skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
.NET has underlying it 30 years of carefully-optimised Windows C/C++ code. it makes using all the Windows API really easy.

Do you tell people that "an elephant is like a tree", much?

I think you are talking about WinForms there. There's a lot more to .Net than targeting the "30 years of Windows C/C++ code" that makes up WinForms.

There's WPF on the desktop, and WPF's little brother, silverlight. The's serving web pages via ASP.Net WebForms and MVC variants, And serving data over web services. One could spend several careers using .Net without using as a wrapper for Windows' C Dlls.
Ask HN: How does one handle politics and bureaucracy in a growing start up?
I joined a start up around September when there were a few people, about 4 at the time, and it's recently grown over the past few months to around 18-20 people.

We are all exceptionally smart individuals, but I feel that it's slowly becoming bureaucratic and it's demoralizing me and my work. Now, instead of focusing on the problems or tasks at hand -- which is an overwhelming task of itself, I have to worry about who's talking about who and what decisions are being made where.

Certain individuals are starting to have influential company wide decisions, even encroaching on "technical decisions" which seems to me like it might hinder productivity of a start-up. I guess what's really bothering me is that these decisions are made without input from others, and you're basically handed a "deal with it and shut up" card which kind of puts things in perspective.

For the most part, I feel that if you do a good job, you'll eventually be rewarded handsomely if a start up succeeds, but I feel that with all the politics, I might have to start worrying about what image is presented to the CEO, and by whom.

I guess it might be that we're quickly growing out of a start up phase and moving towards becoming a real company, but I am starting to see a pattern that I will have to step up my politics in order to ensure an appropriate role in the company.

I want to see how the HN community deals with these issues, because I haven't really seen or read anything that address this topic.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.
-D
The Culture of Exposure
That’s a little like hearing what Brad Pitt got paid for his last movie and wondering why the producer didn’t instead hire Brad Pitman for scale.

Oh you’ve never heard of Brad Pitman? You’re not familiar with his work? But you are familiar with Brad Pitt’s work, right? After all, he’s an experienced actor and producer with not one, but two, Academy Award nominations and a portfolio full of household names.

Bzzzt. Horrible analogy. Brad Pitt isn't worth what he's worth because of his portfolio full of household names. He commands his rates because he is a household name. People will go see movies just because he's in them. He's not getting paid for talent, experience, or attractiveness. He's getting paid for his personal brand. That brand all but guarantees that the filmmakers will earn a handsome return on their investment.

You, however, are an iPhone app developer. App purchasers have never heard of you. They will not turn out in droves to buy an app just because you worked on it.
On mobile webapps/sites, absolutely. I have built a gracefully degrading/progressively enhanced mobile website here: www.zocalodesign.com (hit/spoof with mobile browser)

The effort it took me to make this site gracefully degrade was completely not worth it, even though it wasn't THAT difficult for this site. However, my client actually only wanted it to work "on the iPhone".

Furthermore, now with plans for Google to expose native hardware APIs in their mobile browser via JavaScript, how do you gracefully degrade access to the camera or accelerometer?

Finally, on desktop browsing experiences, this argument won't even be around soon, mainly because the current battle is native versus browser (engine) not JS versus non-JS. We are building apps in the browser that are giving us native desktop functionality. You simply cannot do this at the level that people expect (in regards to user experience) nor functionality without JavaScript.
>I work full-time for (approximately) 9 months followed by 6 months unpaid leave during which I make comics. The people I tell about this arrangement usually say they would love to the free time but could not afford to earn less.

My wife and I started a business together and took (and 5 years in still have) about 40% of our previous joint earnings collectively (and she was working part-time). We did this 1) to work together, 2) to bring up our children ourselves, 3) to bring art to the masses, 4) because we're crazy.

It's amazing but this month I managed to eke another £12 per mo off our (domestic) outgoings. We could definitely use more money but I've been surprised by how much we managed to cut our costs. It seems that if we went back to our previous pay levels we almost wouldn't know what to do with the money (except we would, pay off the mortgage for one).

tl;dr I think you'd surprise yourself by how frugal you can be.
Cheap Unlocked Phones
A few? One?

I'd venture the guess the number is very small or perhaps even zero.

At that rate he'd burn through a reasonable budget for an iPhone app within weeks. And I mean the entire budget, which would normally include graphics design and backend work.

I have no doubts he could get an app off the ground faster than most teams - given he lives up to his bold claims, which is entirely possible.

But as with every software project that's only a very small part of the story. The elephant in the room is maintenance and ongoing development.

If you have $500k and were to launch a business around an iPhone app what would you rather do? Give most of that money to a single person, get your app in 8 weeks and call it a day?

Or would you rather hire a team, pay significantly less for the initial launch, get it in perhaps 16 weeks, but then still have money in the bank and a committed team for further steps?

Hiring this guy at that rate just seems like a bad business decision for pretty much any project. If anyone does then, well, kudos to him for parting the dumb from their money.
I think the best analogy he made was the 70s/80s. It isn't that one is necessarily better than the other, but they are different. It takes some time to assimilate from one to the other.
I don't know him, so I can only go by what he wrote there. So all I see are two things he cites as accomplishments, yet with that, he is nearly guaranteeing a hit. I don't know of anyone -- writer, filmmaker, etc -- who'd base any sort of track record on just two outings. Hell, even Spielberg had a bomb when he was hot: 1941.

Here is Steve Jobs on designer Paul Rand, who Jobs wooed from IBM to have him design the NeXT logo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak

So ask yourself, would Steve Jobs think the guy who wrote this post was worth the money he was asking?
David Boies beat Microsoft once - Can he do it again for Salesforce.com?
I believe some places have very tightly optimized code. What I question is the risky assumption that under every .NET class you have carefully optimized code, refined for over 30 years. What did I use 30 years ago? Oh... A 6502. I had an Apple II+.

I also believe the Java stack has some very carefully optimized code too. It certainly has the performance to back up that affirmation. Besides that, it was designed to be easily portable to other OSs and architectures, a feature that's more important, IMHO, than speed under Windows.

Finally, you should only optimize for speed the code your profiler says has big impact on your performance. The rest you should optimize for readability and correctness. There is a lot of very subtle bugs we introduce when trying to optimize stuff and it's much easier to optimize correct code than to fix blazingly fast, heavily optimized buggy code.
NUnit is a more than Trivial utility, and is free.
They are borrowing money each month, without paying interest on it, so it does cost the credit card companies money.
How transistor really works, an alternate viewpoint
Resveratrol in Red Wine May Prevent Immature Fat Cells From Maturing
The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
Study: Open-Source gaining significant traction in the enterprise
One day, Mr. Lee is going to feel deeply embarrassed that he wrote, and published that piece.

Until then, I imagine he's going to get four or five clients a year, bill them 50,000 each, and laugh his way around Costa Rica.
I met Zed in person a few months ago at a meetup. I had an awesome 45 min chat about everything technology. What a nice guy. I wish him all the best.

Mike Lee's blog title is "motherfucker". From that alone you can derive what type of person you're about to do business with. Theres no question his experience and skills are incredible. Fact of the matter is there are other successful app developers who likely have a resume that is comparable.

Think of it like dating. Would you date the hottest girl if she had a shitty personality? Maybe :)
This claim seems completely specious:

With a config file you have to hunt around for the right stanza, type in the right exact change, restart the server, and pray it works. With SQL you can actually query the database, and run updates (then pray that works) which are much easier to get right and do.

With apache, I make an edit, check the syntax with apachectl configtest, then restart if the syntax checks out. The kinds of errors that get by the syntax check (bad regex in rewrite rule, typo in a host name etc) are just as likely in SQL. Text files allow me to use the same version control tools, text editors etc I use for the rest of development. Deployment is just a matter of copying a simple text file around etc.

Putting this all in SQL is a solution in search of a problem.
> In this economy we need more money being spent.

Economic activity is not economic productivity. Spending money doesn't make us richer. Producing does.

Encouraging people to work more would help the economy; encouraging to people to spend more would only help to the extent that it stimulates people to produce stuff for sale.
"Don't suck" is good advice, but only to people who don't have a problem anyway.
Wood of course. They are breeding giant mutant trees.
Use jQuery or another framework. The only issues with JavaScript in IE6 is interacting with the DOM. The actual JavaScript implementation is fine.
"im so great at coding because i've spent so little of my life doing it! that makes me better, qed"

huh?
Good troll post, with the up votes it looks like there are other trolls here. If you're going to say something like this then please back it up with some data.

Visa is a financial giant within the credit card industry. I'm sure they have created a secure platform or they would be held liable for any mis-appropriated funds. Also,
Visa would be aware of the fact that any bad press regarding a hacked platform would cause users not to use it. So I'm fairly certain they would have taken their time to implement a robust security design, even though you have misgivings about the .aspx URL.
The article describes the basics of vipassana (insight) meditation. The same description applies to zazen, the meditation practice in Zen. I believe it is actually the basis for all meditative practice.

You can layer on certain guided thoughts (like mantras and chants), but meditative practice is more powerful the simpler it is. You must strip away as much as possible -- to just sit and bring the body, breath, and mind into sync using breath focus and an aware non-judgmental mind. There are many books written on the subject; I can personally recommend Mindfulness in Plain English (free version at http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html).

Meditation of this form is key to transforming your entire life. It is the gateway or pathway you can use to find and accept your true self and see yourself and your life for what it is. It is how you truly see that you cannot escape the present moment and that you have the full ability to choose how you relate to it. Sogyal Rinpoche says it better than I: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tIBYxed16s.
Losing money in its time-value. Gotcha.

Edit: I thought they still made money off of the vendor fees though?
They might turn out in droves because he offered a $30,000 dollar prize for solving a puzzle in his app "Puzzlloto". Which has been pulled from the app store...

http://puzzllotto.com/
I don't think you're supposed to hire him to build a whole app.

You hire him to give advice for an hour or two so you get pointed in the right direction, or review some code, or fix one bug your team is stuck on, or he can help you find the right cheaper person to hire.
I believe he's saying that he'd love not to.
If you're good, you'll get a job. I agree about SV job market. I'm getting pinged by recruiters everyday, mostly for Hadoop and Java work.
Neil Gaiman also took a lot of flack when it was revealed how much he charged for speaking engagements. But when he explained his reasoning, I came to see how his high fee rate was justified.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/political-football-in-...

Similarly, if Mike is entertaining a lot of contracting requests, a surefire way to filter out the wheat from the chaff is to set a high contracting fee rate.
Some people react poorly to meditation -- even having hallucinations. See this story for more examples:

http://www.sfweekly.com/2002-08-28/news/bad-vibes/

So sure, try it, but if it doesn't feel right, don't force it.
Precisely. PayPal's core functionality is the ability for anyone to receive money. The ability to give money to a select few electronically is 1970s era technology.
Nope, it's a different solution to the same problem. Like you said, if they're equivalent solutions, yet the sqlite3 one is simpler (code is smaller by far) and has other advantages (migrations, tooling, schema) then sqlite3 wins.

Also, I still stand by that getting a SQL update correct is much easier than editing an apache config file. Only The Spaghetti Monster knows how Apache configs actually work (and he works for Microsoft).
"Bars" is not a unit of useful comparison. What happens to your cell signal dBm when you do that?

(For one, if you have excellent coverage, handling the antenna only makes it slightly less excellent. If you have already shoddy coverage, it's a bigger problem.)
Companies have the right to pick whoever they want to lend money to, for any reason except legally rejected ones.

Part of the unexpected side effects of credit card reform is that when you reduce the profits of certain classes of customers, this causes the companies to not be able to carry the less profitable loss leaders, so companies start cherry picking the best customers.

It's like how 80-90% of a banks customers make it no money at all. They are all loss leaders. They make their money on a very small percentage of the customers.
Does anyone here really know if the author is serious? I honestly can't tell, having never heard of this guy, if this is an instance of Poe's Law or Stephen Wolfram-style megalomania (well, at least Wolfram has more to show than "not one, but two number one titles on the App Store").
Then, come talk to me when you can change the nginx config on 100 hosts based on the hostname and three sections of the configuration file using sed and awk.

If I have a section of a config file that's host-specific I'll bust it out into an include and generate just the relevant parts.

Go take a look at the nginx code for loading configurations and then go write an nginx module. Figuring out how to get configuration settings out of the thing is horrible.

Putting settings into SQL doesn't magically solve this problem. As an admin I'm still going to have to know what fields and values each module expects. Much worse, I'm also going to have to manage tree-structures in SQL for directives with subdirectives, which is something even full-time SQL people often struggle with.
Song/ad in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4CEDFQBos
You can sometimes get away with removing features under the guise of a "compact" version for a new platform, e.g. OSX -> iOS, WPF -> Silverlight
That description of meditation uses terms which cause a lot of confusion. Focusing on anything leads to problems. Dismissing thoughts leads to repression and unconscious expression of the thoughts. The way my teacher puts it is "rest in the experience of breathing." That means fostering awareness of every aspect of experience: the physical, the emotional and the mental.

As for "effective," if you practice with any hope for improving your life, you're likely to end up disappointed. That said, I do two hours of dzogchen meditation a day, one hour when I've just gotten up, and one just before bed. This allows me to be highly functional on five hours of sleep a night. (I've always gotten about five hours of sleep a night, but this allows me to function that way) and has opened up a world of new possibilities in emotional awareness and emotional regulation. It does force awareness of the pressing problems in life, which is uncomfortable, but better, in the long run, than ignorance.
I contacted a company that I had done interviews with but had been biding their time. I let them know that I needed to make a decision NOW and I really wanted to work them, and so pretty please hurry up, thankyouverymuch.

So the TL;dr is "give companies you interviewed with who never got back to you a kick in the ass." The other assertions are conjecture with no connection to the parable.
Mac OS X to be rebranded iOS desktop?
His Ruby

for line in ARGF
for word in line.split
if word.match(/ing$/) then
puts word
end
end
end

I'd write as

for line in ARGF
puts line.split.grep(/ing$/)
end

Or

puts ARGF.map{|line| line.split.grep(/ing$/)}
Ok, that's just plain wrong. Stores like the Apple Store or Fry's make their biggest margins on the accessories. Of course they care about selling as many any the can. You really think the margin on an iPhone is anywhere nearly as big as the margin on a rubber iPhone case?

Any economist will tell you there is cost associated with having inventory sitting on the shelves and not moving. Floorspace in an Apple Store, or any store for that matter, isn't free. There's rent, opportunity cost, maintenance, etc. Basically, if people stopped paying high prices for rubber cases at a store, the store will drop the price because there's cost associated with it sitting there. Maybe Apple can endure a lot more pain than their competitors, but that's not magic, that's because of the pile of cash they're sitting on. If they had less cash, they wouldn't be able to endure as much pain in the market. Yes, maybe there's other forces at work, but basic market forces don't stop applying just because it's Apple.
I'm solving the problem of migrations, automation, tooling, and simplicity. Yes, you can do the many of the same things in both, and if you're an old school "I-ssh-into-100-boxes-all-day" sysadmin then they're the same thing.

If you're a modern system administrator who automates, automates, automates, then this is better.

For example, my challenge still stands, load an nginx config and tell me what version of nginx it is for. If you can't even do that then how can you automate it better than a sqlite3 file (remember, sqlite3 file, NOT RDBMS).
The Openness Elixir
That's true of every job, no? You wouldn't see the top 0.1% of archaeologists, paleontologists, or even aromatherapists out of work for long.
This is coming from the dude who used to work for free and live in Wil Shipley's basement? Wow.
Considering that you already built a poker product and some trading programs and that betting on fantasy sports will be the next major thing and there is no industry leader yet, I would probably look into creating a fantasy sport product with a trading component in it.

Something that you can sell to media operators or gambling sites either as a standalone product or white label.

Coding and selling.
I am installing it right now. One issue (or not): I tend to use different versions of Clojure libs for different projects, etc. and this looks like you install packages globally on your clj setup. Looks well worth checking out.
They may be equivalent in terms of functionality, but I'm having a very hard time guessing how they might be equivalent in ergonomics.

For instance, how would you represent something like this in SQL?
http://topfunky.net/svn/shovel/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
Please don't let JSON go the way of XML, with namespaces and complexity.
Hallucinations are very common once you get high enough concentration. For example simple visual hallucinations (lights) is commonly associated with the onset what is called "access concentration". Complex hallucinations are also possible, visiting eg the "realm of the hungry ghosts" . A lot of this kind of stuff is talked about in
http://www.interactivebuddha.com/mctb.shtml
I don't anticipate it being an issue at all. I've been involved in the hiring processes, and I don't care about gaps. What I care about is skill set and personality. It doesn't matter to me if you took 10 years off, if you had the skills and personality I wanted, I would hire you.
Because combing through large amounts of data in search of a hypothesis is as old as the hills. (In fact, the dangers of generating false hypotheses were already detailed on HackerNews a few days ago.) Brin isn't proposing some new way of doing science, he (I think) is just suggesting that the current mentality/funding-structure/whatever is not set up to support this type of analysis optimally.
You don't get 1k an hour without high high availability
Fascinating definitions but this has more than a whiff of crack pottery. Few things encourage economic activity (and productivity) like a rich person coming with an open wallet.

How are people to work more when there's not money to pay them?
There are dozens of things that would have to be broken to make this work, for instance sys.set_trace. Either tracing is broken, or tracing is rewritten with a new threading strategy (that's not this strategy) or you're back to GIL-land.
First, no, if you actually read the nginx code for modules they each have to define their own little schemas in raw C code using some undocumented or barely documented C structs. In the sqlite3 database any modules I do will be equal citizens, able to have their own tables, and query the database. Much more orthogonal solution.

So yes, putting them in SQLite (not IN AND RDBMS), does magically solve it, and does it for all the languages that know sqlite3, which is all of them.

As for having to know about the structure of the database and know trees and stanzas and things like that: Did you RTFA? I said there'd be handy tools for dealing with it so you don't need to know this stuff. Seriously, you think I'm going to foist a full on SQL schema on anyone?

That'd be about the stupidest thing ever. Of course I'm going to have tooling that makes this easier to work with, and in fact you can write your own tools to manage it.
Err, I meant to make it clear that I'm comparing their public writing style, not how they are in person.
I admit I was way off - Windows has only been around since 1985 or so, and in usable form since 1990. And Java does have some very fast code. And I agree about optimisations too. It's easy to go overboard to get more speed.
That "absolute authority" being that they can demand your identification. Not too scary.