skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm sorry, but I still don't follow where you're trying to go with this.

You don't understand what I mean when I say there are no secrets of the winners? That success is what success does? How is that either difficult to grasp or in any way controversial?

> You don't strike me as someone who is particularly well informed with the modern startup, or the principles of turning an idea into a business.

So the fact that I have been a successful software developer for decades doesn't count? That, as one example, I turned my idea for a word processor into a product that became a worldwide best-seller doesn't count? You need to show a little respect, given that you're presuming to pontificate about something you've never accomplished, to someone who has.

> If you were, you'd know that cofounders are important ...

You know what? Thinking is important. A respect for evidence is important. Your belief in the value of co-founders is falsified by the history of successful businesses, and I already provided a list of obvious examples where co-founders only got in the way.

> ... going the path with a partner has numerous tangible benefits.

I guess that would explain why the most successful companies were started by individuals, or teams consisting of a leader and followers (which contradicts the meaning of "co-founder").

> You'd also know about the pitfalls that kill startups, things people believe to be important but are not ...

Like believing there are surefire rules for successful startups? The thesis that there is a winning formula is as true in business as it is in war -- it's proven false over and over again. In business and war, whatever strategy you choose, your enemy will adapt to it, which means you have to ... wait for it ... think original thoughts, thoughts that by definition aren't on a list of surefire ways to succeed. Thoughts your adversaries won't anticipate.

> It is not useless advice ...

It is useless advice simply because it's out there -- everyone has it. What you need is not more canned formulas for success, but more life experience and less respect for formulaic "solutions".

"When we started out, I had six rules and no children. Now I have six children and no rules."

> That's why I don't dismiss it, I seek it.

And eventually you will stop wasting your time trying to find the magic potion.

But, contrary to what you say, your writing so far only proves that you are incredibly rigid in your thinking, incapable of hearing anyone's advice, and you already have your mind made up about what constitutes a successful business strategy. You are neither flexible nor open to new ideas. You can't be bothered to listen to the advice of people who've had successes you can only dream of.
Here, he is referring to the Tumblr product properly, and referencing their trademark'd product properly. He is not using their trademark to refer to another product, or confusing users about the trademark.

Dumb question from not-an-IP-or-any-sort-of-lawyer - which way does the presumption lean? There's nothing here

http://web.archive.org/web/20130603151032/http://istumblrdow...

that straight up says that the product is unaffiliated with tumblr or acknowledging someone else's ownership of the trademark. Also the site seems to make an implied claim about the reliability of tumblr. If you were tumblr, it's probably not going to earn you some sort of even-keeled citizenship award but it seems it's not utterly ridiculous you'd have your lawyers ask the other party to cut that crap out, please.
PR theater. After how these companies reacted to the initial leaks, I can't think of another possible scenario other than the CEOs sitting in a room with government officials discussing the best strategy for damage control, and the government giving them green light to sue. But I guess I'm just stating the obvious.
Now that their back is to the wall and their reputations destroyed.... now they will sue.

I think there is a point however where one has to accept the reality of surveillance at this point and that large companies are probably not going to be the best points of resistance. Open source and open infrastructure with strong crypto and chain of custody tracking on keys is what is going to be required in the long run. I am not even sure we can go back to trusting the certificate authorities here and if we can't do that then these lawsuits are way too little way too late.
Lessons from GitHub's First Year (2011)
> I made a few abortive switches to Vim that didn't last a week because my productivity was too hampered

What exactly was it you were doing faster and better in your previous editor (which was?)?

> the environment [was] too extreme & foreign

What about it was weird?
> It's a question, but not The Topic of this thread.

How can you discuss whether interstate air travel is a right if we can't discuss what a right is?
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Att won't let you use a smart phone without a data plan. Or at least, the reps I've talked to insist it isn't possible.
$800m of blackmail material
But Sinclair went on to kick start the UK Microcomputer industry. The ZX range (Aka TS range in the States) was one of the most popular an influential home computers of the 8-bit era. I think only the C64 beat it world wide. it was also one of the most cloned systems as Brazil, Russia and many other Eastern European countries cloned it and extended the original design.

Apple was niche and mostly unknown in the UK at the time. The Apple II never really made it here.
The problem is that many STEM majors are not the kind of STEM workers there is a demand for. In my country a big share of people who have a CS degree barely know how to write real code. I think it's because 1. the education is too theoretical 2. free education system (no barrier means a lot of people who study without having any real interest in programming).
The 83 calculator was rugged, had great battery life, was programmable even in the simplest of ways, and basically kicked ass at its niche--remaining useful even through senior year of mechanical engineering at my college.

I'm sorry it's not sexy and shiny, but the thing represents an excellent optimization for price, durability, speed, and utility. The fact is that the 83 is basically the AK47 of the calculator world--ugly, old, outdated, and utterly fantastic at what it sets out to do.

You seem to overlook the fact that while we've got these great general-purpose tools for doing computation, the 83 is first and foremost a graphing calculator. It handles basic statistics quite well, handles graphing and intercepts okay, and as a bonus has a very simple and robust programming interface.

Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and OLPCs are cool and all, but in terms of just giving kids the basic tools they need to solve adult problems soonest, they fail.

EDIT:

I'm not saying I think they still need to be $100 a pop--a design refresh to get them down to more modest prices wouldn't hurt, but still.
A clumsy and crude PR exercise to minimise financial loss.
Scratch? Squeak? Puredata?

As 'stuff' lives on the Web, perhaps the next generation of constructionists need programming tools that they can use to make 'stuff' for their friends and put on a server?
That's an interesting conclusion, but I don't see the argument supporting it. Zero-sum rankings within each group, in nested groups, seem to make perfect sense for most purposes -- what's wrong to me would seem to be the assumptions like, e.g., that punitive measures need to be assigned to the bottom rank within groups every time, regardless of the overall performance of the group.
You realize you're the only one "going" when you pick just one single phrase out of his whole post and make this kind of remark on it, right? You're not exactly contributing to the discussion...
Not to mention resource depletion and the peaking of flow rates in oil extraction.
It's not a presumption, it's a test.

I'm too lazy to look up decisions at this hour to cite legal language, but wikipedia's definition looks correct enough at a glance:

The nominative use test essentially states that one party may use or refer to the trademark of another if:

1. The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute).

2. The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol).

3. The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial, and the same test applies for metatags.

So let's apply the test:
You can't identify the tumblr service without using the tumblr trademark.

Only the minimum necessary to identify tumblr was used; words were used, not the font or symbol.

Nothing on the page suggests sponsorship or association with tumblr

It's not even a close case here.

The fact that Tumblr doesn't like it is completely irrelevant. The whole purpose of nominative fair use is to allow things like competitors to compare their product to yours. If this was a presumption that had to be overcome, Ford could never compare themselves to Toyota in commercials, because they'd just fling trademark lawsuits at each other.

The fact that he is making statements about the reliability of the tumblr service is exactly one of the things nominative use exists to allow.

It is in fact utterly ridiculous. Toyota and Dyson don't threaten Consumer Reports with trademark lawsuits when Consumer Reports makes reliability claims about their cars and vacuums.
They don't do it when a guy posts about car troubles on his blog, or even if a guy makes opinion statements about the reliability of Toyota (or Ford or whoever)'s cars in general on his blog.
This is because it would be ridiculous. It isn't less ridiculous because Tumblr is popular, or because it's an internet service.
He's not even making claims. He is reporting a factual state of reachability to Tumblr from various points on the internet.

If you look, you'll see he's complained about Tumblr and their service reliability on their blog. Given that, it's hard to see this as anything other than Tumblr being pissy at someone with an audience that doesn't like them.
Looking forward it seems unavoidable that our lives will be fully recorded, and that we will not be able to control this. There are two possible ways to deal with this: either we have strong data privacy legislation which enforces data firewalls that the subject of that data controls, requiring a judicial review to bypass on an individual basis, or we abandon the notion of digital privacy and accept that everything we do and say is known to everyone. In the long term, i imagine it could become the second option, but for those of us who grew up with a sense of privacy it will be a hard transition.
Advanced search options in GMail
That's not an issue for a long time already.
What you describe is very close to how hundreds of thousands of grads are hired into Indian software service industry. Aptitude test followed by training and plenty of time to come to speed and be evaluated. It has worked out fine for them. Layoffs are very rare.

Startups are a different story as time to market is crucial and you have almost no slack.
False dichotomy. It is entirely possible to hold people responsible for war crimes without killing people. A good first step for the United States would be to ratify the 1977 protocols to the Geneva Convention, which explicitly define these actions as crimes against humanity and thus require certain legal responses.
The audiobook player app don't do this.
> In the EU we laugh every day when we unpack a product.

And you should. The U.S. system is ruled by the fear of -- not harm to consumers -- but lawsuits.

> "This is not a toy." "Keep away from children." "Do not reuse bag." "Immediately dispose of this bag."

The purpose of those warnings is to guard against predatory lawyers. The risk to consumers is only a smokescreen.

Here's a story from the U.S.: A robber was escaping the police by sprinting across a rooftop. He stepped onto a painted-over glass skylight, fell through, and was injured. He successfully sued the building's owners for painting over the skylight. True story.

> Obviously the people don't need it, but your legal system requires it.

Exactly right. But the legal system isn't about protecting consumers, it's about defending against liability lawyers.
cached version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130314085338/http://www.chrisfe...
Specifically regarding #2, I would like to see an emphasis on training and any company requesting a foreign worker visa pay into a pool that is dedicated towards training domestic technologists in transition. Unemployment is one thing, but, not everyone has availability to learn/transition into new skills.

Again, my argument is based off the norm that companies invest much less in their employee development than they used to - the onus is strictly on the employee these days. Which is the other extreme.
That's a pity – in spite of everything, it's a wonderful place with some amazing people.
The ads are served by an external service so not sure how the app developer would prevent that.
2) Unless you have a gastric bypass they should be attracted to each-other in the stomach, before going anywhere where you can squeeze stuff, well assuming they where eaten during the same time.

Also I think the sharp edges are a thread, if they go trough wrong, I think there is a risk of it ripping apart the gut. BUT I'm not a doctor.

Of course there is the simple solution of not buying unsafe toys (or letting kids play unsupervised.)
The trade-off is that while you're cutting down on a large, and generally blocking request, you're losing cache-ability of that CSS. On the next pageview, your browser will have to download that font/CSS again. The best way I've found to handle this is inline it, but use JavaScript to cache it in localStorage. That way you can get the best of both worlds.
These comments tell us far more about the people making them than they do about the issue in question.
STEM seems to me to be very much not zero-sum, so I think the more the merrier.
He's probably talking about many-to-many relationships that he has planned.
My thoughts exactly.

The post sought to position Microsoft and Google on the moral high ground, linking them to the values of the founding fathers.

If they wanted the moral high ground, they should have sued years ago. They've lost my trust, and no PR exercise is going to win it back.
Let the app creator create initial tags. Have system tags like spam or malware, that cause the app to be reviewed. Let users add and vote up or down tags, perhaps prompting them when they update (so they will have used the app. Downvoted tags are removed. Upvoted tags are placed higher in a search for that. let users searching specify tag only, or app name and description, or both.
There are many factors at play, but wages I've seen in the US have remained flat, or even dipped once one factors in inflation. I make less than I did in 1999, in spite of the fact that I've been promoted. Part of this is the use of offshore talent, and H1-B visa workers. I've got people from both camps on my team now.
I fail to quite grasp what both of you are arguing.

Power is desired in scarce societies when lack of power means lack of sufficient resources for survival and reproduction

Where those resources are available to all, then power be ones a function of aberration not necessity

With sufficient mobility and abundance invasion and tyranny will become like beating up water. Recently a guy in Syria asked advice on best European country for asylum. He had a job remote in Australia, so whilst looking like a refugee he was actually just moving house. Imagine is everyone on Syria right now had that option.

What if one day they gave a war, and everyone just left.?
(Replying to both you and dylangs1030 here)

The "18th century" thing stuck in my mind from some media piece, and now that you mention it, does sound rather obviously like a myth. But the place exists—I think it was probably Tangier Island [1], and the accent there is indeed archaic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E#t=0m33s

Some of that sounds like a Monty Python sketch! It's definitely an example of one native English speaker (me) finding another (them) hard to understand.

I also second the commenter who brought up the Glaswegian accent. I love how it sounds but damned if I can make out half of what they're saying.

Maybe you're just gifted with dialects :)

[1] http://goo.gl/maps/Brbtr
My experience is that it's very hard to find good developers, or university graduates who want to become developers.

The CS grads that I've interviewed fall into three groups:

1) They were good at Math, spent 4 years avoiding anything involving computers, and whose career goal is to find a cushy middle-management job.

2) Arrogant CV-fillers who think that their HTML/JS 'skillz' make them them God's gift to the world. Who then end up working for Big Consultancy Firm working on Sharepoint (because the money is good).

3) The rare gem, who love computers, love coding, and get usually get snapped up instantly by Google/Microsoft.

As someone who doesn't have a degree, I find the level of CS graduates from (top!) universities disheartening. I've seen people who couldn't implement a simple sorting algorithm in pseudo-code (or even explain how they'd do it!).

Things I can do with my eyes closed; you know, because I have actually read my algorithms book cover-to-cover.

The cause is clear: developers can earn very good money at the moment. It's a good career move. So it's attracting the lazy chancers who just see the $$$$$.

What ever happened to pursing a career doing something because you, you know, love doing it?
If you've subscribed to some service via Paypal, try and find a way to unsubscribe and stop payments from within the Paypal interface.

You may just end up pulling all you hair out before you find a way to do so.
Yep...we have no proof of Google or Microsoft being complicit in NSA surveillance.

Despite that, news like this is going to be analyzed in whatever light suits the reader's bias. People are going to argue and say that this is just a fake attempt at saving face, and that it's a conspiracy sanctioned by the government to allow these companies to regain their reputation. Then there are going to be counter arguments citing what the CEOs announced publicly. And so on and so forth.

People will believe what they want, one way or another. Occam's razor be damned.
But this is the public debate that Snowdon called for. The leaks put pressure on tech companies to defend their reputation and when they do, each new development keeps the story going.
Or just, avoid stress by working a reasonable amount of time and planning your meals.

I think they call that working smarter.
Oh, I didn't mean that killing people was the only way to make laws. Locking them up or taking their stuff away works too. But upholding a law against people who don't want to comply always requires the use of force.
This has gotten too personal and no longer has any substance. If you want to reply to get the last word go ahead, but I won't be replying to you any further.

If you presented any worthwhile ideas, I could discuss them. But all you've presented is that success is unmeasurable chaos and therefore any discussion is pointless and awash.

You have such a strong disposition, you even call it magic potions and canned formulas. Your last paragraph describes you as much as me, think about that.
So bear with me for a moment, the wikipedia page lists as a pre-requisite for the test to apply

"Nominative use, also "nominative fair use", is a legal doctrine that provides an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the United States Ninth Circuit,[1] by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own."

It doesn't say 'you can name your product after the other product', not does my poopy layman's understanding of http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tmcase...

And even if you could, wouldn't it be a lot clearer if you took some steps to actively dispel even the possibility of confusion?

Neither Ford nor Consumer Reports publish an unidentified 'do toyotas break down a lot' magazine or website so this seems somewhat different.

Mind you, I completely agree that tumblr's heavy-handedness about it is completely silly, I'm just trying to understand how it's so obviously legally silly, as well.
I've been thinking more about the whole "better multiplexing" issue for a bit now, and I suspect that some sort of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_sense_multiple_access_w... type of solution is ideal for this use case. Because if you think about it, two transmitters at once is not an unrecoverable failure mode, in fact it's easier to handle here than in, say, the original ethernet standard, because with packet-based internet stuff we can do things like changing the data rate on the fly in response to collisions.

Currently the system I'm imagining works as follows: Every T seconds a new packet is initiated, and fancy spanning tree relaying or whatever is used, and eventually everyone has the XOR of all server and client versions of the packet, which happens to be the XOR of whatever various clients happened to include into their packet. Now the additional information for a client who chooses to add that will be the payload plus a checksum value (which must not be homomorphic under the XOR operation). If one client transmits, the checksum passes, and everyone is happy. If multiple clients transmit, they collide, and the checksum does not pass, and each transmitter knows this and waits a random backoff time (number of packets) before trying again. But in addition, a collision is often a signal that the packet rate is too low, so collisions also cause the packet period T to decrease (and lack of messages will cause it to increase, naturally).

So I think the basic "matrix of shared secrets" construct can be extended to allow low-overhead (for values where "low" means "on the order of 3x") communications, because dynamically varying the period between packets and allowing anyone to try transmitting during any packet time will tend to mean that when no one is transmitting bandwidth drops to a very low level (I could easily believe 16-byte idle packets every 5 seconds for something where absolutely low latency isn't a requirement).
How do you know it's just PR theater, and that these companies aren't just trying to legitimately defend their reputation? You dismiss the entire story and claim that it's so obvious, but how can any of us know that right now?

And, in the face of not knowing, why default to an explanation other than what has been given to us?
I'm all for throwing the book at people who knowingly market things that appear to be safe in a particular sense but are not.

Buckyballs are obviously strong magnets that are small enough to swallow. Seeing the product or hearing a two sentence description is enough information for a parent to understand that it is not suitable for children who still regularly place toys and random objects in their mouths. Young children should also not be allowed to play with knives, household/automotive chemicals, cooking appliances and sources of electricity.
Most poor people (not enough food to eat level poor, not 40k is poverty in SF kind poor) do not pay any taxes and actually get money back from the government (unearned income tax credit).

Before I moved to US I lived in a poor Eastern European country. When I was in university my food budget was ~$70 and my total budget was around 150-160 dollars/month. Eating out was not really an option even once a month. 2k/month is as far from real poverty as I am from Bill Gates.
I thought Libya worked out pretty well, overall.
I would put my truecrypt partition in Chinese server.
> Yep...we have no proof of Google or Microsoft being complicit in NSA surveillance.

The top secret internal NSA documents saying they were partners in PRISM with colorful logos and all weren't enough?