skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They execute very well, but calling them that visionary is a little overboard.

They're not the first ones out with something new. Instead, they are consistently the first ones out with something that works really well across the entire User Experience. To do that, they have to make sure they wait until the technology can support the sort of UX they want to present.

It doesn't pay to just be visionary. Plenty of visionary people tried to build a flying machine before the Wright Brothers. In many cases, the technology they had access to just wasn't strong enough, light enough, or powerful enough.
Fantastic, I am just sad that KDE didn't do this first.

Actually, KDE did it first: the application indicators specification started as what was basically a port of KDE's KStatusNotifier.
Hairdressing Scissors-Professional Hair Scissors-Barber Salon Scissors
It's not so much doing the unimaginable as it is the ability to exercise awareness about the essential functions of a device. They don't lose sight of the device forest for the feature trees.
When can we get out of this 1800s Industrial Revolution mentality?

I can see the author's point that it is bad to hire job-hoppers at a startup. A startup probably needs people to stay around for their knowledge.

But this is such a terrible generalization. People leave for basically one reason - they will be happier doing something else. Why not make your company the place they will be happiest at rather than blaming those around you?

The author is upset because with "job-hoppers", employers do not have as much power as they once did. This advice is incredibly biased towards keeping the status-quo for the author's own selfish reasons.
Visual Basic - VB .Net - Api - LoadCursorFromFile by Heinz Prelle
I don't think the author is interested in making a fair transaction. It sounds a lot more like he's trying to frame the situation so that he holds all the cards, leaving the employee with the short end of the stick.

"That awesome gal you hired in engineering has job options and she knows it."

I can totally imagine him lobbying for more H1-B visas so he can get "captive" employees who are stuck without options to leave.
> one coud assume that power users would allow public voting and therefore would be voting more

I don't think that's a good assumption. I surely have more than 2000 votes on reddit, but some of them are on political stories and I don't particularly want a public record of that.
Is "attempting to influence it through their policies" equivalent to "treating it as their property"?
It also seems like, if true, it would be self-correcting: if it were hard to get tech jobs, people who had jobs would be pretty reluctant to leave them. You don't go job-hopping when there's nothing to hop to!
My favorite thing he attributes to a supposedly bad employee is that "they are only in it for the money." Yeah, and he's not.

Heck, if you're not in it for the money, don't take equity, don't take a paycheck, and heck, don't even charge for your products or services. After all, desiring money is bad. Just stay home, eat popcorn and watch TV and -- hey wait a minute: all of that costs money!
what are advantages of wget over curl - warm, fuzzy feeling aside ?
Doesn't apply in the biotech field, where startup lifespans tend to be fairly short. Particularly since most of the employees are hired in about the middle of the company lifespan (unless they hit paydirt).
Single-use credit card numbers (and one-time passwords) would help a ton. Multifactor authentication of any kind would also be good. The problem with all of these ideas is that they're harder to use than fixed CC numbers and passwords.

I do like the convenience of being able to memorize a password or CC number though.
upvoted.
This is a very valid question - the system tray imho is just a moniker for a 16x16 icon.
I would want the ability to either minimize any app to a normal toolbar or dock to a system tray.
Honestly, if a company can keep interesting work coming, and compensate me fairly (e.g., inflation-competitive raises, come on, that isn't so hard now is it?), I don't have any trouble sticking around forever.

Unfortunately it seems like the standard MO in this industry is to dangle a tasty carrot of an offer for jumping from your current ship, and then the gravy train stops, your raises can't cover cost of living increases, and your only way to advance is to jump ship again.

If your employees feel valued, feel like they're treated fairly, only a small portion will quit (the ones who just have to get up and do something else, and that's fine). If you have a persistent, significant problem with "hoppers" that speaks more about you as an employer than about your employees.
I doubt there's many employers willing to spend the money it would take to lock someone in.

(Because you certainly didn't expect me to agree to that clause for free, did you? No, you're going to pay. And the sooner you lock me in, the more you'd better pay if I can't even evaluate the job before the lockin starts.)
You should probably frame your question this way, "Which tech organization wouldn't buy stolen company secrets and property?"
It clearly depends on what you are looking for and their record. If they've created a couple successful startups, and left after they were successful, large and losing the startup culture, then that seems like a reasonable bet.

If they just bailed at the first sign of difficulty, ... well how are you going to learn that?
IIPA equating open source with piracy is among their most outrageous positions, previously discussed in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148079

Recall that in February IIPA requested that Canada be placed on the 301 watchlist as well: http://www.zeropaid.com/news/88127/iipa-demands-canada-be-pu...
Here's what I think would be ideal from a User Experience perspective: Firefox silently prepares the update as soon as it's received but keeps the old files around. At either the start or end of the browsing session, it asks whether you would like it to update or not and, if you do, all it has to do is flip a bit switch and you're updated.

The major pain in updating is that the point where I'm starting my browser, I'm usually in the middle of doing something. Interrupting that by 30 seconds is not my idea of fun.
Always Remember Number One
The api looks cool. I'd like to test it out before the beta if you need more people.

I have a question though. You've already described the exact format for all of the record types. So why not implement record creation with PUT and have the sender put the JSON for the record in the request body? You want idempotency for record creation so why not use the idempotent HTTP verb?
There might be some people who'd take it, since it also means guaranteed employment for the same period: an employer couldn't fire you without documented good cause that'd stand up in court. But I agree that it'd probably make hiring in a startup/tech sort of culture harder, since this isn't a culture where there's that much value put on the can't-be-fired aspect (the job market is good, so you'll just get another job).
I applaud this move. It should force the IIPA to show its true colors, since it's not really "anti-piracy" or "copyright enforcement" that could be motivating their objections. India's offer already covers those issues sufficiently.

No, instead what they are after is further restriction on fair use and preventing threats to their business model from open source software and domestic procurement policies. What a surprise.
My sentiments exactly. And what about the "temporary" employee that can't get hired permanent because the company can't find a budget.

This is the wrong economic (and political) climate for this kind of BS.
That's strange, e-mail me your credit card info and I'll verify it manually.
I love this article and even though I've always respected Steve Blank, he just went up a huge notch. The question I always ask people who pitch an idea / tell me their startup is:

"If you succeed to your fullest extent how will the world be different in 5 years?"
Actually, you'll find that we're doing both. It is perfectly valid to point out conflicts of interest (it's a favored denialist tactic to invent CoIs that don't even exist, so isn't it hypocritical to take umbrage when CoIs are brought up?), so long as the actual claims are also addressed. This is like the difference between making your argument rest upon an ad hominem and making a wonderful argument followed by "oh, and you're an idiot."

You don't get to reject the mountains of well-understood science just because one guy dared raise questions about conflicts of interest.
Question: at a startup without titles, what do you think of fashioning one's own, within certain ethical limits?

It's obviously wrong to take the CEO title if you weren't the CEO (he or she might take it personally) or CFO if your job had nothing to do with finance, but I think a certain amount of leniency is allowed.
I like the idea that tenure and accomplishment are like quantity and quality. But I disagree about how you measure accomplishment. At least for developers I want to see evidence in working code. What have you built? What open source projects have you contributed to? It's not just about making 'a good resume'. In fact the best candidates spend 0 time on the resume.

Mark Suster implicitly is thinking about sifting through a thousand resumes. In that context this is a perfectly valid heuristic. If you end up in a thousand-resume situation you have no major accomplishments. If you have no major accomplishments you had better have at least shown staying power.

Outside of this scenario, though, I imagine this heuristic can be mis-applied.
I find the use of the term "loyalty" here not only immature, but dishonest and hypocritical. The plain truth is that tech startups, and especially the more cutting edge and fast paced among them, are some of the least loyal employers to ever inhabit any job market.

It's not even an idealogical, but plain economical observation: take two companies. One is low-stress, slow, steady money. The other is a crazy fast, big money. Angels or VCs give you tons of cash, you can afford to pay top employees almost any amount of money, with any kind of crazy benefits you can think of (including those freshly baked blueberry muffins in the lobby, which nobody ever eats) but if you don't get that product out before your competitor, you lose it all.

Which company will be faster shedding an unproductive employee?

I can't count the amount of VC funded startups I've known to fire entire teams just because the product vision changed a bit. The main client is going to be an iPhone app instead of a web widget? Immediately fire with no notice or compensation all 5 "star" web developers who left permanent positions at Google, Amazon, Facebook etc to come and help your realize your dream.

I'm not even talking about non-productivity, incompetence, or engineering mistakes that would get you fired from a trail-blazing startup in about 5 minutes.

To expect "loyalty" under these kind of terms is sheer delusion. The only "loyal" employee you're going to get is someone entirely unfamiliar with the above realities - aka a clueless newbie on his first startup job.

There's not much point explaining how the notion of "job hopping" being an employee's "fault" is entirely baseless in this context. This is an important discussion, but so much beyond the grasp of this curious article, that purports to apply to the reality of startups while ignoring the elephant in that particular room.
I think you raise an interesting point. At a time when companies are so ready to shed unneeded workers, it should come as no surprise that employees are less loyal.

However, I don't think that's the point of the article. The author is saying "I'm a businessman, and I've learned not to hire 'job hoppers', and you shouldn't hire them either." He's giving advice to other employers, and as such, he doesn't have to be 'fair' to the job hoppers. From his perspective (and that of other employers), hiring someone is a considerable investment (estimates vary, but between 30 and 40% of annual salary seems to be common). Having made that investment, no one wants to see it walk out the door 2 years later. It only makes sense for the employer to look at an individual's job history and form an opinion about whether they are a good risk. It doesn't really matter why you left six jobs in the last 10 years - your reasons only have to satisfy you - from his perspective, you are not the person he wants to invest in.

As I see it, if you like to change jobs frequently that is your business. You should do what you want to do, and accept the consequences (that some prospective employers will consider you too flaky to take a chance on). But don't turn around and complain that people aren't willing to take a chance on you, and won't give you the job that you now think is the perfect one for you. All other things being equal, if you were the employer and had a choice between someone with a track record of 'job hopping', or someone who seemed steadier in their employment history, which would you choose?
The problem with having different menus for different categories is that it optimizes the use case where a person has Bittorrent, IM, music and 10 different things in the background versus a person who only has one.

The person with only one background service will see unnecessary cluttering with different kinds of menus. Take a look at the forums, a significantly large number of them ask about how to remove the messaging menu (because they dont use it)

In addition, I have a clipboard manager in the system-tray. Which menu does that come under ?
If you're going to cry out censorship, then at least have the common decency not to rely on the tired old CRU/climategate scam. This has been rather thoroughly and soundly debunked over and over again. Denialist papers get rejected from peer reviewed journals because they aren't science, not because there's a conspiracy.
You can also "roll up" a window, IIRC.
Loyalty is a one way street for most companies. If the company has problems they expect me to suck it up and help keep them alive however the reverse never happens.
I think what was meant was:

Even though Macs may be less secure than Windows, there is significantly less malware targeted at Macs, so a Mac is relatively 'safe' for an average user.

On the other hand, if you're running the server for a bank - where you expect to get constantly hit by crackers looking for an exploit - Windows would probably stand up better than a Mac.
Edging Back to Nuclear Power
Jeff Jarvis: I want the opposite of what Facebook just did
That's false equivalency. The NSF doesn't fund research to show that the earth is flat, because it isn't. Just because the well-tested AGW hypothesis exists doesn't mean that AGW denialism is on equal footing.
I think both extremes look bad. Somebody who has had 24 jobs in the last 24 months looks pretty bad. Somebody who has had 1 and only 1 job in the last 24 years also looks rather bad -- depending on the field. If it was a librarian and that's what you're looking to hire, great. But I've noticed that as a general rule, in the software field, if somebody stays at the same employer for 10-20 years, that's usually a bad sign. Not always, but generally.

Also think if you were in the software field in the mid/late 90's and you were NOT job hopping, in some sense, you were probably not being very smart. Because there was so much demand for our skills that you could almost always get more money by moving on. Once all the frothy demand died down, yes, it tended to become smarter to stay. But all of this -- all of it -- is just generalizations. People leave jobs for all sorts of reasons which do not or should not reflect badly on them. Family, sickness, education, career growth, moving to a better home or community, etc.

I think loyalty is more important at a startup than at a larger, more established business. But never EVER assume the business will be loyal to you, the employee. If you're lucky, they will, but don't assume that. The whole point of the business is to maximize profit for the owners, and the executive/managerial class sometimes really is just out for their own best interests, even if that means canning employees and/or shutting down entire lines of business that otherwise are staffed with good people doing good work. They look at the numbers, and may often "do what the numbers tell them." Likewise, an employee can analyze matters in the same way. It's fair.
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the problem is that companies do not pay a fair wage.

they hire a person, and then if they work like a slave for them...the most they'd see is a 5% raise if that. And in this economy, chances are the company won't even give the people a raise for years. And early on, in one's career, the experience you gain is valued way more than a 5% raise.

I'll give you an example of my friend. He came into his company and ended up with a $12K raise in salary. Pretty much was the top performer there. So the first year he got a 5% raise(max available, and only after 4 months on the job). Second year the market crashed. And the company pretty much slashed the work force. 50% of people were let go. Out of 30 people in his department, only 3 were left. No raises that year. The next year, no raises, more jobs slashed, the rest of his team was let go...and my friend ended up being the only person in the department(company has multiple divisions, so he was just transferred to another department). The next year the company turned around...but once again no raises.

So look at my friend...1. top performer...out of 30 people in his department, the only one who wasn't laid off. 2. more and more responsibilities, pretty much attached to his blackberry. Works nights, weekends from home too. 3. the ONLY person in the entire company who knows anything about 60% of the company's internal software..and no raises. And due to inflation....you can even say his salary was slashed, because it wasn't adjusted with inflation for multiple years.

Now why would anyone stick around with a company like that? Why wouldn't he move to another company for a 20-30% raise? In fact he wants to...but he can't because he is the only person working in his family, has kids and he figures, it's better the devil you know, so he is waiting for the market to turn around...+ he likes his commute.

Now let's say he sticks around for another year, and the next year the company decides to give everyone raises. Do you think the company will be fair, and will give people raises for the 3 years they stuck around supporting the company through the tough times w/o getting paid their fair market value? Or do you think they'll just give people 5%(if that) and maybe a $500 bonus?

Bottom line: Employees will stick with you through thick and thin as long as you pay them their fair share...noone likes changing jobs...noone likes the first 3 months on a new job when you don't know if they want to keep you, noone likes job hunting, noone likes interviewing.

If you don't, you shouldn't be surprised if they feel justified to look for a company that pays them what they are worth.
Interesting tack, say something blatantly offensive claiming it will make you a lot of enemies and then use as demonstration of courageous conduct when you are in fact saying the kind of thing that would otherwise make you look pretty damned evil.

The barrage of vitriolic and savage responses here is totally deserved, I can't get over the fact that people like this still exist.
[citation needed]

All joking aside, the CRU e-mail hack revealed no such thing. To say otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest.
There are absolutely loyal companies. It's just not the norm.
I was a bit skeptical at first due to the frequency I read articles like these with nothing really new to report. However, this post is a collection of solid tips and explanations that are very important to practice.
I think you just described Germany.
Did you actually read what "hide the decline" meant? Go learn about proxies and you'll see that what they mean is that there is a false decline in proxy temperatures that must be corrected for, likely due to increased CO₂ concentrations changing how tree rings are formed. There's no deception here-- they were up front and honest about this problem, and referred to data analysis techniques to correct for a false decline.
Yeah, but it's really germane to (what I consider) the real question, which is: "When did our path to history start?"

I mean, it's a big difference if we had 150,000 years of prehistory, or a million, or 50,000.
The bitching about "job hoppers" mostly has to do with "free agents" who end up, for one reason or another, in high demand and who can ramp up their compensation with frequent job moves. Such people are fairly rare and generally don't make it to the top ranks of anything. This style of free agency may have been common in the late '90s, but it's not nearly as relevant now because the expectation that each job move involves a pay raise is gone. For example, Google is not going to pay ex-bankers more than other employees just because they were overcompensated on Wall Street.

In my experience, the worst agents (psychopaths and narcissists who will fuck up the company for their own gain) are almost never job hoppers. Sociopaths understand social power and how to get it, and they know that it takes time. They don't job hop often (and they look before the leap) because they rarely need to, being inherently good at politics and quite capable of getting a pay/promotion trajectory far better than would be available to them if they changed companies (and had to start over, politically speaking) every few months.

The worst corporate sociopath I've ever seen is 28 and has just been named CEO of a company with about $10 million in revenue. He's been there for 4 years, and it's his second job since college. The company will probably crash and burn under his rule.
Why did these kids succeed? The answer is, quite possibly, that they deserved to! Go to their website and take a look at the supported use case for their app. Their app appeals to both the browser and collector mindset. Already, they are harnessing powerful psychology. On top of that, if their "perfect formatting" claim for article, then they also are presenting a polished UX.

I tried out two different Wikipedia apps for my old Windows XP Tablet machine. If you're technically inclined, you can load a compressed snapshot of Wikipedia and carry it with you. That puts you in the position of "administrator and custodian" of your Wikipedia snapshot, which isn't fun and seems like work, whereas being a browser and collector is an addictive sort of hobby.

You can think of this as Instapaper for Wikipedia.
screenshot or it didnt happen.
lwp-download handles this correctly though, no need to write your own LWP::UserAgent program....
The biggest practical downside I can think of is if in checking references, your former boss gets called and has a reaction of, "John Doe, Senior Foobar? I don't think we even had a Foobar". So might be worth running it by whoever it is from the company you'd be likely to put down as a reference. I've met founders who are perfectly fine vouching for any reasonable title the employee wants to pick, though.
very true - take a look at the Klassik theme combined with Skulpture.

I really wish someone would make a better theme - gnome themes look so much better.
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