skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an really interesting situation. What I'm really curious about is how/where IP of Tipjoy would eventually end up? Ivan doesn't own those IP, TipJoy does.

Assuming Facebook had initiated the acquisition, I can only imagine they're after
1) The technology/IP behind Tipjoy
2) The talents

I find it hard to believe that Facebook would fork out $5M just for the "talent", so I think that was more of a technology buy for Facebook.

So if that's the case, Ivan would be threading into an unfavorable situation since their investors technically own parts of TipJoy and would want to protect TipJoy's technologu and IP. I do think there's a potential that those investors could file claims against Facebook and Ivan if he does end up working on Facebook's payment system.

Again, I'm not pointing out anything against Ivan but I do want to know as entrepreneurs, if we do get into such a situation, what sort of risks/factors could arise from this?
Take responsibility for revenue & profitability. This should be the #1 concern for at least one person in your team, sounds like you should take over this piece.

Quite simply assign a number you need to bring in for '09 -- that should keep you busy for 60+ hours a week.
But it's also not some tragedy, either. It's a practical joke. A prank. That is all.
Thanks for the reinforcement. As I mentioned above, sometimes it really gets me down that Nick and Scott are blazing away at programming and I sort of have to wait for stuff to happen. I should talk to Nick about having me keep up with all his blogs. . .
The evidence of 4chan's involvement here is kind of shaky.
The New-Media Crisis of 1949
I personally sit on the fence here.

It's funny because just a few weeks ago, this article was on HN. Don't these 2 arguments contradict each other?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=660720
Heh Heh, you can actually check out our partnership announcement with ChinesePod at our blog (http://blog.skritter.com/2009/08/teaming-up-with-chinesepod....). Glad to hear you like it.
Keep the animation. 10 seconds -- I knew what your website did, how it worked and why I would want it.
How do you do the ping without an email?
I started reading Mashable when it launched. I recently deleted Mashable from my feed reader. It's a completely different site than it once was. I have no problem with that, I just don't have any use for it anymore.
Yeah, that's the point. Other representations are possible (binary), but only one has proven suitable for programming. This is presumably because of the way the human mind works. It would be remarkable if it were the only good representation for this. It would also be the reason why Lisp is the limiting case among programming languages, at least when it comes to metaprogramming. But I repeat myself :)
If it happened to my friend i'd laugh my ass off. But if it happened to me? not so much.
Abby > Ivan? :-)
Can you solve Seth Godin's math problem?
Thanks for the comments. I'll just add a few of my thoughts:

1. If we misinterpret facts, please call us out in the comments or by emailing one of us (ben@mashable.com in my case). We strive for accuracy, period.

2. We're more than just a tech blog. We're also a social media blog, and we're not only interested in the technologies that make social media possible, but in its effect on society in general, the good and the bad. Social media and web technology has had such a profound impact on privacy and culture, and we're interested in covering that.

3. The image you refer to is already becoming viral. Our goal's to try to sort fact from fiction because we have a platform and an audience to do that. We never write with the intention to harm or embarrass anyone.

4. I think GVRV has it right: we do have a different, broader demographic than many other blogs. I tend to write my articles so that everyone can understand them, not just technical or entrepreneurial minds. I do write about programming and entrepreneurship when I can though, and love reviewing startups.
On what basis are you saying that they didn't?

Edit: Well, now we know. "No basis" actually turned out to be an understatement. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779693

Edit 2: just noticed that it was you who asked the question. Credit where credit's due.
That Facebook story isn't unethical. Turns out her account and others have been hacked. It was a top story on HN today too. Hope that reassures you.
Nicely written. Thanks also for synthesizing the above posts.

In response to 1), that's one of the reasons why we're trying to address this. Even if I'm passive, it bugs Nick and Scott to keep me occupied, and that's not fair to them. As you put it, they are the engines of the company and although I want to remain busy and productive, that goal doesn't preempt respecting them.

Regarding the SEO, I'm working on that. Our login system is currently being redone which is indirectly foiling our attempts to use Google A/B testing, but as soon as we are no longer splitting the site between two domains, that should be resolved and then I can start working the minutia of the site that hasn't had any attention paid to it.

I'm also working on a newsletter, which we had at first discounted, but everyone has told us that they're great for business, but as you said, they take a lot of sweat equity. Hearing it reiterated makes me more prone to dump the time in and actually do it.
Before posting I did a quick search and saw that Chinese was said to have about 200 Million "second language" speakers.

Clearly those aren't people inside China?

That was the extent of my "market research" and haven't claimed any authority on the subject, but my feeling was that the audience here would be smaller, but focused. If I'm serious about learning Chinese it's going to require such an investment of time that I wouldn't be shy about throwing some money at the problem if the CW held that this would be a good way to learn.

The demo impressed me. And in my head I made the connection to learning how to type.. I can learn just as well on a typewriter, but PC software can give me feedback and instruction that wouldn't be possible on a typewriter without an instructor watching over my shoulder.
Thanks for the picker-upper. I've actually been personally emailed by one HN member to thank me for the frankness of this post, and responding to everyone has been very therapeutic. I'm the pessimist of the group (always have been), and I think you're probably right about the mentality being a big part of ongoing internal decisions about how to feel about my part in the company.
It would seem we have some competition. We welcome it, hopefully it'll make use better!
I wish. I tried that really hard in college, but I was terrible at it. Granted, they start off with Java at Oberlin (stupid in my opinion), but it wasn't the syntax that got me, it was the logic. So I scrapped that. If only my brain were more scientific!
Google, Apple and AT&T: Enough Blame to Go Around for Everyone
But they sure made the situation look pretty shady.

Really? I read it twice and while I agree that the author was trying to make it look shady, all he actually comes up with are "undisputed facts". It's like trying to make a horror movie by adding scary music to paint drying.

I know nothing about the details here, but when an attempt at innuendo refutes itself, that's pretty weak.
I pretty much do all of this stuff and I'm also the main coder. It changes day to day which I enjoy more, though...
Some people try to add wayyy too much meaning to their lives...

Yeah, those people who have some kind of standards and live their life for some higher purpose, they're really taking this entire living thing way too seriously. They should just laugh it off when somebody takes their identity and has them say things they never would.

Did I get that right? Is that what you're saying?
I don't think Facebook needs the domain, code or registered users. They liked the idea and obviously the people behind it. But to launch it on a Facebook like scale it would need a rewrite, tons of legal power and probably a new name anyway (even TipJoy learned to not like their name).
Hey encoderer, thanks for spending the time to reply in such detail. I guess our demo video IS useful for something other than distracting people from our conversion actions!

That last bit about the gaming aspect has been a thought we've been entertaining for a while. We've actually thought about implementing it as a facebook app so that you can challenge people in facebook to character-offs. That would be sweet, but Nick hates the idea of programming a Facebook app. We'll see if I can't wear him down. :)
This is the correct way to prove the summation. Although, I would point out that for r > 1, it's probably better to phrase it as ( r^(n+1) - 1)/(r-1). However, it's important to note that this is only true from a series starting from zero. For a series starting from m it is:

(r^(n+1)-r^m)/(r-1)

Which is trivially deducible from your method or the parent's method. For some reason I tend to dislike geometric proofs. This is probably because I find it very easy to make proof fallacies visually, more so than symbolically. However, this geometric proof is also less useful than the symbolic because it is much harder to use it to prove the summation at values smaller than infinity, whereas the symbolic works just as well for n.
The Notes What Spawned JQuery (2005)
Hey idlewords, since you are indeed in our target market and you didn't dig Skritter, would you mind sharing why exactly? Perhaps you could give us some information about how to make it better. Feel free to email me personally (george at skritter.com) or post here. And no need for censoring your response to polite banter. Maybe you just don't think it's a worthwhile service at all, but if you had some specific ideas, we'd be keen to hear 'em!
> brand name

The founders have themselves said that they have little traction, and 3rd party payment services will not add much value.

> domain name

Doesn't matter, when brand name isn't useful

> Existing code base

Its takes significantly less time to build it the next time.

> Registered users

Facebook has 250 million users! <1% cant matter anyway.
Facebook didn't do anything wrong. Tipjoy was out
of money. They'd been talking to several potential
acquirers, including Facebook, but those deals all
fell through. So the Tipjoys were going to have to
get jobs somewhere. Since they were worried about
money and Ivan admired the hackers at Facebook, I
asked FB if they'd offer him a job, and they did.

It doesn't portend anything for the future of startups,
as this story seems to imply. If your startup tanks,
you have to get a job somewhere, and lots of hackers
get jobs at Facebook. There are several other YC
alumni working there.
I think most people probably do realise that. I understand you're probably not in a position to tell it all just yet either. Seems like it would be in Facebook's and your own best interest to clarify the already-public information (if not more), though? Kill the speculation before it starts to echo.
That would only be a "math problem" if it came with enough numbers to do some calculations.

Oh, wait -- he's probably assuming that the only worthwhile metric in the problem is fuel usage. Well, with that requirement, it's easy. Hell, I've even done the calculations for determining how long it would take to recoup my losses if I bought a motorcycle and used that instead of a car with decent fuel efficiency, given some assumptions about future gas prices, a while ago:

http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=449
Even if it's "standard operating practice", it's unethical and stupid and deserves to be ridiculed loudly and publicly.

This comment provides common sense PR firm position:

I have had clients ask me to write reviews for them, and have refused (and explained the rationale). Why? Because refusing protects them from articles like this. Something that hasn’t been a focus here is that numerous companies have engaged an agency to perform this task for them. As a PR professional, I consider exposing a client to the risk of being featured in an article like this to be completely unprofessional. I haven’t had a single person push back after explaining this.

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/08/22/cheating-the-app-stor...
I got an idea. Take loan from a bank to buy a bank.
Heh, true. I had to skip ahead. That being said, this massive intro was more entertaining than most intros you find on Youtube, but how long can anyone be expected to watch the same three Motorcycle stunts/tricks? What stood out to me was the short text scroll at the beginning. I was thinking "wow, people even put slow, useless text at the front of their videos 50 years ago, it's not just a Youtube phenomenon".

Nevertheless, an interesting video. I learned something; I've actually been wondering exactly how that worked for a while (classic hacker attribute: enough to think about it and perhaps determine it on my own, but not curious enough to just look it up).
Typical song: 24 Mbit
Typical book: 6 Mbit

I peruse (listen to) the bits of a song much, much more frequently than I peruse a book. This makes the book outrageously overpriced relative to the song. And I've pretty much stopped buying music, but I still buy books. Looks like I won't be buying any ebooks anytime soon, though.
Why not? It's funny. Congratulate the people who humiliated you, and go on with your life.
So in order not to be nihilistic, you have to take everything too seriously? Screw that! I can find meaning and joy in existence and still not think Facebook is worth getting upset over.
I totally agree; it's a problem I've thought about as well, and it's not just HN either. People scan news headlines (whether on news media outlets or on news aggregators) always looking for something shocking or moving or hilarious or despicable. But after the initial reaction, often it fizzes out and there's no follow up. I would say though comments fairly quickly, the discussion can and does continue at times through a second or third link posted that gets voted up. But yeah, not enough times, and it's not even obvious often what it was posted in response to.

Well, I'd be interested in looking at that long essay if you end up posting it somewhere.
Do you have any specific recommendations for UI reading?

You should read Don't Make Me Think if you haven't yet.
CakePHP runs the whole framework codebase on each request. It's actually over a hundred times slower than rails (!).
If I were you, I'd spend lots of time talking to users, including sitting alongside them (virtually if necessary) as they use the product.

This is a great thread, and I applaud your attitude in searching for ways to add value. Most people would simply try to defend their existing position. If you apply any of these suggestions, you should post a follow-up in a couple of months.
Isn't it a marvel of nature? We're consciously shaping the world to suit ourselves. We're being very destructive and savage in the process, but destruction and loss is natural.

I most enjoy the comments one sees online made by people who talk about how our biology is going to doom us to destruction. The point they miss is that being aware of our biology allows us to circumvent it, to some degree, and that's a part of evolution to. Mental/technological evolution still counts as evolving.
Hey, that might be clear to you but for 99% of the people checking out those profiles it might take a while for that to sink in.
You sound like you're trying to be sarcastic, but read plainly that sounds pretty reasonable. Especially since $DEITY would, being omniscient, know all about the deception and not dock them any Heaven Points.

Hell, isn't being oppressed what religious people like? They should welcome this as an opportunity to show their unconcern with worldly things. $DEITY will be most impressed. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of his tests.
If we americans worked in gallons/mile instead these sorts of decisions would be obvious and intuitive. No one goes out with the goal of burning a gallon of gas so measuring how many miles you can go by burning one is silly. mpg is the reciprocal of what they want and people are bad at reciprocals.

I fixed his problem below:

Suburbans: 23.5 liter/100km
Priuseses: 4.7 liter/100km

Suburban+: 18.0 liter/100km (save 5.5 liters)
PriusPlus: 2.3 liter/100lm (save 2.4 liters)

Would you rather save, 5.5 liters or 2.4 liters?

(And you don't have to "go metric", just using gallons/1000miles would do fine.)
Sticky Light - non imaging photodetector
Christ NO, are you kidding? I was browsing 4chan when threads about this shit started going up. They are pretty clearly behind it.

I was just wondering when it would hit the MSM and then HN.

Not very long, it turns out.
> O'Reilly is talking to people, but he's helping people talk to eachother as well. He's introducing officials like Vivek Kundra, the new CIO of the Federal government, and Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra to ground-breaking hackers like geek rennaisance man Chris Messina and YCombinator founder Paul Graham.

I was going to flag it as being about politics, but that was kind of interesting to read, and I guess you could say it's on topic.
"it’s just an issue of IT planning"

I don't think it is. I think I recognise this problem - this is a case where the customer does not know what they want, because they lack the necessary background to formulate their needs or define their future direction. People without systems engineering experience usually constrain themselves to their perceived understanding of a solution when trying to express their needs.

For example, if you went to a customer five years ago and said "how would you like to edit your documents" they would have described a word processor to you - not Google Docs or Zoho and certainly not Etherpad - it would never occur to them to ask for those features. But show them those features, and they love it.

I have come to believe that you don't ask your customer what they want. You try and guess what you would want in their position, and put that forward as a straw man proposal. The customer has enough mission-specific knowledge to help you perfect your mental model, but they are rarely going to ask for anything innovative of their own accord.

There is a huge potential payoff in banging the right heads together. I have knocked months off a schedule that way. I don't know O'Reilly so I can't tell you whether he is the right person to be doing that, but we definitely could do with someone.
Sorry -- you're spinning off into religion-land. That's not what I'm saying at all.

I'm saying that the entire purpose of a life, any life, is what value you give it. If you like trees, or unicorns, or puppies, or whatever -- that's really all you have: your definition of yourself. For somebody to assume your identity and make statements that go against everything you stand for -- whatever your value system -- that's about the worse thing you can do to a person, save actually physically harming them.

This has nothing to do with religion or Christianity, except, I guess, that people think it's funny to pick on Christians in a way that would be reprehensible if done against any other group. Would you like to imagine what kinds of jokes we can make against ethnic groups? Minorities? People who are retarded?

It's obvious that these "jokes" wouldn't be funny at all. Why the brain freeze when it's done against Christians?
I wish I would have stayed in college for a master's degree, especially had it just been one extra year. Work will be there forever, but once you're at work, it can be hard to get back to school.

(The primary benefits I personally see to a master's degree are more options for getting work teaching (which I like to do... you might not), and a possible edge in some work environments. I've done lots and lots of software work that probably doesn't use much more computer science knowledge than I had before I started college, so I hardly think the graduate degree is required to do well at work...)
Note to the reader: don't believe every plausible-sounding explanation of events you read on a comment thread.
Yes, that's what I'm saying. It's some text on a web page. Do something useful with your life, if it means that much to you.
I sense strife intra-marital strife.
..I was going to be a rock legend. Fail
I'm OK, the bull is dead: Communication skills for engineers
The choice is obvious is my opinion. Saving one year of your life (getting a masters in one year instead of two) is extremely valuable. If you think you will ever get a masters, take the opportunity to do it in one year. If you can get jobs at those companies now, you certainly can still get them with a masters degree.

The only reason not to get a masters degree now is if you would like to study at a different school.
That's not a bad idea gruseom, I hope that I can come back with excellent examples of all these ideas being put into practice.
This was shared by a co-worker due to a problem i had at work, the business and engineers speak a very different language...anyway, the article has proven useful many, many times for me, hope you guys like it.
You can't separate the religion out of it. This kind of joke wouldn't work against anyone else. It's only because of their bullshit "hard line on (something allegedly bad)" or from making a big deal about their piety and "clean lifestyle", that they're susceptible to such pranks in the first place. Reasonable people unconcerned with maintaining a squeaky clean image would indeed just laugh it off.

I think it's fine to mock stupidity in all its forms, so the archaic superstition of religious belief is fair game. I'd be equally fine with mocking racism, homophobia, any other religion, etc - all of which, you'll note, would also be susceptible to this kind of attack. Coincidence?

Anyway I think you're well aware of my views from other discussions so I won't repeat myself.

what kinds of jokes we can make against ethnic groups? Minorities? People who are retarded?"

Christianity is a choice, unlike membership in the other groups you've mentioned. That changes everything.
CrunchPad competes with Apple in the portable computing market. TechCrunch is likely biased when reporting Apple and Google portable computing news, especially when reported by Michael Arrington.

http://www.satine.org/archives/2009/08/22/the-real-truth-abo...
I stupidly got caught out a few years ago when Reddit left all their passwords in plain text, and then got hacked. I was dumb enough to have been using the same password on Paypal at the time, not quite understanding how Paypal was linked to my bank account.
I went with one of the 3 companies you have listed there right out of college and if I had an option for a Master's degree I would have taken that. Like tjr said, work will always be there. The company might "pay" for it but they still expect you to work the 50+ hour weeks while you are going to work and school.
Now, I dont read any article on mashable or techcrunch before I read user comments on that article on HN.

I am guessing everybody has sites that fall into the category of "check HN comments first, and only then follow the link". I also do that depending on the title.
That's a good way of thinking about it. I guess the issue is that I'm actually not sure I'd ever get a masters (if not now).

So -- would I be closer to my goals foregoing a masters (for all time) and getting an extra year of work experience?
Just cause you would like it doesn't mean everyone would.
Oh and it's also not that funny... Maybe it's just me? Well I do love seeing people suffer and get hurt. Love those Japanese game shows, but these people didn't ask for it. The were targetted causes they were Christian?
Ivan, I'm noting your comment, and Paul's, on my post. But the offer I made multiple times to you and Abby still stands -- if there's more info that you want to get out, I'm happy to chat. pk