skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As startups are not anywhere near a guaranteed job, downturns are really hard on morale, but you have to stick through it. Why do you have to? Because commitment. If you aren't ready for that kind of commitment, then early stage start ups are not for you probably."

I feel like working for a startup in this way is for suckers. I've seen it so many times: You work really hard on a project and either the startup goes under or it gets bought out and you get a very small percentage (this almost never happens, however).

If I'm going to make that kind of commitment and take that kind of risk, I might as well start my own company. The risks are almost the same and the payout is much higher.

Yes, you may learn a lot from the experience, but does it have to be at the expense of your mental health and self-worth?
Sorry I should be more polite. Fuck heads.
Because they'll stick guns at us and throw us in prison if we don't pay them off?
U.S. will lose big bucks due to PRISM.
FundersClub (YC S12) is hiring a designer
We are a venture-backed Y Combinator company (~$6.5M raised from top VCs and angels) founded by serial entrepreneurs. We are building the best way for top entrepreneurs to fundraise and for private investors to invest. You can view our marketplace’s one year results here: https://fundersclub.com/oneyear/

We believe in simple interfaces, clean design, and pixel perfection. Our design is driven by a strong desire to build an experience that people love and a product that they use with ease.

The ideal candidate has experience working as a designer on fast moving small teams to deliver production web designs, a desire to “move fast and break things” (ship quickly, iterate quickly, emphasis on action over planning but still deliberate about design), and the ability to discern what is important in order to build the simplest solution and design to a problem.

We expect excellent wireframing and storyboarding skills, technical skills in Photoshop and Illustrator, and process and communication abilities. We expect strong self-motivation and an inner desire to perform at the top of your discipline.

Salary is $110k+ w/options, negotiable. Strong company-provided benefits (health insurance, meals, cell phone, laundry, maid service, transportation, paid time off, etc.)

E-mail your portfolio to design@fundersclub.com
Honorable mention for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach which has been mentioned many times on HN. Has many different ways of explaining Godel's genius. Though to be fair you could just read this article and be good.
The problem is that cities want more revenue and so aren't motivated by public safety but rather ways to bring in more money, hence the desire to suppress evidence that in some cases may make people safer (like the flash bulbs, for example).
Does this mean that Google implemented a Persona endpoint for Gmail, or that Mozilla is now using OpenID (or whatever it is Google uses now) to piggyback on Google's existing login mechanisms?
Never ever. I embrace it. I love it.
> If a company can reinvest their excess income in new ventures that will drive growth that will increase revenues and thus the stock price. That is a much better use of capital then generating a profit

If a company has excess income to reinvest, that is profit. You can't reinvest profits if you don't have profits to reinvest.

> That is a much better use of capital then generating a profit

No, actually, its a use of profit (perhaps one that converts it into capital.) And, obviously, you have to generate profit before you can use it for anything.
WHAT'S NEXT?!?? REMOVING...

<font face="comic sans ms">???</font>

???
I regret giving Lavabit my business and more so paying for several years up front. This is immensely disrespectful.
JBQ, the OP, decided to stop distributing AOSP builds because of the legal troubles getting the proprietary binary blobs needed for builds. Many people interpreted it as an action by Google against the open source community and have proclaimed that they're going to boycott Google.
Sadly brief list.
We had those in Maryland before the speed cameras, but the crack of speed ticket money is too good for our law enforcement to put down. It's unfortunate, speed cameras have been shown to have a negative impact on accidents.
16GB on my late 2011 MacBook Pro. I rarely go below 8 GB, and I love the freedom of having more than enough. I would highly recommend it!
Given how prominently they feature the diskless servers I was a little surprised that I did not see any mention of the power infrastructure. Did I miss the page with the details? What happens during a power failure?

A related question: what percentage of the nodes can lockup/hang/freeze without losing user data?
true Patriots...
Good idea, but I'm not going to go install Java to try your service. Remove that giant, monolothic and irritating dependency if you want anybody to use this: I shouldn't need to install 200 MB of software to connect to your servers through IMAP.
Swarm casts humans as ants in the first Google Glass MMO game
"SINCE 1994 Tracey Aldridge has been arrested 100 times, jailed 27 times for more than 1,000 days and spent a total of eight years in prison."

The math does not add up. There were not 27000 days since 1994. Did I misinterpret something?
100% about #1. I don't even mention price or anything until we're at the stage of "So, you ready to start?" I want to hear absolutely everything first. When they are ready to start, then you discuss price.

I used to start off with my rate and found that it makes customers uneasy as they try to tailor their game plan to your rate. It's a looming overhead for them.
Android could eat away at Apple? Sometimes I wonder if I live in the same reality as everyone else.
> Using technology to automate much of the work now done by employees and contractors

This sounds like they are just trimming a bloated IT department, and just using security as an excuse.
Reek vs RuboCop
But then the prices of the food would be more expensive to compensate, which is arguably the reason that the tipping culture has been created in the first place.
You don't understand how corporate accounting works.
The Bloomberg Terminal kindly reminds you s/was/is :)
I find it amazing that anyone can still justify what the government is doing. Every line has been crossed. To the DEA, to the IRS. And, still, you are okie dokie. I am amazed.
I assume that means 1000 days total, not 1000 days per incarceration.
1000 days over 27 intervals
I agree with you. Small workarounds like E2E encrypted email aren't enough.

I think that it's time the tech industry had an open and frank discussion about about re-building our infrastructure from the ground up to avoid organizations with means (e.g. the NSA) from abusing the system. Privacy is essential to a healthy culture and a healthy economy. Can you imagine Putin taking advantage of similar tracking to hunt down homosexuals with his draconian anti-gay laws?

This is a pandora's box that needs to locked shut.
I bought an OpenMoko a number of years ago. It was a brave effort but a hard mountain to climb.
Or you know, a massive index of predictive technology that knows where I'm going and when before I do? Those services and data are more important than any physical product Google will ever release. Because it will power your interactions with their devices. Glass, Watch, Car, all will be powered and interacted with primarily through Google Now. Your Keep notes will becomes TODOs that your car offers to drive you to on your way home.

People thinking in hardware products can go hang out with Apple and see how that keeps working out for them.
I'd love to see some beard analytics...
Arch Linux has good docs on i3wm.
Don't be so bleak. If you're going to do something that will get the attention of any government, here's a simple rule to follow. Don't use 3rd parties. And if you must, do it in a way that can never be traced back to you in the "real world". It isn't hard and it isn't even illegal.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Invisible-Protect-Children/dp/1...
True - the discovery piece (which weapons work best where, trending, etc) would likely not produce revelations, but it would make for an excellent leaderboard for the extremely competitive.
Q: Why is this privatised?

A: Too easy to abuse.

If some change makes for easy abuse, the private industry will lobby for it to be made public policy.
For my own project, the GC tradeoff with Go (or Java) is acceptable given the relative ease of development w.r.t. C++. Since there are better structures in place to explicitly control the layout of memory, you can do things with freepools, etc, that take pressure of GC.

For high-performance things like the systems I had to build at Google, I don't know how to make things work in the high percentiles without bringing explicit memory management into the picture. Although it makes me feel like a hax0r to talk about doing work like that, the reality is that it adds 50% to dev time, and I think Go/Clojure/Scala/Java are an acceptable compromise in the meantime.

It is possible to build things that minimize GC churn in python/ruby/etc, of course; I don't want to imply that I'm claiming otherwise. But the GC ends up being slower in practice for any number of reasons. I'm not sure if this is true in javascript anymore, actually... it'd be good to get measurements for that, I bet it's improved a lot since javascript VMs have received so much attention in recent years.

Final point: regardless of the language, splitting services out behind clean protobuf/thrift/etc APIs is advantageous for lots of obvious reasons, but one of them is that, when one realizes that sub-service X is the memory hog, one can reimplement that one service in C++ (or similar) without touching anything else. And I guess that's my fantasy for how things will play out for my own stuff. Ask me how it went in a couple of years :)
How I am making $80/day selling products between Amazon & eBay...
Maybe it's time for an entirely new message transmission protocol. Email clearly is insecure and not securable.
Good analysis, I largely agree.

Then again, you hear about Microsoft or Sun/Oracle passing notes to the NSA about insecurities in the OS or JVM so that they can go about their stealthy ways. I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened with Go. But good point, it's open source.

There is also an issue with Go dependencies that may make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities. The solutions are discussed here: http://kylelemons.net/blog/2012/04/22-rx-for-go-headaches.ar...
Careful, up-voting this comment will put you on an NSA list.
I see many comments here about developers upset about being treated as "just a developer."

Well, if you want to be respected as more than "just a developer," you'll need to understand more about the real world. Specifically people.

If that doesn't convince you, look at it this way: healthcare is a huge, growing, and technologically behind-the-curve industry. It offers a huge market for your services. Mental healthcare needs better solutions.

Also, I have met my share of severally mentally disturbed developers. So this could be any of us we're talking about.
ah yes, let's cut down on the amount of people who will dob on us.
Another bitter Scala fanboy that goes trolling other language threads looking for any mention of Scala and who is very angry that Scala isn't taking off and never will.

That's the thing about the Clojure community. It doesn't have wackjob fantatics like you.
I've been boycotting US-based Dairy Queen restaurants for the last 15 years because my order got screwed up once.
Hopefully the 90 percent all become Snowdens and the other 10 percent quit.
Apple may be Developing Hyperlinks for Audio
NSA plans to get rid of 90% of system administrators, automate their jobs
The VT100s I worked on were all off-whitish-bluish, not green. Also, some ambers.

But they all had raster lines.

So, if the future doesn't have raster lines, it's not the future.
Walmart is much stronger internationally? They crashed and burned in Germany, and the map of their international locations is.. not very impressive.

Frankly, looking at the US map, as a non-american, even there their presence isn't particularly exhaustive. The USA just happens to be a big market.
The cost of labor is always pushed into the client. The only difference is that tips aren't added to the price, or fixed.
An internal Amazon company motto is, "it's still day 1." That's their view -- that it's still the early days of the internet. That's why they reinvest so heavily, because it's still early days.

MS people I spoke with as late as the late 90s still considered themselves to be a 'startup' (though not using that term), but were quick to point out that they could get disrupted in any market - they were playing in many fields, but weren't dominant ("yet", in their minds). I think this was perpetuated by the sr mgt in anticipation of the anti-trust trials - 'look, we're not some big monopoly - we're a scrappy startup that could fail/lose big at any time!'. I'm not sure anyone believed it, but also not sure that anyone in the mid 90s might have foreseen a time when MS wasn't a dominant player, but here we are.

They're still big, and they matter, in some markets, but very few people are afraid of them any more, or even care what their plans for the future are. People fear Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. MS is, if not totally dead man walking, in grave danger of becoming that without anyone (including their mgt) even noticing.
Since Edward Snowden was considered an administrator and he was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, this means a supposed large cut in contracts to external legally immune corporations.

First off I doubt much of a cut on spending or a hindrance to the vast expansion of the world's surveillance state.

But if this does mean a cut in those employed it implies less targets to battle back judicially, legislatively, socially. Less 'independent' opinions (dismissing a probable increase of automated bots) attempting to justify their salary. Plus automation is king only to a point, how do most hacker seminars end? "Its always about the people."

With a clearer trail of monetary remuneration to follow that gives those in the dissenting camp a better chance to isolate and make examples of the collaborators who seek to route around justice to enforce their vision of law while hiding in the legal shadows collecting cash.

edit: Be on the look-out for a large increase in marketing of surveillance state tools to nations like Saudi Arabia, or torture loving UAE, typical nations that companies that Booz Allen Hamilton and others whore themselves out to for monies.
Public XMPP servers
As a shareholder, you don't want a dividend IF the company can invest that money at a higher rate of return than you can. Berkshire Hathaway is the textbook example of this: they have not paid a dividend in 40 years, but the book value has grown by about 20% every year (averaged out).

I would not say that Google and Microsoft necessarily grow suboptimally because they have a lot of cash sitting around. The current opportunities may not be worth investing in. Berkshire has tons of cash, waiting for a good opportunity. And when it comes, cash gets poured into it.
I wonder if you get more interesting government contacts for running a Tor exit node vs. a mixmaster mail anonymizer now.

I certainly got a lot of interesting contacts when running a remailer. It was awesome being able to talk to them as a relative peer (since I was doing defense contracting), and explain calmly why remailers are good, what level of monitoring is possible, what security assumptions the whole network operates under, how you would defeat it, and why it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I was thinking the same thing. In the past, when people have advocated replacing SMTP with something else to combat spam, that idea is always shot down with "too many clients, too much infrastructure" but if you have a new application and real demand (and it seems like there is) then you perhaps you could get enough traction to make that work.
According to a source speaking off the record, most of the reduction-in-force will be achieved through mysterious auto accidents.
Sounds like an excuse to bring in a different huge company with another huge contract to 'automate' tasks.
What It Means to Be An NSA "Target"
The problem with persona is that it sends the same identifier to all websites (nominally your email address). That makes it super-easy for those websites to feed your activity to a central tracker like DoubleClick which will consolidate all usage information from all DoubleClick affiliated websites.

Persona would be a lot more privacy-preserving if it generated a unique identifier for each website. A "persona" for each website instead of one persona for the entire interwebz. Since the system is mostly automated it shouldn't be that hard to add one extra layer of indirection.

It might even be possible to shoe-horn it in to the current protocol with just a little bit extra on the browser and identity provider sides, but no change on the website code.

If anyone has actually done that, please post, I'd like to hear about it. Availability of that functionality would sway me to start using Persona and probably anyone else who is worried about spreading their email adddress far and wide across the internet.
I don't fully get this. It's the nth article about non technical topics I come across where the first comments start with ripping the content and the author apart.
Always in such a subtle but mental and aggressive way. The other article which comes to mind was the post about the 10 simple things which make you happier from yesterday.

It seems to reflect how narrow minded this community outside of technical problems and business models actually is.
tl;dr

Interesting problem this year: build a REST/JSON client bot to solve numeric expression riddles, based on answers. It's Jeopardy for numeric bots!
> <blink> support should be dropped for one release out of every four.

Thanks for the laugh.
Economist is also a quality news source. I'd rather have articles from the Economist make the front page over sensationalist/uninformed tech articles from The Register or similar sites that lack substance.
Pretty sad world we live in that this is entirely realistic.
Sorry, why are you convinced that the problem is marijuana and not the Robitussin? Robitussin's active ingredient is dextromethorphan, an NMDA receptor antagonist that can destroy your NMDA system through repeated usage, which is a leading hypothesis for the cause of schizophrenia.[0]

You could compare what you're saying to "my friend smokes weed and tobacco and got esophageal cancer, but I'm pretty sure it's the weed."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_hypothesis_of_schizo...
Those are some good links. Thanks. He's very savvy guy. Interesting how he chose to conclude the interview which was very clearly targeted towards the "investors" of Amazon as this:

"And the reason that I'm doing this interview with you is I want customers to understand what makes us tick, how we operate, what our principles are. I think customers want to know who they're doing business with."

smart!
I'd say that's exactly what they want everyone to think.

Of course we see more violations in china, but who's to say you don't have 10 times more of that from the US?

Just because they don't do it to US citizens (in most cases) it doesn't mean they don't do it.

Believing the other side is worse just cause you "see" more of that stuff, ends up being just blissful ignorance. Every party has it's faults and I have no doubt in my mind that the US has the most.

But we shouldn't worry... that's all to "protect the american citizens from terrorism" :D
Judging by [1], the latter.

1: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/56526022621/what-is-an-iden...
Are they shutting down preemptively because shutting down a service that has received an NSL is illegal? I'll be watching what happens to Lavabit to find out.
> This discussion should not be on hacker news.

Ok. I'll bite. Where should it be? What site provides deep discourse into these topics in an intelligent manner?
Thing is, back in the day, blink did have its uses...

<blink><font color="red">"If you click continue,
your database will be irretrievably deleted, your
children shipped off to coal mines, and your tea
served lukewarm."</font></blink>

Even corporate intranets loved it: http://forums.asp.net/post/433145.aspx

It worked!
Seems more likely that this was a business decision under the guise of something else.
FWIW - firefox has supported multiple profiles for years, long before Chrome even existed.

Run it with the following command-line arguments:
-ProfileManager -new-instance

That brings up a profile picker/creater. Each profile is isolated, different plugins, different cookies, etc. The only information leakage is when a plugin keeps its own data outside of the profile directory, like Adobe Flash keeps its version of cookies in a per-user directory rather than a per-profile directory.
Isn't Pond (agl's thing) that?
> I’m proposing that tipping allows us to assign women a role where any sexuality they display can be attributed not to their desires but instead to their greed for money. In doing so, we both dehumanize and desexualize women, in large numbers.

Sorry, but as merely a "guy's opinion", this is pretty worthless. Maybe if he brought in some quotes from actual women working as waitresses, it would be more convincing and he could make a case.

But it's just far, far too simplistic. Maybe some guys look at waitresses that way... but that doesn't mean all of them do, or even a majority do. Lots of people disrespect lots of service workers, period. And why stop with women? What about hunky bartenders hired for their biceps or handsome faces, to attract a nice female clientele? Are they dehumanized as well?

This blog posts starts out with some interesting observations, but quickly veers into drawing unwarranted universal conclusions, making waaaay too many assumptions.
Ah! I didn't connect this to the AOSP stuff (I didn't follow names in that). Thanks!
Growing and selling marijuana will give cigarette companies their first favorable publicity in decades.
Buying out the competition?
Good idea! We can easily accommodate that.
Our app is based in research we've published, which we've made available here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6376

We're also actively seeking developers and game designers for the project, and we're accepting donations =)

I'm watching this thread, and I'm happy to talk about anything related to Swarm!

edit: send any inquiries to swarm.over.glass@gmail
Any other Obama supporters out there so utterly disappointed in this administration? Call me naive, but good god this is depressing. Seems like the country at large is so much more willing to let this stuff slide because it's not Bush/Cheney doing it.

Congrats Democrats. Your complicity here has pretty much converted me to a third-party voter.
Ask HN: How to deal with inappropriate interview questions?
A while back I had an interview with a fairly well known startup for an internship. The interviewer asked me a few personal questions - what did my parents do, do I have any siblings, what is my relationship status, whether or not my SO would be willing to move, etc. At the time I was a little creeped out but I didn't think much of it since I ended up taking an offer somewhere else.

<p>Now it's about the time that I'm going to start looking for a full-time job and I was wondering what I should say if that situation comes up again. If I say "sorry, I don't feel comfortable answering these questions", I'm afraid they might think I'm being prudish or something. I know startups are quite casual, but are these types of questions normal?
I don't understand either. How can reinvesting corporate revenue avoid taxation? Isn't corporate income taxed regardless of whether it's put into the bank or reinvested into new ventures?