skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to upvote the first two paragraphs and downvote the second two, so I'll comment instead :-)

Stallman's ideological intransigence is the backbone of the free software world. If he was even a little bit "reasonable", free software would have been nibbled to death by ducks by now. Instead it's still going strong after thirty years.

Freedom isn't reasonable, and there will always be a few people who go to unreasonable lengths to defend it. This is a good thing, and Stallman has managed to do so by not killing anyone, not overthrowing anything, but by building something unequivocally positive and good.

Free software is going to win, of course, because it will never go away. Companies are transient. Ownership is temporary. Freedom is persistent, so long as the rule of law is operative. GPL is still the dominant open-source license: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/02/15/decline-of-the-gpl/ (or it was as of 2008-ish)

The thing that gives free software power is precisely the freedom Stallman baked in: the freedom of developers to change the code. A decade from now any given proprietary system will be a pile of undifferentiated hexidecimal sludge, but we'll still be able to compile the Linux kernel from source, on architectures that aren't even invented yet.

For all that he rants about users using non-free software, the core freedom Stallman is defending is developer's freedom. To paraphrase George Orwell, "Freedom is the freedom to modify source. Grant that, and everything else follows."
Report: Apple plans a new Apple TV box with an app store and SDK
The practical, utilitarian present is always hideous. The romantic imagined past is always beautiful. That's why today there's more dignity in being a burlesque performer than a regular stripper. And why Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter and avoided touching computers until they became so ubiquitous he couldn't not touch one.
In general, I think fixed equity splits WITH VESTING are the way to go. Probably the optimal split is something like 51/49 (to prevent deadlocking) or 33.3/33.3/33.3 but anything near even is good enough.
A lot of things already use time windows like that. Package delivery, cable technician visits, garbage collection, ... .
Wow. This is written like no one has every said this to Stallman before. These are old arguments with well thought through answers (even if you don't agree with them). Ironically the letter demonstrates the same tone deafness it accuses Stallman of.
I always found it as the "how much my gut reaction matches with what the mathematical model suggests" kind of puzzle - useful for both exploring your own biases and the limitations of the model.
Not any more - once you can prerender the "SPA" on the server and use the same codebase to rehydrate it on the client and take over - which you can do today with React and soon with Ember - then with the right setup the "progressive enhancement" bit can be "am I on the client now? let's do some extra stuff" implemented as part of the same component.

e.g. here's a form that uses the same React component to render on the server, to handle regular form submissions and render redisplay when invalid and to progressively enhance with live validation and ajax form submission when JavaScript is available on the client: https://isomorphic-lab.herokuapp.com/add-thing
ParcelNinja.com
No, but we help with immigration issues.
Wow, what a fallacy quote out of context. On the same page you linked he says:

I don't believe that the US government directly planned or instigated those attacks.
Landsat-live goes live
Founder here, happy to answer any questions you might have. This is the tool I used to discover a massive twitter spam issue in a bot-related discussion a couple of wks ago.
What is your religious affiliation?
And that is why you browse with a virtual machine which is re-initialized from the CD copy every time you restart :-)
Let's say for the sake of argument that the patent system is 5% encouraging research and 95% stealing credit.

It doesn't matter to someone explaining that good rents exist. That the 5% exist at all allows a demonstration of the concept.

The article mentioned that the patent system overshoots, with a link to more info. That's all that's needed.
And here in the USA I think of Italian sub shops. :)
There is a much reduced and heavily edited sequence on quantum mechanics in the ebook. I have not yet read the ebook version and can't tell you how they differ, but the editor did state upfront that it was one of the sections which changed the most.

Regarding the LessWrong/OvercomingBias version, I must say that you should take the blog posts with a huge, gigantic, over-sized helping of salt. Speaking as someone who majored in physics because I love the field even though I knew it wouldn't help my comp sci career, Yudkowsky does not have the necessary background to speak with authority on this topic and it shows. He makes a few outright mistakes and a lot more overly broad statements, he ignores many validly competing alternative explanations, and as a result the grand philosophical conclusions reached are left unjustified (and as an editorial aside, probably bunk IMHO).

The important result of analyzing quantum mechanics as a case study in rationality is the valid point that if like most people (and sadly, most physics professors) you think quantum mechanics is weird, that should be very concerning. Quantum mechanics is real: it very accurately describes reality. If you have a problem with quantum mechanics, you have a problem with reality, and that's about as anti-rationalist as you can get. To improve, find out what part of you rejects the reality of quantum mechanics in spite of experimental evidence, and censor that.

Once you've achieved that step, you can skip the rest IMHO.
Is there any credible evidence for that?
So, your bet is on nuclear energy and biotech? ;)
Interesting that their only "official" release channel seems to be Bandcamp. I'm pretty sure for the Open Goldberg Variations they had a torrent from the start.

I'm sure Archive.org and others are going to pick it up quickly.
I am a 28 year old technology project manager. How can i help YCombinator?
saam, gib me moneys.
In attempting to debunk this sort of statement, he has literally written the following: "In the hands of RationalWiki generally, and RationalWiki leader David Gerard particularly ..., [the fictional version of the Roko's Basilisk event] somehow metamorphosed into a Singularity cult that tried to get people to believe a Pascal's Wager argument to donate to their AI god on pain of torture. This cult that has literally never existed anywhere except in the imagination of David Gerard."[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2myg86/xkcd_1450_aibo...
Sounds like a marketplace for invoice factors. I guess it's better than having to call up a factor and setup an account. But, issues like credit-worthiness determination, reserves, fees-based on credit worthiness, etc. still arise.

I'd assume, initially, you'd rely on D&B or something like that to determine worthiness. Are you building a marketplace to let anyone provide money to factor? Or is this only for existing factors? Are you providing the funding, so you are the factor?

There's a ton of money in this type of business. If you can make 1.5-2%, per month, on your money, that's a huge win. It's kinda predatory in the transportation business, where margins aren't great and every dollar counts. But, in higher % businesses, it's a cash flow decision.

Interesting. Would love to chat more about it, if you are interested.

Email in profile.
At least 2 of them are LaRouche, not Stallman/FSF, so I'd agree with you that they are unfair and inflammatory. The Obama/Hitler one is apparently from LaRouche organizers [1]. The global warming one obviously is as well. The Windows 7 sins image is actually from the FSF [2]. I don't know about the Swindle image.

[1] http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/03/29/lyndon-larouche...

[2] http://en.windows7sins.org
What are your thoughts on advertising as _the_ way to make great services available for free (Google, reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow)? What problems do you see with this model? When should this be preferred? Does it only work for massive sites?
What you posted, according to your own premises, is worse than just saying "Think safe thoughts!"

If I modded this, I would delete your post.
Responsive design has to go beyond optimizing for different screen sizes
If you haven't watched it yet, I can highly recommend the documentary 'citizenfour', which is about the meetings between Snowden and Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill.

Free to watch here:

https://thoughtmaybe.com/citizenfour/
Backup methods comparison, part 1
Question: As a potential entrepreneur, the thing that scares me the most is the lack of real world data. By data I mean: page views, sales reports, analytics, market shits, etc. It the kind of thing that you can't find on the internet, and if you find usually the data is incomplete and doesn't tell the whole story. Does YC provides real world data in order to help startups to understand how the market works actually?
I have had the same experience...without the longer articles and additional hours.

...I basically maintain a blog just to keep notes for myself about current things that I am working on. Each post is short and to the point. The titles are not "click bait". I figured that if I needed it someone else might as well and I am leaving it up to the search engines to figure out relevance.

...funny thing is it gets decent traffic and next to 0 on monetization. I allow Google to place ads so that the url rental is free.

Next to no traffic prior to Panda...pretty decent traffic for the topics (some are very specialized and esoteric like a specific bit of code to extract a Sales Order from Quickbooks Enterprise).
Alzheimer’s Drug Sharply Slowed Cognitive Decline
Hi Sam,

I am a 28 year old project manager. How can I help YCombinator?
He's assuming linearity, which at the very least needs justification. He's assuming that the function that maps from the pair (number of people, type of torture) to suffering is linear in the number of people, and also linear in the type of torture. I don't believe either of those things are true.

To put it more clearly, he says:
> So we can keep doing this, gradually - very gradually - diminishing the degree of discomfort

And I don't agree that you can. The difference between dust-mote and torture is not one of degree, but one of _kind_. It's a discontinuous function (in my opinion). I don't know where the discontinuity is, but it's there.
Hello Mr. Altman,
Thank you for taking the time to do this, I was hoping you'd be willing to give me some advice?
I really want to be successful one day.. But I just have no discipline and I rarely work toward my goals. I know what I want to achieve.. I just always pick short term rewards over long term ones.
That's just what I mean, you end up examining your beliefs about what your gut reaction would be. Holding the knife in your hand and deciding what to do with it is when you find out your real gut reaction.
My startup is trying to serve ALL the families that live in an apartment building or in a neighborhood (to get economy of scale and make delivery as cheap as possible), but is really hard to get older people to trust and use the internet to buy online. What are your advice to deal with this demographic?
Not sure what you're implying. Is ThreatPost supposed to be anti-Apple?
> about which he's pretty much the only person with any visibility or credibility at all to say something

But the only people he has any visibility or credibility to are people who a) know who he is, and b) agree with him. I can't imagine any situation in which his arguments would sway someone who currently disagrees with him.

I'm willing to bet that if you talked to the majority of geeks these days who weren't already using linux in 1998, most either wouldn't have heard of him, or would have heard of him in the same vein as Eric Raymond, Dennis Ritchie, or Donald Knuth: people who have done great things in computing, in times long since past, and who have no relevance to what's happening in computing today beyond those legacies.

So imagine Stallman showing up to a CS class, looking and behaving like a bushman who'd been lost in the wilds of Alaska for 40 years, insinuating that the US government was responsible for 9/11 and telling them to stop using Facebook and Google Docs and cell phones. What possible credibility could he ever have?

The FSF, with him at the helm, is going to continue to remain a valuable organization, but the FSF without him at the helm would be a valuable organization that would finally have a real chance at being taken seriously.

Side note: I spoke to my 25-year-old coworker, and he had only the vaguest idea of who Stallman was, proving my point that, to this generation of programmers, he's almost completely irrelevant except in a historical context.
Does anyone else only see "Some rights reserved" Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) as the license set? They said it would be released in the public domain, shouldn't that be noted on their download page?
Because? How do you know? Show us the reasoning.

Also, there is this concept of "thought experiments". Building a universe-sized computer may sound as likely as sitting on the light wave and looking around, and yet the second one brought us Relativity.
Pretty awesome stuff from Paul Irish, as usual. Really digs deep to understand where the slowness comes from, which is _huge_ on mobile -- even current-gen flagships have trouble with poorly composed HTML/JS/CSS.
I think you can probably customise Kubuntu as well; e.g. I always do remove the Ctrl+F4 key mapping from KDE so I get the "usual" Windows MDI behaviour.
What difference will the darkness make? I only read about this 10000 lux of natural light exposure scarcity. Don't we get the needed darkness by sleeping?
It's my understanding that any vulnerability that has been disclosed is ineligible. If 8.0.4 patched the exploit that won here, it would have been merely by coincidence.
Is this more hustling than hacking? I'm scratching my head and trying to figure out how it's a "hack", as in "beating the system" [1].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html
I was one of those ass hats that made developers work for 12-16 hours at day. You worked 60hrs in a week? Here, have a small bonus to make your SO feel better about it. Took me 15 years but eventually I realized I was pretty incompetent at judging time to completion (esp. other deveoper’s time). I made other people pay for what was basically my issue.
In my view, few but the principals should work more than 35 hrs to 40 hrs a week except for very short sprints in unusual circumstances. Employers that make you work more have failed to raise enough money, can’t accurately schedule the development process or may simply enjoy causing you pain.
If you want to run at peak strength as a journeyman developer, work 40hrs a week, sleep enough, don’t engage with folks that are hostile and take a month off in the summer (go somewhere totally different from your normal environment)
Most (not all, but most) of these exploits cannot run if you use NoScript/NotScripts or equivalent.
Given all the concerns listed here, what's a good way to store names?
I forget which speaker, it may have been Peter Thiel, was discussing how difficult starting a startup is at one of the startup school talks, and said "there are easier ways to make a lot of money". I would be curious if you knew what he (or whomever said that) would consider easier.
I think you make an interesting and very valid point that "Stallman and the FSF are basically the platinum standard by which all free software rhetoric is judged".

That said, it's unfortunate that the standard for free software rhetoric is shrill, conspiratorial, and purposefully marginal.

Most successful organizations realize the value of aesthetics. There's a good reason that the World Wildlife Organization has a panda as its logo and not, lets say, a water buffalo.
Whistle for N.C.A.A. Tournament Is Instrumental to the Game
Yes, in general about 3 partners, sometimes many more. We are very rigorous about maintaining quality and compute lots of statistics on this.
How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all).

The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.
What is this moonspeak?

Modern web apps do so much more than what this proposal is trying to solve.

React + Relay/GraphQL is much more likely to be the next real big step forward on the horizon of web/app development.
To be fair Neuromancer was published in 1984 so computers and word processing was weird and clunky and expensive.
Hi Sam,

In the Winter 15 class there was not a single startup from the African continent. Are you guys interested in startups that are targeting emerging markets?
"The "traditional free way of life" was not living in a city where you couldn't be a farmer"

This is nostalgia. For most of human existence, we did not farm. We lived in small hunter gatherer bands in very small numbers migrating over vast open landscapes.

But that doesn't invalidate the dream of being a freehold farmer in today's world. It's no reason to prohibit being a small independent yeoman farmer the way North Korea has.

And there's no reason to prohibit building a traditional city and living an urban life the way US central planning has outside a few grandfathered exceptions which have become incredibly expensive because demand rises while supply cannot grow.
Hi Sam,

I've heard you mention a few great things about University of Waterloo (They even have you in a video on their Engineering channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQz5hj8y1TE).

Waterloo has such a vibrant startup scene and several groups from the region have gone through YCombinator.

When is the next time you are coming to visit Waterloo?
Ask HN: I found a security bug. Should I report it?
Disclaimer: English is not my native language and I'm not that good at writing.

Backstory:

I was checking my account on the website of a well known computer-related company (I'll keep it anonymous for now) and I found out that they were giving away some games for those who purchased some piece of hardware of a another brand.

Long story short I found the username and password of their sendgrid account (by decompiling one of their programs) and was able to login successfully.

Why am I asking this question? Well, I don't want to be sued for hacking since I'm a student and I don't really have the money/power to defend my self.
Which is a great response, considering that the letter was about framing your message in a way that appeals to people rather than 'stop being so pro-free software'. Seems like he missed the point entirely, or just dismissed it out of hand because it was criticism, even though it was highly constructive.
Hey. This may sound like an unusual question, but I thought I'd ask.

We started our company about 4 years ago. Since then our apps have been downloaded by 3 million people in over 100 countries (see http://qbix.com/blog/ ) Every year we've been applying to YC, and never even making it to the interview. I know that YC likes to invest in teams and the ideas sometimes change ... and as far as teams go, I think we've done some impressive things. (For example, http://qbix.com/about) So I would think that at least we'd get a chance to be invited. We applied about 4-5 times in the last 4 years. The weirdest thing is that most of the times the founder video didn't get any views on YouTube (we tracked it).

Could it be that YC just gets so many applications that they don't really have time to go through them all, and watch all the videos?

Does it make sense to apply again? Are we blacklisted for some reason?

Sorry for being so blunt, but we really do like YC and we were just curious because there's very little feedback as to what goes on in the application process.
We currently support range sharding by primary key.

Both compression and custom sharding are things we definitely want to do (https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1862 , possibly https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/364).

I can't give an ETA on these features yet, but it will probably happen later this year.
Sam,

Whats your take on startups targeting opportunities in developing countries ( difficult to operate terrains)?
These are of course markets that have the potential of affecting billions of people.
It's a flat partnership--we all get the same economics (including me). If you want a salary, it trades off against your equity.

Part-time partners get less equity and spend less time on YC.
It makes a bit more sense in the original context of the contest, where you were doing the attack on the actual hardware you would win. So time limits were so that everyone got a shot, and a race since there was no prize after someone won it.
City of Philadelphia: Open Data Census
Blah blah something about herding cats blah blah.
Yes, I believe so. Though there are other competitions, and also the regular bug bounty programs that most browsers offer.
Sam has already helped you indirectly by investing in reddit which has all sorts of community sourced help. Check out PeaceH guide to getting discipline[1]

http://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/2dd7yh/advic...
It seems like you really need to know the potential cofounder as a person, though, otherwise you won't be sure what they're like when stressed or making mistakes. Doesn't this limit it to people you already know fairly well?
hey man don't listen to all the negative comments that are bashing you ! You were brave to bare your failures for all to see. Yes your success came from the shady affiliate world, but learn from your mistakes and move on. Offer a real solution for users out there and I think your results will be different.
I look forward to the day when 9/11 enters the same category as the JFK assassination, and questioning the official story is merely fringe and not (necessarily) crazy. 2300+ engineers are on record disputing the science of the 9/11 Commission; even if they're utterly mistaken, it doesn't mean every single one is a paranoid lunatic.
>the money is actually relatively low compared to standard tech benefit packages

225K is low compared to the standard? What standard are you talking about?
At that point you would probably submit it through the regular bug bounty program. Pwn2own is just more lucrative.
You could, there's not much downside and you can reapply if you don't get it. But your chances sound significantly higher for the the next batch.