skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to have slowed recently but Clever was borderline SPAM there for awhile. On more than one occasion I wished I could flag their post. (I understand that would probably be a slight misuse of the flag button.) Had there been a comments section I likely would have said something to get myself banned for a bit. So maybe it was a good thing I couldn't comment.
I'd way rather see his guns and/or knives than his $500 mechanical pencil.
IMHO, the worst startup ideas are the ones that seem like GOOD ideas, but turn out to be bad. A horrible idea that's clearly bad will never go anywhere. Ideas that seem good end up getting funded, offices are rented, people are hired...
That's not a good enough indicator - it is removed from important context that may be relevant.
Dries Buytaert: Making-drupal-8-fly
"privacy-friendly ads", all ads need to track on some level, so it will only depend on which company you trust more.
Agreed, and I'm not criticizing them for improving on one another's products.

Re Google Plus, however, circles don't actually do that (ie they don't work like Facebook groups). People have no idea which circle you have put them in.

Circles are also incredibly slow and clunky to the point where they become unusable for more than small numbers of followers.

It's not ridiculous to think that someone could do a better social network than Facebook, just as Facebook did a better social network than Friendster, Google Orkut and others that were around at the time.

You could say the same about Google Search, of course, or eBay, or Amazon. However, it's tough taking on properties with more than a billion users.
Seems like defaulting to comments on with the option of disabling them if the startup is in stealth mode would be a good solution.
The Last of the Typewriter Men
I think it's more likely they don't thoroughly audit every piece of crapware they allow to install.
I use NoScript and Policeman on Firefox, with conservative settings (disallow all active content (scripts, fonts, WebGL), whitelist-only cross-site requests). I've also configured Firefox to block cookies by default; only permitted sites can store cookies for the session, and just a handful I allow permanent cookies.

Web pages load much quicker, Firefox uses less resources, my browsing is significantly more secure (see [1] for risk of loading arbitrary fonts), and I can browse the web without Google/Facebook/AdvertizingCorp (and thus the Five Eyes) building a profile of everything I do. It's a nice feeling.

This set up also blocks ads served from third parties, which I feel is an agreeable compromise on web advertising. If I send a request to your website, and you send me a document with embedded images stored on your website, I'll download them and view them alongside the page. However, if you try to tell me "go send 5 unsecure requests to each of these three companies you've never heard of, and execute their 20KB of code, to get flashing ads alongside this page" - I'll ignore you.

Sites loading resources from external domains (usually Google) is nothing new. I've been browsing this way for two years now, and I've developed a healthy level of contempt for 95% of web developers. The vast majority of them just don't care for their users; campaigning to get the developers to change their habits is a broken model. Ultimately, you have to take control, and decide for yourself what you want to run on your computer.

I don't know why more people don't browse this way; some actually ridicule this approach ("get with the times"). It boggles the mind.

[1]: https://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fo...
I don't know if the offer really was insultingly low or not, or if he/she interviewed poorly, or if he/she is highly skilled or not, or whatever. These facts aren't terribly important.

Having a feedback mechanism might encourage people to be nice, and I can't see how that's bad. Yeah it might suck to have to spend an extra two minutes talking to every candidate, but I don't see that making or breaking a company.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ronco.html
If true, this is horrifying. I went to McGill and the Education students didn't seem this incompetent.
I came across a Twillio billboard the other day and the entire message was "Twillio. Ask your developer." I thought it was pretty bold marketing. No explanation of the service, they're just selling the fact that developers know it and like it.
> When is the last time that you saw a successful hardware startup that did something nontrivial (a la Intel)?

Define 'nontrivial'. I'd call Tesla and SpaceX nontrivial. Or what kind of hardware are you talking about? Maybe take a look here: https://angel.co/hardware

> All of the shifting money between hands on Wall Street is sucking the air out of our industries.

That's the very definition of a false cause and it's also so woolly that is barely means anything. Which money is "shifting hands on Wall Street" and what is is that even supposed to mean? Of course money is being transferred, that's the very idea of a financial system. And how does this "suck the air out" of anything? Banks are not the ones who would rather fund your photo sharing app than the next Intel. If you want to go down that route, blame the Angels/VCs who are the driving force behind what is getting funded. Or blame the people who are more interested in reading about/working on the latest flavour-of-the-month Javascript framework instead of actually tackling the hard(ware) problems. Wall St. are not the ones behind the wheel when it comes to determining which new ideas get attention.
You don’t have to believe in “the fold” for the Web to know that the title should be near the top.
TwitchCon
> they're just selling the fact that developers know it and like it.

The less-overt (and perhaps more important) message from that billboard is to developers that they should know it.
Out of curiosity, are there any decent libraries you looked at for doing language detection? Thhat's the main reason I'm using Highlight.js in one of my projects instead of Prism or Rainbow.

Unfortunately, the tradeoff is no support for generating a display with line numbers. In my case, that was the lesser of two evils, but I wouldn't mind using two libraries if it meant I could get everything I want.
My frustrations with X11 are more specific to my line of work. I do a lot of front end work. X11 is just a mess. It's tough to call out dealbreakers with X11, since there's always some obscure workaround. It's tough to find careful explanations of X11 shortcomings without the discussion devolving into ranting.

Wikipedia probably gives the best overview of problems:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System

Keep in mind X11 came out in the late 80s, and many of the current criticisms were expressed in the early 90s. We're full on 25 years beyond that now, with no de facto replacement.
Yes, it does mean others can decrypt your bank traffic.

Here's how this type of MITM attack works.

Situation: user is using laptop in public location with WiFi. Between WiFi device and net is a computer with MITM software.

Client laptop requests "https://www.bigbank.com". MITM box gets HTTPS request, sees it is for "bigbank.com", and generates a fake cert for that site. It then uses the Superfish root cert to sign the fake cert. MITM box acts as server for that connection and sees the user's traffic in the clear, unencrypted. The Lenovo client laptop sees a valid cert chain descending from the Superfish cert installed by Lenovo. The user sees a green bar and lock icon.

MITM box then opens an HTTPS connection to "https://www.bigbank.com", and acts as client for that connection. The two connections are connected together as a proxy, so that the user sees what looks like a valid HTTPS connection. The MITM box can log everything, including bank passwords.

There's even open source software for doing MITM attacks: https://code.google.com/p/subterfuge/
Oh, OK. Was not aware about that.
As of this past fall, you can remove entries from Recently Watched, at least via the web. Just click on "Recently Watched" from the homepage and click X next to something you want to remove.
European Lawmakers Demand Answers on Phone Key Theft
Microsoft invokes nuclear option on Superfish
well there is a line to walk i guess. on the one hand, i think a lot of people would like to know about things like my experience so they can decide if its worth the trouble for a certain company if thats the risk. you are probably right to worry if people are actually just going to stick to the facts and not get too emotional though.
1911
That's up for debate. Some rights groups (the mpaa etc) see a vpn as "bypassing technical protections". Once upon a time some claimed it a CFAA violation in that you were accessing a computer system under false pretences, ie you were fibbing about your location. BS imho and CFAA law has moved on from such interpretations, but some still call for netflix to block VPNs.

Either way you are creating an unlicensed copy, or at least a performance, of the work. It would be the local license holders right to go after you, or Netflix, for violating "their" copyrights.
Until there is a flaw in the offsetting positions and everything collapses in a heap.
A Liar Standing Next to a Hole in the Ground: Gold Mining in Arizona
My bet is that, if we did disappear and another species "caught up" so to speak, the descendants of modern chimps would take the crown, with the right evolutionary pressures, in 5 million years at the earliest. That's about how long ago we forked:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee%E2%80%93human_last_...

Of course I wouldn't bet too much, because it's really a bet on many, many events occurring together, and we're all familiar with the product law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

If we started a human-directed breeding program to develop chimps capable of language (arbitrarily chosen marker of intelligence) right now, I would guess we might be able to cut that time down to merely hundreds of thousands of years.
Valuable to the readers or to the people posting job ads? I wouldn't want comments on my job ads and I assume the same is true of YC companies posting here.

I would wager many comments would be negative opinions of the job, the company, or something entirely unrelated.
In theory, yes.

In practice, this tends to be a difficult problem to solve because most Linux environments are managed imperatively/procedurally rather than declaratively, meaning that in order to revert to a previous state, you have to be able to run the exact commands required to do so. The traditional answer is to manage such a system with Puppet or Chef - thus allowing an administrator to tell the system what it should look like rather than how it should go about it - but that's generally yet another layer of logical overhead to be considered.

NixOS - in theory, at least - addresses this more fully by integrating declarative configuration rather pervasively throughout the operating system itself, rather than trying to just add a layer on top of the operating system in order to manage it. It relies heavily on the Nix package manager - instead of installing a program directly to the filesystem hierarchy, it installs it to an isolated folder named with a theoretically-unique hash, allowing multiple versions of the same program to coexist without conflicting (and allowing users to pick which version they want), making it painless to roll back software upgrades (just go back to a different selection of which package folders should be linked to, rather than having to manually remove and revert each package), etc.; NixOS leverages this package management system for everything, rather than just the software installed, and will create GRUB entries whenever you commit your configuration changes (by running `nixos-rebuild switch` or `nixos-rebuild boot`, causing an instant configuration switch or a configuration switch on next boot, respectively).

Other operating systems can hypothetically do this, too, and they'd end up looking similar to NixOS in terms of how things are organized and configured. As I said, I think that's probably the direction where most operating systems will eventually go.
Why? If people cant answer questions about a job post there is something wrong. I criticised a job post on a mailing list fairly brurtally and got it much improved, and had positive feedback. Hopefully they got a better person for the job. I see the posts here and would never apply to many with the strangely asymmetric thing of no comments. It could at least be an option to have comments.
The White Devil Kingpin: How John Willis Became a Chinatown Overlord
Knightscope K5 – MaaS, $6.25/hr security robot
This particular issue has come up in previous HN discussions, but I would draw people's attention to innocuous and quite reasonable-sounding phrases like "need-to-know basis." What does that really mean for a company like Google, whose core business model fundamentally depends on extensively data-mining user information? "Need-to-know" could mean almost anything, or whatever Google wants it to mean. This is a classic Google privacy strategy: controlling the debate by defining the terms.

Despite a reassuring policy, you, as the website visitor, don't get to decide these things and to the extent possible, the fact that this is even happening is abstracted away from most non-technical users.

Another example of Google's brilliance in 'controlling the debate by defining the terms': policies like this cleverly (but wrongly) lead the reader to assume that cookies are the only way Google tracks users or correlates their activities. What about TLS-based tracking mechanisms, for example?

But this is a problem that's bigger than Google. When information accumulates in distinct places, the value of exploiting that information always increases. Eavesdroppers naturally move to those places to exploit that information, sometimes with a legal backing (NSA/GCHQ) and sometimes without one (Aurora attacks, and other NSA/GCHQ activities).

Even if you interpret Google's pronouncements charitably, it would be a mistake to assume that using the Google Fonts API can't or won't harm user privacy. Google is a massive target for essentially all eavesdroppers, and the Aurora attacks (and other breaches with lower profiles) show that the accumulation of information--even under reasonable-sounding terms like Google's--can still end up in the wrong hands, and can be an inherently dangerous thing for user privacy.
I am not a lawyer, but it should be cheap enough to ask one for an opinion that counts. But I'll toss my opinion out there.

This is not unique to startups and/or founders. Likeness is a contractually controllable commodity, e.g. using your image, reputation etc. The catch 22 for you is that as long as the current team is not mis-representing your role or current activity, I think it may be tough for you to stop. But I think you can likely get it stopped if they are mis-representing your current level of involvement. Think of it this way, it really would be no different then a company saying hey, Bill Gates was one of our co-founders, he left the company to pursue clean water but ya know he really gave us a good start. I think that would be tough to stop, but I could be wrong.

I have had prior employers use my involvement with a project to prove to a new customer that the people who created the product had industry credibility. Is that illegal? I seriously doubt it, my bet is that they have the right to say that as long as they don't mis-represent that I am still working the project. I personally do not like that one employer did that, because I really did not believe in the updates they made to the product. At the same time I did not pursue whether there was anything I could do about it. I figured if anyone ever asked me, I'd just tell them the truth at that point. My bet is a lot of engineers have had this happen and just do not realize it.
You'd have to be one hell of an idiot to air your grievances about being rejected for a job application on a public forum like this. Great way to reduce your job prospects for the future.

I suspect this sort of thing would be fairly rare, because it looks bad on both the applicant and the company.
Britons can now buy Dell computers with Bitcoin
> larger species burrow?

yes, gray and Humpback whales have several bottom feeding strategies that involve exposing burrowed preys and stirring up the sediment. Some dolphins do this also, is not so unusual. Some sharks and of course almost all rays do this also.
Elon Musk nearly bankrupted himself funding SpaceX and Tesla.
I don't think so, because HBO's old content is already widely available. It's only kind of good for retention, and that only on HBO Go (and Amazon, now that it's there too).

The competition for new subscriptions and paying that one more month always takes place in the present/future, or at least for content you haven't watched yet which for any fan is going to be present/future.

And Netflix is kicking ass there, TBH. They have high-quality dramas, resurrected cult (and my!) favorites, the deal with Marvel, and probably half a dozen other things that got me salivating that I'm forgetting.

To be honest, I think Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are -all- schooling the old school providers in terms of interesting new content, HBO included. I love Six Feet Under, Mr. Show, and Deadwood as much as anyone, but aside from Silicon Valley and GoT, nothing else current excites me. At the very least, HBO needs to get much better at both making -and- fulfilling promises.
Analog Synth Filter Envelope
Or maybe as China slows more Chinese people will flee China, pushing yet more money into the can/au housing markets.

The Chinese people I talk to in my neighbourhood all talk of Canada and Australia as more "stable" than the UK, China or the US. I'm not surprised. If all you have to go on are news reports, the US and UK don't come off well.
Smoothing out bumps or making it "easy" and worrying about fragile stuff is totally unrelated to acting intelligent.

In early grades, I had amazing teachers. Plus they had "enrichment" where they pulled us out of less-useful classes, gave us a lab and a dedicated teacher who just said "hey, what are you interested in?" I excelled there.

After moving a few times, I unofficially dropped out of school in 7th grade (12 years old), after grilling my teacher and realizing she didn't really have a clue. Other teachers were worse.[1]

I attended for a few more years (partially coerced by illegal police force[1]), then at 15 dropped out for good by leaving the country.

Things turned out OK for me. But I lost a LOT by not getting a real education, not having a chance at college. Just the lack of maths alone takes a lot of effort to rectify. Yes, it's still my fault, but the system shouldn't be encouraging 12-15 year olds to make such mistakes.

Kids will have enough bumps with bullying and school life in general. Adding idiocy bumps that make a mockery of education and intelligence just make kids cynical and tune out.

(It also makes such graduates more OK with the idea of corruption, stupid bureaucracy, mediocrity, etc. - a shrug and a "that's how things work". Such things should be vigorously fought, not beaten into children.)

1: One "science" teacher: "Carbon-14 dating is a lie told by scientists that hate god."

2: Somehow there was enough of a "problem" to haul me in front of a judge who pre-emptively revoked my drivers licenses for 3 years. I told him I'd just get a pilot's license instead and enrolled in flight school the next month. I also found it hilarious how people in court used the term "infinite wisdom" when referring to the judge. Illegal part was that I am not a U.S. person so they didn't have jurisdiction for enforcing mandatory schooling any more than they'd have on any other B-2 visa'd tourist.
Or more generically, can a software company become a content provider faster than a content provider can become a software company?

Put in those terms I'll bet on Netflix.
Rescue Forensics (YC W15) Helps Law Enforcement Find Victims of Sex Trafficking
Moved from Minneapolis to the Boston area a few years back. Apparently the weather missed me. It's been colder here than there up until a day or two ago.
> There might be a few word here or there that are not widely understood ("bodkin" is not one of these, its meaning is generally known in the UK

This is wrong, most people in the UK don't know what a bodkin is. Many people would think it an item of clothing or something to do with alcohol.

About 16% of working age adults in the UK are functionally illiterate http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/adult_literacy/illiterate_ad... (have less literacy than is expected of an 11 year old child). http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jan/24/books.politics

The average reading age in the UK is that of a 9 year old child. http://s-i-w.com/library/faqs/readability/what-average-readi... (although he doesn't give a source for this and it seems a bit low, even to me)
This isn't my area of ownership, (and I actually agree with a number of things you said), but as far as I know it is exactly why Google goes out of its way to NOT retain those logs, and to explicitly NOT serve this traffic off of a domain that handles user cookies or other PII (i.e., separate by design from search or gmail, etc).

It seems the original author didn't understand this, so it's worth calling out here clearly.
I'm not a fan of their suggestion interface either, but InstantWatcher and CanIstream.it go a long way towards fixing that.

But...Roku, a spinoff? Nope. Roku's independent, founded by the guy who founded ReplayTV, which was TiVo's only real competition way back when.
Posting anon?

Treat them like they treat you.

You're just a bottleneck in the hiring managers process, so make companies a bottleneck in your job process.

There may be some "holy-grail" of working at FaceGooOrStartup where you can do "work you love", but after a while you realize that all work is balls and you'd much rather not work at all (or run your own shin-dig).

Apply the technique of a "smart" spray and spread your CV gently across a wide-enough net.
I found this a while back on vimeo jobs page.

"Ahhhh…greetings, fellow internet developer! We’ve been looking for you: https://vimeo.com/jobs"
And how's the weather where you are?

I took my dog to the dog beach this morning. Sunny and 12* ABOVE. We had one day of snow this year. And the "wet coast" is really a myth. Seattle gets rain, but Vancouver is tucked behind Vancouver Island and is much drier.

In all seriousness, the real estate market is driven by people with money, the investor class. They are older and do not necessarily work, or they work internationally and can park their families anywhere they want. So Vancouver, being Canadian but without Canadian winters, is something different. I think Toronto will burst long before Vancouver.
I find that going to Netflix for something specific isn't fruitful, and I use Vudu for that and rent/buy it.

But I can generally always find -something- on Netflix to fill time, as long as I'm not too picky about what it is. That strikes me as more the model they were going for.

I will say this: they're very good at a number of niche (maybe not your niche) genres, critically-acclaimed horror and documentaries being two of my favorites. Blockbusters are fine and all, but I've usually seen them well before I'm going to fall back on Netflix for something.