skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand a part of your perspective. After all, from an objective point of view you are the one who's ultimately accountable for getting things done. And by that logic, you deserve the lion's share of the rewards when they come due.

But the problem with your reasoning is that, in reality, growing a successful company is a team sport. No matter how brilliant you are, you alone are no match for a high-performing team. Or even a medium-performing team.

The real issue is not what you deserve should the company "turn profitable." It is that you are extremely unlikely to become successful until you figure out how to build a great team. Which is hard, by the way.

My recommendation is that, if you have established product-market fit and are now in execution/scale mode, you need to either step up as CEO and make learning how to build and manage a team to achieve real results your #1 responsibility. Or if that's not your thing, you need to accept your strengths and weaknesses and find someone else who can play that role.
If it's Gruber's currency, it's accumulated in spite of Gruber's best efforts to strangle that particular metaphorical revenue stream.

If "Markdown" was just one ergonomic markup syntax among many, then yes, a hostile name-takeover would be completely a dick move. However, Markdown won; there's a bazillion slightly-incompatible implementations, and it's not Gruber's baby anymore. Hundreds if not thousands of people have invested a part of their life into Markdown, either by writing an implementation, using one in a larger product, or just taking the time to learn the syntax.

While Gruber is the original creator of Markdown and deserves respect for that design achievement, the Markdown community is much, much larger than he is and when the two come into conflict, it's not surprising that Gruber loses.
It's even less about missing features than about bringing some sanity to the ambiguities in the few features that Markdown has. Markdown doesn't even do a good job of spec'ing the few features that it does have.
Woz wasn't even there for the time of Apple's greatest success. You don't have to like Jobs, but he did great things even without Woz.
It's public currency. He hasn't touched the 'spec' in what, 10 years? We've moved on, he needs to as well.
Agree with everything on that post.
I would suspect that most people using SBCL has more to do with momentum than anything. CCL only became available on x86 fairly recently.
Yea, I think this a really good idea.

I've also had the idea of an AirBnB for 'toys' (i.e. sports equipment, motorcycles, bikes, instruments, etc).

There is already RelayRides for cars, and qraft is probably the closest existing site to my idea, but I think it could be executed much better than qraft.
You got it! Political surveys as well as B2B. It makes no sense that it's magically non-dialer since 75% of the calls are now 12 seconds instead of 6 seconds :P

People don't understand that flat-rate in this day in age means "I will send you all of my calls that are above the flat-rate, to your flat-rate" - aka LCR'ing the flat-rate. The whole industry has changed so much in the last 4 years. I am excited to see if the $0.0007 flat intercarrier FTC ruling will ever go through.

You are right - if the stats are good, the carrier doesn't care. The stats are the ONLY thing the carrier can control, and should control, imo.
Yes, but for instance sometimes in my open source projects I disagree with the philosophy or with the purpose of a patch and I mark it WONTFIX, I feel bad because I don't want to offense people that take the time to contribute, but above all I don't want to mess-up with my project so I don't commit the patch. At the end of the day I think you're the creator of the project, you have a vision, you are the editor and you must not feel bad about it. And after all, if people disagree, they fork it and make it their own project with their own name. But calling it abandonned or bad stewardship is simply wrong.
"the currency behind it" seems to be everything about this. These identical actions, under a different name that neither included nor winkingly referred to Markdown, would neither bother Gruber NOR provoke any community reaction. It is an odd situation.

"New syntax, new name. That’s all I ask." https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507651498692849665

Regarding the name: "It more than just suggests control, it asserts control." https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507557595906052096
I agree. I can recall a few relevant instances when I was working on my OS (for a class). I would get stuck on a problem (sometimes design related but also sometimes debugging), give up for the evening and head home. By the time I'd walked halfway across the football field, the answer would come to me. Not sure if it was the walking or the fresh air, but this happened at least twice throughout the 7-week project.
> There are no class browsers for Lisp because deep class hierarchies are very rare.

That's actually false. Deep class hierarchies are quite common in object-oriented Lisp. Also there are class browsers for Lisp.

> ... to subclass a base-class ... This is extremely rare in lisp.

It is isn't. For example, an application's condition classes will always be a subclass of something. Only relatively primitive applications will not introduce new condition classes.

> I can count on one finger the number of times I've subclassed

Then you have never used CLOS or any CLOS-based libraries.
> only the ability to quickly and precisely do exactly as you are told

In my experience, my 4.0 existed because I didn't do what I'm told. If I disagreed with a teacher's answer, I would write in "(e) bsilvereagle's answer" and usually get full credit. Similarly, not once did I write a Bing-Bang-Bongo paper in high school as instructed, yet I got top grades in English because I could independently construct a worthwhile essay. I don't think I ever completed a Chemistry lab as instructed either, I would stop half way through and start tinkering around and could usually come up with a hypothesis/experiment/conclusion that was much better than what the lab set out to do.

In short, don't assume every 4.0 you see is going to do exactly as they're told.
His twitter certainly isn't doing him any favors as a character reference, either.
George Carlin answered this question better than anyone in the world. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj5Sd3BRm_I
This is real simple. You don’t get to appropriate the name just because you wanna. Maybe legally you can under some circumstances, but ethically it’s completely and utterly bankrupt. I cannot even fathom how anyone could even get the idea to appropriate the name and the project in that way. It shows a complete lack of respect and decency.

Naming it something different is very simple. Really, very simple.
The company I work for allows it as long as you sign a Conflict of Interest Disclosure Statement. It states that the side job can't directly or indirectly compete with the company you're working for, nor can you use company resources for it. Also, it can't affect your performance during your regular work hours.
I feel stupid. What is "signaling"?
Does anyone know how this compares to Generic Programming in Haskell? There are lots of different approaches the Haskell people took when solving this problem of traversing ASTs.

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Generics
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Research_papers/Generics
Played with some Big Blue Disk demos on that machine he is pictured with.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the strong parallels to the vans that operate in New York. There was an excellent article on it in the New Yorker a few months ago:

http://projects.newyorker.com/story/nyc-dollar-vans/
That's strange, they made money on the deal, but got tax benefits from the losses?
I'm sure I'm stupid, but what is "signaling"?
You unequivocally do not use the creator's project name.

Look at the MySQL bifurcation. We don't have "MySQL++" by Percona and "MySQL Redux" by Monty — we have entirely new names. We don't see companies going around calling themselves "MySQL Labs" just to co-opt the good will of a pre-existing name. Oracle would sue the name infringers into the stoneage (temporal lawsuit warfare; very advanced move).

Now, I doubt teh groobz will lawyer up and smack down (unlike Oracle), but if you are creating something new using a pre-existing name just so you can exploit existing popularity you didn't create yourself... that's just a dick move.
.ready() is where you put pretty much all app setup. There was never a good place to do this before.

The app refactor is the single biggest improvement to Django in years. Bigger than CBVs, IMO.
If you're going to ask such a question, you should list a means of contact in your public HN profile.
Go ask the victims of Gurmeet Singh, Eric Chung, etc how ensured they feel. If the driver isn't deterred by a criminal conviction with years of prison, losing the taxi license certainly won't work either.
GWT is coming back  in 2015
Unexpected Cuba
Rough timeline of Peter Thiel's accomplishments:

- Started his hedge fund at age 29

- Co-founded Paypal at 31

- Paypal acquired at 35 (Thiel took home $55M)

- Angel investment in Facebook at 37, co-founded Palantir the same year

- Founder's Fund at age 38

Interesting that he's had all of his big wins starting in his 30s, that each success compounded into more successes and enabled him to go up to bat for even bigger wins, and that it's the result of 10+ years of hard work and intense focus.
In the modern realm of scripting-is-programming and "startups must win at all costs, damn the ethics" mindsets, people just act as greedily as they can until a larger (monetary) entity gets tired of being exploited and begins causing (monetary) pain down upon the exploiters.
I have not personally seen a contract provision or company policy that was a blanket prohibition on outside work.
The BSD license argument (it was also brought up in the other discussion) seems a little bit strange. Markdown.pl, the perl script is BSD licensed, but the markdown specification (if it existed) isn't BSD licensed.
Someone should mention Steve Wozniak here
IMO Gruber's request is perfectly reasonable:

> They’ve done more than “formalize”. They’ve changed the syntax. New syntax, new name. That’s all I ask.

- https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507651498692849665
I was being flippant in my use of decimals there, but that's a detail.

Even if you get 0.1% and are ultimately diluted to 0.01%, a billion dollar sale is $100k. When people sign up for below-market pay, they're not envisioning a distant eventual windfall of a year of market-rate salary.
It's when VC's invest based off the interest of other VC's rather than the merit of the product/idea, kind of like a bandwagon.
If one of the Y Combinator partners makes a follow-on investment in a company, a lazy investor might assume it's a "signal" the company is worth investing it. Conversely, if a Y Combinator partner doesn't make a follow-on investment in a company, a lazy investor might assume it's a "signal" the company isn't as attractive.
"useless" seems a little extreme. the tool is fun and fluid enough that even if it were to vary within 20bpm i would still use it to get stuff out of my head. prototyping.

for what it is, i think the usability issues are more severe (no quantization, inability to modify a sequence, no pre-roll or indicator of where in the loop you are recording, can't seem to play over another track without recording).
those receiving the devices are already charged with the task of acting as a form of surveillance towards the good of the state. The technology will just prevent them from cherry picking what they wish to survey. (probably a good thing with regards to crony-ism and corruption.)
Well, now.

Are Atwood et al. calling it "Standard Markdown" because they don't have enough of their own popularity, and feel the need to appropriate someone else's decade-old coolness in order to be recognized as significant people because they can't accomplish that in their own right?

Or are Atwood et al. calling it "Standard Markdown" because they know quite well that, given the massive proliferation of Markdown varieties all of which use the name "Markdown", naming it anything else essentially guarantees that because no one will ever hear of their effort, and therefore no developers will ever use their standardized variant, no matter how much less painful doing so would be for them and their users?
nod was found because he (or his girlfriend) dropped off packages over a "wide area" by going into post offices and mailing things. The indictment claims the investigator went to the PO and asked if they had noticed a certain car, and the employees there were readily able to provide details on a individual that made frequent mailings.

A large seller has too many packages to easily avoid leaving a trace. Automated analysis of video recordings near a post drop, for instance, could reveal these patterns.

Apart from that, sellers often mess up on opsec, just because it's so hard to maintain over such a large period of time. That's just how it is.
Sam seems to be one of the best things that's happened to YC - and extra kudos to pg for recognizing that and working so hard to grab him.

The most important piece of this write up is concerning the rules for being part of the investor email list. This takes what was previously an informal rule (don't mess with YC companies) to a much more formalized rule. Every decent investor is going to want to be on this email list which means they are very clearly and explicitly incentivized to not screw a YC company.

This will hopefully not just have a positive impact on YC companies. What I hope is that the idea of what "screwing" a company means will get further standardized which will have a positive impact on every startup around the world. i.e. a very good filter may simply be "are you on the YC list?"
As a white male, I've experienced nothing but respect from police officers. Of course I'm horrified by the reality of stop-and-frisk, but NYPD is far from a force of racist assholes. Body cams will definitely help, but let's not classify them hastily.
I can totally relate. I mean, I've only ever worked for small companies for that very reason.

Have you tried working for a big software company instead of a financial institution? I know that banks don't treat software devs all that well, but shops like Google, FB, Rackspace etc. have a pretty good reputation of having a great culture and work environment.

Personally, I've only worked for small shops. Nearly all the places I'm currently interviewing are BigCo's though, and I'm not sure how that is going to turn out.
> I don't think Knuth would be happy with "Standard TeX".

Perhaps that's because Dr. Knuth actually standardized TeX, unlike what Gruber did with Markdown.
You should monetize this with affiliate links at the very least. Looks like a promising project, good job!
Yea I've seen people making the hand motion on the side of the road around here quite a few times. It's not so much a wagging of the finger as a constant pointing downwards, like you're tapping on an invisible desk.

It makes sense, there isn't very many taxis in the area. They mostly hang around the airport and downtown.
Most of the comments they're quoting aren't even that. They're purely an attempt to get sneak a link in as the "author" of the comment -- WordPress makes the username a link if the user provided a URL with the comment. The content is irrelevant, and is present primarily to try to get past spam filters.
When you make something, and publish it with the intent that it is used by others, then you can't turn around and decide that any/all criticism is unfair.

Take the Linux kernel for example. If Linus Torvalds decides to abandon all support for architectures other than MIPS in the Linux kernel, would you not consider it fair game to criticize his stewardship of the Linux kernel? Or is all criticism silenced by, "well, it's my project so I can do whatever I want to do?"

This is also a little more ambiguous because Markdown is a loose file format spec rather than a project with "actual" code, so no one is really "submitting patches."
The Hazards of Going on Autopilot
I think (still looking for opportunity in a startup) if I had to choose, I choose a startup based on

(1) the missions

(2) the investors

(3) founder(s) history and attitudes

equity is always a nice thing honestly there are startups that will never go IPO and there are the ones that will fail in a year or two, and there are ones that will go on for a very long time and held privately by founders and there are ones that will be acquired within a few years. The chances are, before your company is sold, you might be looking for another job already.

Also, read the equity/stock agreement CAREFULLY before you sign one and understand what you are signing up for.
Bitcoin promoter pleads guilty to unlicensed money transmitting
"are murdering" implies that it continues to happen on an ongoing basis. "on a regular basis" is moving goalposts, but not moving them very far.
A bit off topic, but one of my favorite parts of any social science paper is when the authors describe how they developed the dataset. In this case, it's a clever linking of tax forms, Census Bureau surveys of business owners, and state unemployment insurance databases.

It's a neat solution that the authors are justifiably proud of. But since it's considered passé to talk about your data too much at the expense of your results, it only gets a couple pages (pages 9-10) of the paper even though I'm sure they spent many man-months compiling and cleaning up the data.
That's on the way. We have applied to a few different places and just got approved. Definitely don't wanna clutter the pages with ads. Thanks for the comment.
Investors fighting over YC companies

My impression was that it was less to do with fighting and more to do with YC companies not being able to raise funding because a YC partner hadn't invested in them.
I've experimented a bit with a treadmill+laptop, but the first thing I tested was my spaced repetition performance, which went down while using the treadmill: http://www.gwern.net/Treadmill#treadmill-effect-on-spaced-re... So I'm not sure if I want to continue trying to use it or reserve the treadmill for winter when I can't take my usual daily walks.
Goodbye, Joan Rivers: the only woman to host a late-night talk show
Uber is now forcing Uber Black drivers to accept UberX fares
It depends on when you get hired. Early engineering key hires, pre series A, are often 0.5-3%, but is probably around 50% of market salary ($80k on $160k, say). Employee 100 in the same role in a highly successful company could be as low as 0.01%, but is nearly at market salary ($140k?). There might be 2-4 years in between the two hires.
Nugget: A tiny and sexy command-line downloader for Windows
I hope that sometime in my lifetime government will stop trying to ape the nomenclature of business.
Social Stream Recommendations Not for OCD Curators
Yeah, but Gruber is apparently upset about standard markdown, but not about the other dozen uses of markdown all over the place. It's a bit late to get upset about calling things X Markdown. If it where a trademark, I think he'd lose it, because they have to be actively defended.
> I mean, if you chose to identify as Muslim, is someone holding you to the Muslim belief system wrong?

If I choose to identify as a Christian, is someone else forcibly holding me accountable to their interpretation of proper Christian behavior wrong? Consider, for instance, if that interpretation includes a prohibition (violations of which are punishable by death) on ever renouncing Christianity? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Qatar
I tend to use Clozure CL most of the time. Clozure CL's compiler is a bit more primitive, but the compiled code is smaller, the compiler is faster, the runtime is much better (better GC) and it has a basic non-GNU-Emacs IDE on the Mac.

> f there had been very good free versions of Common Lisp 20+ years ago, then I think the language would be more popular today.

This fails to understand a few things. Good versions of Common Lisp did exist 20+ years ago, even free ones. But Common Lisp implementations tend to be complex systems and thus its not easy to to get this financed over a long time.

Common Lisp was unpopular between 90s and 2000. A new generation of developers had to rediscover it to revive some of it: SBCL, ECL, ...

> Today Pharo Smalltalk really is a wonderful programming environment and it is free. In the 1980s and 1990s it was very expensive to get a Smalltalk programming environment.

Common Lisp has many free and good implementations today.

If you look at Pharo Smalltalk, it's nice, but it has the same limitations like Squeak and other implementations: it looks and feels non-native. That's because the UI is non-native.
Herein lies a major reason why early Finnish academic results are so uniform:

"“To be honest, we are not interested in a child’s academic skills at all. From our perspective that would be silly,” she said. The motor skills tests, by contrast, “show us a lot and help us diagnose any learning disabilities,” she explained. If a learning deficit was detected, it didn’t count against the child or banish her to a different classroom."

The article describes advanced methods of diagnosing learning decifits. Early interventions pay off big time. When a kid is found to have some sort of a problem, he/she will receive extra help within the normal classroom (e.g. teacher's aide). That prevents the social circles from breaking up and usually the better students learn even more by helping others.
Few extra months of early help to make troubled students into average performers is reflected well in the PISA results. It has also societal effects (equality/equity). Best students might not benefit nearly as much from extra attention than worst, but in the western sphere gifted students are the main focus of attention.
Finnish school system makes everyone average, for better or worse. But is not a bad thing when your average is still world class.
It'd be great if instead of founders generously giving to employees post-facto, startup contracts were more employee-friendly from the beginning. How much % should engineers 1-10 demand? One percent is typical for eng #1. On day one, with no code written, where the founders depend entirely on the engineers, where it's just an idea and investor money, they're only a hundredth of the value of the company.
Signaling is the idea that you can get the insight of information that is not public yet by watching the behavior of insiders with access to the private information.

For example if the officers and board members of a company are selling shares in a company, they probably think the company is going to decline in value. At the same time, they might make statements saying everything is great and getting better, but the signal that they are selling is stronger than their words.
You're assuming all startups pay below market.
Conspicuous destruction of evidence is a risky endeavor. Body cameras won't make it impossible for police to get away with crimes, but they will make it much more difficult.
It has to do with name placement.

The words "Standard Markdown" sound like it is the standard from the owners of the Markdown. Also, from the "everything has happened before" mindset: https://twitter.com/peterseibel/status/507601508561457154

If they called it "Syntaxx, a flavor of Markdown that 9 organizations agree to support to enable text markup interop," that would be okay. Just like how "PerconaDB" is "PerconaDB, a mysql fork that's still protocol compatible with additional performance improvements."