skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there's a third: start your own company

I'm going play the role of semantics really quick. I like how PG differentiates between a startup and a company. What I've learned while coding, and dealing with Angels are the differences in stages...so I'll share my definitions (with dev examples)

1. Idea: just a concept, like an app
2. Project: the investment (usually time) we as entrepreneurs put in, like coding an app
3. Startup: just launched/deployed and ready to improvise as you grow, now your in the App Store and are out of beta
4. Business: your in the black, or at least have a projected growth rate of being there (u made angry birds)

I see why the startup stage is the greatest risk/reward investment, because in my eyes, it's like you just turned on the engine, everyone hears the growl, but you haven't spun the wheels yet.
There's some dejavu for you. I remember this exact same discussion when "Wolfenstein 3d" hit the scene. That 3d killing of Nazis was sure to be "the line".

The secret jumped out at me when I read that drone pilots were getting real, bona-fide combat PTSD just from pushing the button while looking at those grainy monochrome heat images. People (almost all of them) know the difference between real and imaginary. "The Line" is in us, not on the screen.
> the alternative is very, very different and I think libertarians really underestimate how evil and creative and corrupt people can be

The entire point of the parent post is that we don't underestimate the corruption that humans are capable of achieving when given power. Hence the revocation of a monopoly on the use of legitimized coercion.
I'm going to take a guess here.

YC doesn't have to give up the best of its limited resources to competing startups. They just help get you to a Series A round. They can do this for competing companies without any issues.

VC's help assemble an executive team, provide critical business relationships, etc., and it's not in anyone's interests if they have to divide their best contacts and resources between two competing companies. They should want to go all-out in providing one company all their best resources.
Autoscaling with AWS - part 2
SF bay area car rental startup faces lawsuit
"but most of all because I don't want to."

Like a boss.

pg - I know you mentioned increading idea conflicts in the essay, but in your comment you touched on it again in a slightly different way. VCs can only invest in one of a given type of company. The increasing ease of starting a company should result in more startups in more obscure markets where previously would-be founders only saw employment and academia as their two paths. These new investable markets should present VCs with new and less saturated opportunities.

Are VCs and other investors going to be ready to jump into previously uninvestable markets? Feels like they weren't with hardware. Do you expect it to be different this time?
But there was never a chance, with the Congresses Obama was handed with, that the prison would be completely shut down.

You've added a critical word there with "completely".

Congress blocked Obama from bringing Guantanamo inmates to the US for imprisonment or trial. But 86 of the 166 inmates are never going to be tried. They're already cleared for immediate release. Everyone (CIA, DoD) has agreed to this. Obama has the power to release them with the stroke of a pen, and the State Dept. apparently has a plan to do it and is just waiting for the go-ahead. So while Obama may not have the power to close Guantanamo completely, he does have the power to free more than half of the prisoners there, the ones who are not accused of anything. Yet there they stay, for no discernable (other than political) reasons.

Pinning the blame on Congress has worked for Obama politically, but if it's true that he's the one keeping more than half of the prisoners there, and with weaker justification since they are the ones unanimously agreed to be innocent, then it seems fair to say that Obama is more at fault than Congress is.

Source: http://ianmasters.com/sites/default/files/mp3/bbriefing_2013..., which is an interview (starting at 1:36) with one of the public defenders involved.
First official Brain-Computer Interface journal coming in January 2014
Presumably through voluntary subscription to private services, or flat taxation of alternative currencies controlled by and tied to local communities where usage of the currency is voluntary.

The way we're taxed federally right now with corporate loopholes and crazy income tax laws is bad.
I surf a lot of the web with javascript off.

Most of the time, the major content of a page doesn't require it. When it does, it is usually either poor design, or good design where the design is intended to display a bunch of crap I don't want and download a hoard of tracking data.

To put it another way, when I'm surfing, Google Analytics isn't doing anything in my interest.
Scala in 2007 - 2013
As an Austrian, NATO was never there to protect us.
America was admired for setting an example as a
great nation where people can live freely.

What, in the civilized lands of Stiegl, has ever threatened the free
movement and assembly of people, at least since the downfall of the
Austro-Hungarian empire?
And what has prevented Austrians from immigrating to the shores of
America, like the Germans, Swedes and the Dutch?

I'd really like to know.

(Very trace amounts of sarcasm deposited in this response.)
> Yeah, for instance the biggest overhaul of the healthcare system (Obamacare) happened without really trying.

I was watching during the selling before
the voting for Obamacare, and I concluded
that Obama did next to nothing.

What did happen?
The Dems had both houses of Congress. Senator
Kennedy had long had a team working on healthcare
overhaul and had a plan on the shelf. That plan
got pulled off the shelf, modified, and then
rammed through, e.g., by Pelosi, Reid,
and Emanuel.

For Obama, when he
went to a town hall
to support the bill, he made some remarks
about the costs of an amputation, got his
facts badly wrong, got slapped down by
the American College of Surgeons for
saying things that were "uninformed,
misinformed, just plain wrong, dangerous"

http://www.facs.org/news/obama081209.html

Then Obama essentially quit efforts at public support
of Obamacare.

When a team of Republicans
went to the White House to try to draft
a better bill, Obama was not really
engaged.

Obama signed Obamacare, but he had next
to nothing to do with getting it passed.

Obama didn't have to work to get Obamacare
passed: Kennedy's old plan,
Pelosi, Reid, Emanuel, and
the Dem majority were enough.
That's just the way it was.
Jermaine Dupri In DANGER of Losing So So Def Music
The answer is simple. Imagine how successful your manufacturing union would be if it had a monopoly on manufacturing labor within your state. Now imagine how successful it would be if your employer couldn't sell the products you manufactured to anyone outside your state.

Free trade gives American companies access to markets to sell their products, and it gives citizens (and not just those lucky enough to be in a union), access to products that would normally be more expensive if they were forced to buy from a monopoly (either on labor or on capital).

That argument is strong enough that 87.5% (in other words, a supermajority of economists on both the right and left) would abolish trade restrictions altogether if they had their way.
http://ew-econ.typepad.fr/articleAEAsurvey.pdf
I haven't noticed any particular trend recently. It's a constant undercurrent.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Paradox-Choice-More-Less/dp/006000...

http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html
Or, the NSA program is a targeted intelligence system designed to stay within the wide latitude afforded by the law and the 4th amendment? Not the establishment of tyranny, but a mundane apparatus that ultimately will have little real impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.

I think reasonable minds can differ about which characterization is appropriate.
I think a fair question to ask is, "If you do not understand the internet, should it be easy to disable javascript in your browser?"

As a person who uses noscript every day in FF, at first I thought this was a bad idea, but the more I think about the support aspect of this, the only time I think you really should turn off JS is when you understand enough to find the advanced options.
Just out of curiosity why is search text actually occurring in the page body an 'advanced' feature?
There is a long back story behind this product. The wikipedia article[1] gets into some of it. For a while there was a chance that these stops would be required for all new table saws sold in the US. Sadly that time seems to have passed. The PTI (think MPAA for powertools) did an effective job of killing any regulations requiring the sawstop. Instead they have trumpeted these silly plastic guards as an effective alternative. I have yet to meet a contractor or hobbyist that has not removed the plastic guard from their table saw.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop
Given the eight years of the Bush administration Europe was as desperate for change as the American left and I think this accounts for most of the initial excitement about him. In hindsight this may seem foolish, but looking back I can remember exactly how great the divide was (not that it seems to be getting any better).
Must be a different Argentina, I was there these days and although some guys that works in the Argentinian branch of the bank I work were very tech-savvy and were complaining the restrictions of moving money out of the country they did not cite Bitcoin, at all, some were venturing with buying gold and moving it out of Argentina but that was all.

For me it was odd, bitcoin appears a good way to move money from there to the other side of the River Plate.
>If the Russians have anything, it's encrypted blobs.

i'd be really surprised if Snowden hadn't been made an offer by Russia he'd have hard time to refuse - give the info to Russia or you're on the next non-stop flight to New York. Dealing with Russian government ... after not liking to deal with US ... somewhat illogical.
You can fairly easily use /dialog/feed "manually" instead of sharer.php if you're worried about the latter's lifespan – you just need to set up an app for your domain first since "app_id" is a required param (and also "next", which is a redirect URI on the same domain).
Example: http://antiprism.eu/en#share
Here's a very relevant blog post by Alex Limi of Mozilla: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/

Most sites these days that aren’t just displaying content will fail in interesting & mysterious ways if you don’t have JavaScript enabled. For the general population, Firefox will appear broken.

And yes, I know that some people have reasons (privacy, web development) to turn off JavaScript. There are many add-ons that can help with this — but it’s not something that we should ship to hundreds of millions of users.

(EDIT: this is the relevant quote, but worth reading the whole article)
What? If you can't explain in one sentence the fact that disabling JS will break most websites and it should only be done if you know what you're doing, then you've got bigger problems.
Is it possible to try without twitter login?
The old guard is back at the helm in iceland. The coalition that governed before their crash. The recent pledge to become a media and anti-corruption heaven is mostly shunned by them.
What usually goes wrong?
I got a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine running Interlisp-D in 1982 and enjoyed it greatly. It had knowledge of code like modern IDEs making code inspection and refactoring easier. Back then, it was like magic.

Now however, I prefer IntelliJ for Clojure and Java, and the similar IDE RubyMine for Ruby development. I think very good IDEs are a spiritual successor to the wonderful programming environment if my 1108.
> This destroys a non-technical user's grasp of the differences between static HTML and programatically manipulated HTML. It hides the setting amidst hundreds of other obscure settings, and does not emphasize the extremely powerful tool that JavaScript is, and the fact that it is optional.

Most 'non-technical users' don't have a clue about HTML, Javascipt, static features, etc. To them the internet consists of Facebook, Google and Youtube.

Arguably users who want to disable Javascript could be classified as 'technical', at least enough to be able to Google either a) how to do it from within Firefox, or b) install a plugin such as NoScript to do it for them.
Guess you missed the sarcasm. I know it's the internet, but I thought I slathered it on pretty thick.
> This destroys a non-technical user's grasp of the differences between static HTML and programatically manipulated HTML.

I think this line says it all.

Non-technical user don't even know what HTML is, the concept they'd ever "grasp of the differences between static HTML and programatically manipulated HTML"? Do these people live in the real world?
But not if the number of same-sex competitors increases by the same amount.
Here's the bug where the option was removed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851702

Limi's blog post "Checkboxes that kill your product" is cited in the bug as a good explanation of the motivation behind this: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/

The option has been added to the DevTools for developers who find it useful: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=864249

And of course addons like NoScript or js-switch are available if you still want this in your UI: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/noscript/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/js-switch/
> Personally the primary opposition I have with GMO is the very murky patent environment. It's no secret that Monsanto engages in patent warfare and manipulates legal systems across the world to stamp out competition.

I just don't see what that has to do with GMO. Your beef is with the IP system. It's like saying software sucks because software companies abuse the patent system.
What is your point exactly? I'm not saying they will. I'm saying they would.
paulgraham.com's design is actually quite similar to the design of default templates for Viaweb online stores, the company pg founded. Every Viaweb site had a left-hand row of buttons with navigation elements and simple sans-serif text in the center.

I actually have a theory that the software running paulgraham.com is a sort of stripped down version of the original Viaweb content management system. You can see in the view-source that there is still "Y! Store" JavaScript running on his pages, and that, for example, the titles of each essay on his site are actually images hosted at yimg.com (e.g. for this essay, http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/paulgraham_2270_385).

pg has spoken about how one of Viaweb's major features early-on was that it worked around the limitations of browser fonts by auto-generating images (GIFs) with rendered anti-aliased fonts and served those in the browser. Looks like his site continues to do the same thing to this day.

If my theory is true, I really hope pg never redesigns it. It serves as a pretty cool historical reference to the company he founded, that made him wealthy in the sale to Yahoo, and that ultimately allowed him to start YC / HN.

The left-side navbar is also an image map! (remember those?) My guess: Viaweb generated a single image out of the navbar description and markup for an image map. In those days, browsers didn't handle parallel downloading well. A single navigation element with an image map probably loaded faster in browsers than several navigation image buttons.

Yes, image maps are out of vogue and text-as-images is unnecessary with modern browsers. But, if the software running paulgraham.com truly has lineage to Viaweb, then that is so much cooler than any modern redesign could possibly be.
The Road to PS4 | Mark Cerny talks at Gamelab 2013
It is different, very different. Obama
avoids blame. He's terrific at avoiding
blame. E.g., at Harvard Law, he was
editor of the Law Review but didn't
write anything so never got criticized
for writing anything. In the Illinois
Senate, he voted "present" some huge
number of times and, again, avoided
any blame.

Reagan? He got blamed for Iran-Contra.
Obama's not getting blamed for
NSA, Snowden, Benghazi, Morsi,
Syria, etc.

Obama is uniquely good at avoiding
blame.

Also Obama is uniquely good at pulling
together a coalition with the technique
I described.

Obama managed to avoid any significant
role or blame for the response to
hurricane Sandy. W seemed to be involved in
responding to
Katrina and then took everything that went wrong
in the neck.

I like the remark in the movie Hunt for
Red October: "I'm a politician which
means that I'm a liar and a cheat
and when I'm not kissing babies I'm
stealing their lollypops. But it also
means I keep my options open.". In other
words, avoid taking a public position.

If a president has a vision or program
he feels strongly about, then he will
do all he can to push it, expend his
political capital, and maybe get something
done. But another approach is just to
step back and keep fingerprints off
things that might not work. In Obama's
case, it also helps, maybe has been crucial,
that long the MSM was on his side.
OP uses a fresnel lens and gives instructions on how to focus the HUD at infinity to avoid this problem.
Spectrum is finite. We're using ours more efficiently now by chopping it up into smaller and smaller sections of the Earth, and by digitally encoding, compressing, and in some cases encrypting our signal.

As a result we're sending a lot less stray analog RF out into the universe. And the stuff we are sending looks a lot more like noise.
I can't remember the last time I wrote an application that didn't rely on Javascript for even parts of its basic functionality.

I simply don't understand why you would want to browse the web without JS enabled and the average user definitely would never turn it off except in error, causing them to think the browser is broken.

Every single common-use browser on the Internet supports Javascript, there is no reason to assume it is not there as a developer.
The unfortunate reality is that it's not about the firms, it's about whether the individual partner at the firm respects founders' time. For example, I know founders who have had unpleasant experiences with an investor at a16z.
VCs want the high burn rate because it means that the company moves to finality (liquidity or failure) quickly and gets off the books in time.

They're not in the business of building long-lived healthy companies, even though that's something the world sorely needs.
The US government nothing. US oil companies and Halliburton made a pretty good buck though.
"If humans are full of logical fallacies and poor decision making, just making a collection of humans and giving them unlimited power does not make the logical fallacies and poor decision making go away. It can often makes it much more harmful."

You know, this is not some novel insight. This has been known for a long time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_carta
I'm surprised that checkbox hung around as long as it did. I imagine only maybe .001% of browser users actually really cared enough to turn that off, and if they did, they were probably already running something like NoScript since toggling it in the preferences all the time is way too blunt an instrument anyway.
That's what the trip produces, a feeling of deep insight of everything. Maybe it trips some "Eureka" area in the brain.

It's not only LSD that does it either, other drugs do it, as do some activities. People with a lot of practice in meditation seem to develop the same feeling, from the way they describe it.
Show HN: Māo - Minimalistic BDD Test Framework For Go
<proselytizing>
Software needs to empower the user. Writing arbitrary limitations in to code to make certain functionality harder to achieve is a seriously repulsive attitude for developers to have.

The current trend in removing features from software seems like a great way to have a dire shortage of engineers in 50 years time. The attitude that "software is a magic and untouchable black box, you can only use it to do the specific thing the developer wants you to" destroys the true power of the computer as a tool, it might as well be a radio or a TV that incessantly produces other peoples ideas.

Write useful, empowering and well tested modular code. Let the user work out what crazy and wonderful ways they arrange those modules. Don't make changes that serve only to glob more functionality up in to impenetrable, monolithic black boxes.
</proselytizing>

Also: Overriding peoples existing preferences during upgrade? Nice work guys :/
Key word application. An extremely small percentage of the websites I visit qualify as applications.
This response explains how I use Acme to store (and later modify) commands in files in each directory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5566567

In addition, I wrote a generic tag-indexing tool (in Plan 9's rc and Inferno's sh) to find random bits of information (including commands) without caring where they live in my file hierarchy.

https://github.com/catenate/notabene

http://swtools.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/nb%E2%80%94search-an...
I've got two of them (both from Woot). One is 10 lumens the other is 15. Both are fabulous when camping, they are pretty easy to watch indoors at a couple of feet in all lighting conditions (10 - 18" diagonal) and mildly amusing in a dark room at > 100" in size.

They do get warm so having them on the dash would either require some forced air cooling or a different mounting system. Paired with a webcam they let you reproduce the 'put a controller on anything' [1] stuff that Microsoft showed off.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/wearable-projection-system-turns-a...
Can you get away with using unicode chars instead? ... Sounds like this could be a good open source project.
As this was a forward looking piece I was surprised to see no mention of crowd-investing. Are YC companies looking forward to it? Are they indifferent?
But even Hacker News would be provide a better user experience if it made more use of Javascript to publish comments, etc. instead of all the jumping around with the current UI. Something only possible with JS.
I know somebody* who occasionally puts his phone on the dashboard like this to watch movies while driving.

*me
Right. Non-technical users do not think that way, at all. Javascript and HTML are implementation details of the website they are using. Even people who hire IT consultants tend not to understand these things much, although they might think they do.

I can imagine most web developers who freelance have dealt with a complaint from a client who had mistakenly turned off JavaScript, at least once.
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The other thing Alex posted is firefox really gives you no indication of why the internet looks weird and is breaking left and right. So you can disable js or images or ssl and unless you're lucky enough to know a programmer or IT person really have no guide to undoing whatever happened.
>> I simply don't understand why you would want to browse the web without JS enabled

Security, performance, JS ads ...

>> Every single common-use browser on the Internet supports Javascript

My company provides a web based app to Fortune 500 banks, around 15% of the browsers we see have JS disabled.
I suspect Knuth writes because he has something he feels compelled to say, not because of market analysis.

There is always shelf space for well written books which express an author's passion. In fact since there's shelf space for all those books about Gettysburg, good writing is probably negotiable.