skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More blather from the guy who wanted devs to stay on for years in dead end jobs so people like him wouldn't discriminate against "job hoppers" and when he got thrashed on HN for that article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287110), wanted to give us advice on "How to improve civility on HN" (http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/06/03/some-tips-to-i...) which had its own discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400882.

As for the article itself, summary -> "As many of your employees as possible should be collocated. I have weird preferences on which specific employees (with specific titles!) can and can't be co located and will fund only companies which meet those criteria."

Useful nonetheless. Potential founders get fair warning on which VCs to run from.
Dale and I were yacking on IRC about this a bit and I'd started to Firebug perl.org as an example of where grid alignment can make a big difference in perceived quality of design:

Before:

http://img.skitch.com/20100706-5hspebiyxsf8cdk4dk1itfdb9.png

After:

http://img.skitch.com/20100706-bn6hbwa1qsb2q8isdjnn254p9y.pn...
I agree. Native apps are great if you have some features you want to implement that aren't practical in a web app, but I can't think of any case where a website with a native app for mobile devices has any good excuse not to also have a web app to fall back on.
Paying money for a domain name is so 1998, go with the name hack or use another name entirely. Google will save you.
The problem with crowdsourced design
It's not that hard when you're selling a company with cashflow and / or IP. I don't think being a single founder and being a team player are necessarily orthogonal.
Forced upgrade? I know many, many, many people that are still using a first generation iPhone, iPhone 3G, or iPhone 3GS. There are, of course, enthusiasts that will get every new revision, just as there are enthusiasts for any sort of product. I think you're ignoring a large population of people that are content with their "old" iPhone models.
With things like games, you can see that an app could be the only option. While HTML5 is almost there, it still doesn't offer the performance and capabilities of a native app, while Apple's stance on Flash means Flash-based games are a no-no.
I'm working in Taiwan for past 5 years
Let's hear it for Singapore.
Does the iPhone 4 fit into the 1st gen dock without any modifications like the ones described in this article? I think I still have my old dock packaged away in a box somewhere...
Thanks, I will try to clarify my rants better in the future :)

I have only looked at web forms, I guess. Never actually formally been taught anything to do with .net. That was enough to turn me off.
I really have to disagree here. I think this is absolutely the wrong attitude to have towards the design community. If someone came to this community and asked to build them an app for free they would get shut down.

Instead of putting up $300 on 99 design have a look around for a designer that makes logos that you like the look of and send them an email and ask what they can do for that amount. You might only get a few hours of their time, but you're probably going to get a much better result, and you'll be doing the whole design community a favour by not asking for free work.

EDIT: As a stop-gap, the inkscape option that pwim suggested sounds good.
I'm not a huge fan of domain hacks. I would definitely at least try for the .com. If the person hasn't really had much interest in the name, then maybe they'll sell it in the 3-figure price range.
Ash does some simple and inexpensive logo design work - http://inkash.com/Print
I agree that spending a little time trying to pick another name is good, but these days it's almost impossible to find a .com that makes a decent name.

To pick a name where you'll be able to get name.com, it has to be something really out there. Something foreign (Heroku), something fairly random (thesixtyone, Weebly, 280 North), some weird spelling (Disqus, Xobni (haven't seen too many backwards-word sites. could be some gems there), or something else strange.

I'm not saying that you can't find a good name that's a little more direct, just that your odds are a lot worse, especially if you want a reasonably short domain name (which you do).

So I guess if I were looking for a project name soon, I would briefly try a few obvious things, then look for japanese words, try reversing a word, etc.
Fast Company is looking for 2010’s Most Influential Person. Be In The Nov Issue.
Yes, it fits pretty nicely.
Related, the "Which American accent do you have?" quiz. apparently I have a "Northeastern" accent. I'm from Australia, so I can't say that is particularly accurate as to the location, but it did pick up a number of features in my speech. It is interesting doing the quiz to see what words sound the same to some people.

http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action=go_detail&sub_ac...
The World Changes But Domain Names Stay The Same
If I recall correctly, Clojure does something like this on most of its basic types. Since it wants users to avoid in-place modifications, it provides data structures that have modification functions that return new instances of the data structure with the changes made. These also do not regenerate the whole structure; they only use memory to point to the one modified/added element.

Please correct me if this is false.
It sounds very likely that you have faulty ram (use Memcheck) or an overheating graphics card. It could also be an old Motherboard BIOS.

I say this because I have had the same thing (crashing games) on my own computers and eventually traced it to those causes.
The notational conventions I adopted, and why (EWD 1300)
Orange County Website Design
Even among more traditional businesses, you see more than one founder being the norm.

For example, in a retail or fast food establishment, one person will usually handle the operations side and the other will handle the business side.

I really don't think a startup is really a startup if you don't have anybody working with or for you. That's also legally reflected in the difference between a sole-proprietorship and C/S corps.
Couldn't you just CC posterous? And for the archive, forward the mails to posterous?

I may be perhaps missing a finer point on why conversion is better.
The sugar cane machine
"you'll be doing the whole design community a favour by not asking for free work."

This is a free market. Supply and demand. If people are willing to do quality work for free, let them. If someone is looking for quality work and they find it for free, they should take it. Doing a group of professionals "a favour" does not enter into the equation.

"If someone came to this community and asked to build them an app for free they would get shut down."

That's because no one made millions because of a logo. Apps are simply more valuable than logos, period. And they require more skill to create.
What can I work on for two months?
I'm currently in summer vacation and was wondering what I can do to push my python knowledge/skills further.

I just recently learned python from diveintopython last month and I've built some small scripts and utilities for personal use; however, I'm somehow unsatisfied with this. I just feel like I need more, maybe something bigger.

I literally have spent days trying to come up with an idea of a good project that I could do but I just can't come up with anything and I don't think I have enough python skills to contribute to an open source project. I wouldn't know how to start either.

So, HN, I'm wondering if you have any tips or advice that you can pass on to me? If it's any help, I'm interested in text processing, data parsing, stuff like that.
That is probably what he meant when he gave his own, strogly non-rhotic pronounciation of "err" as an example for how people might pronounce "her". But without everybody knowing how to read and type IPA, you can't be to sure about anything in discussions about phonetics.
Or perhaps this is a grim answer to Fermi's Paradox: the galaxy is quiet because someone preemptively wiped out the competition a long time ago.

Except us?
"Footnotes and modern spelling"? For Dickens?
"Basically women aren't generally willing to devote their lives to the kind of intellectual pursuits that 90% of the time poor, downtrodden, old and alone."

But women are totally willing to devote their lives to the kind of pursuits like caring for the children, sick, and elderly in their family that 90% of the time result in them being poor, downtrodden, old, and alone. They just play the odds better by doing work and not getting paid for it.
And then on top of that, they write articles about how it sucks. These women are getting out of control!

I think the list was right to include only men. But your idea that women aren't willing to devote their lives to intellectual pursuits 90% of the time is disgusting. Most people only paid for their sons to be educated. What kind of intellectual pursuits from 90% of women would you expect to magically appear from that scenario? Now that it's acceptable for women to be educated. They make up 55% of college students, so we can probably expect more contributions in the future. Sure computer science and engineering are severely lagging, and it will take some time and effort to introduce that field to more women, but it's not because "women aren't willing to devote their lives to those kinds of intellectual pursuits"
A Professional Logo Design – What all does it mean?
Then let me give a brief on this. This is the Age of the Internet. And as we are well aware of the fact that its use has cut all the boundaries and now, everything in this world is accessible at a single click.
Actually I think you're right. I don't actually pronounce an "r" sound at the end of "her", I just use a different non-r vowel from the one I use for "father". Never mind, I take it back.

I'm still skeptical about rhoticity in African languages.
Ars reviews Android 2.2 on the Nexus One
Every week there is an article about how nobody uses the URL bar anymore; they just type in the company name and click the first Google result. In that case, projectna.me will do just fine.

If you are going to advertise on TV and billboards, then you need a .com. Otherwise, people will just be clicking links or getting the email from their address book, so you could just as easily be 293874djkhae98745jmdcf.com.net.org.lol. Google will save you.

OTOH, I bet "project name" has some pretty high-ranking results already, and you may never show up. Who knows.

(My personal page is apparently the second result for "jrock", which is a pretty popular subject that my website is completely unrelated to. So who knows.)
I think it would be a pretty rare squatter who'd turn down say $300 free and clear for an obscure domain, provided you don't clue him in to your interest. As one of the other commenters said, just approach it casually and don't clue him into the fact that you want this domain badly enough to post on HN about it.

Being friendly always helps; don't seem annoyed by the fact that he's squatting, don't say stuff like, "well, you're not using it anyway", etc.

That's point #1. The second point is: why do you really need the .COM anyway? Do you anticipate a lot of people typing your domain in directly? Won't they use Google? The competitive advantage of .COM vs. .XYZ is nothing like it used to be IMO. Take 4chan.org and 4chan.com as a colorful example.

The bottom line is that if your product is useful and your website is indexed, people will find your site. They're not going to hit the parked page and think your site doesn't exist. I mean, if you were selling lolcats it would be one thing but for an SaaS product with tech-savvy users?

Also, don't go through the automated "make an offer on this domain" process that some registrars (eg Godaddy) have. In my experience that increases the perceived value of the domain, because the guy on the receiving end gets a nice colorful email, etc, "ooh! somebody's interested in your domain". Just send a short, boring three-liner to him directly.
Save NYC sublets and vacation rentals from anti-competitive bill
I hope you never misstype your password on OpenBSD.
99designs.com
Do you know the book from Steve Blank? What are the difference between them. Is it worth a buy, if you own the "Four Steps to Epiphany".
99designs.

I feel bad about it because I would hate to see a programmer in the same boat. The truth is I just haven't found a versatile designer that's reasonably priced whose work I consistently like.

As long as 99designs consistently provides better results for less money i'll probably keep using it.
Drug Submarine Seized In Ecuador Is Huge Leap For Smugglers
Nicely observed, but I have two just for the records (again, I know):

i.) this is a list of/for CS professors; RISC expands to Research Institute for Symbolic Computation which is a CS/Math department of Prof. Buchberger who discovered the famous Groebner bases.

ii.) AFAIR (too many years gone since), the A* algorithm is pretty much a generalization for graph traversal. I remember my professor showing us that how by either prepending or appending nodes to visit to a list either gives depth-first or breadth-first traversal. So I think in a way at least both lists agree on the most important algorithm...

edit: obviously I forgot to state that a tree is a graph, too.
“The biggest thing I fought against is just laziness” [clip]
Planting Flowers and Fruit Trees
A worthwhile cause perhaps, but flagged nonetheless.
How many pages has this book? I don't see the number anywhere. Could be my fault though.
IPChanged.com Change IP Address Via Web Proxy Server
UK Government spends thousands on iPhone apps
"ac.be" is captured as the hostname here, but that's a domain suffix (it should be ucl.ac.be). It might be worth switching the HN suffix list to the Mozilla's suffix list? http://publicsuffix.org/
This is great. I created the achievements mock-up article primarily because I was excited about tracking my National Film Registry movies. And this site has that! Thanks!
I'd like to get your feedback on how good you are with
women, since I'm working on a solution for this problem
many men have

What kind of solution do you have in mind? Are you aware of all of the thought that has gone into this area via the "seduction community?"

I was the stereotypical nerdy/geeky kid growing up and was always really shy when it came to talking to women and have not had a tremendous amount of success in that regard. But the lessons I learned from the seduction community / PUA community have made a big difference for me. I still wouldn't call myself good with women, but better than I was. I won't even take a stab at quantifying that though... the whole thing is just a bit too nebulous, IMO.
Don't pay squatters a red cent. Be creative but also realistic. A crisp unique name is better for SaaS than an obvious phrase. The quality of your service will set you apart, and fwiw, Google is not called SearchEngine.com.
You understand that you're assuming everyone here is a straight man, right?
Show HN: Turn scripts from userscripts.org into Safari Extensions
I would even bet that disqus.com didn't just go to namecheap.com and say "hi, I'd like to pay 9.95 on disqus.com, please". Most pronounceable 6-letter domains are already being squatted on.

In my experience, it really can't hurt to approach the seller and see what you can negotiate. Just make it clear that you have a plan B, and plan C, and so on, and tell them "I have a budget of $xxxx--are you willing to sell". Be willing to walk away, and make sure they understand that.

Finally, keep in mind that a domain for which you pay a premium is an asset that, at worst, you can take to squatting on and try to resell someday. So even if it appears to come with a steep price tag, you should recognize that it's part investment along with the obvious expense part--just like a car or a house.
The Origin of the &lt;blink&gt; Tag
Minor bug report: The url has > & < stripped rather than escaped, so I needed to resubmit with the > & < replaced with &gt; and &lt;
FreeNAS is awesome and extensible. Out of the box it's quite functional and it's open source.

It's the backbone of my work/home network. All the Linux boxes have it mounted in the home directory, so all the machines with Rhythmbox think it's local. All the windows machines can access it easily.

There are a dozen services you can enable as your needs dictate. Setup is straightforward through a web interface. Extra bonus it runs headless on crap hardware, in my case a 433mghz Emachine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS
I agree, however I feel that in almost every case, regexes are only natural for matching regular languages.
Multiple video summary tool. Condenses many videos into one short, concise summary, with the ability to jump into the "full" video at a click.

Users watch the source video. They click and hold a button to determine which parts are important as a summary. The software builds a model of which parts most people find most beneficial as a summary.

The system then creates a single video out of these, first version could just be a simple playlist with time in/out markers.

The idea would be to condense entire sections of khanacademy to 10-20 second summaries, so you can see where you are lacking quickly and then jump into the detail.

Just another one of my ideas I don't have time to try :)
You beat me to the punch. It'd be nice for a title to specifically address heterosexual men; otherwise it comes off a bit sexist and heteronormative.
I have a friend / former co-worker whose sister is a graphics design student. She (the sister) created the last logo I needed, and I'll probably go back to her in the future.
that background... geocities?
Did you have experience with this? Do you have any experience with logo competition and logo designers?
Oh yeah, web designers love when people ask for free work because they "love to do it anyway" or because its "good for their portfolio"

/sarcasm
More accurate summary: author (me) believes that teams that colocate the three most critical people (CEO, VP Product & CTO) perform much better. I think some developers can be remote.
After writing a user script for adding a download link to Mixest, I wanted an easy way to install it in Safari. Firefox already has Greasemonkey and Chrome has native support for userscripts.org, so I thought Safari needed some love.

If anyone has suggestions on how to generate an archived, signed extension instead of just a folder, I would love to implement a solution.
You can counter-offer. I offered a domain-squatter half what they asked, and they sold to me immediately... leaving me thinking that I could have offered much less.

Maybe choose a different name. "Project name" is probably hard to google for. That's another reason for making up words. It's easy to test for uniqueness by googling it yourself.

Choose a .com name. ".com" names are helpful because people expect it (and sometimes ponder a little over why it isn't a .com); and browsers try automatically complete to that first.
Oh yea, I also like the integration with oEmbed. First time I've seen it. Definitely will play with embed.ly when I get the chance.

It appears that you're rendering the embedded content using AJAX? I tried pasting a YouTube link directly, and nothing happened. Wrapping it in a proper 'a href' tag triggered the embed, so I'm guessing there's no sophisticated URL-detection.
Hà Nội, Việt Nam
One thing that the author does not account for is the cost of the commute. If the average total daily commute is 1 hour, over 10% of the day is lost to the commute.

That coupled with the gas (and pollution) necessary to get the workforce from point A to point B, means there is a heavy tax on our resources and time on having everybody work in a particular spot.

Collaborative technology is getting better. Many times email (or the next iteration of communication technology) is better than meetings.

I also personally find I get more done from home than from the office because it is a more relaxed atmosphere. I can focus and easily pace around (which helps me think) without bothering anybody. At work, I'm often distracted and am not as happy (that has got to count for something).

Anyways, I cannot wait to have the freedom to work from a location of my choice.
Science Careers,from the Journal Science
Problem: They are all crazy.
I actually tried that (I thought it was that simple too) but the formatting came out all strange.

I sent a note to Posterous support, and they said that Posterous was not meant for email newsletter archives and I should not use it for that reason.

Weird but for some reason it doesn't quite work and they seem to not be focusing on that.
A whole class of Internet startups, including AirBnb (YC-funded) are affected by this anti-competitive legislation pushed forward by big-money NYC hotel interests.
The Perils Of Opinionated Software
Ask HN: Help with naming our new website?
I teamed up with a couple tech bloggers I know to try join forces and start up our own site based around commuter tech.. but we can't decide on a name.. I know i'm new here, but i'm a looong time reader.. and just hoping you guys can help pick one, or have any advice on which would be best to sum up our purpose?

We've got 3 options we put on a temporary site, to ask for people's opinions: http://wirelesstrek.com/

Appreciated in advance any advice the mighty HN can offer us...
I got "Western", even though I'm from the Midwest. It says: If you really want to sound "neutral," learn how to say "stock" and "stalk" differently. I actually associate that with a more East coast accent.
Markdown support would be pretty rad, I'm gonna think how I could integrate that to notepad.cc :)

I like this app though. I think it's purpose would be different than notepad.cc. Again -- putting stuff in a text box and saving it is a pretty widespread feature!
A Virtual Girlfriend? Yes, iPhone Has an App for That.
Ask HN: Should I use a Groupon-like site?
I am a partner in a retail business. We've been inundated by calls from Groupon clone salespeople (we do business in an area where Groupon doesn't exist, but has many successful clones).

To be honest, I dislike Groupon because it causes our industry to engage in behavior that seems to have a similar result as a price war. I think there exist many customers who now say: "I want to buy X, I'll just go onto one of the many Groupon clones and find one where X is being discounted today."

Moreover, I'm afraid that customers who see such heavily discounted items will question the actual cost and quality of our materials. And I'm also very concerned about the quality of these customers - I suspect many of these people are very price-sensitive and thus are not ideal for our business. I'd love to see statistics on the retention rate of Groupon customers, but no one seems to be sharing this information.

I've seen a few repeat business users of Groupon - so apparently those businesses think it's a good deal. Alternatively, maybe they're just being the most aggressive players in a price war in exchange for temporary gains.

On the flip-side, we've held off on working with these clones for so long that the annoyingly persistent Groupon salespeople, seemingly desperate for a deal, are starting to give us decent terms. My partner is more open to the idea than I am. Do any of you know business owners who've used these types of site? Any opinions?
Ask HN: Good or bad idea? Using a domain that starts with 'the'.
My biggest fear is people will fail to use 'the' when typing in the domain, and end up at the other website, which has a similar focus. Yet at the same time, the other website is not likely to gain much traction for all sorts of reasons that are irrelevant.<p>So keep looking for a better domain? Use the root word but with a different domain type (.us, .me, etc.), or go with 'the'<domain_name>.com ?
Second this, have had a great experience with 99 designs in the past.
You can read at least some of his arguments at http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html. What in there would you say is refuted by this article?