skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"when you have no skin in the game"

Your parent is referring to perhaps (similar to) talking heads in a way that they get on TV not knowing all the facts or reasoning and state after the fact what should be.

But even if they state "before the fact" there is not a complete record of their thoughts on everything as being vetted as correct (success has a million fathers etc.)

So you can go back and say "see I said this was a bad idea" but what about the other 20 things someone says that you don't have the same outcome? You can just cherry pick. There is a common stock ruse that works this way. You call people up and say "I'm giving you a tip don't buy now". Then next month you call back all the people that you gave "tip a" to but not failed "tip b".

That said there is much to learn from criticism no matter where it comes from or what their axe is to grind etc.
dmor,

I just won a $100 bet by calling this. Thank you.

Anyhow, their marketing strategy has been very fun to watch and unfold. It has literally been done live on this site and most people did not get up in arms offended. Which is the smart way to do content marketing. They have also launched a business with what is simple an excel spreadsheet of data. I know they have code for it, but they could have launched with off-the-shelf software. Imagine that!
Shame on the shareholders, then, for letting that happen. In the case of Zynga, why did they buy stock? Was it because Zynga was an amazing company with brilliant technology, a solid executive team focusing on long term fundamentals and sustainable business practices? Or did most of them invest because the stock price was going up and the business had buzzwords like "social", and so they jumped in like sheep to try to ride the gravy train?

There's truth in what you say about the system rewarding the lazy. But that's fundamentally because of the stupidity and laziness of the shareholders. There's still opportunity in this turbulent system though to pick winners, and be a shareholder that rewards competence and punishes incompetence.
I suggest not joining Zynga after knowing what they are doing. It was difficult to know that a couple of years ago, but now the picture is clear. They are a metrics driven company, nothing more.
Because social programs get their money from coercion.

Garbage. I quite like paying taxes, because it suits me to outsource some money allocation to the government. You have a vote, and presumably when you benefit from things you voted for you don't go around feeling guilty at how you've coerced other people into going along with it.

Defending the proposition that we shouldn't be so concerned about the costs

You're focusing only on the costs, while ignoring the potential savings. Finland spends this money because it expects to get something in return: lower infant mortality, and its correlate, lower rates of infant ill-health and negligence. Bringing a baby to term and delivering it only to have it die represents a massive loss of productivity, and that loss is not confined to the grieving or irresponsible parents, it ripples out through society, both via spending by the parents' relatives and friends and through loss of economic productivity from illness, despression and so forth, not to mention that underprivileged children who do survive are more likely to suffer from mental illness, fall into crime, become homeless etc.

This notion that social programs are just a cost and deliver no benefit is asinine. It's highly economically efficient to provide new parents with the essential tools for looking after a baby, and a great more productive than issuing homilies about the (tiny) marginal increase in taxation that results.
Does anyone know the specific tax implications of a write-down of a bad acquisition? In this case and in HP's case it's truly hard to believe that the assets acquired are that severely depressed and I would like to know how this affects taxpayers via reduced taxed obligations of the acquirer.
Reading about Jason Trigg reminds me of Carlo Lorenzo Garcia of Living Philanthropic (http://livingphilanthropic.tumblr.com), who spent a year giving to a charity a day. He didn't have much to give, but he blogged about it and had quite an impact, inspiring others to give as well.

The way I see it, Brooks is an op-ed writer, and it's his job to come op with something to write. Criticizing something that most people would view as inherently good is a sure way to gain a lot of attention for your op-ed piece. Maybe he truly feels that way (negatively) about Trigg's actions; but IMHO it doesn't matter; he's a writer looking for an audience, and either way, he got it.
Was also curious. Found this:
http://blog.bitemyapp.com/projects/

HNOfficeHours
Designed to allow people to offer advice/expertise, or seek people offering advice for a given problem/specialty. Includes scheduling and search. Fun weekend hack from 2.5 years ago. Now deprecated in favor of better alternatives.
From Virus Genetic Engineering to Clean Energy By Lemelson-MIT Class of 2013
It's why I've come to prefer the term "RESTish". It probably still isn't enough to mollify hard-core purists but indicates that, e.g. the user knows versioning ought to be in the accept header rather than the URL, but also that hardly anyone either creating or using web APIs cares.
But given this has been an issue for so long, why the action now? Did TAL raise something as an issue that motivated folks to call their congressmen, petition their representatives more than if TAL had not aired the episode? If it's just timing on the part of TAL, it's well timed.
How big of $200M price tag for OMGPOP are bonuses and earn outs?
Monitoring and Profiling Tips: Trouble-shooting Node.js and NodeFly
Hire a better first developer. If you go in to screw the guy working for you (and by my lights, what you describe is screwing), you invite bad karma.
Ruby, I just blew your buffer.
Does your JSON response at the root entry point to the API return something signifying what all possible operations are?

Does the JSON representation of a Employee object returned URLs as a part of the body for the resource addresses for any "child" objects?

I don't think it can be considered HATEOAS if the answer to either is no.
How much money was omgpop making at the time of the acquisition?

That's probably an overly simplistic way of looking at it. OMGPOP had very little money in the bank but had just gotten a runaway hit with Draw Something. So they were a prime target to take over
What about jsonrpc (http://json-rpc.org/)? I am using it in a project and I really appreciate the simplicity. Would be curious to hear from others who have experimented with it.
The cost per capita is the same, so your argument doesn't really make sense. By the way, I see that argument every single time when someone proposes the USA to do something better. "It's a big country, we can't fix anything".
Now why should it be any different? There are a few companies experimenting with different hierarchies, hierarchy-less, and different role/position value assignments (tied somewhat with hierarchy), but in general I think pitch-forking the "1%" is just the "herd entitlement".

If you're on the bottom and don't like it, then get on top; this day and age that is actually possible. In history prior, you had to be born into the right name or granted a monopoly by the empire or king in order be "financially independent" (or thieve). In the USA you just had to have a great idea and the persistence to get people to buy into your idea.

NOW all you need is an internet connection, some free software, time, and some free fucking education to build financial independence.
Disclaimer: I'm co-founder of FoundationDB.

This is a great blog post. It shows all of the weird faults that motivate the CAP theorem's relevance to real world distributed systems. I especially like the part about the NIC "dropping inbound but not outbound packets". Good times!

I want to highlight a conceptual jump that I think some people will make when reading this article that is incorrect. That jump is: "Because network partitions occur in the real-world, then we should choose CAP availability." In fact, what we actually need is systems that deal gracefully with partitions, regardless of whether they are CP or AP. An AP system needs to "reconverge" in a timely way, avoid long latencies, etc. A CP system needs to avoid split-brain scenarios, remain up despite some nodes being partitioned away, etc. Mostly, either type of system needs relentless testing that seems to be dangerously uncommon.
- Deployment Process

- Project Management (Agile?)

- Testing (Process, Tools)

- Code Reviews

- Current Libraries
Thank god, David Brooks is here to save us from the scourge of young people giving their money to charity. Who else will stand in defense against these blackgaurds?! If not for this article, the scourge would surely grow ceaselessly, with each new graduate striving to give away more of his money than the last until our economy and very way of life collapse! Truly, David Brooks is a hero today.
"care now to avoid paying the $5,000 deductible down the line."

Does not answer the question of what to do with people who don't have a pot to piss in. You aren't going to deny them medical care. That's the problem. Just like you can't say "if you smoke we won't fix your lung cancer" (forgetting even if the link could be clearly established).

Bottom line: You have to prevent people from their folly. Although certainly some people would respond to the incentive in your example.
Which you can't fully do until you or someone else is offering it.

Bullshit. Companies do this all the time.

Hey ABCorp, it looks like filing is a major nightmare for you, would you be interested if in working with me to find a solution for your problem? Would you be willing to commit to paying for something if I built it? What would you think is a fair price? Etc etc.

The mere act of having this conversation is the validation you are looking for. If things go really well, they may actually help you fund it prior to you being live, in exchange for a discount/preferred status etc.

Advance commitments happen all the time, you just need to take the right approach and actually listen to what people are saying.
I think I agree with you, but I'm not so sure on the difficulties of reverse engineering.

Small electronics are a good example to both our points; once a new device hits a factory in china it's as good as pirated (sometimes it's pirated in the same factory after hours!), but that hasn't terribly hurt the companies cranking out cheap USB drives, and companies like Apple have just moved way the up value chain.

I do think they have significant use for things like engines and heavy equipment, where (everything but the metallurgy) is reversible, but they take $BN investments.

Software patents (and really all 'business method') patents are total trash, if only because the USPTO can't possibly keep up with the pace, so people get patents for linked lists (in the 90s!) and shopping carts and such.
I'm not going to get into the pros/cons of this viewpoint, but there was an incredibly popular post called "What is the Monkeysphere?" a few years ago, which was surprisingly deep, considering the site it's on. It describes several of the things that Brooks is saying, and is worth reading:

http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
Indeed, I have "Zynga" on my linkedin profile and got roughly a dozen emails from recruiters last night.

Linkedin revenues probably had a nice bump in the past 24 hours.
njs12345 answered for Haskell, I don't remember seeing a way to do this in Python though depending on the situation you could just use a single queue for everything of course.

FWIW there's no primitive letting you wait on multiple conditions in threading, and Queue is implemented in terms of a pair of conditions.
Building Windows 8 Applications with AngularJS
Shrug, it's not like he wouldn't get paid for it.

I have no idea just how miserable it would have been working at Zynga, but working for a year in order to get three month's of severance doesn't sound too awful to me.
You could call us that, but we try really hard to make sure you only get emails you actually want. We helped to write the CAN-SPAM Act so you can get valuable emails but not spam.
> A straightforward solution of the problem is superior to one that makes you feel like a high priest for having discovered it.

It is also much better for the team and the company. Beginning musicians are just trying to play. Intermediate musicians are try to play as fancy as they can. Master musicians play what's needed by the tune.

It takes somebody who's past all the ego issues to devote their intelligence to making code look simple. It takes great intelligence to solve a complex problem in a way that looks simple and straightforward.
Wow, I pretty much completely agree with your title assessment (not sure about the VC stuff since I don't have experience there. I'd summarize it as, "titles don't matter...until they do." The specifics are unimportant, but I've been burned by this at least once, and negatively affected by it another time.

I wish it didn't work this way. I'd like titles to not matter. I'd like to work in a true meritocracy. But, there will always be outsiders assessing your organization. Oftentimes they'll use title as a proxy for something els--and then it matters again. Especially when that person is a new boss.

The only solution I can think of is to call everyone Beverly.
Jack Dorsey's Five Startup Tips to a 17-Year-Old Entrepreneur
All property is a government granted monopoly in the present system, although much of it would be accepted through social convention or defensible by private force in the absence of government. Copyright/patents would probably be defensible for the sufficiently powerful too...
Heroku at WWDC
Hmm, I'm skeptical, but would definitely like to be wrong. There are a lot of people trying to be the VC data source (VentureSource, Dashboard.Io, Datafox, internal proprietary tools), but the problem is that most aren't that useful at capturing what's valuable. @PayBackTony has the right point below - the problem is that the majority of relevant data here is qualitative, and by that very nature, harder to capture. Additionally, there really aren't that many VC's out there - I assume the goal / scope is to go beyond that.
One reason is that education politics are extremely conservative.
We experimented with EC2 in the early stages to use as a possible load failover, and no matter what we did, we could never get better than 150ms ping times even between internal zones.

The EC2 network also has mysterious packet filtering on it that prevented IPSec tunnels from working correctly.

I've managed to leverage CDN and globally distributed servers for a fraction of the cost of Amazon services just fine, and I have the added benefit of 100% full control of all aspects of it, including the network.

A good analogy is that EC2 is like an interpreted language versus compiled - you can get a lot done and it's easier to get started, but if you're really serious about performance, you need to program in C.
I have been approached by this sort of situation before with a "Hey <name>, if you ever change your mind, we have 3 places we could use you the next day. Call me if you ever change your mind about working for <your current employer>".

It's all about working with a range of people who value your skillset, and having a skillset that's valuable to a lot of people in useful ways and not setting off alarm bells, and understanding truly what other companies do (so they know you know what you'd be getting into without a lengthy interview/whatever process).

Giving talks at conferences, user groups, and helping people randomly (small amounts) for free on places like mailing lists builds tremendous goodwill in this arena and demonstrates your mannerisms, knowledge, and community relationships to everyone observing it.

--

On the other side of it, I have a list of people if I know they sound unhappy in their jobs or got laid off or fired, I'd thrust them in front of 3-5 people in front of my network INSTANTLY as I know they're not the sort of people you get by any other means. The golden handcuff type employees.
I used to work at a place that happily used SugarCRM (which is open-source) for both email marketing and for CRM, so there are better CRM solutions for small businesses than simply doing spreadsheets/in-house.
So this definitely deserves a lot of attention as it makes young parents' lives quite easier. And I am not arguing against it, just that in the end someone has to pay for it.

The beneficiaries likely return it and more through increased productivity. It's a lot easier to be productive when you don't have to worry too much about essentials.
Hi, everyone! I'm the the author of this post and the creator of the book as well. I'll be around for a while, so please feel free to ask any questions you might have. Thanks!
I'd say it's just coincidence. The White House doesn't decide to take a policy position like this "over the weekend". I'd bet it's been in the works for a couple months, they've just been nailing down the plan and the wording.
It's worth pointing out that programmers are in demand and highly paid and there is nothing forcing anyone to work with "leeches". In addition to having people "flock to you" there's also the option of joining the flock. Most people would kill to have our market power.
Income mobility is actually lower in the USA than in Europe, fwiw, and most startups are founded by people from middle-class or better families. Part of the reason is that the free education is, especially in poorer areas, not great: high-school computer curricula are in a sad state. Another part of the reason is that people with a family safety net find it easier to start companies. A third is that family connections help, whether it's for "friends & family" rounds of funding, or for product introductions (see: Bill Gates).
Whether or not Gandhi actually said it, this reminds me of:

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."

The author's argument is that doing so might damage or worsen you, but surely it is still a net positive? Furthermore, the "rubbing off on those around you" might work in the other direction too.
Not the ones with advanced economies and reliable social safety nets, though. People tend to leave places that don't offer economic security and opportunity for those that do.
Sounds like it was a real cluster * * * *.
> And that's not going to be solved by a book with a picture of sheep on the cover.

Attacking a book by its cover?
This seems cool, but I was wondering: Why is it called "3D printing" machine and not "sculpting" machine?
I recently canceled Spotify, I had it for almost a year. They still have problems and don't seem to care quite enough.
Playback has become erratic, you never know when a song will just stop playing.
Microinteractions
OP here. I got an email with an interesting argument on the topic. Paraphrasing: Today JSON is hip, tomorrow may be something else. By supporting XML by default and using XSLT to translate it to alternate outputs, you're able to support multiple formats without having to modify your software itself. Ofcourse, this does come with the cost of having to maintain XSLT files.

To businesses that need to support multiple formats (enterprise requirements?), XML + XSLT sounds like a fair approach - it allows you to simultaneously create idiomatic XML & JSON
Since you brought it up, which companies are those? Otherwise It just seems like you are making it up to make yourself look better.

By the way, I've also made iOs apps that barely get any ratings.
They have not competition in the mid-high range home computer sector. I specified as much in the comment, if you read it all.
The price, maybe. Food - not.
Using their application makes my internet connection feel like a dial up modem. Backend integration is horrible, API calls can take up to 5 minutes to get a response back.
"...further into a start-up that'll scar their CVs and render future employment more difficult". Let's not be so cynical. If you're a quality engineer or designer I have a hard time believing being part of an ecommerce startup that didn't make it as a scar that will render further employment difficult. Loyalty and seeing things through during dark times can be admirable in some employers' minds.

Sure, people might take a pay cut to work at a startup, but if they believe in the vision that's perfectly fine. Are we going to criticize poets, musicians, comedians, teachers, or other people who don't make high six-figure VP of Engineering salaries because "they could have made more" in a cubicle somewhere else?
Salary Negotiations: Why your first salary is incredibly important
This kind of sexism isnt really isolated to CS unfortunately.

If that guy had called the author the n word, which I'm not sure I can even type without offending someone, the situation would have been handled differently. Interestingly, society will still tolerate derogatory behavior towards certain groups of people, but not others.

Also if that guy were a woman, and the author was a man and the interaction were something like "...I dont like some dick/asshole/jerk* telling me what to do", then the issue wouldn't be about sexism, it would be about one person being inappropriately hostile toward another.

For the sake of discussion, I wonder if it is more useful to boil some feminist issues down into people issues so that more people can relate and respond.

Instead of addressing it as sexism, I wonder if the author brought it up as generic hostile behavior, would the situation have been handled differently... maybe not?

No one of any stripe or colour should have to deal with that kind of attitude in the workplace, whether or not it is sexist, racist, homophobic, or just generically mean, but managers/supervisors can be conflict adverse, and try to avoid reprimanding people in general. Having to deal with the situation is just more work on their plate.

I wonder these things, because I have my own very likely sexism influenced "situation" at work with my boss. Everyone agrees that he is being a jerk, there is no argument there. I also happen to LOVE to explore and discuss gender issues, but when I bring up this situation or others with that lens, peoples' eyes cloud over.
You're right talk is cheap. Here's my latest startup I just built with 5 others:

http://www.brabble.com/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brabble/id570281083?mt=8

Edited: 5 others. Forgot the Angel.
Too bad they ended this article with such a weak quote from Sen. Leahy
"Unfortunately, misuse of low-quality patents through patent trolling has tarnished the system's image."

This implies that "the system's image" is the thing he's trying to protect, rather than the livelihoods of people just trying to make a living in a free-market economy. When small businesses are sued for scanning a document and emailing it[1], there's more at stake than "the system's image".

[1]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-wan...
I'm sure there's no law requiring that, say, a Land Rover dealer exist in your state. This has nothing to do with whether a dealer exists or not but whether a manufacturer can directly own and operate a dealership.