skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not saying their won't be a negative reaction, I'm just saying that there are folks who are perfectly ok with people walking around with recording devices.

If enough of those people embrace the technology it will be a 'success' and people who do object may become disconnected like people who shun Facebook for its lack of privacy as well. Fashion is a powerful thing, even stupid fashion.
I think this is the first post I've ever intentionally "kudos"'d. Launches are hard. The title is intentional link-bait for HN, but it rings at least in part true: a grand launch carries a lot of expectations, but means only the start of an effort to find your target market.
I agree with his conclusion. Another way to put this: you should absolutely never invest money you can't afford to loose.
Simple logic. DRM requires secret (from the user) code to run on user's machine. DRM doesn't trust the user (user is treated as potential criminal) for the sake of content owner interests. Such kind of predisposition makes it very reasonable for the user not to trust the content owner in return and to treat DRM by default as a privacy breaching malware and security risk (until proven otherwise - which isn't possible, since it's a black box). Trust is always mutual. How else can you view this?
It seems kind of silly that certain browsers download it again. Isn't it stored as temp data somewhere? They should only have to rename it.

I'm actually happy with the way Chrome handles downloads in that it starts the download before you confirm if you want it, then deletes it should you decide you don't. It's cool clicking the "Download" link, navigating to the folder, renaming the file, and seeing the download is almost done.
>>Focusing on minor issue (native plugin) while ignoring the major one (DRM) sounds strange.

I don't think it is a minor issue at all. My biggest complaint with flash has been the security vulnerabilities, and I trust Google/Mozilla with web encryption WAY more than I do Adobe. Can you explain why you consider it to be such a minor issue?

>>And in reality this whole EME thing won't even remove native DRM code. It just will hook it into JavaScript.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'in reality'. Thats it's entire purpose.

>>The risk caused by DRM won't get any less than it is already.
I know? Who is arguing the opposite?
Generating valid excel 2007+ documents from XSLT
I don't know when you read this, but I edited my comment repeatedly and it's probably a little different now from when you first read it!
No, it's not the same thing. When you use Facebook Connect, your browser asks Facebook to provide relevant information to the site you want to sing in. As a result, Facebook knows about which sites you signed in and when.

With Persona, you ask the identity provider to sign a proof-of-identity for you, which the browser stores. Then you can use it to sign in to different sites as long as it's valid(it expires after a certain amount of time for security reasons). Your identity provider wouldn't know which sites you signed in. That's why it's called browser-id.

So yes, the workflow is almost the same, but it's much better for privacy reasons.
IFLS is not a government target. It's loved by every one. So haters gonna hate.
QWERTY out, KALQ in: the new fast keyboard for touchscreens
Job titles, shmob titles
At 42Floors we still don’t have traditional job titles. As our company has grown, we keep attracting more entrepreneurs who themselves have never cared about job titles. We’re now at 14 people, and we still don’t really have any hierarchy in the company; so there is not really a need to embrace a lot of formal organization.

A little while ago, we did implement some processes to keep creative anarchy and functional teamwork in balance. But hierarchy and job titles still didn’t emerge.

In fact, the only reason we have job titles on our open positions is that the rest of the world kind of expects them; but once you get here, we don’t really care. We’re a startup. Everyone wears multiple hats. Smart people will do awesome stuff if given the freedom to figure it out.

We’d love for you to come check us out. If you want to write Ruby or Backbone.js, or manage a sales pipeline or talk commercial real estate, we might have a job title that’s right for you.

http://42floors.com/jobs

42Floors
Creating the world's easist way to search for office space.
Great first article in the series. Can't wait for the rest.
The web (and WebKit in particular) is on track to catch up w/ native frameworks in terms of tools at the disposal of developers. Albeit in a slightly more rough form.

The next 5-10 years are going to be interesting.
Can Ouya kickstart a coder renaissance?
It's not clear from the article if he used his position to gain access to any of the systems he is accused of illegally using.
Many hackers are employed in positions of responsibility, but have the common sense not to shit where they eat.
...And then you've loaded them up with a bunch of areas where they've taken technical responsibility until they're overwhelmed with maintenance. So you can't possibly put them in a management or leadership position.

I disagree with you in 3 ways:

* I didn't limit the scope to technical responsibilities. You did. I mean everything from product leadership, customer interactions, management, growth, etc. No shortage of interesting things to do in an early-stage startup if you're willing to get your hands dirty.

* You imply increased technical responsibilities are a bad thing. How can one think that and be an engineer? Being overwhelmed with maintenance may indicate other problems. Maybe your organization doesn't value gradual maintenance and has to pay it all at once. Maybe you're getting the shit maintenance work while others get the fun projects. Or maybe you have low tolerance for the unsexy but necessary work of maintaining your code.

* You present technical responsibilities and leadership as mutually exclusive. Leadership and management are not the same thing! As a technical lead you may not be anybody's boss, but in a good technical organization it should give you plenty of opportunities to show your worth while growing personally.

I think the mistake here is confusing career advancement with the number of people reporting to you. Startups don't work that way. The measuring stick for your trajectory should be 1) how much you get done and 2) how much recognition you get for it. How many people report to you is an implementation detail.

... If you've been kicking ass managing a small team, have made it clear that you're interested in a director position, and the company hires an outsider instead, maybe they're idiots and it's time to move to greener pastures. That's how smart companies find great first-time directors.

... If you're an engineer but want to try your hand as a first-time manager, and you're not given the opportunity, find a company willing to take the risk.

... And so on.
That would probably scare most users, to see a long filename full of gibberish.
> In 2009, nutritionist Joann Bruso decide to keep a McDonald's Happy Meal uncovered on a shelf for a year. Apart from a few cracks in the bun, it remained unchanged. "Food is supposed to decompose, go bad and smell foul eventually," she wrote on her blog.

> "The fact that it has not decomposed shows you how unhealthy it is for children."

How does that show it's unhealthy for children? I'm not saying that a burger from McDonald's isn't unhealthy, but why is this evidence of it?

Also, beware if you copy and paste from that page—a "Read More" link is appended to your clipboard.
http://skepticalteacher.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/the-myth-of...
I prefer developing in ruby/rails. I just put this site up on my small linode because I didn't need to do anything dynamic with it. The linode was already configured for PHP so I was lazy and just went with that. Might move it to Heroku after this and perhaps change it to a small sinatra site.
I totally identify with this article.

At my last job our boss would usually double our estimates before giving it to customers. The trick is he wouldn't always double them so you couldn't count on that when making an estimate. Looking back it was probably better then any of the methodologies we tried implementing that never caught on.
I agree: fanatics of magic woo are indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced fanatics of technological woo.
>So if the vast majority of people end up using native apps, and more and more information gets siloed behind these native app clouds on DRM'ed mobile devices, because that's where the money is, and the Web becomes a ghost town, that would be better for everyone?

You're talking nonsense. The web is just the dominant way of accessing "app clouds" on today's internet. Users don't care whether the code running on their device is Java vs. Javascript if the end result is the same. All you're promoting with "put DRM in HTML" is for all the horrific things you dislike about native apps to be allowed to infect the web.

You're fighting the wrong battle. It's not "make sure the web wins over native apps" -- it's "make sure open wins over corporate oligarchy." DRM is the opposite of open. We should not allow DRM to be in HTML. We should not allow it to be in operating systems. We should not allow it to be anywhere -- content providers who claim they won't sell their content without DRM are just lying. Make their choice "no DRM or no distribution method" and they'll pick no DRM.
If--before gaining any traction and in the very early stages--your startup continued to grow through total neglect, then I would say that it is a very rare exception indeed. Rare enough that the author's point holds.

But, congratulations to you.
As a non-developer looking to hire a developer, I would want to know what specifically you can do. And sometimes I might not know the difference between Java and Javascript. I see that the banner skills transition, but the transition is seamless and probably timed long enough such that people will miss your highlighted skills. Consider adding somewhere your "features" or skills. In fact, the "details" inside each app are more compelling than what's on the front page. Maybe switch and use the mini-pitch to create demand for your skills.

I second the comment on grammar -- says the hypocrite.

Great job!
"When you are conditioned to beleave and cheer a "scientific" fact, it is improbable that you'll allow new facts to replace your beleave. You have made a new religion wit a new "Idol"."

Religion is the belief in an absence of evidence. Science is the whole of objective reality. You don't seem to understand what "science" and "religion" actually mean, but you really don't like persons who don't believe in anything, so you assign bizarrely negative qualifiers for someone who knows things.

No one on earth worships "SCIENCE". It's a tool we use daily, whether you understand why things work or not.
from the article - "Don’t worry if your app is down most of the time. It just needs to work well enough to demo and take screenshots of." ... ha ha

They laid down the whole plan on the paper to get bought so easily. Ideally this is what it takes rest is up to us...how we execute it.
Gross, weird, surprising.

I don't eat McDonald's. But could someone do this with a non-fast food burger for a control? Some things are not so likely to decompose, say, because of salt content or because of cooking.
I think there are a fair number of colleges to profit from their sports programs. There is also no question that sporting programs are an important aspect of alumni contributions.

The problems is that there are many more that sink dollars into programs irresponsibly because they either irrationally believe they will get a profitable program or feel like they have to maintain some level of "sporting commitment" for its own sake.

The data is ugly.[1]

1. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-14/ncaa...
The thesis of the article is mostly correct, though there are plenty of exceptions in the valley - the Facebook and Google IPOs made 100s of instant millionaires.

This part bugged me though:

"Lets put it this way. You're working at a start-up. You've got some decent stock, say, like, 200,000 options. You vest over four years and your strike is $1/share (which is WAY too high for an early employee, but you feel "good" about this one.) You're making 50k under market value."

Number of options and strike price are almost meaningless without context - specifically, number of shares outstanding + ESOP pool. PPS is derivative of the number of shares outstanding, and strike price will typically be the PPS at the last round of financing, so whether it's $1 or $10 or $0.10 is _completely_ determined by the valuation of the company divided by the number of shares outstanding.

The number of shares outstanding (+ those allocated to the ESOP) is the meaningful number here. 200k options could represent a significant stake in the company (up to 99.9995% of the company, for example, if the company has only a single share outstanding and no other options issued!) or an insignificant stake in the company (for example, if the company has 1 trillion shares outstanding).

The only thing the 200k options / $1 strike price tells you is that if the company doubles in value, you will have made $200k (less taxes & tip). Triples in value, $400k. Multiples by X, $200Xk.

If you don't think the company is going to double/triple/10X in value during your time there, don't play the game.
It's a minor issue comparing to the issue of DRM. You say - let's worry about plugins, while users will agree to use DRM anyway. I say - if user agrees to use DRM, user can as well use native plugins - such user doesn't care about security or privacy already and there is no point to drag that issue into HTML at all.

I don't think it is a minor issue at all. My biggest complaint with flash has been the security vulnerabilities, and I trust Google/Mozilla with web encryption WAY more than I do Adobe. Can you explain why you consider it to be such a minor issue?

I don't really understand why you at the same time ready to trust some balck box DRM code from Netflix or whoever. Which can do anything of this sort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Apple don't communicate and partner. They give orders and expect obedience. The only partnership I can think of is the iBooks one. And it went to court.
I'm pretty interested, but most concerned about keeping cross-compilation intact for ease-of-install as the community grows. Sooner or later, we'll have the resources to do cross-compilation and pcre. If you want to jump on the google group or github and convince me otherwise, I'm happy to listen.
Describing everything in terms of Geometry
Gambling your company's last $5000 in Vegas is quite different than taking out a $175M loan to gamble.
Indeed; it's the most basic form of "begging the question."

The fact that it has not decomposed shows that A. it is made with preservatives, and that B. the ingredients were manufactured to dessicate before they decompose. (The burger mummified, basically.)

To write a proper article, you must take those two premises, and explain how either of them entails "bad for children." It's not hard, but you actually have to do it if you want to write an article that properly convinces people of something; you can't just go "look, it still exists, that means something something biology!"
If you want to do something good on the internet you have to do this as Satoshi Nakamoto or John Smith because no good deed goes unpunished.
Hey! The algorithms group is up!
Why not static HTML files? I can't find anything on your site that justifies server side processing and in this sense you might be over-engineering. This is your call, though!

Your site is currently a three page site and while I appreciate unrolling would cause a little bit of code duplication, I wouldn't say it's enough to lose sleep over. In fact, you could just make it into a one page site, which might be a perfect fit for what you're trying to achieve.
the thing is, this is truly an incredibly feat of technology where we are at the point in history that we can actually control life, that is program cells to do what we want. It's incredibly innovative, and immensely powerful. Software ain't crap compared to biological programming.

Also the reason it takes (relatively) longer than electronic computer circuits are because there are biological machines, enzymatic 'robots' if you will, of polymerase enzymes binding to DNA and RNA and so forth. And that, my friends, is the beauty and wonder of this campaign.
Flatliners!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099582/
Good read...but not conclusive either way, based on the comments?
The numbers are different but in both cases failure nets the same result: some form of bankruptcy.
I find the whole idea of borrowing money for investment purposes a little strange. Isn't that basically just gambling?
Australia police arrest hacker group LulzSec 'leader'
Regarding the load time, using static HTML with a site generator would yield great results here. There really is not reason to be using PHP here.

A great option is to put it on S3 and distribute it with CloudFront.
People have contributed lots of words. Ask a sorority president if you can give beta access to all of their members, send them all an email and see how 100 new girls use the app.

If you rely on HackerNews for your feedback exclusively, that is why you will fail.
What would bank regulation would have done to stop Cooper Union's getting a loan and blowing it?

If you own the land under the Chrysler building, someone is going to be willing to lend you money. It seems to me this is the bank functioning pretty well.
Even that might be overkill. Static files served up by Nginx would do the trick nicely. For a brochure site that isn't going to see anywhere near as much traffic in such a short period of time ever again, a CDN is even overkill.
The problem is that they know as well as we do that DRM doesn't work

Unfortunately, as much as some of us would like that to be true, it seems very unlikely. DRM isn't some binary thing where either it prevents copying 100% or it doesn't; it's a deterrent. It works as long as it stops/delays anyone from copying the product illegally so they get it through a legitimate channel instead. It works and is cost-effective if it does that to enough people that it saves more money than it costs in implementation expenses and any loss of good will. On the evidence to date, that loss of good will doesn't seem to translate into much actual loss of custom once the bitching dies down, presumably because most of the people doing the bitching were never going to pay for the material anyway, so it's a relatively low bar for DRM to be economically viable.

The reality is though, adding DRM to browsers produces no value for anyone other than the lazy big media companies that can't adapt to the modern world.

Of course they can't. The law in most places is set up so the content producer's side of the bargain is clear, but that law is not enforced to make sure that everyone else keeps up their side of the bargain too.

Lots of people post on forums about how these companies need to "adapt their business models". Approximately 100% of those people also enjoy content made by the "lazy big media companies" in question under their current business model, which is becoming less effective. Wanting cheap/free access to that content by making sure that the legal/economic framework under which is was produced continues to be circumvented is a Faustian bargain. It's not sustainable. But no-one seems to be having much success with ideas for alternative business models so far.

Of course there will probably always be mass market films or pop music or sports games that will reliably make a profit even under these conditions. However, the same conditions are toxic to smaller, independent content producers who might have done something innovative or catered to a niche market. Next week the same consumers who object to DRM and dying business models will be complaining that modern AAA games are all derivative titles in long-running series, the SyFy channel doesn't show much good sci-fi any more, the latest Hollywood blockbusters are mostly SFX, action scenes, and attractive young stars whose acting abilities are debatable, and it's getting harder and harder to buy a general purpose computer and run your own software on it instead of buying a device that is already locked-up to some degree the moment you take it out of the box.
I used to work at a big fashion e-commerce site, and this is the best advice in the thread. Don't rely on nerds for feedback on anything related to fashion. Try to get it in front of people who will actually be using it.
I agree that Nginx would be sufficient.

However, configuring S3 + CloudFront really isn't that much effort (I'd argue it's even simpler than Nginx).

It's not that expensive either! : ) It would probably even be within the free tier if I'm not mistaken.
Chances are that PlanetOnline is a reseller for .mn, not a registrar. Look in the WHOIS information for the domain; the real registrar will probably be listed there, and you should be able to contact them to take control of the domain.
The three killer apps of Bitcoin will be 1) Donations 2) Nanopayments 3) Electronic and algorithmic trading of stuff we can't trade electronically now

Currently it's mainly money laundering from hacking or dealing drugs, and often misguided investing.

What a lot of people don't understand is that bitcoin does not need to hold its value long term, and that a currency this fungible doesn't need to increase in value when the supply is finite or shrinking (because of hoarding). Merchants adjust their bitcoin prices at a high frequency and charge premiums to buffer the risk.

In the past 6 months according to Mtgox USD prices, at the worst 95th percentile you could loose 6% per day, which is worse than paypal usually, but on average you gained value when holding bitcoin. But as I said that doesn't need to stay that way.
I think the raptor image and name are a little incongruous with the lickable eye-candy Apple product screenshots below. If I were you, I'd consider going all-in with it and just make the whole design a little more threatening and ominous. You could really go for a Rebel brand archetype. Broadcast that you're hardcore, you charge a lot, and you don't care if you scare away a few clients in the process; they were probably lame anyway. Heavily emphasize the blue/grey of the raptor image, lose the big flat Twitter "get in touch" button, the red, the gawdawful Lobster headings. Throw a motorcycle in there, make your logo look like a tattoo, use an Old English-style font. It would certainly be a refreshing distinction from all the Creator/Magician archetypes going around in this industry thanks to Apple.

I'm just a programmer though, so this thought experiment is probably not worth all that much.
Yes you can. Say we/us instead of I/me for everything. I know there's one of you, and I know you're proud of that. But if I'm a client, fear of lone wolf syndrome may lead me to avoid your company.