skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software Schedules and the Parable of the Loaf of Bread
Today, I want to discuss a common problem that occurs after the estimate is delivered. Often, the estimate is considered to be too high and management tells you how long you have to complete the task. Sometimes this is motivated by important business goals. Other times it’s motivated by a manager who wants to look good or has a bonus tied to a delivery date.
You'd think that someone from Forbes would know that you get what you pay for.
RIMM not taking iPhone innovations lying down
While by no means is Dubai going to be Silicon Valley, there are very encouraging signs for business in Dubai. I have spent about a month or two there over the past two years.

As it has already been eluded to, there's tons of money there. In the last five years, every major consulting firm has an office in Dubai. Every major tech company has an office in Dubai Internet City. The city is organized into economic industrial units - Festival City, Healthcare, International Financial, Sports, Media, etc.

From the tech startup side, if you have a financial, native backer, you're fine to startup a company. There is a booming business for networking, like Cisco and Cisco partners. The market exists there for tech startups, but probably not for web startups as censorship of the Web varies.

As for lifestyle, it doesn't get much better than Dubai. It's a fantastic place to live. When you think about falseprophet's post, a lot of the same applies to LA, yet millions call it home.

As for local skilled labor, there are many people out there seeking jobs in Dubai from neighboring Gulf countries, and the growth of the Doha campuses are contributing to a young tech talent pool in the area.
If the votes are accurate, which of course they must be, then voters are smarter than lurkers.
I think you missed the irony. The fact that he voted himself in the top 5% almost ensures that he is in fact not (according to the original study... assuming I remember correctly)... so he would make a great Editor!
Then how do new users get started? They have to write comments? Most people don't want to do that.
Add a hint of Weimar as well, could be a potent mix.
This looks very similar to a Mac program (whose name I've long since forgotten) I used in college in the mid-1990's. It's good to see somebody is finally putting that CPU power to good use: once you got beyond 5-10 separate objects, a 68k couldn't even manage 1fps.
Give users the ability to post a poll every 100 points?

For existing users, just give them (karma mod 100) points, or don't do this to prevent the flood of new polls from occurring.
Wow. Got a link or saved copy?
I think the problem is that the voters are smart enough to know the statistical classification for this kind of poll and vote accordingly to plug the holes.

So in this poll I'm pretty dumb.
True Knowledge: The Natural Language Question Answering Wikipedia for Facts
I'll vote whatever this guys votes:

http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2008...
How about limiting the rate of posting based on karma.

And definitely put a karma requirement for polls.
A better backup system based on Git
Brazil - Rio de Janeiro
Spent several years in Beijing. Now I'm working in Shanghai with a foreign start-up and 我的中文也厉害得不得了！

Moving abroad is great. The problem is that unless you really work at becoming fluent in the local language your career options are limited. For most people travelling helps them realize what they want without providing much help getting there.
Facebook asks labels about music service
Well, the smart thing would be to store the data in normalized tables like your supposed to, and then denormalize it with a fast refreshed materialized view (or one that is updated on a schedule, depending on how stale data can be tolerated), or add the extra speed with a caching layer.

If your hitting flickr traffic, then you have some tough problems to solve, but I don't think starting your app with non-normalized data would be very smart!
Microsoft unveils IE8 Beta 1 (now available)
I don't think lack of articles submitted is a problem. What's wrong with lurking and posting a few comments here and there to gain the karma needed for posting?

Another idea is that posting one article a day could be free, but ti costs karma for each additional one posted (maybe even an increasing cost based on how many you post per day.)
Lua has excellent support for building sandboxes for untrusted user code.
So far, I've gotten all my legal stuff done by:

1. Doing tons of research and being well-versed in the legal field. This is good stuff to know anyway, so I put the time in at the beginning learning how to do it myself. And you save a lot of money by drafting the documents yourself (pulling from examples online) and then just paying a lawyer to review them, rather than going to a lawyer and paying them to pull out one of their standard templates.

2. When it does come time to get a lawyer to review your documents, find one you trust through personal referrals and then hope that their website needs some work. Then, in you come to the rescue ;)
There is a karma minimum to create a poll. I think it's 200.
I've been using Ruby for a while, but I've been using proc/lamba and eval sparingly. It's nice when you need it. I've mostly used proc to delay computation by passing blocks around, and eval to generate code or class_eval to write as if I was writing in the class.

Anyone else use them for anything else?

So, the aha moment was being able to use eval as an interpreter, and lambda to enclose it to pass it around?
File-sharing and property rights
Social Media Thoughts and Musings March 2008 - Burnout, the next big thing, aggregation
World's smallest gun fires 300mph bullets - but is just 2 inches long
State of the Computer Book Market: Languages
AOL Mail was rewritten in Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 and released today. It is better than Gmail.
First Look: Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft missing the cloud with Windows on a USB stick
I know, I know... blasphemy! But damn, it's a sweet little application.
Thanks NoBS - do you remember any of the sites you tapped to get some of the original legal terms?

edw - the idea for the article is that there is a fair amount of legwork you can do yourself to avoid legal fees without wasting a ton of your time either. For example, it takes less than 20 minutes to incorporate your biz at MyCorporation.com and it's only about $300. I've done 3 companies through them. So I'm just trying to provide entrepreneurs with some quick/easy resources.
'Testers Are Idiots'
No, you don't get it at all. Voters in my poll are smarter than people who don't vote in my polls.
Fuzzwich (YC summer 07) launches a new look and previews Animator
This is Ryan from Fuzzwich. Check out the screencast at http://www.fuzzwich.com/animator if you have not already. The Fuzzwich Animator is the start and the foundation of our new online animation studio. We're very excited by the new focus and look forward to inviting everyone to animate in the near future. We're also very curious to your feedback, so please sound off!
Mental health crisis plagues post Katrina New Orleans
This is Ryan from Fuzzwich. Check out the screencast at http://www.fuzzwich.com/animator if you have not already. The Fuzzwich Animator is the start and the foundation of our new online animation studio. We're very excited by the new focus and look forward to inviting everyone to animate in the near future. We're also very curious to your feedback, so please sound off!
Spam Hits an All-Time High
"... 6) Escaped from Colditz POW camp twice? ..."

7) Escaped from Colditz POW ... in a glider?
No, ideally people just wouldn't submit or vote up crappy submissions.

I think the problem is that it's easy to vote up quick amusing little things, but longer submissions that take effort to read, understand and evaluate have a bias against them, so crap tends to float on top.
Babies see pure colour, adults via language centres
awesome new look guys, huge evolutionary step. Love the twisp and catsby annimation, too. :)
Set a Blank Password in Windows XP To Protect the Computer from Internet Attacks
I'm not trying to be biased here, but having to install Silverlight prevented me from watching that.

Does this mean I'm getting old and bitter or wise?. I don't ever remember hesitating like that to install Flash...
I think this might be a good idea but I'd say that it's too early to implement something like this. Let's wait and see if the poll submissions subside or if we realize that we're being overly conservative.
I really like the colour scheme of the new homepage/site, but have a few observations:

(1) It's not immediately obvious to me what Fuzzwich is and why I should use it - I really think you could benefit from a prominently positioned tagline on the page itself ("Animation for Everyone" is good, but why put it only in the title bar ?)

(2) If your new screencast is a big play you definitely need to sell it more on your homepage - bigger or bold font / more prominence would help

(3) What's with the (wasted ?) space to the left-middle of the page ? This could be put to good use with a big SIGNUP NOW ! style button or maybe a funky image to sell the screencast with.

Just my two pennyworth - Hope some of it helps. You have a cool product - As pg says "Don't give up" :-)
could someone please provide a credible state, zip code and phone number that would work in the sign-up?

They don't seem to want users from outside the US.
Excellent points. I'll take into consideration immediately. Textmate is go!
Any reason you did parseClosure(x,y,lambda {|doc,out| ... }) instead of parseClosure(x,y) { |doc,out| ... } ?
I wasn't going to say anything, but I hope one day Humor will see to it that this quote gets put on a page of famous quotes.
Ca,94941, 415 389-4100

(mill valley pd)
I don't think there is anything intrinsically wrong with polls, except when they push other submissions off the new page before enough people get a chance to vote on them. Maybe polls should cost karma only if the main thread doesn't get above a certain number of votes.
I've always liked Fuzzwich, especially the goofy stuff that people come up with, just using the simple tools. I've used it to make birthday "cards" for people.

I can't wait to see a Geico Commerical done with Fuzzwich one day.

Ryan, make it happen!
I tried to pass the codeProc.call in the block but it wouldn't process the data until I passed the codeProc as a parameter. I don't really understand why to be honest.
Can someone qualify the "It is better than Gmail" statement? I'm not opposed to the possibility that it is, but I would like to see what you think is better. Thanks.
Then there is the danger of people creating pseudo-polls using the old "vote up if..." trick. Not sure how YC deals with those -- maybe the editors nip them in the bud?
Congratulations! I can imagine you get a lot of respect as a Westerner who respects Chinese culture enough to learn Mandarin. Now, I imagine your prospects for your career/geographical locations pretty broad.

I think I'll start with Spanish. I'm thinking of 3 months of immersion language training in a Latin American country.
My favourite feature is the large, colorful ads scattered about my inbox giving me some real choices for lasik eye surgery. I appreciate that.
I did not know about the free zones. They are really interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

However attractive they are, the cost of flying a team out to Dubai probably equals the cost of the average web application beta.
This is a fantastic post on a topic that's been a problem with the web since day one.

Very insightful. The Four Reasons feel very accurate.

Thanks, Paul!
The comments so far are a mix of negative and positive about making this change now, but the voting is 20-3 in favor of the change.

I guess this is another case of the general issue that the people who write comments have different characteristics than those who hit the vote arrows.
thats temporary
fyi, the favicon is still the old logo
I'm of the opinion that if you can't explain something without being exasperated, then why are you bothering to explain it? Go do something else.
Interesting - but what do you mean 'building' sandboxes?
Very cool! Glad to see someone trying to bring animation to the masses
What if every Entrepreneur had to tell the Truth?
Add an "I don't know" option. I would pick that.
I've written about the key take-aways from Dr. Twaalfhoven's lecture in my blog...

http://ocastaneda.weblog.tudelft.nl/2008/03/05/the_indivers_...
Ask YC: What's your bounce rate? What's good?
What's the bounce rate on your home page? What do you think is a good rate? Average rate?
My feeling is that anyone who doesn't think they have anything worth saying probably doesn't have anything worth linking to either.

Requiring that users acquire at lease one point of karma from posting comments before they can submit stories would also eliminate the random floods of spam submissions, since spammers aren't likely to either (a) post comments, or (b) have the comments they post get voted up.
Loving your work is essential. Doing nothing but work is one dimensional and counter-productive. 37S is just highlighting the minimum expectations for their employees.
I worked with a team that had a few Indians that migrated over and did online master courses to compensate for their Indian bachelor degrees. One did CSU Boulder's online course work, one did Phoenix Online, another did something else that I forgot.

All in all they still have trouble keeping up with the kids that came out of an American undergraduate college. They spent quite a penny for it too and spoke highly of it but now they make the same money as the rest of us despite none of us (I don't even have a bachelors) have advanced degrees.

From what I heard experiences Phoenix Online is wholly dependent on who you get as an instructor. Will it greatly impact your salary in the future? I don't think as much as good experience and good projects on your resume would.
Carnegie Mellon develops magnetically levitating computer physical interface
I'm pretty sure 37S employees are pretty well covered in the salary department, especially given the level of audi love.
Do you measure your work in terms of time or productivity? In a field where projects are deadlined based, should speed, efficiency, and productivity be rewarded? Do I really need to be in front of a computer for all my time as long as the task is accomplished?

Companies are still hiring based on standardized patterns established eons ago. I had thought all that rah-rah of the dot-com boom would have taught us about the information revolution and how information workers are different.
Number of front page items should expand to keep the number of non-poll items on the front page constant.
I think that the old adage "time, quality, money - pick two" applies here as well.

I can get standardised contracts, NDA's etc. off the net, read through them, google a little legalese, and put something together that works. The longer I spend the better it gets. Of course a lawyer would be able to do in one hour what I spend 15 hours doing.
The Bug Hunter
Law firms in startup hubs offer deferred-fee deals to the most promising startups. Typically you can use up to $25k
worth of time and they won't bill you till you do a
big (series A) funding round. Several firms, including
those regarded as the best in the Valley, offer such
deals to all YC-funded startups.
a) Yes, there were one or two other users that I have karma upbombed. I did it in compensation for comments they made that had gotten to extremely low negative levels. You've previously emailed me several times to stop responding to dead comments and once telling me you killed a comment that suggested using another comment as an impromptu poll. With that email, you said the only reason you didn't ban me from the site was because it was a borderline case.

b) Your email to me was harsh. My response was "Sometimes I think you take yourself too seriously" which was meant not as "fuck you" but "have a sense of humor about up and downarrows."
Users who obsess about karma should lose karma :)
Martin Newland is "starting up" a new well-financed (naturally) English-language newspaper in the Emirates (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/23/1).

Web-startups probably don't mop enough cash fast enough to be interesting yet. ??
Now this was a good use of "let's go shopping!"
Creating polls should not cost Karma.

For me a poll may be a replacement for some of the Ask YC threads.

I like the way it is now but for those who are worried about karma ¿? maybe the best solution is not getting karma for submitting a Poll, of course that would need a better place to search for polls, should YC add a poll link to the navigation menu?
I fought a long and expensive legal battle all throughout college, which I eventually won. I was able to get 50% pro-bono rates because I had started a 501(c)3 non-profit that had a related interest in the case.

I once avoiding having to hire an attorney to sue a non-paying client by suing the company myself in small claims court for $30 in fees. You can't file anything electronically, and the courts like old-fashioned cash or checks payments in person, so it's anathema to the ways high-tech entrepreneurs, but it worked. I got a check for the remaining amount the next day; the other company simply didn't want to show up for court.

Writing blunt letters to the CEOs of large companies can be effective. I've saved thousands of dollars in costs by writing letters. I inadvertently ended up altering the manufacturing process for a well-known company's blade servers, as well.

Writing blunt letters to lawyers who overbill you can also be effective. I've been billed for other clients' time, billed double for a new attorney to join a case due to the original attorney having to go on maternity leave, billed for "this isn't my area of expertise" as advice, etc. The law firm may not agree to work with you again afterward, but they won't make you pay if you have a point. After all, they have bigger fish to fry.

Gold and platinum credit cards have extended warranty programs that will usually take care of issues with faulty equipment that would otherwise probably require a lawsuit to actually gain anything. I've saved several thousand dollars thanks to such programs, as well.

Lastly, I was able to borrow some standard agreements from my family business.
It sure does this: "Makes searching faster"
As long as you take care of this little nit: "Have to ensure consistency in the application logic"
Why Leapfrogging is Rare
Does this run in Firefox on Ubuntu?
Great site; I always thought that user-generated animation has the possibility to become huge. And being able to create animations from withing the browser... wow!

Like with HTML, it would be great if there was some way of doing "View Source" and be able to build on somebody else's animation.
That way, we can eliminate a lot of junk polls.
what is the point of that comment?????
all great points - can you drop me a msg at wschroter@yahoo.com so I can ask some specific questions?
"... This article comes off as being written by someone who, while incredibly credentialed, just seems like an outsider. It seems like an article my parents would write and they don`t necessarily have a great grasp on the way business is evolving. ..."

I'm a long time sceptic of HBS business case studies and a fan of watching & re-watching Startup.com.

"... GovWorks's failure is a textbook example
of the perils of grandiosity. Smart entrepreneurs
recognize that start-ups cannot afford to pass
on any opportunity, no matter how small. ..."

But when I read points like the above quote I think the author is right on the nail. There are a lot of things GovWorks got wrong [0] but this observation strikes pretty much to the heart of it. To not even entertain the idea, meant saying no to any potential cash-flow. Lack of cash-flow caused the eventual sell-off.

[0] Lets see growing big, fast with other peoples money, letting non-tech staff dictate the development & having a co-founder who wanted to call the company "come on to Caesar dot com"
You are kidding me right? I spent a few minutes playing around with it and there is no way in hell I'd switch to this from gmail. It has a few nice touches, but generally is slow and badly designed.

Cons:

1. Slow. Much slower to navigate around than gmail. This is killer.

2. Mail receiving is slow. Sending a mail to gmail, appears in under 30 seconds. Sending a mail to AOL mail took over 5 minutes to appear.

3. Interface is confusing. Create a contact and the button to actually do the create is above and to the right of the form?

4. Filtering is too hard to access, doesn't show you a preview of what will be filtered.

5. Way too much space taken up with ads.

Pros:

1. Calendar integration is good. Nice to have it right there in the same interface.
Ask YC: SQL Help ! (feel free to ignore)
First: I'm sorry if this isn't aproppriate, and the right place to post it. Feel free to flame me, downmod me, and generally be a nuisance. But since I've been around here for a while I know that there will be someone that can help me.

I've recently decided to take up programming and find it to be great fun. (I've always been the biz and ideas guy) However, I've run into a problem that I can't quite figure out. I've tried different forums, asking people, etc. but nobody seems able to help.

Anyway here's the question:

I have three tables in a mySQL db: list, labels, and content.

The idea is to be able to create a matrix with entries from list along one axis, entries from labels along another axis, and entries from content as the intersection of the two. The content table has a field that corresponds to a field in labels, and a field that corresponds to a field in list so that I am able to place it correctly in the matrix.

Now i want to do a SQL query that returns an array with items from the content table, ordered on the X axis by fields in the list table, and ordered on the y axis by fields in the labels table.

The reason for wanting to do this is that I want to create a number of HTML tables with columns that will change, and are not the same for all HTML tables.

And again: sorry if this post is inappropriate. I hope I have enough karma for someone to bother helping me out.

Links, clues etc. would be great. I don't mind figuring stuff out for myself.

Help me Obi-wan Kanobi - you're my only hope....
Hehehe, I downmodded you and then I upmodded your other comment. Always thinking, that's me!
Yes. IMO having people participate in a discussion before starting one is important. It forces the poster to get a general sense of the site and its (un)spoken rules before starting a discussion.
Though this probably sounds pedantic, it's not intended to be. How would one define an error-bar for alexa's report on octopart?

Isn't the whole problem with alexa, in this case, that the cross-section alexa trackees, is not necessarily the cross-section of people who would be interested in octopart?
Please don't judge yourself against the Blue Man Group; that's like a performance artist judging himself against Larry and Sergey.
How about an instant kill option with polls? People can send your karma to zero if they don't like it. That should solve the problem, of polls existing that is.
Mandatory "go and have ideas" time? Also, Mandatory Fun Day? The flexibility to go and cruise round the city would be amazing for me (if I got a job). Tell me that I have to do it, and when, and my reply will be my resignation.
Looks really good, like the new direction.

I've a quibble with your screencast though - I can't pause it. It kept stopping and starting to buffer. It'd be much better to be able to stop it like a youtube video and let it load before watching.
I hope someone makes a "for older person" version. I'd like to play it too.
Great idea. I will wish you luck, but you do not seem to need it anymore.
Initial IE8 Thoughts (Robert O'Callahan)
This post is indeed inappropriate. You should ask for help on the MySQL mailing lists, or on one of the many forums for asking programming questions on the interweb.
This is really awesome. Best of luck guys!