gdl

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

Number one would be my choice unless I had some reason (ie family) that necessitates going for the more "practical" second option. Assuming you're a youngish bachelor that can comfortably get by on the lower salary / benefits, the startup sounds like a great match.

Jobs take up a lot of your time - do your best to find one that you can enjoy. If the point of money is to buy happiness (even though you supposedly can't), what's wrong with "spending" some money and benefits to make 40 hours a week more fun?

The traditional answer here would probably be to recommend the book "Elements of Style" by Strunk and White, so I'll do that in case you're not already aware of it. It's short, easy to read, and focuses on good style and common grammar mistakes. It's common as a high school or college text here (USA). From your question you seem pretty fluent already (your intro feels native or very near) so it should be well-suited for you.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what are the advantages of this over simply enabling HTTPS for everything? Performance, maybe, but Google has been often-quoted these past couple days calling that a very small issue.

It sounds like you're still assuming HTTPS to start the connection, then transitioning to a different encryption / authentication scheme after that. It would still require the time and effort involved in making the switchover (both HTTPS and the new bits) on a large scale, and any new parts of the plan would need to be made to work with old browsers and operating systems on the client. And since most of the data would be unencrypted, a lot of potentially-sensitive data could still be sniffed.

So I think you're overcomplicating things. We already have a good system in place to handle this stuff, people are just too lazy / ignorant / indifferent / resisistant-to-change to make it standard. See also IPv6.

"Your privacy is our top concern."

...later...

"A cheating spouse's cell phone armed with Honey Location gadget can tell a thousand proven facts and can help you on the road to finding the truth."

Ahh, delicious irony.

I'll second this. I haven't looked through it myself, but have heard it praised many times as an example of exceptionally clean and efficient code.

There's nothing here that suggests to me that Google is weak in the republican market; all it shows is that they are not in the top ten favored brands for that side. No other Internet companies are listed on the republicans' side either, so we don't have enough data here to draw any useful conclusions about how Google stacks up against their competition (unless Google is worried about losing customers to Fox News and Cheerios).

You ask for our thoughts, then make a point that if we don't like / understand him, don't bother posting because nobody cares. So is there a point to this other than to have a bunch of people say he's awesome and feel that they have great taste in art?

As it happens I do enjoy his work, but preemptively shunning critics is silly and counterproductive to the kind of personal growth that I think he would encourage.

>> by that logic, you should never donate books to a library, since it is effectively costing the author sales.

Precisely. Should authors and publishers be paid by everyone that wants to read their work, or should the books be available freely to all that want them? (And yes, they would get paid for the number of books the library owns, but the system is set up to minimize that amount and it should certainly be less than the number of people reading them.)

What is the moral difference between pirating a book and paying no money to the author, or borrowing a copy that had been donated to a library and paying no money to the author? The borrowed copy prevents another patron from borrowing at the same time, but this feels more like a physical limitation (and legal loophole) than a morally relevent distinction.

People try to place value on making sure that authors get paid, and on making books freely available to all (that live near a library?), while neglecting that these are mostly incompatible with each other.

Oh, and the "I later bought my own copies" argument is also commonly used in favor of piracy.

It's reasons like this that I don't claim any strong opinions on these issues myself. Things are complicated. There are too many factors at play - especially when you toss in greedy corporations and all that - to make clear distinctions between right and wrong that hold up from all angles.

...which then results in a few people reading the library copy rather than buying their own, so that he effectively stole a book for personal use and discouraged multiple sales by other people who would have otherwise bought copies. His attempt to pay back the publisher for the book just cost that same publisher $50.

Our systems of morals assume a scarcity of goods which is increasingly not the case when the goods in question can be represented as bits of information. Sooner or later society will have to decide on a new set of moral rules to account for that, but for now things are fuzzy and a simple application of the traditional answers (goodwill and charity in this case) don't always give the best solution in a modern context.

(Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing with this solution - I just like playing devil's advocate.)

College-aged people are grown-up enough to live their own lives. I know it would be painful to see one's child getting involved with PHP, but in the end that should be their own choice to make.

Successful founders are already edge cases, and these grants won't be handed out to the stereotypical "dropped out to play World of Warcraft" population. If someone is capable and driven enough to attract these sort of awards, I wouldn't expect their (dis)taste for formal education to have much effect on their odds of success.

I think the real point here is that they are making bets on the young and idealistic kids that haven't been tarnished by years of drudgery, beauracracy, and being told that they can't do things. So they do whatever wild ideas interest them, and if any one of those kids happened to be right about something that more 'educated' people would consider idiotic, it's a massive win. Kind of like the old DARPA approach or Google's 20% time. In that respect going after dropouts would make a lot of sense, since those are going to be the types that care less about following the establishment and will be more likely to execute genuinely novel ideas.

I would click ads in theory if I happened to notice them and was interested. But so many sites become horribly slow and unuseable because of ads that I have used multiple methods of blocking them for years. And even when ads do show up my instinct is to ignore them as irrelevent noise, so clicking is quite rare in practice.

Informal reasoning: in a=b, the 'a' and 'b' are merely placeholders that act as pointers to the same underlying value, so they can be used interchangeably. It's no different than referring to "seven" and "the integer directly following six" - I could use either reference any place I could use the other with no effect on the overall statement. Ditto for c=d. All that is happening with a+c=b+d is that two references to values are being changed to different references with the exact same underlying values, so the result is necessarily the same.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms if you prefer the math and logic jargon. High school geometry taught me to dislike dealing with formal proofs, but I think that should be about the right area to look.

You can make real polls with a built-in voting system once you get to some karma threshold (I don't know what). Or you could make a general "Ask HN" type post and have people leave responses.

Your way (as I interpreted it) was to leave "yes" and "no" comments to be voted up, which would get you a karma boost for each vote. I don't think I've seen that before. I'd normally assume that was someone trying to cheat the system, both for making polls and gaining karma. But after checking your profile, seeing that you've been here a few years and obviously haven't been worried about karma, I just take it as a clever workaround without any bad intent.

I use NoScript and enable JavaScript only on sites that it's needed or actually helpful. It's partly a security measure and partly to make sites load quicker on a slow connection by avoiding a bunch of analytics and other bits that do nothing useful for me. After an initial breaking in period of whitelisting common sites, I rarely even notice the difference.

Also, I like your method of making a "poll" by commenting with the answers, so you get karma for every "vote" cast. I'd accuse you of being a karma whore, but your join data and karma pretty clearly prove otherwise, so I'll just call it a clever hack and leave it at that.

I liked this. Simple, concise, and good info.

But... do you really have to use a 453KB .png for the header background ( http://uxmovement.com/wp-content/themes/gothamnews/images/bl... )? Surely you could create a similar effect using a few percent of that.

This doesn't seem to clearly identify anywhere what it is that is being measured; everything is based on a "latent factor for consumtion of alcohol" that is said to be standardized, but never given a proper definition. The closest I could find was:

"Indicators of alcohol consumption in the Add Health data include the frequency of binge drinking (drinking five or more units of alcohol in one sitting) and the frequency of getting drunk."

That doesn't say if those are the only factors used, or if they mixed in several different data sets until they found a combination that made for a compelling graph. I'll give them credit for mentioning that they've controlled for income though, as that was my first assumption.

I would be interested to know if the skew is really in total alcohol consumption, or if one side tends to binge occasionally while the other gets lightly buzzed frequently, or if there is a different split entirely that this is glossing over.

I have a 4GB Sony (I think) that I bought a few years ago. It has always corrupted bits of data here and there (think a few dozen lines of random noise in the middle of some code) so I pretty quickly learned not to use it for most things. It now holds mp3s for my car, which fails much more gracefully with garbled input than a compiler does.

But it was cheap and relatively high capacity for its time, so I wouldn't take much from that other than "you get what you pay for".

Let us all pray that it doesn't agree with you.

Of course those digits are random, they're straight out of pi!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_point

It seems too eager to go through year and day pages, and doesn't always hit the optimal path:

  Mike Godwin -> Godwin's law -> Adolf Hitler

it gives:

  Mike Godwin -> 1956 -> 1889 -> Adolf Hitler

Also strange is that the "1956" it follows is in the text of, but not linked from "Mike Godwin".

Either way, I like the Web 2.0-style Hitler drawings :-)

> solving this problem is something I'm quite excited and passionate about

I'd say that's your answer.

If it's something that interests you, you're going to pushing that much harder towards the goal, which makes a crowded market less of an issue. Besides, isn't the point of all this entrepeneur stuff to do what you want to do?

If you're going to be financially dependent on this, then yeah, do the research and weigh the odds and all that. If not, do what you enjoy, and if it fails at least you've had fun and gained a bunch of experience for next time.

Awesome. I've been a longtime random.org user but have always complained about the lack of a Comic Sans interface. It seems my prayers have finally been answered:

http://randint.com/labs/comicsans.php

(My first Comic Sans number was 17 - it even feels more random than the competition!)

That sucks. I've used TrueCrypt for Windows and LUKS for Linux, but have never been a Mac guy so I haven't looked into that side of things. Google suggests that your main options are OSX's built-in FileVault to encrypt just your home directory (and optionally TC or something for additional non-system data), or PGP Whole Disk Encryption for a whopping $150. Or running a virtualized OSX within an encrypted container within a second OS, with all the extra boot time and performance hits that would entail.

I'd bet on something better coming out before too long given more interest (and laws) about encryption these days, but unless I've missed something, for now it looks like you're pretty much of out of luck for as good, complete, free solutions go.

I haven't had the pleasure of dealing with border agents, but I would assume that they'd leave you alone as long as everything looked normal at a casual glance.

A couple example suggestions for that:

1) TrueCrypt let's you change the bootup text, and can be set not to visibly show keystrokes when entering your password. This means that you can make it boot into what appears to be a standard "No operating system found" type error message, which will not react at all until you type your correct password and hit enter. Unless they're dedicated enough to examine the boot sector they wouldn't be able to tell that it's not just a corrupted drive. Toss an OS install disc in your bag for added realism.

2) TrueCrypt will boot from CD into an encrypted drive. Using this to your advantage, install a small Linux partition and set your computer up to boot into that unless the boot CD is inserted. Nothing suspicious at all remains on the drive except for a parition of apparently random data, which they'd have to be pretty suspicious already to even bother looking for. You could copy the TrueCrypt bootloader back onto the drive to boot without the CD for convenience if you're not going to be crossing borders for a while.

...And there are probably other ways. The TrueCrypt documention offers a number of suggestions on how to look minimally suspicious to suit whatever level of paranoia you may have.

While we're at it, I'm pretty sure this one is obligatory: http://cakesy.com/886e854a5

The above example makes the text look too small though, IMHO. Maybe scale things up dynamically to fit the text to the available space a little better? Still, very neat toy.

All things being equal I wouldn't expect 50/50, but there are a lot of variables to consider beyond a simple time measurement:

Does the cofounder have amazing skills or other benefits to the company so that he's worth more than might be expected?

Has Joe been kind of slacking this entire time, not having done much work or taken much risk, while the cofounder expects to put in hundred-hour weeks and is quitting a high-paying job to take the offer?

The interesting bit with Perl is that so many people don't realize it's pass-by-reference because the standard idioms for starting a function copy the aliased "references" by value, which then act just like in any of the other languages.

  $var = shift; // Take the first value passed to the function, copy into $var

or

  ($var1, $var2, $var3) = @_ // Copy the first three into $var1, $var2, and $var3

Using the aliased variables directly and with the intentional goal of altering the originals is almost unheard of in my experience (excluding some clever bits of magic in a few modules). Even if you want to pass a reference: you'd pass an explicit reference, copy that, then dereference the copy.

Machine code can be decompiled too, even if not as cleanly. It would slow down efforts to make an unauthorized fork of the software as a whole, but anyone curious enough about individual bits and pieces could still see exactly what's happening. Closed source is really more of a legal block than a technical one.

Given that and the lack of popular, high-level languages that compile to machine code (C++ is the best I can come up with), I'd reconsider whether that's really a priority.