skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> And the advice is just ridiculously obvious to anyone with a brain. "Never have a meeting without a clear agenda."

The thing is that in many places it's not obvious. There are a lot of people who spent many years in companies where this wasn't a common practice and they just don't know any better. It's not that these people aren't smart, they've just never seen anything different. Having a 1 hour meeting with a dozen people to solve the most simple problems is just "how things are done".

Let me make a quick analogy.

To a lot of people here, the idea that XP, SCRUM, and other agile development methodologies are a much better way of developing software is "obvious". To many, many people in larger companies it's definitely not obvious. They have decades of experience doing things using waterfall, and most of them have never worked at a place that did anything else. It's just "how things are done".

If you think all of these things are obvious, then this book is likely not for you. For lots of people, this book contains ideas that are very different from what they're accustomed to. That's who will get the most out of this book (or other books of its kind).
"I've actually been more on the other side of the job hunt i.e. finding people to hire. The problem there is that the good/quality coders are just impossible to find."

What can I do to stand out as a quality coder when I'm applying? I'm probably not the best on selling myself properly but I think I'm a good coder (and have had very satisfied clients/employers).
One lesson (relearned) is to never say anything is impossible to do with a general purpose computer unless it actually violates a law of physics. (Even then, have a think about if you can achieve the same goal without said violation)

With computers, the answer is always yes, but you might not always like the bill at the end.
good point. I uneditorialized it.
Where Dijkstra went wrong: the value of BASIC as a first programming language
obviously the buyer is fake. You really think someone would pay $250K for retweet.com? Why? Dear lord man.
freezing rain will cover an unheated street lamp.
Chemotherapy For Prostate Cancer
This would be really, really stupid, since they had bids over $200k and they would have had to pay $500 to win their own listing. Seems unlikely.
I've perused the listings of flippa a few times. Its usually 90% affiliate marketing (really badly done) if this is real its a huge win for Flippa.

On an unrelated note, I was once amused when a lady posted her health related blog (It made about $100 a month or something) for $65k. When people corrected her saying oh you mean $650 she was a little more then offended.
Appears to require a small amount of magic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896629/how-to-run-clr-2-a...
It's not every day you can experience all the astonishment of overturning a fundamental assumption without any of the pain of forced changes. I enjoyed that conversation. (I'm Alex K, btw.)

Thanks for all the comments, everyone! Very cool to have that post picked up by Hacker News.
Actually, I doubt the buyer is fake, and I really doubt that all the bids leading up to $200k were fake. $250k is not a tremendous sum of money for a site with this kind of traffic, traction, and with so many blogs and sites all over the web using it. I wouldn't buy it, but I have no trouble believing that someone who knew what they were doing could easily make a good return on that $250k.
Yes; ISLisp was an international effort (EU + JP + some U.S. delegates) while EuLisp was purely European (France and UK.)

Also, EuLisp is a more divergent dialect, and even more ambitious than common lisp; it had ML style modules, continuations via let/cc, generic LAMBDA (yes, first class anonymous methods!) full support for TCO and other goodies. EuLisp was an ideological successor to LeLisp (which was ancient and fugly) and I consider both the academic dabblings of one Christian Quinnec, Lisp designer extraordinaire.
dude, seriously. I just registered and bided on a random site. You don't have to pay $500 to bid, and there is no proof that the $250K was paid.
Whether it's Greenspun or Spolsky, it's still explicitly described as "tricking" your users. It's sneaky and underhanded, and an incredibly bad way to treat your users.
uhm... about the whole punching thing... you give too much credit to the better angels of our nature
StreamFocus - Seeking Co-founders
The professions, and everything about them, are designed for people who don't have to work to earn a living

Which professions? Ambassador to France?
Ahh yes, the expensive deployment options. Too true. You can use Admin Arsenal. (www.AdminArsenal.com). It has a 30-day fully functional trial so as a one-time option you can do the cert deployment at no cost. Plus, Admin Arsenal doesn't use agents and is installed on your workstation, so it doesn't require its own server.

If you want to keep it the licensing is simple - per administrator, regardless of the number of systems that you manage.

Check it out.
Google Testing Search for Television
Ah wasn't paying attention to the title. Its my first time seeing something like this.
Hey Shane,

Why use profanity? Your friend is putting herself out there looking for a job and you lessen her efforts by using profanity in your comments. Way to be a friend.
This is just too close to Godwin's law to be taken seriously.

"And what is fascism anyway? Good luck finding a concise or clear definition. We are kind of foggy on that. Presently, the word is most commonly used to cast aspersions on a particular political stance or belief. The implication is that if you are fascist you seek to impose a vision of the world on a group of people and that vision generally contains some notion of moral superiority."

What is the point of defining something as X if X can mean anything to anyone?

'Fascism' should mean a militarist, ultra-nationalist and authoritarian political regime within a precise moment in history. If it can mean anything than everything is fascist.
Inside the Low-Paying Cheezburger Empire
Caching strategies for Clojure's memoize
Stop Writing Bullshit Documentation
She could get a writing job at a place like RWW easily. Unfortunately it's one of the only places she could get a job. It's also a boiler room. I don't know what the right phrase for a blogging boiler room is.

I hope she truly loves SF because career wise there are more and better opportunities for people like her in NYC.
Making Ruby Fast: The Rubinius JIT
Thousands? That's one for every working day ten years in a row.

No need to exaggerate to make your point.
I'm a little confused here. The title indicates the site sold for $250k however the bidding still has ~2 hours left?

Is the headline incorrect, was the auction extended, or am I missing something?
I was hoping that people would see the screensnap at that blog and THEN decide if they'd go on to the site itself. It never occurred to me there'd be a flood of people who'd click through and kill the site I pointed to. Plus, I figured some people might be on a mobile device and not see the site itself, so they could at least look at a screensnap. I will never do that again.
And, as far as I'm concerned, in this case you're the one being intellectually lazy by making a knee-jerk rejection of the article on purely superficial grounds.

I don't completely buy the argument being put forward here (it certainly doesn't help their case that they at one point admit that they don't even know what "fascism" means), but it's interesting food for thought.
Lets think logically.

Retweet.com is a site that is famous for stealing code from its competitors [1]

They claim to have millions of visitors. They clearly don't. At best they could claim this traffic on compete.com if their retweet widget had massive distribution, like the successful original Tweetmeme - except Retweet.com doesn't. Have you ever seen their button in use?

So we know that Retweet has a "shady" code base, we can be pretty certain their traffic is false. Their popular url shortner? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=RT.nu compare that to any of the popular services. Not so much.

They had a contest for visitors when the site launched. They never hit the 1M or whatever unique users, not even close.

Guys, this company can't even spell "All Rights Reserved" correctly - "All Rights Reservered" A simple google search would come up with the amount of ridiciulous-ness this company has created.

But it has a bid! So it must be true. Except all you need is a verified phone number to bid. Yeah.

$250K. Honestly.

[1] http://www.techmeme.com/090727/p56#a090727p56
Hi,

We built our site (www.tripping.com) using Zend and we worked with a talented Zend Certified PHP engineer (Lucian Hontau) who is based in SF. If you're interested, just send me a note and I'll be happy to put you in touch.

Good luck with your app!
Jen
jen [at] tripping [dot] com
Hey, I'm in Tampa. Maybe HN should have a better jobs section.
Tell that to my Wii, its DRM certainly doesn't mean shit.
You know, I really don't remember which party, it was a pointer over to the full house's site. This hiding of bills has to stop. It is the information age and I had a lot easier time getting the full text of a bill ten years ago.

I'm just worried everyone is going to have the same "end of fiscal year no money for you" that has plagued the reservations under IHS. The sad part is the coverage of the news media is so poor on these, that the few stories that have gone out are thought of as aberrations instead of the day to day reality. I just wished the gov (both parties) would prove they could get it done with the limited population already served before moving on.
Effort shock: how the Karate Kid ruined the modern world
Wish I failed when i was in highschool. I had to wait till i got into the real world to have that honor.

Consider it money and time well spent. Knowledge is power.
How They Will Make You HATE The iPad
I don't know. Personally I would feel bad about applying for a scholarship. There are probably people who would need that more than I do. I mean I could find the money, it just seems really hard to justify.

That said I still think it's a least twice as expensive as it should be for the target market. And yes I realize that the "Lean" in "Lean startup" is not monetarily oriented, but if only funded startups are present I would think the conference might lack the diversity of attendees you would want.
Evidently the admins disapprove of your Koolaide dude.
So yes, some of these gems don't need man-pages. I wasn't hoping for 100% man-page coverage (maybe an interesting tool to write, now that I think of it...), but better than one apart from the gem-man quasi-meta-manpage would be a start.

In particular, I'm thinking of things like rails, rspec, heroku, and the like, which, while primarily libraries, have cli components that badly need man pages. I can't tell you how many babies I've punched as a result of typing "man rails" or "man spec". It might be just me, but if it can be the first token in a shell command, I expect it to have a manpage, and it is almost (physically) shocking when that is not true.

(I do need that awk | sort | uniq, because I have multiple versions of unicorn that all show up with that command)
"to communicate the way you see the world" --- and get paid for it, I might add.
Alexen is awesome. I just added it to the header. (Hackanonical is even more awesome, but it sadly doesn't fit there.)

Thanks for the words!

Alex K

PS I appreciate how strong codex/codices example is, but, well, Alices, not so much.
IPhone app usage peaks at 9PM on weeknights
There is a "Buy It Now Option" which won it. The headline is incorrect.
Contract HN: Build Graffiti for iPhone + iPad
I run Graffiti on Facebook (http://facebook.com/graffitiwall). It's a top 50 Facebook app (with a higher user rating than any in the top 100+) that lets users draw for each other using a very simple interface. We have so far neglected to build Graffiti for the iPhone or the iPad and I think that's clearly a mistake since it seems like a perfect fit. Obviously it's a short time frame, but we'd really like to finish it before the iPad launches in a month or so, if possible.

The application will be simple: the user will draw (using color, width, and opacity), and then be able to send to a friend via facebook or email. There will also be a way to view Graffiti the user has sent/received, and ideally a way to replay the drawing like we have on Facebook Graffiti. We can handle most of the design but don't have any experience making iphone apps. It will most likely be a free application and we're going to promote it heavily from Facebook Graffiti.

Should be a fun project. If you're interested, shoot me an email at hn.jobs.tmt [at] gmail.com with your resume and links to any iphone apps you've built, plus your rates.
Hey guys, I run Zerk Media and we also happen to be working on something similar (http://adzerk.com). It will be interesting to see how they stack up when we both launch.
Fascism is an economic system based on government control of nominally private enterprises.

If fascism is limited to the political regimes within a precise moment in history, we lose a useful term.
with this in mind clistctrl, I'm curious as to what other (or more "trustworthy") online marketplaces exist for listing a Web site for sale. And, when are they the best route to take, and if not, what other routes should folks take?

I own a couple domains, well, online businesses, that generate some fairly significant revenue - not affiliate marketing, not buy-my-ebook stuff, but real freemium subscription businesses that are content oriented and have highly specific demographics. No, no porn either :)
They're not telling you that. License your own code under whatever license you want.

When you use my code I want you to be restricted. I want you to make all your changes publicly available to everyone, and if you make a hardware device that runs my code, I want you to make it possible for users to modify my code and be able to run it on that device.

If you don't want to agree to my conditions, don't run my code.

But this isn't about taking away freedom; I want there to be more freedom. Because of the conditions I impose, anyone can build off your work in addition to my work. More code, more freedom.
Or if anyone looks by Copenhagen I'll treat them to a homemade Smörgåsbord

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sm%C3%B6rg%C3%A5sbord
Thousands? That's one for every working day ten years in a row.

Or three days worth of email
$500 is not for bidding, but for the listing fee and the "Success Fee" (commission). The creator of the auction pays this amount; if that happens to be the same as the winner of the auction, then they lose this amount.
Almost everyone who invokes Godwin's Law has a very reasoned argument why they can connect the Nazi's to Topic X, that is nevertheless fully contrived and meaningless.

I did read the article, thoroughly, and found the classic intellectual laziness associated with Godwinesque arguments. And I quote: "Sontag’s point is that the fascist sympathies and racial preoccupations that guide Reifensthal’s work for the Nazis also can be seen in her photographic work on the Nuba people in Africa. You can uncannily substitute Cameron’s name whenever Sontag mentions Reifensthal and substitute the Na’vi whenever Sontag mentions the Nuba. The entire Sontag article could just as well have been a review of Avatar."

In other words, So-and-so is a Nazi. So-and-so wrote an article. Substitute subject X for A and object Y for B, and it's practically a review of Big New Thing XY. Ergo, Big New Thing is Nazi-Fascist propaganda. QED.

Hogwash. This is an example of the same intellectual ineptitude that equates Obama with Hitler.
It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly
...and that makes me sad because that makes me feel like I should just stay on Windows. What's with the gigantic fonts and ugly Gnome themes?
It was a direct answer to your question which was explicitly about fb + twitter. What's not to get?
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Sometimes you need to suffer for your art
And it's the sole moderation mechanism on Hacker News.

Domain names get put on a big blacklist so that any posts linking to them get [dead]-ed instantly. It's used for outright spam, low content sites (Infoworld, for example), and purging people critical of YC companies (kungfugrippe.com was banned for mocking Scribd). It's totally the wrong solution for the first two problems, and unseemly for the last one.

Users get hellbanned -- every link and comment they post is [dead]-ed instantly, but they see them normally when logged in as themselves. They're also disenfranchised -- they can vote and it's counted but doesn't affect the sums (this happens to normal users randomly too). Great users often get hellbanned over a brief spat concerning a narrow topic — instead of being told not to do that, or given a timeout, their contributions from then on are just blackholed. I occasionally see hellbanned users where paging back through their history reveals nothing worthy of moderation — though there are some cases where I know that the person is being banned simply for having been banned before (like Giles Bowkett's last several accounts).

I make an effort to contact hellbanned users when I see them making substantive comments — make sure there's an address in the public part of your profile! I've sent around 10 such emails and a few github messages, it would be at least twice that if more people had contact info or used googleable usernames.
FWIW, the post is a slightly cleaned up version of an actual conversation I had with my husband. (I'm K, he's M.) It's not a format I'm likely to reuse (or have used before), but it fit the occasion and captured very well our feelings of surprise at learning how CSS parses selectors.

Plus, it's always fun to try out new formats, even -- or maybe especially -- if they don't stick.
Ah yes, the Na'avi were athletic and the fascists were athletic, therefore the Na'avi might be fascist. The Na'avi were sexual and the fascists liked sex, so the Na'avi must be fascist. And yeah it was really sinister the way they preferred living in harmony with nature rather than turn over their home to be strip mined. Sheesh. I'm so glad he pointed this stuff out.
Ummm... yeah. That represents around seven months of infrastructure cost for us.

Maybe next year, if we can fit in an 'entertainment and networking' budget.
I expect going into Gnome or KDE and resetting the settings for xfce would have also worked. Though frankly I didn't bother -- if an experienced Unix user can break it in 10 minutes without trying, it clearly isn't stable enough to use.
This is the kind of person you pay $100k starting to though, to keep them around for a while.

I was like this, and I kept changing jobs every 6 months because someone would come along and offer me twice what I was making before. Sure, I'll come work for you! (Oh, and I'm 24.)

My bet is that two years from now, she will easily be making $50 an hour, even if she starts on $12 today. But if you're that person paying her $12 today, I estimate that will last maybe 3 or 4 months. Then someone else will have her talent, and you'll be saying to yourself, "yeah, paying someone like that $12 an hour was fucking dumb of us".
Knowing the hospital's external IP would serve as authentication.

Unless the hospital provides wifi for guests and visitors.
My apologies. I just joined and did not realize sarcasm wasn't accepted. It will be hard, as I am by nature a cynic. However, However, after better reviewing the welcome page here, I agree with the no drama edict. Once again, my apologies.
1) They can print dollars, reducing the value of existing dollars.

2) The government was growing massively in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. If government growth was the solution, why did we get so much of it before the problem?

3) Is the government more likely to subsidize new, growing industries, or old, stagnant ones? Government subsidies will "save" the most jobs when they target industries with low capital requirements (like the ones that rely on cheap labor) rather than ones with high capital requirements (like high-end manufacturing). Venture capital is a tough job; deciding that some guy in DC is going to do an even adequate job at it is a stretch.

It is not "universally agreed." I think we can all agree that both of the cases I cited included an unprecedented level of government spending, coupled with an unprecedented recession.

"I was healthy, then I sneezed and you demanded that I start using leeches. I've never been sicker."

"It is universally agreed that the problem is insufficient leeches."
Why? The threshold to looking at it is higher than using the web only.
Ask HN: copying terms or FAQ off of other sites?
Is there any legal risks involved in copying a competitors terms of service or for example his FAQ page and using it on your own site?
People think this kind of trolling on ebay, etc. is funny, but I don't think they realize that they just made a contractual offer. If their offer is accepted, they're legally obligated to pay up.

If the sale price is $250k, and they already have a verified phone number, the legal fees to sue for breach of contract (and recover damages) might be worth it.
Is there something specific about that patent that you find silly or do you find the whole notion that the specific way that an interface element works to be silly?

It seems to me that if such things can't be copyrighted, or trademarked, aren't covered by design patents, and shouldn't covered by utility patents, then choosing to implement something in software rather than hardware would be a losing proposition for anyone trying to differentiate or innovate.
Catch 22, Monkey Wrench Gang.
Indeed. Though you have to exclude preservation of timing (and memory usage) effects from your definition of semantics to make any optimization possible.
$699 for another few months of food and rent while you actually work on your startup.
Ask HN: How to open a U.S. bank account without stepping foot in the US
There are endless benefits of having a U.S. bank account, but not everyone can fly from wherever they are in the world to the U.S. to open one.

So I was thinking of ways to open one without necessarily having to be in the U.S. and my hypothesis is that:

1. You can incorporate in a state online and get an EIN or FEN (you just need a Registered Agent)
2. Take that EIN/FEN and open a business account online (with WaMu it used to be possible, not sure which banks now though)
3. Have any additional paperwork sent via DHL
4. Get debit card mailed from bank, and start using your account in your country.

I ask because I am increasingly partnering up with entrepreneurs and freelancers in Latin America, and the whole payment situation is a mess, with a combination of wiretransfer, xoom, paypal, and even mailing cashier's checks.

I was wondering if any HN entrepreneurs had any experience doing this
The problem with that view, is that Linux distributions are free and maintained by a lot of people in their free time. (Yes, and many companies as well.)

Your solution has to come in some form of contribution, and it has to be specific. The best thing would be artwork, code, etc. Even if all you can do is E-mail somebody who actually works on Ubuntu, and let them know what you'd rather have, I think that would help, too.

What's "gigantic"? What's "ugly"? This would tell me nothing about how to make you happy. How about you tell them, "the text in this area here, in this particular program, is bigger than I'd like; and over here, in this program, I think having green would be better than brown". That kind of thing.
Godel would probably have said "furchtbar herzig".
Second the Burns book recommendation.

Burns wrote a book in the 80s about how to meet people. It was the best book I ever read on how to meet girls. No gimmicks, just advice that works.

http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Connections-David-D-Burns/dp/...
It was not at all a direct answer to the title of the original post, which implied twitter makes no money. It also doesn't make much sense, considering there are an inordinate number of profitable private companies.