skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagining an existing company implementing a policy like this and forcing it on its employees is pretty different from a small startup deciding on it (with the enthusiastic buy-in of the principals) and then going off and hiring people who are excited about it.

I've worked as a consultant for years. It's a job that requires a lot of travel. We don't hide this from prospective hires, and despite having a schedule that's a lot more rigorous than 1 month in 6, and going to places that are a lot less swank than a five-star in Bangkok, we've never had trouble recruiting.

Actually I think there are a lot of people for whom the possibility of traveling twice a year to some semi-exotic locale and having their food/drinks/entertainment comped would be a big draw. As long as you're okay with the demographics that tends to lean towards -- young people, probably fresh college grads -- you might end up finding people willing to work for less, because they'd see the travel as a benefit, than if you were hiring for a cube job.

A lot depends on how you spin it, and what kind of people you try to recruit. It's going to affect the character of the company a lot though.
I don't really want my tool to be the kind of paranoid you're describing. I know what I'm doing, I've never lost changes like that, and I don't want git acting like it knows better. The commands are semantically correct, you just need to use them in conjunction with your brain.
Both the $47M and the 600 people salaries were part of their budget. So she gets to save the 600 salaries. Plus whatever resources poured into projects those fired were working on.
Can We Solve Chess One Day?
Surely the same argument applies to SVN as well? Whichever VCS you use, you're going to force contributors to adapt to a particular version control philosophy.
Hmm, seems like I was misled by the PR spin (not an uncommon occurrence). I hear you, we are a big company going through a split and we had many stories of our CEO, god bless his soul, doing similar things, e.g. grabbing a list of people and cutting randomly, cutting off crucial teams in the process. And we did have a Sun alumni who totally blew our company with his cool but ineffective sales mumbo-jumbo.

As much as I agree the wrongness of these decisions, I also see that some circumstances present a no-win scenario (Captain Kirk be damned), whatever you do there will be mistakes, but the important thing is to ACT! As far as I can see Ellison at least did that.
The money makes things interesting even though they've made nothing yet. Imagine how things change from a momentum standpoint if they work on the 10 or 15k they planned to this summer and use the rest of the money to get people like Chris Messina and Caterina Fake working on the project
Alt+Shift+F works for me on Chrome. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Keyboard_shortcuts -- I had to include Shift since Alt+F is used by Chrome to bring up the tools menu.
It depends on the device and the requirements of the devices' carriers. Most carriers specify that devices has bootloaders that will only allow flashing system images signed by the carrier; these devices require some manner of exploit to gain root access and overwrite the system's bootloader. There are also devices capable of running Android that have no restrictions on the bootloader at all, such as the Neo Freerunner; almost as "open" is the Nexus One, which has a bootloader with a user-accessible method to "unlock" the phone and flash a new system image at the cost of voiding your warranty.
The perfect storm, I read the message while listening to 'waiting for your conference to start' elevator music.
A lot of other people have had the same thought and you know some of them did? They wrote some software to automate it.
Website Access Log Visualization
Show HN: Talking to your customers made easy.
Dear Hackers and founders,

I am working on a startup which aims to make customer development
easier, faster and perhaps lazier. We all know how important
it is to talk to customers, GainGeek (http://gaingeek.com)
makes this process easier.

My hope is that this app will resonate with all those following
Eric Ries's Lean startup and Steve Blank's customer development strategy.
I thought it would be a great idea to submit my idea to the eyes of
the most critical crowd I know. Please let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Edo.

PS: Some will note that this app could be intrusive.
My bet is that the benefit of talking to customers
will outweigh this disadvantage.
Take a bright guy, stick him in with a bunch of students who likely have connections (sons/daughters of CEOs, politicians, etc.), give him TONS of information about them and tell him not to use it to his advantage.

This is unsurprising.
Everybody here that freelances or that hires freelance coders should read this.
The Benefits of Yoga to Your Health
Not very likely scenario as the CEO has publicly stated that he's not a big believer in Internet privacy. It is already evident that they are ready to take bad press in slowly loosening the privacy. The real issue that Facebook has with privacy is how to get rid of it.

My two cents: FB is set out to collect as much social info about as many people as possible. Probably they have much more data about the folks than we know and that can seen through FB site or API. Their problem is that they cannot openly sell/share that data with partners. So they need to get to the point where they can argue legally (guessing this will end up in court at least here in Europe) that the members have permitted them to collect all that info.
The problem is, there is a lot of FUD suggesting that HTML5 is a complete replacement for Flash, and you can duplicate Flash in HTML5, when the truth is, you can't.
Oddly, such a Flash player would probably do fine on major mobile platforms.
I'll have to check this out. My first reaction is that since it isn't part of the operating system like digital ink is with Windows Tablet PC Edition then it's not as flexible or as usable as I'd like. Thanks for letting me know about this app.
Diaspora raised 100,000$ and 19 days to go
$47.2 Million for the CEO, whose company has lost its way for so many years and continuing do so. It's bizarre!
Thing is, "hit by a bus" is a larger range of situations than the cliche suggests.

It's not just "hit by a bus", "wins the lottery", or "decides to quit". It could be: "takes a vacation". "Gets snowed in" (generic weather disaster that cuts travel and communication). It could even be "sick".

The bet looks a lot worse when you realize it's just saying "this one guy won't so much as catch the flu".

And hiring isn't the only corrective action. Making time for documentation, automation, cross-training -- these are all significantly cheaper and still tip the bet well back into your favor.
Cute story, but I can't see which bit is clever? Perhaps it's an inside joke I just don't get :(
Rely is a fair word to use. It would be sensible to say that these enterprises also rely on IIS, Apache, Microsoft Word, Excel, Photoshop or a long list of other software that they likely rely on.

None of which would dismantle their interests if they disappeared.

But, I suppose you don't get any upvotes for mentioning any of those.
Install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 8.04
In Developer(Backend)
Don't know how many are using it, but yes, Flash Packager for iPhone is available. It just won't be updated.
If you have a Nexus One, it most certainly will. Unlike the G1 or MT3G phones, T-Mobile doesn't have anything to do with the image on a N1, mainly because you bought it directly from Google instead of T-Mobile. I expect my N1 to be one of the devices to have the official 2.2 update from Google.
At least they turned a profit. That is better than turning a loss and still getting paid.
Diaspora: Think about Brand
I'm constantly disappointed in how GoDaddy's treatment of customers has gone down. It used to be really good, but now it's all marketing ploys, sending customers in mazes until they give up, and nickel-and-diming every purchase.
Are you sure this wasn't simply a sales tactic? Or did you know this sales person personally? I generally don't find sales people to be the most honest and trustworthy individuals.
Well, my guess is that if you get annoyed that the site is down, you'll blame the panda rather than the guys who run the site.
Ask HN: review my app idea: easily get comments on wires/designs
My idea is this: an app that lets you get comments on your documents (I'm thinking wireframes/designs). Works like this:

1. Email a PDF to us.

2. We email you back a url and a password.

3. Go to the url, enter password and your name (no signup). Then you get a page where you see all the pages in the pdf as large images (1 image per page), and you can leave comments on the images (ajaxy, like leaving notes on a Flickr image).

4. Email the url+password to your team, and get their comments too.

Thaz it. The purpose of this is to make it easier to get comments on a set of wireframes or designs. Right now, we tend to email the pdf to the team, then get emails back with comments. But there's no easy way to point to one piece of the image and say something about that (we fix that with the ajaxy commenting on the image). It's also hard to get all comments in one place, they tend to be dispersed in email threads (we fix that with having it online).

Thoughts? Should I build this? Would you use it? Is this minimum and viable enough, or should I add/remove stuff?
Even if you're the Air Force?
These New Zuckerberg IMs Won't Help Facebook's Privacy Problems
That's what I thought - but the illusion in question doesn't work if you take a photograph. It's purely psychological.
Too verbose for my taste.

Here's a good sample of effective maintenance pages: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/12/effective-mainten...
Every time I use LaTeX I remember what my prof. said to me. "I never could understand why you need to program if you just want to type a document." Me: "Uhhh, so we really really have to use OpenOffice?" Prof: "Yes". My team partner (windows guy): "Yay". Me: "Sign."
Writing normal letters is very slow, sure. And making the system recognize ugly handwriting like mine is a torture for me and for the developers.

But, there's this thing called shorthand, used by secretaries who needed to write faster than her boss could speak.

It is still amazingly fast. The lack of proof of concept implementations of shorthand recognition is to me a failure in tablet user interface history.

You can't say it is not a good method without having tried it, and a computerized interface would convert the symbols to normal words in a second, providing instant feedback.
Friction points – Why customers don’t buy from you
Agreed to some extent. There's a lot of work to be done. Adobe as an additional middle man, however, won't fix anything.
Research Paper Example Gives a common Idea of Research Writing Style
Research paper writing is a very complicated task and the most of the students have problems with it. An inexperienced writer can hardly create a strong, informative and argumentative research paper because it is necessary to learn how to do it.
The Confederate constitution was mostly a verbatim copy of the US constitution, but there were a few significant changes made during its adoption. One of them was the addition of this provision to Article I:

"Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title."

Despite its association with the Confederacy, this would be great amendment to the US Constitution.
Basic version would be free, if people like it I could easily make a more company-friendly version for pay, later.
A camera is not susceptible to psychological effects i believe. Will it be bigger on a picture?
They produce open specifications for Adobe Flash, so it's 'kinda like open source.' Just like Word XML, right?
Will cash be illegal in 10 years?
Both are pretty slow. Flex is marginally faster.
I know they don't in Korea. Hangul lends itself to typing.
That is excellent news. Congrats.
I've noticed that a number of personal translator devices (still a popular category of device, despite the capabilities of cell phones) have handwriting interfaces.

(The "in Korea, handwriting interfaces are for old people" meme is struggling to escape, but I need to keep telling myself this isn't slashdot. People are actually intelligent here)
"No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web."

That argument seems to apply to Adobe more easily than it applies to Apple.
Removing the restrictions has no effect at all. Nevada, where I live and my wife teaches, changed the law to require that all teaching contracts have some type of performance based pay clause in them. The result is that the contracts for the upcoming school year offer bonuses to teachers based on performance. The requirements are poorly defined or understood. Neither the administration, teachers union or teachers understand how it will work. The general consensus is that no bonuses will be paid out, and the state will be eligible for the additional funds, for which it has already applied.
was just a Rain Man reference
I like how the colour scheme is not the signature grooveshark yellow - an attempt to limit brand tarnish?
> people are waiting for certain features to show up on their device's special build. How true is that

Very. Some manufacturers are painfully slow to release new builds.

> how practical is it to ignore and install fresh new releases from the Android team?

Depending on your phone, this can either be trivial, or nearly impossible. In general, you'll want to devices that Google itself has released, as they tend to get the most sustained attention from developers. In particular, the three Google-released devices are the Passion (Nexus One), Magic (Ion), and Dream (ADP1).

> Does doing that void any warranties?

For the Nexus One, yes. For the ADP1 and Ion, no.

> What about installing a customized build?

Installing custom builds is very simple once your device has been unlocked. You can essentially boot a "restore" image as if it were a live cd, and then use that to install new system software.

> is any kind of jailbreaking or exploitation of bugs needed to get builds not released by the manufacturer onto the device?

That varies with the device. For the Google-released devices, the most you'll need is to grab the "fastboot" tool and run "./fastboot oem unlock". Other devices, like the Milestone (Droid) do not have vendor-supported methods for unlocking.
The issue is effecting WordPress sites, unclear if anything else. I assume not DNS.

Who uses GoDaddy for anything besides DNS?
But pursuing the America's Cup wasn't.
And God help you if you forget one.

God speaks latin1, too.
I suspect they're doing all of this while on tourist visas, which may or may not be entirely kosher depending on where they're traveling.

Of course, it's also extremely unlikely that they'll get caught (except, perhaps, as a result of bragging about it on the Internet...). A guy, or bunch of guys, sitting on the beach with laptops isn't exactly an atypical sight.

Still, they might want to pick their destinations based less on the quality of the beaches and nightlife, and with more consideration towards those which aren't going to try to skewer them for taxes or visa fees if their scheme gets found out.
This page is in that list :) Under heading 4 as the shining example of page that "the same look and feel as your regular site."
Constant factors: constantly foiling you
Does this concept of "accredited investor" exist under current law in the US? The article seems to imply that it does. If so, does it apply to both equity and debt funding?

I've never heard of such a thing, or any kind of legally-imposed qualification requirements for one private party to lend/give money to another. If this exists and is enforced, I'm astonished that it hasn't attracted a great deal of outrage.

The article also talks about SEC involvement in auditing startups. What authority does the SEC have to intervene in a business that isn't publicly traded? What if I'm seeking private funding for a startup that I have no intention of ever taking public? And even if I do at some point decide to go public, how would the SEC become involved before I start planning my IPO?
For some reason, the text in the original display doesn't show, that's why this comment here should substitute:

Dear Hackers and founders,

I am working on a startup which aims to make customer development
easier, faster and perhaps lazier. We all know how important
it is to talk to customers, GainGeek (http://gaingeek.com)
makes this process easier.

My hope is that this app will resonate with all those following
Eric Ries's Lean startup and Steve Blank's customer development strategy.
I thought it would be a great idea to submit my idea to the eyes of
the most critical crowd I know. Please let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Edo.

PS: Some will note that this app could be intrusive.
My bet is that the benefit of talking to customers
will outweigh this disadvantage.
He's referring to the lack of sex issue.
TC Teardown: Zynga’s Profit Machine At Risk
Yes, I'm also curious. One iphone app generates 40k of income a month @ $.99 per unit? Interesting. I'm surprised more people aren't discussing that, rather than the "omfg you travel" and blar blar blar...
Which is worse, cauterization or hacking with a mower blade?
Get out of debt without a second job
I moved all my projects and code over to git from svn about a year ago. My workflow has improved tremendously as a result - especially working in larger teams.

That being said, resolving conflicts in git has almost always been more difficult and counter-intuitive than resolving conflicts in SVN. With git, you have to learn the "right way" to do it, which typically involves several steps or a "git reset --hard origin". I can understand the frustration coming from the guy in the linked post that this post is a response to.
I have the Pogo stylus. The problem with it, or rather with ArtStudio, Sketchpad, Brushes and all the stylus note-taking apps is the same: you cannot rest your hand on the screen. It registers touches from the hand instead of the stylus. That makes all of these apps pretty much useless as far as I am concerned: it is quite inconvenient to draw or write using these applications, even though some of them are extremely impressive otherwise. This, frankly, boggles my mind - granted the screen sensor API is closed, but is it not possible to do velocity distribution thresholding on different touch events, or maybe something more sophisticated, a Kalman filter or something, to distinguish these touches and ignore the 'stationary' ones?
Well, in reality if you have to keep bringing people together for a month at a time to an exotic place, you have a larger problem looming.

Assuming you have decent people and an engaging goal in the company, then these jaunts should really be more about strategizing and prototyping vs. doing "actual" work.

I would consider these more like regular "Demo Days" and brainstorm sessions. My personal bet would be that higher-frequency, shorter duration meetings would allow every one to come together, collaborate, get inspired, and then go off on an 8 week productivity binge. These little trips SHOULD be mini vacations for the team.

The more I think about this, I almost think you're doing it backwards. You'll get 2 months of high-productivity work (the 2 months the team is all together under your plan) and another month of mid-productivity work (the first 2 weeks of the next month after each trip) and then (IMO) a steady taper of productivity back toward zero until the next month-long getaway.

I think these meetings can serve to add momentum to your org. Keeping an object in constant, regular motion is usually more sustainable if the object gets a "shove" at more frequent intervals.
Ask HN: Comment my Twitter client UI mockup
From time to time i throw some code at one of my pet projects idea for an (m)IRC chat-like interface to follow hash tags on twitter.

My latest mockup is up at http://tweetirc.com/chat/prototype/

What do you think?
I like the idea, but I wonder how effective it would be and how many visitors would freak out and leave with a negative experience. A negative response is my immediate fear in terms of putting this on my own site. Some figures would be good once you have them.

Also, I'd lose the mouseovers. I was peering into the images trying to see the backgrounds and didn't realise that there was a mouseover until I'd finished - and at first it seemed like the images were changing randomly or on a timer or something.
Isn't snobol the ultimate text file processing language?
Steam for Mac not very Mac-like, running as superuser?
http://superuser.com/questions/140785/is-steam-for-mac-effectively-running-as-superuser
the other issue too may be driving each other crazy after 3 weeks and having to go another week with each other. One week seems like a good amount of time to spend in close proximity without getting burned out from each other. Maybe it will take some time to figure out the best ratio. You guys seemed to do really well with 1 week - what extra benefit does 3 more weeks at the same time provide?
this is exactly why I switched to namecheap not long ago
Agreed, it never ceases to amaze me how some developers seem to love writing so much pointless boilerplate code.
C4 dev conf a casualty of Apple policies
I believe I'd heard that several developers had done this and had apps on the store, I guess with pre-release versions of the compiler. I haven't heard of them being pulled, though we'll see what happens when OS 4.0 comes out (which is the one with section 3.3.1 in its developer's license).
Sucky or not, I guess one could argue that Photoshop is a somewhat successful tool, I'd say they are not pretending.
It's not a dichotomy; you could equally tell his wife to "celebrate their marriage and not bitch" about moving to somewhere with more opportunities. You should not think about someone's happiness, that does not also think about your own.
Dal peer to peer al car to car: l'ultima frontiera dell'autostop
Hulu: HTML5 Isn’t Ready for Prime Time
OK, they better do something good. Even if it's an excellent standard, or reference implementation, that others can build on. But they just got handed a ton of good will ...
Steve Jobs addresses lack of Mac design awards at WWDC
I find it suspicious that this IM conversation that took place over 6 years ago and hasn't been mentioned before, suddenly "surfaces" when Facebook is facing questions about privacy.
Cool. Please: more success stories on HN!
"best students" meaning those who are eager to learn and have supportive family situations. Teachers can't do it on their own.
Blackberry Tablet to Launch This Year
Highlight the header, you'll see "That's what she said" after "Going down for a bit". As in, she's going down (on you) for a bit.
Diaspora breaks $100k and all of Kickstarter's records
If you're talking about public conversions, very few, I would guess.

Most preachers I have heard speak on the subject like to say that if you witness to people and the number of conversions you see in your lifetime is > 0, then you can call it a success, and if the number of conversions = 0, then you can at least be confident that it had some impact according to a verse in Isaiah 55:11 that says "So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

Given that, from the street preacher's perspective, his success-rate is 100%.

As far as actual conversions, also called a Profession of Faith, I would guess that the quality of the pitch has a lot to do with the final results. Here's an example of a good pitch (American street preaching in Peru, with subtitles):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYLUpHQaiE
Me too, but I'm starting to wonder if they're holding off because they don't want to be the subject of antitrust complaints.