skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has been in meetings with Marissa I'd say that the reason she is ... not universally loved within Google (to put it mildly), is the fact that she isn't a particularly nice person or good leader.

She might see herself as rational and efficient, but to a lot of people she comes across as rude, insecure, and worst of all: horribly inconsistent.

She practices a sort of "off with their heads" style of management and loves the sound of her own voice. She will often interrupt people before they have had the chance to communicate even a fraction of what they have prepared for meetings, often spewing forth cascades of unpleasantness as she argues against what she thinks the messenger intends to say.

Very often the upshot of a meeting is that people are more confused as to what her intentions are than they were before the meeting.

She often sends teams in one direction, and then later, yells at them for going in that direction and sends them in a new direction. She seems to have very weak memory for what decisions she has made in the past. People rarely (if ever?) point this out to Marissa.

She also seems to be quite terrible at managing her staff. She is unable to delegate meaningfully, and if something is OK'ed by one of her reportees you essentially have nothing: there is a complete disconnect so you need to get it from Marissa directly. You also need to verify with her frequently to make sure that you catch it when she suddenly changes her mind.

Due to her foul mood, people rarely, if ever, speak up and tell her when she is being an ass or that she is contradicting herself. Again. The reason is that Marissa will have people people removed if they annoy her. I've seen this happen. I've seen people get thrown off projects just for saying something that annoyed the cupcake princess in a meeting.
can you post # of uniques and # of page views?

also a little bit more specific, so only post these if you want to...but can you post the top 3 traffic sources to your site for the last year.(if you have the user defined hack on Analytics, I'd love to know the specific urls which sent the traffic. But if not, just top level domain would do.) and maybe the top 3 keywords Google search queries that brought you the most traffic.
You could probably get 90% of the benefit of the Japanese lifestyle by moving to a walkable urban environment like NYC, selling the car, and eating the japanese diet. You'd probably have to visit there first to see what that actually is. Any other East Asian diet would be fine as well - hell, a pre-1970s American diet would probably be fine.

I am curious if those life expectancy figures have been controlled for smoking, though. If not - wow.
Mind Reading
Since there's money to be made from stealing someone's identity, then the easier it gets to do it, the more often it'll happen IMO. Services like this are lowering the barrier of entry.

There's a reason companies are trying to scare you about identity theft. They're in this market because they see it as a growth market. They believe identity theft will increase and they're targeting it with their services and products. I agree that some will use scare tactics to get us even more wound up over it and make some extra $, maybe because they've already over saturated the market, however I definitely think it's going to become a sizable problem.
It's a really useful time save.

Unfortunaly git-wip by default doesn't commit files that are untracked (e.g. new). I submitted a patch to do exactly this: http://github.com/MSch/git-wip/commit/22f4b57b67762a0123d1ba...
Ok here's the graph of visitors and page views: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3ws/balsamiq.com-2009-stats

Traffic sources are here: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3w5/balsamiq.com-2009-traffic-s...

FYI, I practically NEVER look at any of this stuff. But maybe I should? :)
Great references to books and talks, thanks!
The actions are far from all that deliberate. Change contrast. Next track in iTunes. Increase volume. The definitely start feeling deliberate because these keys are almost impossible to hit without looking at them - they're small and offset differently from the rest of the keyboard. Tog's point stands - these keys present a horrible target. The one thing he doesn't mention is the staggering brainlessness of putting the 'Eject Disk' key at the top-right corner, above 'Delete'.
>She is unable to delegate meaningfully

That she supposedly schedules 70+ meetings/week is sufficient evidence of this. I suppose this is one definition of a "flat" organization though.
I honestly don't remember much about high school popularity. I remember being constantly stressed by the long days and the academic workload and how everyone - EVERYONE, teachers, parents, students - was expressing a uniform goal of "GET GOOD GRADES TO GET INTO A GOOD COLLEGE." I probably could have hung out with different groups than I did, I probably could have dated plenty of girls, but I just wasn't paying attention. High school was about hoping that the world would just leave me alone for a while.

In the end, I got politely acceptable grades and got into a good enough college, where I proceeded to wish that college would just leave me alone for a while, but at least it was better than high school. But then I finished college, and entered the real world, and everything was simple again. Even the stressful parts.
Menpumaspeedcat
> The scary thing is ...

Sorry, I remain not scared.
Menpumaspeedcatbig
Interesting Technologies for Web App Developers in 2010
Comcast bought one (Plaxo) and BTW Comcast is the only company you've mentioned who owns content. Comcast is also active in pursuing a new recommendation and rating systems similar to your post - its going to be rolled into new versions of their guide and interactive tv strategies. The hard part about this is that Comcast is glacially slow and deploying something like this. (By "this" I mean new set-top-box based interactive technologies - they're not really looking to deploy these apps as a "two-screen" experience)

But I think what most content providers are looking for are ways to leverage existing social networks (twitter and facebook come up a lot) as opposed to a new type of social network.

Oh and BTW Tivo's popularity is dropping precipitously and not a good example right now most people are switching to cable provider DVRs (especially if they start implementing network DVRs)

http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/11/24/tivo-loses-314000-subsc...
Spot on. People absorb some opinion from somewhere - it's almost a cultural, tribal thing. They adopt that opinion. And then confirm it endlessly via Google University's excellent and popular Confirmation Bias program, as demonstrated by the GP's links.

All systems fail, even if it's only rarely. But as soon as they do people seize upon the failure as if it's some kind of conclusive proof of the gut feeling they had all along. They are seemingly completely incapable of thinking in terms of statistics and average, large-scale outcomes. This is, of course, not at all confined to the health care "debate". The situation is so bad that I wonder if some kind of rational risk assessment/statistical thinking course should be introduced in schooling.
It's often been noted that organized crime had a significant part in the current Japanese malaise. They were part of the reason for the ease with which bad loans could be made again and again. It seems likely that they were instrumental in much of the corruption.

Also note that the leadership of the Yakuza is very politically conservative. Putting the brakes on economic development would also serve to slow down social and cultural change, as well as producing a climate generally friendlier to extreme right-wing politics.
U.S. patients certainly subsidize drug research. There are frequent calls for re-importation of drugs from other countries because, often, they are identical to the U.S. drugs, but have been bought by foreign governments exercising monopoly purchasing power. It makes sense for the drug company to sell at the discount because the manufacturing cost is so low that it is still profitable. Consequently, U.S. patients, who do not get the monopoly proxy, pay the higher cost.

This often leads to accusations of price gouging. However, looking at the returns on investment from publicly listed companies suggests that they are not charging extortionary fees. There financial figures are in line with that of the tech industry.

Granted, drug costs only one element among many in the debate, but I am pretty confident in saying that if drug costs were uniform, other countries would be paying more and the U.S. would be paying less (relative to current spending.)
5 Jquery Tutorials To Build Your Own Plugin
U.S. soil is sufficient, but not necessary.
I Love the GPL (Except When it Applies to Me)
But I think the normal way countries get out of it is through war, which isn't terribly rosy either.

How about an upsurge in space exploration? The colonization of Mars, enabled by plasma rocket technologies like VASIMIR? The exploration and colonization of Mars has been likened to the exploration and colonization of the Americas. Mars has sunlight and soil suitable for cultivation of terrestrial crops, and geology influenced by large amounts of water, which likely means deposits of easily exploitable ores. (The point being, to exploit resources locally, and to use Mars as a base of solar-system wide civilization, not to export back to Earth. Mars is positioned advantageously to be the center of economic power of such a civilization. Earth, disadvantaged by its large gravity well, will become a 2nd rate location.)

It sounds far-fetched, but I think a careful examination of technology will reveal it to be quite plausible. Unfortunately, opportunities for colonization have historically led to war.
Oh that's easy. Create a crowdsourced website where you can post all your diagnoses, and then offer up a bounty to anyone who can figure out the legitimate ones.
The problem is not that you look ridiculous - but that nobody would notice that you are incorrect. If someone is always 100% correct that this is a moot point - but I don't think this is a reasonable assumption.
In the book Jack Welch wrote after leaving GE, he noted that the executive staff would often meet to "wallow" (his term, like pigs in mud) about difficult decisions. They didn't have some formal, "actionable" (my quotes because I don't like the word) agenda. Their goal was to collectively think through the problem and make sure they understood it well before making a multi-billion dollar decision. This is the opposite of the meeting style described in the article.

There are times and places for highly-structured, decision-oriented meetings, but I often get the most value out of the least structured ones. Let's say marketing has a vague idea for Feature X -- "Make the homepage skinnable." What's it mean? What are everybody's goals? How muck work is involved in different variations of the idea? There's no way to seek truth though a pre-arranged agenda and a linear discussion with a timer. An outsider might regard such a meeting as chaos, but the change in collective understanding is usually immense.

Why are Americans so obsessed about structure, time, and faux efficiency? I'm all for getting stuff done when the definition of "done" is inclusive of everything important. However, making arbitrary decisions quickly so one can pat himself on the back for his efficiency is hardly an efficient path to just about anyone's definition of "done".
I think it helps you know what words you rank for and where your traffic is coming from.

i.e. if you see that a particular site(that you never heard of), sent you 200 people, where each person went through 6 pages, compared to your average of 2...you know it's probably a good idea to go buy some ads there, since you know that site's audience will convert
HN Request: Please add links to comment threads to @newsycombinator posts
The HN Twiiter account is my favorite source of content, but there's no easy way to find the HN discussion thread. When I read this today, http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/7335235548 , I wanted to see what the HN community had to say, but the only way to do so was to go to the main HN site and search for WIP. Very cumbersome.

Please vote up if you want discussion thread links on the HN twitter account!
quit living in the past, exo-memory is here, now!
We have 5x as many Twitter followers as Facebook fans (363 vs. 74), but I'm not convinced it's as simple as semantics:

Facebook, despite their recent posturing, is for me still a personal sphere. Twitter, despite its flippant image, is for me about business. At the very least it's my web persona, rather than, say, my people-I've-known-since-I-was-11 persona. I follow a bunch of businesses (and moreso, business contacts) on Twitter. The only businesses I follow on Facebook are from friends who have nagged me about doing such. ;-)
Whoa. That's scary.
Fred Wilson: Affiliate Marketing Undervalues The Link
What could possibly go wrong when there's an easily accessible database of detailed information on every individual? Move along, nothing to see here.
I agree.

The tagline is "Backups for the truly paranoid". Yet the site looks like it was built by one person as a hobby. Why would the truly paranoid trust this web site to store his files?

Tarsnap requires the user to be a unix-geek that can compile the program himself and use the command line. But if I'm a truly paranoid hacker, wouldn't I just write a quick python script myself to encrypt and backup my files to S3? Why would I trust you? One thing that may help is that you should let the user upload the files to their own S3 account, not to your S3 account. That would certainly make me more likely to use it.

Also, nowhere on the home page does it tell me what makes Tarsnap so special. To me, it's just another backup program. What's special about it that makes it good for the truly paranoid? Tell me that up front.
It would also account for the fact that she has no memory of past decisions and frequently gets upset about teams doing what she said in the last meeting. And as mentioned: nobody has the balls to stand up to her and point this out since she has a habit of screwing over people's careers for no other reason than her being annoyed by them.
It's not literally "thought-based." They're reading the signals from his peripheral nervous system, not his brain.
people who did well in college and had numerous extra curricular interests and activities is a recipe for low intellectual curiosity?
The fact that it is an imitator makes it easier to diagnose, because a competent doctor will test you for it whenever you have unexplained symptoms.

That is a very unfair thing to say, IMO. You cannot just do unlimited blood tests for everyone who might possibly be at risk of $something. Lyme disease is notoriously hard to diagnose and also very rare. It is unfortunate that the case you referred to turned out the way it did. Our medical knowledge is far from perfect, and no doubt it was a learning experience for everyone involved. But it's going way too far to call the doctors "incompetent". If anything it is our entire medical system that remains "incompetent" and calling out individual practitioners is very unfair.
tell riklomas

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158777
2010 List of Surprises and Predictions
Wow. If the last paragraph is true, it's contradicting point 6 "Discourage politics, use data." already.
I can't tell whether the angry/swearing diatribe tone is a dramatic effect or just lack of creativity/intelligence on behalf of the author.
Follow http://twitter.com/YCHackerNews instead
Instead of "own the content" I should have said tv usage data ( season passes, what's recorded, etc ). Too bad these companies aren't into sharing their data and providing open apis like netflix.

They would be smart in leveraging existing social networks like facebook. The only good facebook integration I've seen is visual bookshelf.
You should consider partnering with (or contracting out) to someone already well familiar with OS X and interested in writing a GUI.

Tarsnap has one of the technically best back-end implementations available, but the barrier to entry for an interested customer is incredibly high -- not just on OS X, but on UNIX as well.

Even on UNIX, producing a working backup setup requires writing custom scripts to do so, and implementing anything like snapshot-based backups is complicated enough that even I spent a couple hours getting everything working/tested, and I'm very familiar with this area.

I'll be bold: You solved the backup problem, now the number one hinderance to your growth is solving the user experience problem.

The UNIX utility should have an exceptionally easy way to configure backup schedules. Possibly even an optional web UI.

A Mac release must have a native OS X GUI (no qt!), be easy to use/configure, and be well-integrated into system services.

After the first iteration on the above you should consider implementing support for network-based backup administration, so that we can control backups/restores across all of our desktop/server installations from a centralized administration console.

If the above is not your forte -- if you're only interested in the crypto and backup issues -- then you need to find a parter or contractor who can step in and solve them for you.
Gmail has no soul. It has positive utility for people who use it.

And this is not related to the main article.
The most useful wisdom always comes from the chlenges we personally face. This is where the best startup ideas come from.
Pedantry isn't boring – it's essential
just out of curiosity, did you attend an academically-intense high school? if so, then perhaps people weren't as obsessed with popularity because there was so much competition to get the highest grades and into the best colleges. but i would imagine that even in an intense school, there would still be athletes, cheerleaders, etc. (maybe the effect of popularity isn't as pronounced, though)
Well as the github repo posted above you attests, there are (unsurprisingly) some non-trivial bugs in the last official release.

Unmaintained code is just not something I would ever use in a production capacity/rely on for my daily work. Especially considering the changes which have come to java and the jvm since 2005.
Some thoughts on content distribution
Brainhacking: How to Learn 2000 Japanese Characters In A Month
And his assertion about license proliferation is certainly not correct ref http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses#top20
I don't get his point. Does he think copyleft is a good ideal failed by the specific personalities of the current maintainers, or a flawed dream unable to survive in the reality of the economic marketplace? The essay feels unfocused and disorganized.

Now, I'm an open-minded child of the modern age and I don't agree with the oppressive old-fashioned idea that every essay must have a point. And truthfully this piece does bring up some interesting food for thought (the SaaS loophole). But it is nothing we haven't heard before, with less juvenile tone.
Except, is that chart of how many projects use each license, or how much much use software with those licenses sees? Those could be very different. But ups for commenting on the substance rather than the style.
I've found facebook to be better for interaction with users. I have ~800 Facebook fans, and ~150 twitter followers, and I get much more than 6x the page views/comments/etc from Facebook fans than from Twitter followers.

With Twitter, your tweets easily get lost in the sea of tweets, whereas Facebook stories persist in the fans' News Feeds for a while, and then show up even more if their friends interacted with it.
Ask HN: Seeking a cofounder
I've been creating a service targetted at indie filmmakers (but any indie video content can use) for Internet distribution.

This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads. This also includes API integration with social sites like YouTube to help with viral Internet marketing.

I've consulted, and still am consulting with, indie filmmakers about their specific needs to fine tune this for them. The above two were the main ones: mechanism for distribution and marketing. So this is going to be more like 37signals than loopt in that we're not going to focus on any one specific thing that is profoundly new.

I'm only looking for technical founders, and you'll probably have to like the indie industry (circumventing Hollywood distributors) or at least indie films, to be passionate about this.

Also i've already finished at least 50% of the prototype (I'm sufficiently technical).
EDIT: I forgot to mention that so far the work is using PHP, python (for a desktop thing), mongodb, amazon s3, amazon cloudfront, and jquery (not a lot of JavaScript). Planning to use amazon FPS for payments. So unless you want to rewrite this in another language (which honestly wouldn't be too hard if you're good), then knowing these technologies would help. Familiarity with git would help too.

Email chris.chen@flixa.tv if interested. Also, I'm applying to techstars in the next few days.

Thanks
Anybody who believes the GPL was invented to coerce users into sending patches ought to have their head examined.
Go you guys!
My company uses Balsamiq for mockups, and I was impressed enough that I started using it for personal projects too.
I'm happy to see you do well.
I think we're seeing the same pattern we saw before in Japan and then Korea, rapid industrialization in support of an export-driven economy. In both previous cases, the growth was driven by vast government support and enormous loans and large economic bubbles (which have largely burst in both countries, but they've left quite a mess as well). It also had interesting side effects, due to the government favoring certain industries, and certain players in those industries, of establishing long running tendencies for croniysm in both economies and in the government that both are also now dealing with. Japan's recent power shakeup in the government is evidence of this, with the head of the DPJ I believe apologizing for future missteps as nobody but the LDP has rule the country in a few generations and they need time to "figure things out".

The difference, and why so few people fail to analyze China along similar lines, is that China is so big, and China is historically communist. We've all acted very confused about what's going on over there, when really it's essentially following the same patterns, just on a larger scale. Eventually, the economy of China will grow to be so large that a pure export-driven economy will no longer work, the cost of employing factory workers won't necessarily realize the same cost savings that they do now, and then they'll have to being transitioning their economy over to other areas of expertise.

Japan and Korea both largely settled on hi-tech partnerships in electronics and manufacturing and automobile manufacturing, which while still export-driven in the technical sense, is loads different than making under priced radios and other flashy and cheap trinkets. China is still largely in the cheap trinket export market, but the plethora of automobile manufacturers, and some notable acquisitions in that areas, as well as an internal push towards hi-tech manufacturing (the Longsoon processor for example) makes me think they'll be in the same state in 20 or 30 years.
From what I can grasp from their page, the paranoid part comes from the encryption used.
I might not agree with the GPL, but I'm pretty sure that the intent behind it is to encourage people to contribute back to the open source community (even if not by directly sending patches).