skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you've become your planned '10-year self' and are running a company, you'll find that there is no up-side to giving a no-hire an honest reason for your decision and plenty of down-side for doing so. As an example here, the binary decision not to hire you as an employee has created such a grudge that, almost two years later, you're still bitter enough to compose a rant against the company -- even though you never set a foot inside the place!

How bad would your rant have been if you were told "you're just not strong in <certain knowledge you thought you had cased>" or "a colleague told us that you were exceptionally difficult to work with in high-pressure situations and often became bitter if you didn't get your way"? What would the up-side have been for the company telling you these things? Wouldn't your bad-mouthing have just become worse, with your rant here (and elsewhere?) even nastier?

Yes, it would be nice if we could all tell no-hires exactly what they need to work on, but it is a very rare person who would say "Thanks for the rejection! That's awesome feedback and I'll tell everyone how you've managed to make me a better developer!"
It's important to note that the product was not important. It could have been Flash or HTML5 or Fooware. What the founders saw was an intersection between demand and capability, and built a business to exploit that availability gap.
Could suing for patents ever be considered a violation of monopoly law? (I know Apple isn't a monopoly.)
How many popular XUL apps are there really?

Songbird?
Flock?

Are they really popular or game changing?

The engineering effort for XUL slowed down Netscape 6 and Mozilla browser for years until it was of decent quality. No real apps have come out of it.

In 2010. Apps belong inside the browser. Browsers don't belong in apps.
As far as I could tell perhaps the #1 Sun died was fantastically inept management, most especially in sales:

Sun just wouldn't talk to you directly if you weren't buying mainframe levels ($$$) of hardware. At some point they established a site where you could punch in your credit card, but if you needed more you were at the mercy of their "VARs" and resellers, who in far too many cases also wouldn't give you the time of day (note this was CPU agnostic, it was true for their x86 hardware according to the stories below and for SPARC hardware in my personal experience).

A little quality time with a search engine will find stories from all sorts of startups upset that they were forced to buy Dell since Dell actually wanted to sell stuff to them in any quantity (at the same time HP's sales function was also messed up in different ways).

So Sun missed out on all the startups that became really big; by the time these companies were buying in mainframe quantities Sun was just a bad memory.

One thing that I noticed happening later was companies dropping Sun because their hardware kept changing. In one case they dropped a great discrete Intel Ethernet chip in favor of the ones on the nVidia chipset, in another, they kept changing the management interface. (A bit like one of the things that hurt Compaq, you could buy many copies of the same model, yet adjacent serial numbers might have totally different motherboards.)

It's no accident that Sun's sales organization seems to be where Oracle is making the biggest quickest changes (hiring thousands of salesmen as I recall).

ADDED THOUGHT: I don't think the thesis in the linked article flies. As I see it, it posits that if Sun had done a (much) better job with open source, the business gained from that could have covered for their failures elsewhere.

Better, I say, to have fixed both sets of failures.
Honestly, you shouldn't have a problem. For your references, usually personal relationships and contacts are fine for early in your career. If they ask if they can call your current employer say no, and explain that they don't know you are looking. Most employers will understand that, and will be fine with it.

The best thing you can do is prepare a short portfolio of links, and publicly facing projects. Because your reference list is short, you need to be able to demonstrate your work instead. Your personality will show up during the phone and face to face interviews.

That said, my last position's interview was so simple it confused me. They just asked if I worked with the technology they used, and if I was interested in learning some new stuff. A few questions to gauge my experience, and I was in. Once you're in the door, at your desk, is when the real interview begins. Here in Florida you can be let go without a reason, and most companies do a contract-to-hire these days for that reason.
Sun was primarily a hardware company and that's where “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is applicable.

The PC killed them.
Why wouldn't a netbook+ChromeOS win?

I disagree @ iPhone. That was revolutionary. It was the first pocket webbrowser that actually worked well and rendered websites properly.

>> "And remember, it was pretty 'meh' before the app store."

Again, difference of opinion. I couldn't care less about the app store. Why would I download software approved by Apple, when I can just use the browser for most things?
Reminiscent of the even simpler game Psychological Jujitsu.

Take a pack of cards. Divide into suits. Discard the diamonds. Give one player all the spades and one all the clubs. Shuffle the hearts and put them face down.

Now repeat 13 times: turn up a card from the pile of hearts; each player chooses one of their cards; they reveal them simultaneously; the player with the higher card gets to keep that heart. (If the players play equal cards, no one gets it.)

When you're done, add up the values of the hearts each player has won (according to any convention you choose; different conventions give slightly different games; I prefer A..K = 1..13 points). Highest total wins.

See http://www.icynic.com/~don/psych.html for more information. (That page has diamonds and hearts the other way around from me, which of course makes no difference.)

(I claimed that PJ is simpler than BC's game, but my description is longer than his. No contradiction: he imported the standard ordering of poker hands by reference, whereas I described all the rules of my game explicitly.)
By definition, patents give you a monopoly.
Too bad Google isn't marketing or branding these devices. If your strategy as a vendor is "hope our OS provider's branding sort of rubs off on us" I think you need a different approach.

Also, does anyone else hate killer/doomed/war linkbait as much as I do?
I am not going to sue them. Why would I waste a year of my life chasing a lawsuit that I can't win, having no legal leg to stand on, over a decision they have every right to make?

However, the "black box" behavior of companies is pretty unprofessional. It makes the job search process a lot more difficult than it needs to be.
Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image

Maybe hindsight is just 20/20, but "slide to unlock" seems to be something pretty obvious.
I value sales and marketing. The problem is that I try to sell and market things and it doesn't work, and I get discouraged and quit.

What is there to blog about about my product? Doing that just seems so bottom-of-the-barrel marketer to me.

I have put effort into marketing things before. Most of my projects have not been up-front money-makers (i.e., they weren't projects with a traditional give me $30 and I give you this program model), so affiliate marketing wasn't possible in that way, but one of my new products is, so I will see how affiliate marketing works out there.

But besides that, I don't really know what to do. I don't have much money for ads on Google, and they don't seem effective anyway.

I would love to get marginal success on an eBook or something. I think it would help restore my faith a little bit, and help me believe that it is possible for me to make a dent again. I've just been beaten down and had my expectations fall short for so long that I feel like there's no hope in any of that.
Which is similar to saying an increase in labor productivity with the spoils going to businesses that deploy labor saving technology more so than wage earning employees. (if I interpret you correctly)
Finding time is never an issue. Every day, you are handed 24 shiny new hours to spend. The real issues (which Aaron addresses) are motivation and mental ability.
Yikes! cotweet.com reads:

"We'll be right back. CoTweet is currently down for maintenance."

I love this tool. Hope it's not going away or changing dramatically.
I wonder if pg ever considers paying Aaron to stop writing stuff. People that read stuff like this have got to start wondering, "Is it really a good thing to get a payoff before I am ready for it?"
I don't remember that being Kevin Costner's line. Shouldn't it be "James Earl Jones is full of Sht"?
Marc Andreessen on "Series Seed Documents" and Why VCs Should Start Using Them
An oversimplification:

pg's "job" is to reach smart geeks living anywhere, convince them he knows what he's talking about and then fund the best among them.

Blogging = high return on effort. He's reaching many geeks and selling them on his qualifications all at once.

Joel's "day job" is managing and encouraging the growth of his (NYC-only) company. Blogging has a lower return on effort because only a small percent would be able/interested in moving to NYC to work for him. Local advertising in NYC would probably provide a better return on his time/money.
idea: a social aggregator, that votes on blogs that elicit that moment; organized by category to form virtual books of 300 chapters.
Given the current pace of technology, I don't think patents should exist period.
By far. And use leiningen swank to configure the classpath for your REPL when working on a project.

http://wiki.github.com/technomancy/leiningen/emacs-integrati...
PG's essays long precede YC. I've always thought that they're more a medium for thinking than anything else.
No, just because they didn't tell you why they rejected your application does not mean they are uncool.

It's different from how Joel presents his philosophy of business. For a person, it would be hypocrisy. For a company, it's more accurately described as inconsistency (because there's no evidence whatsoever that Joel had anything to do with HR's decision not to inform me). Which is probably inevitable when a large number of people are involved (moving parts -> inconsistency). I wouldn't hold this against any specific individual. I'm sure most of the individual people at FC are great.
Dear HN Readers,
Do you think there is an opportunity for a new style of publishing house that focuses on just producing and marketing ebooks?
Rules That Warren Buffett Lives By
I'd argue with this assertion. I think what you meant to say was that the technology choice wasn't important. The product was obviously important, since without the product there is no company, nothing for anyone to acquire etc.

But I agree in an extremely hypothetical way that the technology choice is unimportant, assuming you can make the same competitive product with a number of technologies. In this case though, especially back in 2005, you simply can't argue that they could have made that product with anything else (apart from desktop software, which is a totally different product space). They were clearly aware of their technology choices, were keeping tracking of the latest and greatest, and chose the only one that was technically feasible for the product they wanted to create.
NSNotificationQueue?!

I mean I love how easy it makes doing, say, dispatching a network update request and updating the CoreData model and refreshing the table rows when it's done but really?

"Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods"
It's all about control.. I often wonder if Apple have become the man in the screen, instead of the woman with the hammer.
This seems like a horrible comparison. The Android tablet has 8X less memory, at best, smaller screen, low build quality, a low power chip, no app store, no marketing or brand, but because it has Flash lite it is going to cripple the iPad?

This does not deserve to be front page on HN.
How To Manage Multiple Gmail Accounts On A single Interface
That's a legitimate use case.
Cloud provider roulette
Ohh, I missed that. I wonder if it was going well.

"Enterprise Innovators Program" is cringe worthy, but I guess they are selling to the enterprise. I'm amazed people have the stomach to go after that market.
If I were paranoid I might think that this was a bit of an attack on Google rather than HTC.
Apple has always been about very firm control. I don't think it's necessarily "evil", but it's not a world I want to live in, either.
Couldn't they sue all users of Android devices then? The complaint seems to indicated that users are infringing when they use the devices.

But maybe that would tip people off to how screwed up the system is...
No it won't.
It's great as a stylish remote for $10,000 yuppie home theatres.

But: Can I get one that's ruggedized to work in a mine, or explosion proofed for an oil rig, or certified for medical environment?
Can I get rs232/Can/I2C? Can I build an adapter without selling my company to Apple?

Even if I did, I want to sell an expensive logging/inspection package then Apple take 40%
1) I bet he could sell the same audience on new products as many times as he could make new useful products. He could scale his company horizontally instead of vertically.

2) Something is off if you have the attention of the hardcore programmers in the world, and can't make your programming tool spread. Why aren't these programmers falling over themselves to use and recommend FogBugz?
Yet Apple survives and thrives. Sun wasn't really a hardware company or a software company. That was the problem, it seemed they really didn't know what they wanted to be, so they tried to be everything and failed.
>My first suggestion is to have a friendly chat with the sort of professional who has friendly chats with people for a living. Some people I know have found that to be a lifechanging experience -- for the better.

Oh, can you explain to me what you mean here? Who should I talk to? I don't know what kind of person you're referring to.
HTC should countersue (if Apple are actually trying to sue HTC over HTC's technology and not Google's).

HTC pushed pure touch-based phones for years before Apple released the iPhone in 2007 and should have a reasonable patent portfolio they can use against trolls like this.
Just to start something, I try to sneak in stuff in the elevator, sometimes I stretch. I figure if people can take smoking breaks, I should be able to get up and walk around or stretch out a bit.
It was a rhetorical question!

But responding to your explanation, if competitors are free to "adopt" Apple's innovations, why can't competitor's "adopt" OS X and iPhone by copying them feature for feature, polish for polish, detail for detail, simply changing logos and writing "Hello from Dreary Seattle" on the back?

It is not obvious to me how "polish and attention to detail" are going to be a competitive advantage in a world where competitors have the unrestricted right to adopt Apple's innovations.

I suggest that part of why Apple is able to differentiate with polish and attention to detail is our existing barriers to adopting other people's innovations.
You sir appear to be one seriously creepy fellow. What's up with you?
How to Use Aardvark, Google's $50 Million New Q&A Tool
OK Go's new music video, featuring an insane Rube Goldberg machine
You get 24 hours each day, true. But it's not just about motivation and mental ability. The time you have available to read is only time you aren't doing something else. If you have a job, or school, or family duties, or anything else, you may not have much time available to read. Your downtime is available for you to use as you please -- via reading, or watching TV, or whatever. That's when it's an issue of motivation. Sometimes people don't have a lot of downtime.
Detailed info here: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/mobile/WS4a4606c864353c0a-dc...
Not at the time. I remember people chuckling aloud the first time they saw it. "Hah! Clever!" Steve Jobs even repeats it multiple times in the original iPhone keynote to demonstrate.

I still don't think they should have a patent for it.
As an example here, the binary decision not to hire you as an employee has created such a grudge that, almost two years later, you're still bitter enough to compose a rant against the company -- even though you never set a foot inside the place!

Not such a grudge. I just thought I'd point out a discrepancy between image and reality. I have no idea if this reflects at all on Joel, and I'm sure that Fog Creek is a better place to work than 94% of all companies. The two Fog Creek programmers I've had substantial discussions with have impressed me.

How bad would your rant have been if you were told "you're just not strong in <certain knowledge you thought you had cased>"

I'd ask for advice and maybe the name of a textbook or open source project that I could learn from. I was unemployed at the time, and one great thing about being unemployed is that you have a lot of free time in which to learn things.

or "a colleague told us that you were exceptionally difficult to work with in high-pressure situations and often became bitter if you didn't get your way"?

That's excellent information (in the sense of being useful; it's obviously bad news). It means that you need to use someone else as a reference.
This reminds me of Tichu. It shares the mechanic of trying to make poker hands from passes, except that said poker hands are then played in a bizarre but awesome combination of poker, bridge, and President's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tichu
Dancing Baby Brings Universal Music to Its Knees...
Pretty sure DRM started out as an industry idea. Regardless, it all pretty much had to happen the way it did. At the time, none of the major studios would have considered releasing DRM-free music.

The had to be shown that it would work first.
More Wired hype-garbage.

Here's the quote they listed:

"We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment who did it, from where, why and what was the result more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same."

90% of this is done most effectively and cheaply by sniffing the backbone links and having a fast-response ability to filter incoming traffic via router control. Sort of like what any decent NOC does now.

Where's the destruction of the open internet? Only in Wired's typically-REM (R.E.M. (n) Rectal Extraction Method) hyperbole do we have a conspiracy story. Classic Slashdot fodder, I don't see what it's doing on HN.

No, we're not at war over the Internet right now. But a network-based attack is a fantastic first-wave means of reducing the target's ability -- no different from sending in stealth bombers to knock out radar first. Right now we're in a cold-war variant, arming, defending, and collecting intel on opponents doing the same.

(edited for formatting)
Aiding and abetting totalitarian regimes by censoring search results and turning over email correspondence is evil. Making shiny toys that don't do exactly what you want is not evil. Let's stop using "evil" as a synonym for "reprehensible."
I don't like carrying books around. An ebook reader has me reading a lot more now. Just load it full of good reads, and you feel obligated to get through it all. Also, scanning through HN for good book recommendations. I'm reading "The Art of Learning" right now, and loving it (it's got me back into chess!).
Well, I must disagree on most points. As the archos has a sd card reader, the memory isn't an issue (16GB modules are quite easy to find), the chip is low power but that's not bad, as it'll have more autonomy, (that's why the iPad has the A4), and most importantly, Archos IS a brand. A quite good one at that. The build quality is excellent (well, I can't vouch for this product, but Archos is a good brand).
Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked - Part 2
I'm doing a train commute as well, and also loving it because of exactly what you explained :)
Custom Controls for the iPhone
I'm not sure that's it. I've down voted some of your comments because they just seem to ooze insensibility and really have you coming across like an almighty bell-end. I don't know you apart from a few comments of yours I've seen here on HN.

Just a simple apology would probably have been your best bet. Everyone makes mistakes. Best not to lash out at the people you've already harmed.
You can also play tic-tac-toe with a twist: At the start of the game each player gets 100 silver pieces (100 AgP). At each turn the right to decide where the symbol (X or O) is placed goes to the highest bidder. Three in a row of your symbol wins --- but it can of course be of advantage to bid on your enemies turns to place his marks somewhere harmless out of the way.

(I suggest a sealed-bid-first-price auction, where the bids aren't revealed --- just who was higher. This auctoion type needs a game master of course.)

This auction mechanism can of course also be applied to other games like chess, or Diplomacy (http://www.diplom.org/Zine/W1995A/Payola/).
I'm quoting the last paragraph which is a summary:

"The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility."

In my mind, the whole post is very much worth reading. "This life" is basically here and now since times and societies change.

Reminds me of how back in the day I chose to do software although I had other talents and passions as well. It was not an easy choice but here I am now.
Rails 3 presentation by Yehuda Katz
Until recent updates, Google branded devices didn't enable multitouch by default. That changed shortly after Eric Smidt left the Apple board and all the Nexus One's got multitouch turned on in an update.

Perhaps Apple will sue Google now?

(just a guess - I personally would prefer AT&T sue Apple for 'stealing' their 1960s multitouch technologies for pinch and zoom)
The Brads – Why DRM Doesn’t Work
It becomes obvious once you make the leap to "there is no keyboard, the touchscreen is the entirety of the interface", but prior to the iPhone no one had dared to try that particular path of development. It was probably not possible to patent the concept of only using a touchscreen for your UI, so instead Apple patented a lot of the little details that are a consequence of its innovative leap.
TuneGlue music relationship mapping
This has been the case since they implemented PT_DENY_ATTACH. Revolutionaries that throw hammers at screens do not artificially limit their operating system.
I would be curious what pg thinks of these documents.
Tufte on Windows Phone 7 Series interface design
Don't the last two patents basically give them the right to sue ANYONE who has ever made some sort of GUI application, including vendors in their own app store and people who write apps for OSX? Aren't these basically design patterns?
Interesting in how common it is, perhaps?
That's pretty cool!!
Are we on Twitter?
Emacs Starter Kit includes ELPA and a bunch packages from there: it is precisely just a starter kit with some setup made for you and some "skeleton" for your .emacs.d.

So, if you already have your Emacs and ELPA setup, it's easier to just install a couple packages, but if you are starting from scratch with Emacs (as I was), the starter kit is better.
Someone just posted this on HN
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161919
http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/

It might help you find some new music branching off bands you already like... it's pretty cool.