skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I am stunned that Robert Mericle, who paid these judges to sentence children to his facility..."

Was this proven in court?
OT, but that Cotton Crop Blues link is at 6575 views as of now. (19:25 6Aug2013 ) Very curious to see what an HN link does to it.
I was thinking this same thing. Hell, Family Guy is practically written on this algorithm (South Park nailed it).
I don't know the person or the YC company in question, and I realize I'm nitpicking, but these three things stuck out at me.

> I wanted to have a significant impact so I was constantly asking the founders to work on the long-term vision and culture for the company.

Anybody could waste months and months working on the long-term vision and culture. In a startup, that's next to useless as everyone should contribute to the long term vision. It's the day-to-day that's important.

> I also told them that VCs invested in talent and not the idea.

VCs invest in traction. "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."

> The leadership was struggling with the vision of the company. It was pulled in many directions - sometimes ad-hoc based on customer feedback or angel advice.

That's what an early startup is -- figuring out product/market fit, largely based on ad-hoc decision making like this. Picking a vision that just works is incredibly rare.

I know dozens of YC founders and in my experience they're really good at what they do, but you can't expect to stumble on Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Evan Williams by joining a random YC company. There are probably less then a dozen people of this quality in the entire world, and YC invests in ~60 companies per batch for god's sakes!

EDIT. And also:

> The culture was bad. Engineers were constantly told what to do.

Engineers should be told what to do (but hopefully not how to do it). Being good at engineering doesn't in any way qualify you for being good at managing product.

EDIT2:

> Then another round of raising Series A started. The “nos" started piling up. Our last hope said “no" 2 weeks back.

Of course the nos started piling up. Having a few rejections is nothing, we went through ~60 rejections before raising the first round for our company.

Excellence in the absence of pressure wins you no accolades. How you act when the house is burning down is what ultimately defines who you are. It's cool if the guy wanted to leave because this kind of pressure isn't for everyone (and that's fine), but blaming two measly rejections on others is off-putting. It's easy to blame failure on others, much harder to take responsibility for it yourself and help turn a dire situation into a victory.
Early stage companies do well to take this approach, because they can use the input to inform future service/product enhancements knowing what works and what doesn't.

Specifically with Dell, one of their big angles, IIRC, was custom built stuff. While there wasn't an unlimited variation of possibilities, it was enough that my Dell wasn't necessarily the same as your Dell - whether it was their problem or not, many other vendors would punt on the support.
It's actually rather easy: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/embedding-file-executabl...
Yes, perhaps better would be less time + public burning at the stake (or reverse the order), especially in extreme cases where innocents were damaged severely and there is little doubt that the prosecution is unfair.

Our society sometimes looks like something Charles Dickens wrote about (or worse). Bringing back the old punishments (drawing & quartering, hanging, etc.) might help, but I doubt it.
Man is convinced he commited a murder (by a TV show)
He was convicted in federal court, and in the federal system there's no parole and only very limited credit for good behavior. He'll serve at least 87.1% of his sentence[1] (barring unlikely events such as a successful SCOTUS appeal or a pardon). Most likely he'll die in prison -- old prisoners age quite quickly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_conduct_time
I can see C.ORG being used by the likes of:

* http://corgipals.org/

* http://www.corgiaid.org/

* http://www.sunshinecorgirescue.org/

What are the costs of these .ORG domains? If it's reasonable for non-profits, I would love to spearhead or collaborate on the development of a corgi rescue site.
If the startup is going to outright lie to anyone not on the inside, then there's not much you can do. But the onus is definitely on the prospective employee to press them for the facts, and recognize people for being shifty. The author is justifiably upset about the outcome, but hopefully this can be a learning experience and move on.

I have to say, as much as YC has a great rep, I was kind of shocked when I heard the sizes of their classes in recent years. When I participated in another accelerator last year, our class had 10 teams, and that seemed like a fairly good size in terms of the folks running program being able to keep on top of the startups involved. I have to imagine when you are running classes of 80 teams (though they temporarily scaled back recently to more like 50, it sounds like they are going to grow the number per session again soon), not only are some going to be duds, but some are going to be outright scammers.
I did read it, but it states the obvious (that YC startups are well, startups).

Name the company, let them respond to your allegations. That would be fair ..
> This was interesting, but I would have liked a little more detail.

While I agree that detail would be nice, but I think what's actually needed is a semblance of some actual analysis. There's nothing about this article that actually helps with, well, anything. There's nothing to learn or have a real discussion about.

It's very telling that most of the comments here are about how devoid of content the article is. Anything for visitors, I guess.
I'm hooked on test-driven development (TDD)
28 years - yep, it may sound at first like a long time (even though they destroyed decades of life for their victims). Yet with good behavior these snakes will probably be out in 7 (if i understand the system correctly), and it doesn't look like they are going to serve time in any serious security tough facility.
This is why I always object monetizing public services.
This is great.

For the record, if you just need to do some simple scripting of your Gmail, maybe on cron, Google Apps Script is great for that. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/

Here's a recent simple example I wrote up. http://mikecr.it/ramblings/marking-gmail-read-with-apps-scri...
I don't want a 100% conviction rate from a prosecutor. I want a conviction rate that reflects the statistical norm of a person being charged with a crime and being convicted. Anything outside of that within a few points margin-of-error is grounds for removal.
It definitely feels like much of this post is presented in an overly negative perspective aimed at the startup, when in fact some of this may have come down to the employee not realizing what working for an early stage company entails, namely how haphazard some parts of it may be. It all looked so good when there's a sunny house full of co-eds smoking pot in The Social Network...
I can't tell from the page how much these cost. The linked page seems to suggest that they might be free for the right organization, but if you go to one of the domain pages, there's an "Offer Amount" text box.
Brilliant. That would align incentives more along the lines of serving justice rather than sensationalism/careerism.
I've not seen on a single story related to this about the actual bribers: they just name the company, but don't press criminal charges against individuals, or even sue the company? How is that an appropriate response?
What if you set out to code the RiteTag backend?
What if you could be a co-founder of RiteTag?

It’s 18 months in the making, and about to be re-made. We need 3 back-end engineers for our bootstrapped startup. If this is not for you, perhaps you might forward this post and/or connect me with the backend php person who you know – who should be in a startup with a hell of a future?

Spoiler: This doesn’t pay up front cash. (And yet, we’ll take on no new flakes.)
Modern Operating Systems (3rd Edition): Andrew S. Tanenbaum
All amplifiers will go non-linear at high gain, so certainly the technical effect can be pushed well back into the 20's. I'm sure someone, most likely an engineer in broadcast radio, "heard" distorted audio long before this.

I think it's reasonable and interesting to ask how it became art, though.
Agreed. Normal non-technical people let friends have a look at their computer, and it is often a surprise for both that passwords can so easily be seen. Theory is one thing, but there is IMHO also a practical "don't make it too easy" factor that should be considered. As the saying goes, sometimes "opportunity makes a thief".
I am talking about Ensure Complete not regular Ensure.
We don't do it. We see it all the time in contracts. We still sign the contracts.
Jesse, any idea when I'm going to be able to download my backups from Rackspace cloud servers and instantly/directly load them into either VMWare or Virtualbox? I asked about this a while ago and was told it was coming with the move to OpenStack.
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I'd recommend Linux Mint with Cinnamon for the same reasons.
I'm more familiar with Windows, but Linux should be similar. If your application is executed often, then it's pages should be in memory already, and not necessarily need to be read from disk. In terms of execution, if it's a compiled binary, it should be fast enough, if you need more, what you want is a lightweight application server anyway.
2015 Honda Acura NSX
Most likey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station

Mid way through the opening paragraph mentions several people charged with spying based on surveillance of short-wave number stations.
But they did something that warranted a "lock em up". They materially damaged families and children's lives (in a position of public trust) far more than their sentences convey.
I would also look at PLAI (Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation): http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/2007-04...

It's an excellent free undergraduate-level PL textbook that covers a lot of ground and is informed by both research and practice. There's a 2nd edition linked from there as well.
ObamaCare months behind testing IT data security
What are the benefits of using PuTTY over plain ssh in a *NIX environment?
AMBER Alerts on your iPhone: What they are and how to manage them
> Many people, especially high income people, would gladly pay for the convenience of ready-to-go product.

I'll second this. I've used the linked formula off and on, but there's not a significant difference in convenience between using it and getting food elsewhere. The mixture seems to change within a few hours of being made in a way that has not encouraged me to continue consuming it, so I have not tried preparing it in bulk. Assuming there isn't a way to make it remain appetizing for a few days after making it, it seems to be only about as convenient as weekly bulk cooking of chicken/rice/eggs/veggies/dishes that combine these things.

If nazgulnarsil has made large batches of it, though, I'd love to hear about it :)
Internet is still kind of free. Just don't tell anyone that you're doing this.
Is there a timeline on otter/autoscale in the public api?
Browser Wars: Websockets vs. AJAX
I hope this asshole dies in jail, and I fear he's not the last crooked judge they'll catch doing this shit.

Private prisons are a disgrace to the justice system.
This has indeed become so established that chocolatey.org can offer the following command with a straight face and call it "Easy Install!":

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin
I can't resist (this is the OP): you are missing the point. It's not just throughput, it's high-percentile latency. Latency is critical if you have 1 billion users or 100 users, and it is difficult to bring the high percentiles of the latency distribution down into reasonable territory on Rails since, by default, all operations are essentially serialized.
.org is fantastic because VeriSign doesn't control it. Though the organization that controls .org isn't the most benevolent either, but it's a lot better, it seems.
How Chromecast works: HTML5, WebRTC, and the technology behind casting
Usenet binary newsgroups? E-mail?
If you get them to leave, you don't have to pay severance. It's a typical maneuver to shake the tree before the culling.
The Raspberry Pi can do web browsing and other things you'd expect a basic computer to do. It's nowhere near the fastest, but it works to some extent.
Hi Jesse, I'm glad you're doing this. I love seeing the great people Rackspace is hiring and I'm excited about the improvements you could bring about.

I work for a Python shop that hosts everything on Rackspace. We have a mix of both dedicated servers and cloud servers, and we use cloud load balancers and Cloudfiles.

Here is my experience I had with Rackspace Cloudfiles and Python.

I started using a library I found on Rackspace's github, called python-cloudfiles (I contributed back some bugfixes to the library as well). One day, the project suddenly, without warning, disappeared from github! Where did it go! What happened? All my deploys are broken! Well, it turned out that it had been moved to another github account (rackerlabs) and support had been dropped, and it will be removed completely in August! I had to open a support ticket to figure out where it went. I wish there had been better communication here.

OK, so I started looking at Pyrax, which is the recommended replacement library (I think?). Looks pretty good, except it requires Python 2.7, and Rackspace only supports Centos6 (at least for dedicated servers), which has no official package for Python 2.7 (2.6 only). I could create a custom package to upgrade Python, but I find it kind of strange that Rackspace is providing a library that I can't run on their servers without adding custom packages.

Also, I noticed you recently added a commit to the python-cloudfiles package pointing to python-swiftclient. Is this an alternative to Pyrax? Can I use any of the openstack tools with Rackspace Cloud Servers / Cloud files? If so, should I build my apps on the openstack tools or on Pyrax?

Anyway, I hope you can clear some of this up.
Depends on if that unsavory thug appears in a game rated E (Everyone), T (Teen), M (Mature), or AO (Adults Only).
Off topic, but is there a name for that type of pattern in the header? It looks familiar.
You've just described a physical token duplication attack. A consumer phone certainly is easier to attack than a SecurID or smartcard, but it's a far sight from a really really long password. For starters, the challenge response is calculated by the phone's hardware, so that the private key is not exposed.

The "what you know"-type authentication is literally what you know, not "I don't know it but it's written down on my phone, hang on a sec". You're supposed to be able to provide it without reference to notes (or Post-Its stuck to the bottom of keyboards).
PLOP – Place Oriented Programming
In Alden vs Maine, this is argued pretty well in the majority opinion written by Anthony Kennedy.

"sometimes referred to the States’ immunity from suit as "Eleventh Amendment immunity[,]" [that] phrase is [a] convenient shorthand but something of a misnomer, [because] the sovereign immunity of the States neither derives from nor is limited by the terms of the Eleventh Amendment. Rather, as the Constitution's structure, and its history, and the authoritative interpretations by this Court make clear, the States’ immunity from suit is a fundamental aspect of the sovereignty which the States enjoyed before the ratification of the Constitution, and which they retain today (either literally or by virtue of their admission into the Union upon an equal footing with the other States) except as altered by the plan of the Convention or certain constitutional Amendments."
> Engineers were constantly told what to do.

I read this in the original article and thought "so it wasn't all bad"
just get rid of windows 8

I'm not aware of the grouping functionality changing between 7 to 8, at least to the extent that 8 doesn't group more aggressively than 7.

In both operating systems you can customise whether applications are grouped or not.

And although it's not necessarily PuTTY's job to change because of a new feature in the OS (taskbar grouping), I'd note that there is an API for controlling it [1].

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/08/20/10341...
Ask HN: How to get a job at a Big Company?
For the past 5 years I've been working primarily at startup companies. The one I'm at now is in the process of imploding. I am YET AGAIN having to go on the job hunt. I just turned 30 and am getting tired of this. I'm at the point where I just want to work at a place thats nice and stable where I can expect to have a job 12 months from now.

The problem is that stackoverflow and all the other job sites that litter the web seem to be 100% startup companies.

Where do these mega corporations advertise jobs?

Also, I am a self taught developer. I do have a degree, but it is not in anything computer related. I know Python and javascript really well, but have never touched any of the "enterprise" languages such as C# or Java. I have no doubt that I can learn these languages, but I'm afraid the MegaCorps aren't going to have the insight to realize that. Do I stand a chance?
VigLink appears to be a referral scheme. Quite different.
I'm guessing my $50 offer for z.org to become a dedicated fan site for Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg won't fly then? Fuck it, submitted an application anyway.
"Governments", as in executive bodies, yes. "Governments", and in systems of government, definitively not. There are multitudes of non-hierarchical, stateless mechanisms that arise from communities and societies trying to solve a cooperation problem.

Just four years ago, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work demonstrating how institutional arrangements were developed in various societies facing the problem of resource exhaustion due to overconsumption, without the intervention of the State.

But these are just a few concrete examples of an uncountable number of norms and institutions there are everywhere, and much more there would be if the State intervention didn't crowd them out by imposing its own solutions and banned all others.
The other 2 he is referring to are the ones who got a slap on the wrist though.
It's made of BITS.
Actually, it would benefit the Post and any other participating publisher -- any money is better than no money, after all. In particular, my design is structured so that service subscribers could penetrate paywalls with the guarantee that some payment will be made.

This creates a new segment in the market: people who would pay if the marginal transaction costs are zero.
Plus a lot of the controller code will be auto-generated from simulink or similar.
>YC doesn’t necessarily mean sure shot success. Paul Graham is a human and bound to make mistakes.
I may be wrong, but I don't think YC aims to only fund companies that will "succeed." Each venture is an exploration into a space. I think "mistake" is a bit presumptuous.
The privatization is just getting started. Look at this insanity: http://www.mockprisonriot.org/exhibitors/Pages/default.aspx
Almost every big company has a dedicated careers website.
Huxley 0.3 is out, featuring image diff and responsive design support
If you click through to the research behind the "commute" item, you'll see that it concluded that other things -- like an increased salary -- can indeed compensate for a long commute.

The interesting thing that the research uncovered is that people are strongly biased to underestimate the effect of commute time relative to other factors. For example, their survey found that people with effectively no commute were about as happy as people with a one-hour commute who made 40% more.

So, yeah, the article is wrong to say that things like a bigger house or better job "just don't work". But they almost certainly won't work as well as people expect them to.
For anyone who thinks they might ever own art, first, I highly recommend it. I love art. I don't even know why. But it makes me happy. I think what it comes down to is pride and satisfaction that in some way, my society has makers, one of whom made this thing to put it in the world, ultimately. That's the only reason it was made. Art is art. And everything else, is everything else.

Second, read Don Thompson's The Twelve Million Dollar Stuffed Shark.* He's an economist who took a deep dive into the very dysfunctional world of expensive art. What he leaves you with is a better understanding of the situation: screw investment. Saatchi buys art because he loves art. Yes, he's built a fortune on it, but he also has the largest collection of undisplayed art, and it's estimated the average value of any piece in his collection may be no more than the world-wide average. But he plays his role well, and his role, an ad man, integrates very well with the scene.

If you want art, buy it. But I recommend buying local. Art is the ultimate buy-local situation. My brother is an artist. That's as local as it gets. And his is the best art I own.

I'm starting to realize a little of Saatchi's situation: if you want to show, really show, those favorite pieces, then you have to give them a lot of wall space. Which means a lot of stuff, good stuff, ends up in crates. You realize you're willing to sell it just because it breaks your heart for it to not be shown. But you'll be damned before you let it hang on a wall where it wouldn't be appreciated at all.

If you don't know many artists (if it wasn't for my brother's inside access, I would know none), I think this Amazon Fine Art thing is a fine place to start. Check the under $200 category. There's some really great pieces in there.

The other things are craigslist and gallery mailing lists. Sign up. You'll learn if your city tends to do openings on Wednesdays, Thursdays, etc. The whole scene tends to get into sync. Meet some artists. If you have something particular, a desk, a portrait, I don't know many artists who are unwilling to work on commission. Guaranteed money is hard to come by in the art world.

----------

*http://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-Contemporary...
What is the advantage of public key crypto for 2FA, other than that someone who hacks the site's 2FA database can't then impersonate you to that site later, so the site doesn't need to do a 2FA token reset on all accounts if there's a compromise?

With TOTP, 2FA secrets are unique per site, so a rogue agent at company X doesn't gain very much by leaking your, or everyone's, 2FA secrets.

Does TOTP vs public key 2FA have to have a winner? It seems to me like both are fine if properly implemented, and if a public key 2FA system turns into a standard I'm okay with having both. They have trade-offs but for most people and most sites either one is fine. TOTP wins for now because it's a standard and nobody else uses Twitter's system. I don't want an authentication app that only works for one site.
Billing partners hate reviewing bills. First year associates write some interesting narratives in their time entries.

We are working on the best way to provide this service. Most likely working through a partner. We like the idea of an "Approved by" label. But we want to avoid any conflict of interest.