skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, because he didn't fit into the team. It might've been the suckiest team on Earth, but the bottom line is that they were not comfortable working with him.

He should've quit on a third day. Since he was not comfortable working there either, I don't really understand what he was hoping to achieve by staying. Improve the code and demonstrate that everyone else there is an imbecile ? That would've never worked, and that's exactly where he was doing.

I suspect that he just didn't have any experience with this sort of a situation, which is not that uncommon. The good thing is that now he does have this experience :)
Sapphire - Two New Re-Implementations of Ruby
A few Common Lisp macro tricks
20 New Rules for Faster Web Pages
Remember LISP machines and what happened to them ? ;-)
small, light, fast, redundant: Erlang + Mnesia
I heard somewhere the annual maintenance cost for a megayacht is around 10% of its price. That would mean each year the money that goes into maintenance alone could buy you 7 Eclipse 500 jets. Somehow I think I may have trouble sleep at night, even if I'm a billionaire.
This is coming from a Firefox developer, Safari's main competitor. Sounds like someone is a little bitter and/or scared.

It's a great (though definitely shady) move by Apple. A few people will complain, sure, but they'll gain potentially millions of new Windows Safari users from the tens (hundreds?) of millions of Windows iTunes users.

Additionally, I would guess that most of the people switching to Safari because of this will be IE users, not Firefox users. Given the choice between a user using IE or Safari, which would you prefer? I think even Firefox fans would agree Safari would be better for everyone (except MS of course).
10 Steps To Working On The Road
Ask YC: Best Way to Send Out a Small Targeted Commercial E-Mailing?
I'm looking to conduct a small direct e-mail marketing campaign to a small number of targeted potential business customers (probably no more than 100-200 or so, maybe even fewer). Is there a good, reputable and preferably free or low cost, service to do this, or should I just do it manually (making sure to be CAN SPAM compliant, of course)?
I agree - we thought about doing a VoIP startup last year that involved some hardware similar to Meraki, and our costs came our to around $50 in the best case (not including the startup costs).

Looks like the management team is the same founding team of MIT PhDs, so my guess is they realized they needed to make money to stay alive and that open-source hobbyists aren't a good market in the first place.
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins on entrepreneurship
there are many email marketing service providers... i just came across this particular company, they look professional - u may check it out - its free for 60 days so may be u can try it out ... in the future let us know which service you used and whether it helped ... thx

visit: http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp
Programming languages are easy. Foreign languages are not easy.
Paul, I don't think you get it though.

I've got to say here that I read the essay with the same distaste as Atwood, particularly because of its opening paragraphs. I loved the message, and agree with the theory, but I had a tough time with the presentation.

The connotation that it isn't natural to be an employee and as such those that do are by extension "unnatural" is troubling. I realize that you're not saying "all corporate programmers suck", but clearly, people who have the courage, will, and sheer balls to found their own companies have a unique talent that isn't shared by all.

Of course, the programmers you work with are in perfect harmony with startup life. For them, having a boss is not the way to go. They need to be entrepreneurs. It's in their being.

Some people though, are perfectly happy being employees. These people should not be starting their own companies. They should continue to enjoy life and have fun on their corporate scavenger hunts. They are innately different than the startup founder. That much is obvious.

To extend and equate this difference with being "lesser" - whether by choice, ignorance, or chance - is where you run into trouble with a lot of us. You're inserting a good/bad comparison into an exercise that should remain strictly an examination of difference. Hence, Atwood's suggestion of narcissism.

Of course being a founder is "natural" to you. I've learned that it is to me as well, and no doubt it's natural to everyone on this site.

Sure, a lot of people that work for corporations should look to embrace startups, especially those that are disgruntled. No, startup founders are not a select few geniuses; they are those of a given talents. Surely you of all people realize this. To suggest that everyone shares these talents, or that those who don't are somehow misguided sounds more like religion than business though.

Finally, I don't even think this post was needed. This post suggests that a great many people who read the essay didn't understand it, due to their lack of intellect. In fact, it is more likely that they understood it perfectly, and the problem lies more with how the author chose to support the thesis.
Why Becoming an Entrepreneur is a "No-Brainer"
Or, they may actually gasp enjoy it!

The assumption that there is no way someone could liek working for mega-corp is the problem.

(That being said, I hate mega corp)
Using blank slates to your advantage
I'd blame the direct manager, Jola (and not just because something like that happened to me once). The guy from Germany made the big mistake of not hiring the right people in the first place, so he's completely responsible for the mess, but as far as the firing goes, it's her decision. His job was to bring experience, fresh air and make waves - and he was brought in for this purpose by Johann. At the very least Jola should have held a big long exit interview with him, since she knew already that the company was in trouble.
Good point. I was thinking of actually taking the long route and when all I really want to do is integrate new api's. Thanks.
Has Steve Jobs ever shown even an inkling of caring about whether outsiders think what he's doing is wrong or right?
And another comment: I'm from Romania, and I saw several startups just like this one, funded by somebody abroad and managed by a local not in IT. They all were pretty much like the one in the article. I always wondered why they were such big failures. Obviously, the incompetent local manager, but they failed too spectacularly for this to be the only reason. Now I start to think this kind of culture actively rejects competent people. Even if they stay with the company for a while, they're never promoted to a position where they can use their skill.
Consider the current regulation that exists over the housing market:

- Mortgage interest deduction: In other words, you don't get a tax break for buying a house, you get it for being in debt b/c you bought a house. Hmm.. what incentive does this create?

- One time capital gains tax exemption for the sale of a home: This encourages people to sell their home and then buy a more expensive home, even if a less expensive one would have sufficed.

- The implicit federal bailout of Fannie and Freddie: These companies underwrite a lot of the more risky mortgages and as long as there is an expectation that the government will bail them out, nobody looks too closely at their soundness.

These are the regulations that got us into trouble in the first place.

Now is the time for less regulation, not more!
Bank of America may face $6.5 bln loan loss
Ask YC: Securing your servers?
What techniques do you use to secure your servers? I've had a lot of good luck with things like SuSE and AppArmor for my servers, but I'm curious if there are other Linux flavors (or other OSs) that have some solid security tools for surviving wild on the internet.

What do you use? What wouldn't you ever use again? Any absolute rules that you force yourself to follow before even bringing your server online?

Thanks!
I honestly haven't, but I haven't had problems reading on my PDA before, but at the same time I don't need another accessory that can do the same thing as any other of my utilities.

To each his own
The point is, it's subjective.
One of the more entertaining parts of the Google Tour. The master plan now looks a lot more complex nowadays.
Larry Lessig's Change Congress Launched
This poses an interesting question: if you find yourself in such a position, working at a company that is doing so many things wrong, what do you do? I can think of several different things, but which is right?

1. Easy way out - go with the flow and add your own WTFery to the mix, and try not to let it destroy your soul.

2. Fight for what's right at every turn, and stand up to the status quo.

3. Pay lip service to the status quo, but subtly and sneakily introduce best practices one at a time. It would be an uphill battle, and hard to fight backsliding without blowing the undercover nature of your cleanup operation. In order to do this, you'd have to find the coworkers who still have a bit of a soul that hasn't been crushed, and get them on your side to help you.
The scientific entrepreneur - more myth than reality
I'll get it out of the way: not HN. I realize that this isn't hacking related, but it's Lessig, so I thought it may be of interest.
The saddest, stupidest sentence I've ever read
I've used constantcontact before and it's fine.

I really want to know when the wufoo.com guys are going to incorporate emails with their forms. Having an autoresponder and newsletter would be amazing for us less technically inclined people.
How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive
What? It's not at all clear that you can reproduce Erlang's concurrency ability in C. Someone gave a link to an untested, unknown library that hasn't been tested in real situations hardly at all and that's supposed to be equivalent to 2 MLOC codebases with 99.9999999% uptime?

I was suggesting it to be fair. It has not yet been demonstrated because I have not seen any benchmarks to the contrary or anything approaching real data, and certainly no instances of this occurring in real production software.

Thus, the opportunity to make a fair comparison never arose, so you have some work to do before you say "thppt".

The point was it's easier to get correctness in languages like Erlang, irrespective of what speed is being achieved. Of course, if you're happy with buffer overflows and core dumps, more power to you.
Why Old Technologies are Still Kicking
Mike Arrington seems like a nice enough guy, but the quoted sentence does have a certain, rather chilling, Ellsworth Toohey flavor to it.
When you start sounding like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, you know something is wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-hUkO13Fy8
The Good Guy Behind “Don't Be Evil” and Google Mail
The writer's grasp of probability is almost as bad as the graphic.
That sentence is taken out of context.

Reading the whole post, it is clear that Arrington is referring the importance of recorded music in monetary terms, not artistic.
Read http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/d...
Read it now.
Software Easter Eggs
Terrific! Exactly what I was looking for.
amen to that
Ultimately, tales like this (and DailyWTF postings) are "junk food" for the mind. Sure, they may give a smile and easy sense of smug superiority... but do you learn anything?

Don't we already know there are a lot of bad workplaces, a lot of fubar'd codebases, a lot of clueless-muddle-along programmers? Indeed, so many that you could read a sad-funny tale every hour on the hour for the rest of you natural life and not exhaust the FAIL?

But is that a good info-diet?

Or just cheap sugary click candy, fattening one's ego without any mental nutrition?
Exactly. From the absolutely hysterical reaction here and on Reddit, on codinghorror, and other blogs, you have to know people are projecting absolutely enormous insecurities onto PG's piece. Makes you realize just how defensive and demoralized and miserable the corporate workers really are.
There's a website for people like you: http://www.halfbakery.com/
The booming Y generation
Suggested revision: A significant function of recorded music is to provide marketing material to drive awareness of the recorded music.

Basically it means it's supposed to promote itself. It's also a final product, and it has a very measurable value.
Great idea. Why do you think it is unmonetizable?
I agree. Between the two, Arrington seems closer to the truth. Pretty cheesy to quote him twice like that.
I'm no expert, but I'd start with iptables, snort, denyhosts, bastille, nessus, nmap, etc
2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur
He mistakes a mistaken analogy. The poets that he names are not selling out live readings and the sculptors are not putting on live creation events.

When it comes to music, yes, a concert tour is more profitable for the artist than their recorded music is. This is the one difference between musicians and other artists.

While I don't completely agree with Arrington, I do believe that this blog post calling it the saddest stupidest sentence ever is guilty of the same sensationalism that Arrington is.
Photoshop-like Image Effects using Javascript and canvas
Out of context? Sorry, saying something is "nothing but" means that your saying it's "nothing but."
Was just gonna say...
"What? It's not at all clear that you can reproduce Erlang's concurrency ability in C."

The Erlang VM is written in C:

http://planeterlang.org/story.php?title=Inside_BEAM_the_Erla...

You might want to step back from the ledge a bit.
What Future Tech Will Bring
How to be a great CEO? 8 tips
I agree, and YC is eager to hear proposals from startups working on cures for email overload.
this is a very interesting article and i think a great approach to design. sometimes the simplest approach is the best solution (ie. 3rd grade level sharpie marker arrow sketch) because its something that everyone can understand.
Wouldn't an email overload cure be the supreme complement to Xobni?
Here's another lightweight threads implementation. Looks a bit more mature:

http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/
I didn't say I wanted people to take me literally. I said I wanted people to respond to what I said. That includes interpreting metaphors correctly.
It was in fact what Xobni started out working on.
MySpace and Facebook are also becoming popular platforms for gaming.
Context changes the meaning of every phrase, including that, and often implicitly.
"This poses an interesting question: if you find yourself in such a position, working at a company that is doing so many things wrong, what do you do?"

Leave.
Look for another job right from day two. In such a situation quit is the correct answer.
Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking
The Falling-Down Professions [sub?]
More evidence (appears to have been posted after above comment, at least I wasn't aware of it).

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/a-crisis-in-communicati...

second YC thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144127
3 Internet careers that soon won't exist
Astonishing. Someone went to, maybe 30 seconds trouble to write that blog. You would have thought that, well, they would have thought about it for some of that 30 seconds and realised it makes no sense.
Hazards of Wifi
I suppose a song is a physical object, then. I get it now.
Let's talk about figures
Your post is one of only two uses on the web of the phrase "situational simile." However, it actually seems like a useful term. Did you make it up, or are you just one of the few cool kids to use it on the interwebs?
The same thing can happen at good companies which make bad decisions with tech staffing and development for whatever reason. You have to try and build non-confrontational coalitions that want what you want and don't stress out other people.

Sometimes you have to take stands on major architectural decisions. But if you're creating battles on day three as an incoming programmer you deserve to be fired.
Taking on YouTube
> "Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist."

In a world where there was no way to enforce copyright laws or prevent copying, that would be the case. Artists would make their money by playing gigs and merchandising, and "buying" a song or an album would be just a way of tipping them.
dhamma.org looks great. Just got to find the time to do one of these 10-day courses. They look intense from what I've been reading, but I think I'd really benefit. Did you do one of them?
The TC article title clearly says that artists should not be compensated for recordings. No context, that's the title and therefore the overall message that Arrington wants us to take away. What most of the article says is that the artists shouldn't expect to be able to retroactively be compensated when they had previously agreed not to be in this particular situation.

The problem here is that, all context considered, Arrington is going one step further than just saying that the artists don't deserve compensation here. He is very clearly raising the point that artists shouldn't expect to be compensated at all for recordings ever.

Of course this is quite disapointing to me as much of the music I listen to cannot be created live by its artists but instead takes days or months to prepare. With the advancement of computers, more and more often, musical composers will be able to use just a computer to create music that traditionally could only be created by live musicians - and lots that can only be created through computers. Guess I'd better kiss that goodbye.
I'd love to try to tackle a difficult but noble challenge like this, but I myself do not suffer from email overload (having a simple life where no one cares what you think has its perks) so I'm really not able to empathize with people like Scoble or Mike Arrington. I'd probably do a crappy job of things.
You learn that it happens anywhere.

The NIH syndrome, and all that.
Indeed, but the mere subjectivity of a statement doesn't deprive it of the possibility of truth or falsehood for any given person or group of people.

For example, take the statement "bread is a better food than dung." In my own context, and yours, and probably all of humanity's, that subjective statement is more-than-subjectively true.

For a fly or a dung beetle, that statement is false.

Given the right context and constraints, even subjective statements can be "objectivized" and tested scientifically.

For instance, if you can decide on various goals or constraints, you could find out objectively whether the startup life or the corporate life tends to be better in terms of more money, less stress, quality of life (once you've carefully stated metrics for that), etc.

So, in the strictest sense, the original poster is right, in that by itself, neither the startup life nor the corporate life is better, just as in the strictest sense, the statement "bread is a better food than dung" is neither true nor false. But stopping there can deprive you of valuable information, which might prevent you from eating dung. ;)
>Of course this is quite disapointing to me as much of the music I listen to cannot be created live by its artists but instead takes days or months to prepare.

What kind of music?
Haskell beats C on memory usage too, interestingly enough.

Poor old Ruby though, let's make it win:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?t...
> Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

I think the network has plenty of salespeople. It still needs a better way to send money. We need an alternative to the $0.20 + 2% VISA tax.
Hire an offshore personal assistant to read/sort your email?
And how they probably don't know (or dare admit) that they are. The ones that do know and have made a conscious choice to stay where they are don't need to defend themselves.
The quality of the lectures is the less important part in college. It's the community. It's who are your friends. It is the first time in your life where you choose your peers. _That's_ what makes college so important.

At least, that is what it _used_ to make college so important. With the web, there is no need to have physical presence to choose our peers. Fuck, we're doing it _right now_ on this website. People come to HN and not to reddit not because of the technology, but because of the people who are participating on them.
Can you give an example of something Toohey said that you think has a similarity?
The unmet demand may be closer to 10,000 a day for "high volume communication" and knowledge workers because there is a "shadow backlog" caused by the poor performance of the current approach. There are a couple of different categories of interaction:

I don't want to lose a key e-mail from someone new (e.g. a prospect) or someone I want to reconnect with (e.g. an old friend) in the midst of everything else

I want to have some answers suggested based on a collection of blog posts, a FAQ, or some other knowledge repository.

I want to recombine a number of e-mails into a complex branching thread because that's a work flow that a team I am a member of embraces (see http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email-conversat... ) so that I have the full context for the conversation.

I want to make sure I don't lose touch with folks I have had a prior shared success with (I would like to boost my effective dunbar number).

There are several others. Please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to continue the conversation. I think this is one area that is overdue for a significant change in paradigm, the evidence that the current approach isn't scaling can be found in a variety of secondary and tertiary coping behaviors that we have come to accept without attacking the root cause. I think there will be many approaches that continue to use SMTP as a transport protocol but enhance the user interface with embedded analytics and automation, as well as adding alternative forms of response to include blogging, wikis, IM, and VoIP.

see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143878
> The essay does take advantage over the common "naturalistic fallacy", where people imply something as being "good" from its being "natural".

The essay avoids that fallacy by making the case that humans, having evolved under certain social conditions, might be much better equipped at present to cope with similar conditions. This itself may be true or false, but it is not fallacious reasoning.
Ironically, this is precisely the kind of conclusion people are drawing from PG's essay, and its not what he was saying.

I certainly don't know that people are projecting "enormous" insecurities into Paul's piece. Nor does it make me realize "just how defensive and demoralized and miserable the corporate workers really are."

The essay does not claim that anyone who works in a corporate job is miserable. What is does say is that people would be happier if they were working for themselves (or in a small company). I don't have to be miserable to have potential to be happier.
WeekBit
Weekly news.
Almost any type of music where vocals are not the focus can today be created through computers. More than people realize already is today. I am thinking of instrumental music such as classical, of course electronica of all types, even a bit of jazz and other styles.

Not all music is an extravagant performance art.
In the world of vitamin problems, this is definately a pain killer. I wish I had time to work on a second startup and tackle this as well. Best of luck to those who do - I'm eagerly waiting.
The Sony cam seems to have 14 buttons on it. I imagine that'll be a bit intimidating for a non-techie, whereas how to operate the Flip is very easy to understand.
Secure File Upload in PHP Applications