing the guy because he made more money than you might judge reasonable.

(ps - I think you mean commensurate?)
If you haven't played the "Exile" games, you should (if you can get them to work on modern systems). They're very non-linear and a lot of fun. I remember when I first bought these games in middle school.
Uhm, how is it not their fault? Honestly.
My exact point is - why would it matter? A contract is a contract. AIG isn't in bankruptcy, so shouldn't they honor commitments to their employees? Of course they can change compensation agreements going forward, but changing the rules for work that has been done is not right.