Lambent_Cactus

"If all that is alledged is true, that's pretty damning and this isn't just a general bitcoin crackdown."

This could easily be the open move in a general crackdown, a sympathetic test case to establish that operating a bitcoin exchange == money laundering, with broader applications of that precedent to follow.

At my last gig we used Stypi or Google Docs plus a phone to do live code exercises, and CodePair likes like a step up from that.

But what we're running at my current gig is sending a trivial problem ahead (after an initial phone screen) and then asking for extensions over a Google Hangout with the candidate doing a screen share. This lets people work their way in their own environment with the language of their choice, and do any boilerplate or other overhead up front.

It's not perfect - I'd prefer not to require someone use or make a Google+ account, but it's the best I've seen so far.

In the long run, the price of food and housing should match the marginal cost of producing them. Since a relatively small portion of the (Swiss, at least) population is poor, we should expect that feeding and housing all of them won't move the price much, because the supply curve just isn't that steep. There's no reason to expect an objective material shortage in food or housing - it's relatively easy to make more of both if poor people have the money to pay for them.

The author appears to intend that latter meaning, where SV companies have more egalitarian ownership structures on their own, but that now that we've seen the results, the government should encourage those structures more broadly in the economy.

Actually, the government plays a small part already in how high-tech companies share equity with employees, through preferential tax treatment for Incentive Stock Options. You could imagine many such nudges that could be employed to expand capital ownership short of distributing equity to employees "by force".

Remember in general that the limited-liability corporation as an institutional type is itself a creation of government - the notion of a business as a separate entity with distributed owners such that the business can go bankrupt without allowing creditors to go after the non-business assets of the stockholders is an artificial and relatively modern invention with a large and complicated legal structure buttressing it. C Corporations, LLCs, LLPs, PCs and the like are all creations of government and the way they operate in practice is non-trivially shaped by the ways those laws are structured. Is it so outlandish to imagine an alternative form with a deliberately egalitarian bias (an "E Corp"?). It only takes one state experimenting to make it a reality!

Victims of domestic violence, to name the most obvious example, probably feel differently about making their location indexed and searchable for anyone to look up without restriction.

As far as I can tell from the article, EFF is asking for transparency into how ALPR records are used in the LA law enforcement. The only policy response even mentioned - and it's not even explicitly called for - is for the legislature to set retention limits. Both of those strike me as eminently reasonable requests, and neither of which claims a general "freedom not to have your license plate OCR'd."

Maybe I'm missing something, but how do the HTML and the JS panes relate to each other? Neither appears to refer to or include the other, but obviously they're combining somehow to produce the output.

"the government steps in, briefly nationalizes them, sells off the parts (the shareholders get nothing, of course), and life continues"

That's the solution I would have preferred in 2008, but the political system has shown it can't commit to that solution. You lose any support for that resolution plan from conservatives at "briefly nationalizes", because they're afraid any nationalization won't turn out to be brief at all. So nationalization is off the table, and we have to stumble through with bailouts.

If 80% of candidates are failing, you want to ask it right at the start, to minimize the time you waste interviewing people who aren't qualified.

Take it from this gringo, you can tell he's being at least a little facetious even just watching it cold with no knowledge of Korean language or culture, let alone the artist's discography. The only question is how much of it is skewering a group he's not a part of versus how much he's including himself in the group being lampooned. I'm assuming it's at least a little of both.

Call me old-fashioned, but if you're not making new technology, you're not a start-up, you're a small business. Making a small business is cool, and if your small business happens to be a website, that's cool too.

But if all you want is to make a successful small business, and you don't care about technology, you're not really part of my community, and I don't really want you there. I want my community to be people who care about technology first, and business second. People who care only about business and don't care about technology tend to be the kind of people who ruin the companies and the communities I like, where people care about technology first, even if those companies became valuable because they were full of people who cared about technology first.

At this point they're just trolling the "The [New York] Times Is On It" twitter feed: https://twitter.com/NYTOnIt

I fell like Snow Crash would be much more successful as an animated movie. There's a lot of whimsical, somewhat silly stuff in there that works in a book and could work animated but doesn't translate well to live action.

I get that you're going for a mashup of "Easel" and "Easily" as in "Easily create Infographics!" The spelling, however, makes my mind go first to "Weaselly", which I imagine is not the association you want to create.

The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/meteor/meteor

It also has to have some effect on lowering the costs to launching a new startup by limiting the downside risk, particularly to technical talent. Surely some people have though "Sure, I have a good job now, but if it doesn't work out we'll just get acqui-hired by the big guys in 18 months, so why not?"

Really really cool.

Minor copy edit on your splash page - there's a 't' on the end of 'messages' in this section:

Streak Plays Nice Streak never alters any data in your Gmail. No extra labels, and no moving around your messagest. Streak adds a layer of organization on top of your email and stores this separately and securely in our own cloud.

Which is to say, asking questions isn't so much a marker of intelligence so much as of privilege. More than any particular subject matter, that's what Harvard is instructing its students in.

Relevant and prescient: http://xkcd.com/137/

Is the author really wasting time worrying about this? TechCrunch's market power seems a lot less permanent to me than the existence of cliques in high school. Enough negative stories like this one can cost TC enough readers and enough influence that it is no longer the dominant source of news about the startup community, and can't push around young companies any more. That sounds like a real change in the world that would be great for startups, and not a waste of time ta all.

I for one have always known that I am, in an irreducible way, smarter and indeed _better_ than everyone around me. I am gratified to see this empirical reality reflected in scientific literature, and see no reason to question these findings.

"a huge and growing body of knowledge"

... Laydeez

The naming is a little off, isn't it? South of Houston all bets for street numbers are off, so I'm fine with making up South Xth street, but you should maintain the consistency the grid currently has.

You've lost the East/West distinction between the streets, so the West streets are just Xth Street, instead of West Xth Street like they should be. Worse, the avenues East of 1st should be named alphabetically, not as E Xth Ave. For consistency, I'd increment them as Ave A, Ave B, Ave C ... Ave Y, Ave Z, Ave AA, ... You've turned Alphabet City into just the East Avenues. Sacrilege.

Silicon Valley isn't a special place for invention and for startups because of special infrastructure or special laws, but because of special ideas and special norms. Those norms don't hold up in court, and they erode a little bit every time someone like Pincus only thinks about what they can get away with instead of what's right. This reduces the perceived value of equity for everyone in the valley, makes everyone less open, less trusting, less willing to take a risk. In the end, we all lose for that.

If I had my way, Pincus would never work in this town again. Anyone involved in this decision should be made a pariah. If we don't defend the norms that make innovation possible, we'll lose them.

Shorter NY Technologists: We have no theory of social change.

Which, you know, is fine. If you think the way to change the world is with your "subscription-based site for fashion essentials" I say let a thousand flowers bloom. But you should think twice before mouthing off to the NY Observer, because dismissively asking "what does #OWS even stand for" sounds a lot like "what is Twitter even good for". It's a marker that you haven't been paying attention.

Down at Zucotti Park, people understand that in addition to the decisions that people make individually as consumers, there are also decisions we make collectively. And there's more to politics, which is just the name for those decisions, than policy. Ten-point plans are nice, but the #OWS protesters are making a powerful move just by drawing attention to a set of issues that haven't been on the mainstream agenda. Middle class incomes have stagnated, social mobility is down, Wall Street appears to be back at business with little restructuring, unemployment is at 9%. The protests say, so a political system otherwise ill-disposed to address those issues, that they _matter_, and that there is a constituency to fix them. To their fellow citizens, the protesters are saying "these are serious problems, and we should care about them." If you can convince people of that last bit, and #OWS has momentum on that score, the policies will follow.

You could still issue treasuries. As long as we're not experiencing deflation (the Fed is supposed to target 2% inflation), there's plenty of room for the government to borrow money at negative real interest rates, which it should be happy to do even if running surpluses.

Other countries deal with surpluses with sovereign wealth or rainy day funds, but you could just as easily envision rebating a surplus as fully-refundable tax credit "dividends".

True story. That speech was a major factor in my decisions to leave legal practice and later to found my own startup. Jobs' words that day have had a major effect on my career.

This is an awesome idea, and like others have said, props for thoughtful permissions management.

Oddly though, I found that the prolific tweeters were the ones I wanted to see, and the infrequent ones were less interesting. I have a core of prolific users (none of whom I have met) that I follow because I like their content, and then an outer constellation of people I follow because I know them. Tweets from the former actually have a better signal-to-noise. Is mine an unusual usage pattern for Twitter?

This is the start of an entertaining thriller. Someone should be working on the movie rights.

Lawyers? Retail investors?

Even for finance pros who currently parse the raw filings, I can see how having an auto-generated human-readable summary that pulled out the key points would save enough time to be worth spending money on.