skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I can remember the Germans in the episode aren't made fun off.
> What developers need to always understand is that the PM's view is the business's view.

In theory yes. But I just finished reading a "test strategy document" from a guy whose title is "test strategist" and who doesn't write any code. So I am burnt by reality :-)
So if the little website that takes text you type in and gives you a URL that has that text shown REALLY BIG is now defined as a Startup, what should the rest of us with real businesses call ourselves?
Sure. Or just bragging rights on some website. (E.g. a small line mentioning the winner on the bottom of HN, for challenges that pg thinks worthy.)
Hiring someone costs the company a lot of overhead, whether you work out or not. A contractor can be fired without incurring a lot of overhead. So if you job-hop quickly, companies might be a little wary of spending a lot of money to bring you in only to have you scadaddle off after three months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-denial_denial
Thank you, Joel. Salute!
What developers need to always understand is that the PM's view is the business's view.

I've never understood this bright line boundary between the patchwork of people that make up a technical group, and the patchwork of people that make up a business group. Presumably, the technology being developed is part of what makes the business viable; it isn't just a bunch of people wanking off in text editors on company time, while the grown ups -- the business folks -- do everything that earns money.

It serious just seems like an artificial division to excuse the two groups for not listening to each other.

This becomes even more painful when you are one of the people who wants to be involved in whatever makes up this nebulous "business side", and are told to fuck off back to your toys.

My view: the business is everyone's business, and any time you start developing bright line boundaries to either protect turf, enforce a hierarchy for its own sake, or excuse non-involvement, the least of your problems is one of your techies wanting to play with technology that seems superfluous to the untrained eye.
No argument from me that Spock's work was pretty much worthless, but I don't think articles like this or common sense are that much better. The two problems with common sense are that it isn't very common, and it's often wrong. Some of the best advancements in science are those that challenge our common sense assumptions. While this article does link to some harder research, most of the arguments drawn from the research are weak at best, and consist of much of the same psuedo-science type reasoning Spock engaged in.
This is incredible. The last time I remember them doing something like this was during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Oh, and in 2005: Rosa Parks.
http://theappleblog.com/2005/10/26/think-different-rosa-park...
80% per year outpaces Moore's law, btw.
In bit-torrent terminology leechers do upload but they do not have whole file. Seeders have whole file which means that the keep being connected to torrent network despite the fact that they have no longer any selfish goal in this.
"Also, don't forget the biggest hit of this decade(facebook) was a college kid's side project just some years ago. As was twitter. And many others."

Facebook was a weekend project long before it went to raise money. It wasn't merely a weekend project trying to raise money.

Twitter wasn't a college kid's side project. It was developed by Odeo.

Indeed, the "biggest hits of this decade" seem more to be weekend projects that evolve from that, and then seek funding, rather than weekend projects that remain that, and seek funding.

And while his tone does come off somewhat harsh, I think the message is still a good one.
This raises an interesting question actually.
What works better, scratching your own itch (hobby project) and then putting a business idea around it (e.g. http://www.couch.io/) or putting business first? I think some VCs might prefer putting business first.

I suspect the prior works better but may need some patience. I have a bunch of projects in various stages of completion and now I am working on (enjoying!) something new and hoping to make it useful.

IMO make-something-useful and then bother about business should work better, but then I haven't made much using this approach yet.
Yes, I do.

But that doesn't change my statement.

If you're not willing to break your business to change with the times, someone else will--and by the time you react it's too late.
Google's IPTV set-top weds Android and the Atom - News - Linux for Devices
Don't doubt it, they are losing a significant portion of revenue-generating space on a commercial website in order to pay tribute to a fallen friend.
Daring Fireball: Mozilla, Video, and Mobile Computing
I've had similar conversations with colleagues. I love the idea and hope to someday try it.

One method I like is to use a simple agile/scrum type project where the product backlog is crowdsourced.
My experience exactly (dropped out after 2 years). If a company requires a degree as an absolute, they most likely don't have super smart people working there, or it wont be a particularly great place to work (the government and large financial institutions come to mind).
Watch movies or listen to music from YouTube simultaneously with friends.
Not mine, but it looked interesting.

From Reddit:

Hey guys. My friend and I built this app in our free time after school/work. It started off as a fun personal app to just watch movies together with, but now we have buttoned it up a bit, and hope other people can find it useful.
One feature I wanted to point out was social playlists. You and your friends can join a room, simultaneously make a YouTube video playlist together then sit back, relax and watch/listen together.
It basically does what it says, synchronize YouTube, and if you have a few minutes feel free to stop by and look around. All feedback is MUCH welcomed. Cheers
also a palindrome
Windows 7 can run a web browser, sure yes, it is, but so can anything else. The thing you use to run your web browser doesn't really matter as long as it works and isn't expensive.
We are looking to expand our team at the moment. I'll send you an email with more details. I hope you like it.
What you are describing is not too different from micropledge, a company that was one of the first to be funded by YC. The largest differences I see is that you want to have your group of technical people defined a priori, while micropledge was more of a buyer/seller market.

Finding out what happened to them is left as an exercise to the reader.
> One point to note is that they essentially copied the colors straight from Google

Or their A/B tester implemented as a genetic algorithm evolved the colors towards those used by Google because that increases their chances for survival :-)
I wasn't going to, but reading a few of these inspired me... then reading a few more depressed me (mine aren't so glamorous), but I'll do it anyway.

* helped my mother raise my brother and me. This past New Year, I was able to fly my brother up to live with me for a week, showing him what you can accomplish with hard work and dedication.

* wrote an essay that received a comment saying that the post had helped the commenter overcome something he had been struggling with through years of therapy and self-doubt.

* overturned our high school's regulation that allows only seniors to take classes at the university.

* taught myself Calc 2 in high school and got a perfect score on the AP exam; my best friend and I were the first people at my school to get above a 4 on any AP Calc exam. I didn't consider this a great accomplishment until I ran into my old HS math teacher a few years back and learned that she now tells our story to all of her Calc students to motivate them.

* started a rock band in college, played some really cool venues, did one show with a band that now gets airplay on Sirius XM, and won a few competitions.

* landed a girlfriend (of 2 years now) who is out of my league.

But I think my greatest accomplishment is that I seem to have made my parents proud.
About 2000-2002 was the closest it ever came. GNOME had become usable, Linux could play more commercial games than MacOS.
Here is an example of an attempt.
http://www.cambrianhouse.com/
What made you decide to intern at a small startup versus a larger company? How would you describe your experience at wepay?
How long it really takes to upgrade your system
Is this a repost? I have a feeling that a very similar article was on reddit back in the days when it was still bearable--i.e. even before HN existed.
If he is arguing that many or most weekend projects are seeking funding, he is setting up a strawman. I don't think most or many weekend projects seek funding, especially ones posted here.
The DSP port is an API compatible port of libtheora. Anything that is linked against libtheora can make use of the DSP port simply by linking against it. Nokia haven't shipped a major OS release since the DSP port came out, so even if they were going to ship it and/or Fennec (I have no idea), they haven't had a chance to do so yet. It's probably worth pointing out that the DSP port is not specific to the N900 or Maemo at all. It targets the C64x+ DSP, which is part of the OMAP3 SoC. The N900, Motorola Droid, and Palm Pre all ship an OMAP3 that includes the DSP.

FFmpeg has an independent decoder but for encoding it uses libtheora. The FFmpeg decoder has traditionally been slower than libtheora and didn't implement all of the Theora spec. It implemented VP3 plus the part of the spec that the Theora 1.0 (and earlier) encoders produced, but failed to decode spec-compatible output from the Theora 1.1 encoder (which libtheora 1.0's decoder handles just fine). There has been a lot of development of the FFmpeg decoder recently, so most of these issues are fixed. It's possible that the decoder is faster than libtheora now (as of the last 2-3 months), but I haven't benchmarked it.
So an R&D firm shouldn't be able to get patents, only someone who does R&D plus manufacturing?

I ask that because the startup where I work part-time does R&D for scientific equipment and we then license the technology to companies that are interested in possible manufacturing. Many companies would rather license a patent, and be the exclusive manufacturer than have to invest in the R&D themselves.

And by the way, many (hardware) technologies require a significant amount of time to bring from the conceptual stage to manufacturing stage, especially when you have limited, such as a startup might.
Yea, I slam dunked on him once.
Good PMs will defer on technical decisions and be firm on business decisions. Bad PMs won't.

The logical precursors of this is that technically minded people are either not capable of analyzing business decisions, or that they shouldn't be allowed to anyway because they are technical people. Perhaps both.

If they were capable, there would be no reason for a PM to be firm on a business decision, because the technical staff wouldn't run nearly as high a risk of pushing him to do something stupid.

If we assume they are capable, then this becomes an argument to authority. I would then like to ask the following question: if the people who watch the bottom-line see an improvement based upon a particular decision, do you really think they'll care who made the decision, and what influenced them?
Deletionism is a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

But what can we radical inclusionists do in the meantime?

The articles that do survive deletionism are useful, and important. Wikipedia remains a cultural treasure. So, the proper response to deletionism is not to boycott or withdraw from Wikipedia, but offer qualified support of the common base, all the while preparing for the eventual, inevitable, glorious inclusionist fork.

More of my reasoning here: http://memesteading.com/2010/03/15/dialectical-inclusionism/
Way to go Karl.

I have a similar story from the other side. About 3 years ago I was a sophomore in college looking for an internship. I knew I wanted to get into a startup but didn't know how to get in touch with one.

I asked HN if anyone knew startups in the NYC area, a few people responded. I emailed a few, I received a few responses. Most of them were unpaid, which I MIGHT have been able to do but I do need money to support myself so it would have been a few days at that internship and a few working a paying job. I felt like a lot of the offers were just a dude in some apartment in brooklyn hacking on a project that was calling himself a startup (again, ok, I'd do that) but the ideas were not that good. I won't list them here, but suffice to say it was weak.

Eventually I got in touch with Bug Labs, and over the course of a few weeks hounded the crap out of them until finally they relented and agreed to an interview. They were not looking for interns - I think there were about 8 people at the time and they had 1 round under their belt but that was it, and working out of the old del.icio.us office which was quite cramped at that point. I distinctly remember being asked "So what can you do for us" because they really didn't think an intern could be of help. I think they pictured me making coffee.

Anyway I convinced them somehow to start me a few hours and a few dollars, and go from there. It became clear that I could contribute pretty quickly and I went to full time and they paid me more what interns were getting paid elsewhere, and the whole thing worked out really well. I came back the next summer and there were 2 other interns. I came back last summer and there were enough interns to have an area in the new office called "intern city", which had 5 or 6 guys of various levels of commitment/pay/hours.

It was a great experience for me, vastly more responsibility than I would have gotten at a "big" company like the article mentions, and I think I helped Bug Labs a bit too. Not to mention the guys I was working with were some of the smartest people I've ever met, and I got to be in NYC every day. I would say it was one of the best decisions of my career to "Ask HN" that day.

Oh and now that I and the other interns have convinced them its worth having interns around (and you're in the NYC area) apply for one!: http://www.buglabs.net/jobs

(edit: weird coincidence with the kschultz/kschults thing to these stories)
The good engineer should not be doing bleeding-edge work so much as he should be doing things that are challenging even in small ways every now and then, and rewarded for his efforts. I once worked at a small place that has a really, really brilliant architect on staff (easily the best engineer I have worked with so far). He turned down invitations to interview at some rather prestigious tech companies and was happy to remain in his little kingdom. Most of the time he was fixing bugs, adding smallish new features, etc. - i. e. he was not doing cutting-edge stuff. But he had the freedom to improve the code base as a whole. So every time he had to fix a major bug he would do some refactoring that made the code better, not just for him but for the entire team, as this always involved tweaking the APIs he wrote for the team. It is pretty challenging to improve upon something that is already pretty darn good.
Keep pushing it. I've made 1pm now the usual time to expect my arrival.
Really classy
After two years of parenting (and after hearing/reading many different opinions) I've come to more or less the same conclusion.

The interesting thing, for me at least, is that the same basic approach works for marriage. Assuming all your child's or spouse's needs are being met, sometimes there's nothing to 'fix' - you just need to be present and listen. And for some reason, as a guy, I find that's one of the hardest things to do.
was this the YC startup that had special access to twitter?
What differentiates weekend projects from real startups is the seriousness of the founders. If the founders have very little at stake, then failure of the project will not affect them much. As the founders increase their stake (mental involvement, hardwork, investment of time, money) in their project, they start getting more serious and the "weekend project" starts morphing into a startup.
Remember Microsoft's $80M color? Let's put that to the test.
After reading this article, and the Yelp blog posts about the issue, it sounds to me like Yelp is doing exactly what they claim to be doing, and what they should be doing. Yelp says that there's a "Chinese wall" between the people selling ads on Yelp and the people managing reviews. Former Yelp employees seem to vouch for this. The people suing them don't seem to have any evidence that the ad-sellers are manipulating the reviews. Furthermore, some of the people suing Yelp admit that they solicited reviews from happy customers, which Yelp considers a no-no (and they've made this clear in public).

The only thing the people suing Yelp seem to have going for them is that some of the positive reviews for their businesses (some of which were admittedly solicited) got removed not long after they declined to buy advertising on Yelp. Yelp essentially says that this was a coincidence: Their automatic filters try to eliminate solicited (and vindictive) reviews, and the filters happened to do their thing shortly after these businesses were approached by Yelp's ad-sellers. But there's really no solid evidence of causality. Given the number of businesses covered by Yelp, you'd expect this sort of thing to happen occasionally. Furthermore, there are a lot of businesses that _do_ buy ads that still have negative reviews on Yelp. So.

Also, did anyone else think of PG's essay "The Submarine" when reading that Inc. article? To me, it really seemed like the article was biased against Yelp, to the extent that I wondered whether some of the lawyers suing Yelp have hired a PR firm...
With 10k/month, it's unlikely that it could be a side job, but it's also likely you could live on it and try to grow it.
Indeed, I did. I often listen to The Moth while walking my dogs, but I'd missed this one.

Or at least I think I did... I had to google it up because the URL you gave me had some sort of oddly broken redirect, so I'm simply assuming that he only did one Moth recording.
agreed. the actual text of the message is also really honest and heartfelt.
Apparently Wikipedia's policy on "canvassing" forbids anyone from soliciting "outside" supporters to join discussions you care about.

One of Wikipedia’s favourite guidelines is the one on canvassing. You see, if an article you’re interested comes up for deletion, it’s not permissible to contact outside sources that may know more about the topic, because they are likely biased. Canvassing will often get you a severe warning, or banned. Linus’s law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” On the other hand, Wikipedia’s collective belief is that bringing new people with new perspective to something is a heinous offence… After all, it might upset their precious status quo.

Please go read the policy here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing

The incumbent editors' transparent effort to quell dissent is appalling.
Just to let you guys know, I'm the author of this little experiment.

I'll publish any findings that this project generates under Creative Commons, of course.

If anyone has any ideas on how to improve this, or the data being collected, I'd be super happy to read it :)
SXSW Interactive is Dead
It looks like they surveyed the crowd, got acquired and the ideas are all on the back burner.

I'm picturing a more robust system where all the process is transparent and inclusive for the same people who voted/requested them.

Thanks for the link, worth the look!
I imagine that they'll get a good amount of press out of this, which will (somewhat) negate their monetary losses here. That said, it's pretty obvious that this is a heartfelt message from the company, props to them for doing what most other companies rarely do and honoring the passing of an influential team member.
Yea.. it's too bad they could have done a lot more with at the time. Looks like all the projects are abandoned.. the earliest activity I can find is from 23 months ago.
How about all the publicity they got from it for free? I'm sure visits to apple.com got a big bump today thanks to that. Apple.com is on the frontpage of every social sites right now (reddit, digg, hn etc).
Hindi - Orkut Scraps Pictures Glitter Comments Graphics eCards and Greetings
Wikipedia's deletionist policies scream opportunities for wiki with specialist coverage.

As an example, the open source gaming encyclopedia wiki I founded and built was a partial result of wikipedia's deletionist attitude toward obscure open video games.

What it ultimately led to, is the colonization of niches wikipedia refuse to cover in-depth. This may be a good thing, as dedicated community grows up to make niche encyclopedia much more in depth and more useful than what would otherwise be at Wikipedia.
link to the document released by TechCrunch pertaining to the case
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/18/read-the-just-unsealed-docu...
How to Make Variable Rounded Corners the Correct Way in InDesign
A guess it's always good to have a stash. In case you run out of them.
A little bit of a late launch (even 24h earlier would have been better), but you're not doing a real bracket, so it'll work.

That said, since they don't actually share their whole bracket, the name doesn't quite fit. Also:

* You should show the seedings of the teams so people can make a better decision. Seed is a lot more meaningful than record.

* You need to be much clearer about how the contests work

* The pictures of the HDTV and of the final four logo look grainy and bad.

* Your about page says you're based in "Norther California"

EDIT: You should really not tweet for people unless they explicitly tell you they want to. I wasn't paying attention to the little checkbox under the picking, so I sent 2 tweets and thens saw 10 min later that I had done so. Also, your default tweet wordings are pretty annoying.

EDIT2: Alright, this sucks. I decided to do some more picks, so I went back to the site. I had to log back in which was kind of annoying. Then, it started me with games I had already picked. Then I got some new ones, but pretty soon I was on games that had already started, and it gave me an error when I tried to pick them because of that. And it didn't remember that I had unchecked the "tweet this" box, so I sent some more inadvertent tweets.

I think having people pick the following day's games may work better.
"A company with a culture of quitting does not have ex-employees; they have alumni."

That point really hit home with me. You can beat around the bush and say "hit by a bus". You can put a positive spin on things and say "win the lottery". Or you can actually embrace a common social phenomenon and reap the benefits.
Just getting a lawyer to double check things. Just the base fees of DE incorporation, getting a registered agent then register as a foreign entity will cost you around $500.
Do you have kids? I honestly ask, because having a child pretty much meant everyone who ever had a child suddenly started giving me advice, and none of it was the same. I have my sister-in-law telling me my 15 month old doesn't need vegetables every day.

And no, I didn't need this explained to me. My son is an incredibly happy toddler.
You hear this "open is only better if it's technically better" argument all the time but any popular, open tech I can think of either was or is worse than the alternative.

At what point did Gecko become better than IE? Where would we be without the people who worked on it then? When the technically superior alternative was left to rot because it suited the owner's business reasons.

KHTML? Webkit? Wikipedia? Linux? MySQL? LLVM?

I'm honestly struggling to think of one that was better straight out the gate. Even if I think of one it probably built on one that wasn't.