skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think reliable blanket wireless coverage (which is what the cell phone providers are supposedly offering) is harder to realize than people think.

What are the overheads for yourself to provide a quality wi-fi enabled home. Your workplace, likewise, expends the effort to be a device hub. On-the-go data everywhere? It's likely more difficult than you think.

The cell-tower network was funded by everyone owning a mobile phone to exchange calls... data hungry devices are still in the minority. Apple could have rolled their own "A4" 3G network if feasible. It's in their DNA to control all the pipes. The fact that they haven't tells me that the pipes are prohibitively expensive.
When Caution Carries Risk
Female Anti-Rape Condom
I really don't get the backlash about the price. If a customer uses 37signals services and gets a ton of value from the app, how is $9.99 unreasonable?
I can imagine the frustration of running a large company with thousands of employees and seeing a lack of results, coupled with evidence of employees not spending much time at work.

I just want to shove in that it's not a case of "not much time", employment is a business transaction between adults - a contractually agreed amount of time for an amount of money.

If the employees are putting in the time they and their employer agreed they would, it's not fair or accurate to say it's "not much" time.

If the contract is specified by results instead, then the employer also has no right to say "not much time", only "not good enough results".
URL Canonicalization Best Practices In Plain English
"6pm: The score stands at 34-34. In order to stay upright and keep their strength, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut have now started eating members of the audience. They trudge back to the baseline, gnawing on thigh-bones and sucking intestines. They have decided that they will stay on Court 18 until every spectator is eaten. Only then, they say, will they consider ending their contest."
Hardware accelerated canvas is pretty slick.
On the other hand, when they really have something meaningful to say I will have gotten long past the point where I click on posterous stories on hn. imo the interestingness quotient on posterous stories has been running pretty low off late.
here is a good article on using the social sites to drum up business:

http://freelanceswitch.com/finding/how-to-use-social-network...
There you go Microsoft, now was that so hard? Now we can all play happily together. I almost forgive you for IE6 .. almost.
She's an attorney -- such audit/evidence trails are essential in her profession.
according to 37signals less is more, but that doesn't apply to the price
Dupe: Discussion is at

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455280
Can AIDS Be Cured?
I wonder if he writes both, or if he has a translator whose full-time job is to watch the Russian feed, and translate.
Adobe's Ideas has an 8 minute "user guide" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nILS13_b2p8&feature=playe...). 37Signals's Draft presumably doesn't require a user guide.

If all you want to do is what Draft offers, then the extra "features" of Ideas just get in the way. It's worthwhile for some people to pay $10 for a tool that works very well rather than make do with a free, but less-than-ideal alternative.

The two products are a great example of how one can profit by selling a product with fewer features.

The key is to understand the product from the user's point of view. Draft was meant to replace a sharpie and a paper notebook. Ideas is MS Paint for the iPhone. Although the two apps have an overlapping feature set, they don't present the same value to the user.
I borrowed a friend's computer to provision my iPod Touch. (I don't have Windows or Mac OS X, so I can't run iTunes.)

I can't sync music/movies/photos to the built-in apps (this wouldn't even be an issue for someone with no computer), but I can use the web browser and third-party apps just fine.
Long an Upstart, Apple Plays New Role - Goliath
he didn't mention the 'co-sign the lease yourself or not' question... perhaps that's obvious to those of you who have funding and lawyers and stuff, but for those of us who don't, it can often be difficult to impossible to get leases without personally co-signing.
This should be the new Energizer ad.
I'm not suggesting that you post "pick my clothes for me" on stackoverflow ;) I am suggesting the same type of site where people post a picture and a small description of themselves and people respond with clothing/haircut/other suggestions that people can vote on. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would find that fun to do, not at all like doing somebody's homework.
Actually, other comments mention 2001.
Attorneys are of course the best-qualified people to advise you on this. If you are in Northern California, HN user George Grellas is the principal of a law firm that caters to a lot of startups: http://www.grellas.com/

With the proviso that I am not an attorney, here's a vary basic answer to your query:

a) If I read you right, you are the client and are hiring the design firm. I'm sure they're just trying to be helpful, but since it's your idea and your $, it should really be your NDA - you don't have to write it, but at least select it.

b) Don't assume that the plain English in the rest of the agreement is OK just because it's simple. 'Lawyer speak' isn't always necessary, but is wordy because it's precise and specific - and thus, predictable. 'Common sense' and 'obvious' statements usually depend on unstated assumptions, and those assumptions are not always well founded.

c) As far as it goes, this clause 4.1 actually looks good. It says that you own your ideas and that the design firm's access to them is limited as stated elsewhere in the NDA - which I assume specifies only what is necessary for them to perform their drawing and prototyping services. In short, this clause acknowledges and safeguards your rights.

Of course you want to keep costs down: most likely this NDA is fine, the design firm is ethical, and if you go to an attorney you'll feel like you spent several hundred or a few thousand on an umbrella when it's not even raining. But it's like the lock on your front door: it doesn't guarantee your security, it's often an annoying inconvenience, but if you don't have one you might as well just leave the door open.

The fact that you are wary of a clause which is explicitly written in your favor says to me that you are having trouble analyzing this objectively, which is only going to keep you awake at night. It's not a negative comment on you - most attorneys hire other attorneys for their personal affairs, because it's hard to be objective when it's your own interests at stake. your state bar can help with lists of lawyers, FAQs on engaging one for the first time, etc. Go with a small firm unless you are the sort of person who likes expensive department stores.
More memory will help, but just as important is adjusting the garbage collection algorithm and disabling the unnecessarily paranoid class verification that java does:

http://davidsalter.co.uk/blog/?p=332

Here's mine:

-XX:PermSize=256m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:CMSIncrementalMode
-XX:CompileThreshold=100
-XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
-XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled
-Xverify:none
-Xms1650m
-Xmx1650m

Edit: Yeah, 1650m is way more memory than I really need. I'm just fortunate enough to have 8G in this machine so I had plenty to spare.

Edit again: I use emacs in Terminal to edit /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.inito add these parameters
Chrome supports H.264. Firefox is the one being different.
There's plenty of people that want to volunteer porting projects to Windows, there are other hurdles such as Microsoft refusing to ship a C99 compiler, and getting the Windows port accepted into the main repo for the project.
Stack Overflow updates its Careers site
Even more insane is to give such power to someone on the promise they will never use it again. Or on the promise they will use it responsibly.
Optimization is typically a strength of Fortran. Do you recall which compiler switches you were using for the respective compilers and a code snippet. I have access to many compilers and would be happy to take a look at the code gen you're seeing versus what is expected.
Amazon opposes plan to end Saturday U.S. mail delivery
Longest Tennis Match Ever
How many lines of code per developer?
Curious to hear for mature products what are your approximate ratios of total lines of source code per active developer? How much code is too much such that the organization becomes incapable of reasonable maintenance?
And we should trust them completely.
I wonder if the reason that they get voted as a 'great place to work' is because the company consists mostly of people that haven't worked anywhere else (or it's just a comparison to other businesses in the KC area)?

I had someone I knew in college go off to work at Cerner in ~2003, and I remember that at the time they had a fairly good rating as a good place to work, but that most of their new hires were recent grads (at least on the software end of things).
There's a potential downside to this for Apple though: if they start allowing users to bypass carrier services, then the monthly cost of the service will start to go down as users use fewer features, but that also means Apple will get less of a subsidy from the carriers. Most people don't want to spend $700 on a mobile phone, so I'm sure they're not going to go out of their way to decrease carrier significance to any large extent.
Just to be clear, the styles we're comparing are buzz vs. long (pony-tailable) hair, right? Because the lengths in between are the real attention-sappers -- scheduled retail hair-cuts and at least some sort of daily styling, which requires (sometimes a lot of) attention.

You make good points. And we've successfully moved from the mundane to the philosophical. But as far as maintaining a clear mind, I can weather a head-buzzing every few weeks without suffering any serious thought-train derailment. I even find it rather meditative. There's something purifying and exhilarating about shaving one's head -- it's like throwing away a lot of useless shit you've been accumulating, or putting one's mental baggage astern. My head feels lighter -- and it is!
Anyone know how much they got acquired for?

I know they had about ~1 mil in sales last year.
IR resources
I love the idea of deliberately making it imprecise to serve the specific task (to sketch; and ignore details early on.) http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/getting_real_ignore_detai...

And their pricing strategy (from the comments): encouraging other people to add Campfire integration to their own apps – even free ones
Furthermore, couldn't you replace "FaceTime" with "Skype" and the article would still make sense?

"[Skype], I think, is a first step in the direction of a mobile “phone” with no mobile carrier. If and when [Skype] is supported over 3G in addition to Wi-Fi, it’ll be data, not voice — megabytes, not minutes."

Skype already has a device that works on 3G:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Skypephone_Series

And today, Skype has 529 million accounts, whereas FaceTime has 600,000 (the number of pre-ordered iPhone 4s).

It's not at all clear to me how Apple expects FaceTime to encroach on Skype's market share.
The only browsers which matter are IE, Chrome, and Firefox. The market share of every other browser might as well be a rounding error.
Maybe you're right but no matter how much bad behavior there is out there, it's still important to call people on the bad behavior you see.
Viacom Loses to YouTube: Good for User Content
And/Or hop on #fortran on irc.freenode.net :)
Concur. I've seen upper management at my company doing 70 hour weeks routinely, while their staff meanders along without so much as mandatory overtime. It's a combination of ambition, dedication, different incentives, a tighter identification with the company itself . . . I'd think twice before taking that path in life.
UX Myths : Debunking user experience misconceptions
Memcached predates github by quite a bit, actually. It was originally made as a caching layer for livejournal, and IIRC was made in the early half of the 00s. (Having a hard time finding an exact date, though.)
This is a status update from my Hacker News Experiment. I have chosen an idea to work on, and would really like some feedback!
My little brother did not have a cellphone for most of his just-completed Freshman year of college.

He had an iPod Touch with Skype and omnipresent WiFi. He called me (on my cellphone no-less!) while walking to class.

The iPod Touch already does this, even without FaceTime.
After clicking on either the up-arrow or down-arrow on comments, only that single arrow should disappear, not both. Then, you can always at least cancel out your vote if you clicked the wrong one.
That's called being technically competent, not being halfhearted. Codecs do not belong in browsers.

People want video outside of browsers. Should everything that wants to support video have its own built-in copy of every codec? That's bloated.

In addition to bloat, if each thing has its own implementation, there will be subtle (and probably not so subtle) differences in them. It will annoy users if their videos look different depending on whether they are in a browser, or they downloaded the file and are playing it in a media player.

If the codec has user-setable options, the user has to set their preferences in multiple places.
You're ignoring mobile.
I'll never forgive them for the lack of innovation after they won the browser war back than, against Netscape.

Web would be a totally different place if they continue improving IE versions with, say, a built-in DB, native push / sockets, enhanced JS api, more standards, more of everything.

(I'm a developer on the MS platform)
I've done some woodworking. The proper jig makes all the difference. I think what holds other tablet companies back is the software.
iPhone definitely matters. Which means Safari.
Official White House email transcripts from when Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan worked as Bill Clinton's staff lawyer.

The clever bit: putting it in a webmail interface rather than making people scroll through a 1000 page pdf and double check every header.
> Right. And because you don't know the particular tricks I learned, it indicates some sort of deficiency in your knowledge or character. Hmm... Nah.

Aren't you exaggerating a bit? I never judged the value of a specific field of knowledge. If you want to master Z-80 assembly language, feel free to do so. I prefer the 6502.

> No way I would be at home learning PHP for 'fun'.

Are you sure this is the right career for you? Because if programming is no fun, you will treat your job as a burden. I enjoy weekends (walking, being with friends, reading, playing with my son) as much as I enjoy weekdays (solving mind-bending programming problems, preparing lectures - will do two a month from now).

> You're effectively talking about a student

Aren't we all students? I am re-learning Smalltalk and learning Lisp. My wife is going towards her MBA. I am learning to program micro-controllers in order to build hardware for a vintage 8-bit computer. Learning is good.

> That's an absurd conclusion.

Why would it be absurd to learn how to program for an OS lineage that goes back to the 70s, that has shown incredible adaptability, is used in all kinds of business, from the tiniest to the top Fortune 10, being deployed in all kinds of exciting applications, from the tiniest cellphones to the largest supercomputers?

Why would Dick prefer to miss such a party?
This is a good article and the same scrutiny should be applied when signing any contract.

In the past I was burned by contract with a data center for colocation of servers. The contract had a really _ugly_ termination clause.

The lease term was one year and company required 30 days notice of termination or the lease would auto-renew for another one year term. After 3 years of hosting our servers at this data center the company I was a part of dissolved. When we called to cancel the colocation we missed the notification deadline by a month and the contract renewed for another year. The data center had our servers and was unwilling to negotiate an early termination.

Lesson learned.
also considered arrogance by some
IM requires separate logins to be exchanged, they exist on partitioned networks, etc. IM's handy and has its place, but it's not going to replace SMS.
thumbs up for http://soup.io
Walking around the Berkeley/Stanford campuses, absolutely OK. You can wander many of the buildings, too. The campuses are very large and very open, and people of all ages and origins are already there, so it's hard to stick out.

Office campuses are likely to shoo you away at the main visitor lobby or other entrances as a distraction they're not equipped to handle. Still, there might be some thrill to seeing the buildings/signage, as plain as they often are, from the street.

Apple's on-campus employee store is open to the public:

http://www.apple.com/companystore/

Google hosts a lot of events in parts of their campus, but finding one at just the right time is unlikely, and poking around unannounced without a staff host isn't likely to be smiled upon. There was a previous thread with some ideas on officially-blessed ways to get a closer look:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222642
Good work Microsoft. Welcome to 2008!
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/kagan-in-the-w...
Amazon CTO: The cloud is about much more than servers
maybe they all started biking to work?
> Patent lawsuits absolutely do not mean the company isn't trying its best to compete on quality.

It's just that they have a plan B for time time they can no longer compete in quality.
Asp.Net MVC for web has everything you just mentioned. The real push is towards Silverlight for web apps.
and having a little fun in the comments section by others.
Finding a high priced product more valuable is not ironic :)
Have you ever worked on a challenging project of your own just to satisfy your own interest. How much did you pay yourself?

Paradoxially people work harder on what they do for free. Not because it's free, but because they are choosing the work of their own volition. In fact we even pay other people to create challenging work for us. Ever done a crossword puzzle? Lifted weights at a gym?

The problem we have here is that there is overlap. We aren't factory workers. Most people on this board could land a cushy in-house IT-Admin job rather than run on the development treadmill, but they refuse. Instead they deliberately seek jobs that demand everything from them. Why?

There are similar issues in other fields. Attorneys work long hours, secretaries don't. Bankers work long hours, tellers don't.
An office building I used to work in tried this a few years ago. Within a few months they replaced them with flush urinals because the men's room was starting to smell like downtown San Francisco. Oddly enough, when I was in SF last month I noted that the outdoor smell of stale urine has largely been replaced by the smell of burning marijuana. It really is an improvement.
Whatever the problem is, I would bet that this memo doesn't solve the problem in any way, just makes it worse. No serious person should ever write "The pizza man should show up at 7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late." And I seriously mean never.

"We are getting less than 40 hours of work [...]" implies that it's the minimum, so I guess that's what's in the standard employee contract. But "NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they had a 40 hour job." implies he wants a tired, unmotivated, angry person to do work for him.

What would I do? Take a look at the actual issues. If employees are not at work during the time they should, just because they got used to that - first warn, then after some time find the biggest offender and fire him/her (based on not doing the time agreed in contract) to show the rule is executed. But I don't believe that's the reason - there's no point in holding a meeting late at night, because people will just sleep until that time, or do something completely unrelated. You cannot make anyone do work. Just for fun - you can try the most trivial method - 5 why-s. Try to think of 1 scenario that starts with "bad results" and is fixable at step 3/4 by forcing employees to stay at work for additional time. (in most cases you'll find bad project organisation, strange scheduling policies, conflicts of interests, etc.)

If they don't want to stay the standard hours at work, there's an underlying problem somewhere. If they don't want to stay additional hours at work, there's nothing you can do legally, apart from providing incentives (and that still doesn't guaranty that they will do any more work).

Also the guy SHOUTS in the email. Outside of internet, if you have to start shouting to make your point, you lose respect / have weak communication skills / you're probably wrong - it doesn't help you win the argument anyways.

Why do I think I could do better? Because I can identify a list of things that would make me leave the company asap, if my manager was acting that way, which is exactly the opposite of what he wants to achieve.
I upvoted you for your braveness but I strongly disagree with you. (For me) Type 2 is wrong for everybody because:
+ Been there, done that, ended sadly;
+ We're all different but our limitations are pretty much the same, respect your colleagues!
+ Every successful achieving programmer I've worked with are persons with particularly good sense;
+ Knowing how programming related skills like abstraction and logic are highly related to cleverness you can be easily tricked into seeing programming as a cleverness demonstration or competition. That should be done in college or in controlled environments(no deadlines, no changes in team).
The cartridge replaces a traditional trap, as the diagrams on the second page explain. If you just have a straight pipe, sewer gases come out, which you really don't want.

As far as I know, there is no "processing" of the cartridges; they are just thrown out after they reach the end of their lifespan.
The app and its price tag seem to embody the true spirit of Apple hardware.
this might imply their original concept of blogging via email had too small a market, and they needed to expand to be more general purpose?
It serves a very small niche: Designers / who have an ipad / who do drafting on a iPad / who use CampFire.

I don't understand why 37Signals would release such an application except for riding the iPad frenzy and testing the water.

Something I would have been impressed with is if they added the possibility to add user interactions in the draft. When I click on this drawn red button, it goes on the next screen, etc...

(Sometimes, 37Signals is a bit too extreme with Simplicity (Draft / TadaList))
Of course, there are the downsides:

1) sunburn
2) hats can get itchy

but as your list is longer than mine, I'll concede.