skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good comment/questions. Thought provoking.

> Are you including how the wealthy people operate when they're running businesses, or just in their personal lives?

Generally speaking, both. Some people do poorly in one direction or the other, but I find successful people to be pretty honorable most of the time.

> I've interacted with a number of game companies, for example, and I've found the big ones much more likely to try to screw you over if you don't have lawyers keeping them from doing so, whereas small indie studios will keep their word and try to act in a way that seems ethical

Care to share some anecdotes about the game industry? That'd be cool to hear.

Gaming seems like an interesting example, I don't have any friends in gaming specifically. I get the impression that indie studios are really in it for the love of it, so you're dealing with people who are working with their passionate love for less money, so that's a good point.

Actually, if anything, the worst gap is when going from a laborer or craftsman (generally pretty honest and good guys) to a middle manager. I think, I hope we're on the path to obsoleting middle managers in general, because its just not a role conducive to good people. Good middle managers get promoted or hired away to be upper level managers, or leave to start their own company pretty quickly. So you get all sorts of bureaucratic flunkeys in that role - no good. I'm surprised to hear you've got to be wary around a CEO of a major company, though. I'm friends with more business owners and skilled professionals (architects, engineers, etc) than high level executives, but the high level executives I've met seem like decent sorts. Can't comment so much - I was thinking more about business owners than high level employees when I commented. I guess that's my bias.

> Of course, some people get rich by operating those smallish businesses, and lots of them seem upstanding to me.

Right, this is mostly my social circle and our acquaintances. Maybe the corporate world is uglier and I was overlooking it... one potential HUGE conflict of interest nobody talks about is when ownership and management are mis-aligned, especially in public companies. I think I'll never, ever buy stock in a public company again unless the top 5 decisionmakers in the organization own like a combine 30-40% of the company at least.

Good question, good comment. I would be interested in hearing about your experiences in gaming if you think you can talk in a way that wouldn't potentially bring heat on you.
You still have a chance to get in on startup weekend in mid-August! http://dc.startupweekend.org/
The map is overrated. Instead spend time reading chapter one of http://railstutorial.org/ and you'll have already covered many of the concepts noted {Heroku, git+github, basic Rails stuff} and just keep going at it. Hartl's (Insoshi YC approach is very much suitable for even beginners but doesn't disappoint for more advanced developers as well.

Of course, do tryruby.org first.
Ask HN: Single Sign-on supporting OpenID and Facebook connect?
Is there a free or cheap Single Sign-on user authentication solution which supports OpenID and Facebook connect? It must support an unlimited amount of users. I haven't found such a solution yet.

I'm looking for something like clickpass.com or janrain.com, but it has to be free or cheap, and support an unlimited amount of users. Any advice?
I learned Ruby on Rails as my first programming language/framework. Looking back on my own reservations, hang-ups and attempts to teach other non-programmers rails, I don't think this learning approach will be successful for most non-programmers.

The first question I think is: Who wants to master Ruby/Rails and related technologies? Very few who aren't already developers - at least not at first. We're all cognitive misers. Most people want to learn the minimum to get the job done. Also, for a complete newbie, learning is usually optional. People need to be encouraged to learn a little and then keep building.

For example, when I've taught others CSS/HTML, I used to start with big overviews and then moved forward. Now, I found it's much more successful to give people the tiniest bits of information they need to do something and then building from there. People learn better when they are eager to learn.

Once they start investing some time learning or trying to build their own application, they'll do what they need to do to keep up. Figuring out how to deploy to Heroku is a minor step once you're already on the path, but as yet another whole additional thing to learn, it's intimidating to non-programmers. In my case, it wasn't until I was knee deep that I started pushing myself toward any level of mastery. When I got going, I learned Rails as I needed it when I needed it.

Ruby/Rails can be learned concurrently. While I knew CSS/HTML and basic JS, I started with the framework not understanding the difference between ruby and rails. At first, I struggled with some ruby syntax, but after I spent a day focused on Ruby basics, I stopped having that problem. I built my knowledge incrementally. This approach may not be for everyone, but I believe it is more likely to encourage continued learning.

It wasn't until after I learned Ruby/Rails, that I needed and started using GIT, picked up JS and over the past three-four years grew to be a decent all around rails developer. My best learning has come from working with other developers on larger projects. As I've learned these things, it's made picking up related technologies nearly trivial. Sinatra and mongoDB were a sneeze to pick up.

If you really want to encourage total newbies to learn Ruby on Rails or any language, you need to provide them with as many tangible benefits along the way. If they take baby steps and can see their success, they will constantly be motivated to continue and (hopefully) to improve.
I actually like versions of #1 and #5 on some projects. Revision control usually has very fine granularity, whereas I like to be able to tell at a glance who was mainly responsible for certain portions of code--- that Bob is the main person who wrote file.c, while Sue is the main person behind code.c, and John recently added major functionality to file.c. In-file comments also persist longer, so are particularly nice for open-source code. I've run across code from the 70s and 80s that's long since been separated from its version-control system as it floats around the internet, but the comments in the code still let me know who wrote what, and even a brief summary of its evolution.

And "just fix it" for #5 is ideal, sure, but on any significant project there are likely to be "temporary" workarounds that persist for a while and should be noted (along with who to ask for details), e.g. because they're workarounds for a third-party bug that you're waiting to be fixed, or new functionality hooks waiting on some module that isn't done yet.
"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (Larry Niven)
Neighbors two blocks away are simply nothing like neighbors 2 inches of pressboard and a couple two-by-fours away.

As for permanent neighbors, call the board or your landlord. Either should happily fix that problem for you.
It's not free it's LGPL.
It's a known problem, but..

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Theres+nothing+liberal+about+r...

http://www.nber.org/~luttmer/rentcontrol.pdf

Search http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/02/10/nycs-rent-stabilized-p... for "rent control"
The Curious Case of eCapitalization
I predict it will encourage more attempts to win asymmetric wars, with brute force. Brute force is a blunt instrument. Killing more civilians and thereby gaining the attacker further enemies, not measured in gunships or tanks, but men and women with a major grudge. These men and women can't be beaten through the use of airpower.
Are you suggesting it's not worth testing the software if you can calculate what it should be able to handle? I don't think that's a good approach - software often behaves radically differently under extreme load for all manner of unpredictable reasons, so if you're going to use something in production it's a very good idea to run some real load tests first.
I'm sorry, did you just say that Donald Norman doesn't know what he's talking about and then recommend that he go read his own book to find out why?
Which, ironically, completely crashes my iPhone 3. Thankfully, downgrading is still an option.
Martin Seligman on positive psychology
I'm having problems understanding how to put my applications written in Django on the web(wsgi, apache, nginx...). Any recommended links?

So I'd add 2b)some sysadmin knowledge: apache, config files, ssh, ...
Don't ask us, ask your users how you can improve it, while at the same time tracking their usage habits. Analytics + feature requests is a win.

The most powerful tool for improving web apps is actually a telephone. Get yourself some headsets and a $10 Skype credit. Should last you a month.

Implement the feature and expose it to 10% of them. Watch how they accept it, then push it to the rest. Make a blog post about it and release a PR statement. Let industry publications aware of your existence. Then take a few weeks "off" getting more clients. Then repeat.

Try to keep a "how can we improve" button clearly visible, but not distracting. Make yourself reachable. Get a Google Voice number and put it on the opposite side of your logo.

Something as "simple" as extending the session timeout for everyday software can make a huge difference. People hate it if they kept getting logged out, specially for non-critical and non-financial applications. Go overboard in building trustworthiness; put the app on SSL, show lock icons, never show them their credit card back (if you're stupid/big enough to take it to begin with.) Any sensitive information should be shown in non-editable GUI elements (labels mostly) and show the last few digits to disambiguate. If you ever charge their accounts, or processes payments for them, send an email confirmation ASAP. Payment confirmations are the least annoying form of email; it shows you're willing to leave a paper trail (irrational, I know, but it gives them the fuzzies.) and it's a good opportunity expose them to your branding/message/identity.

If you ever keep a "purse" for users, where they can add and withdraw funds, never EVER send them an email containing their balance figure; some people have email notification widgets that popup a dialog with the subject and first few lines of the body ("$20 Payment Received, you now have $20.15" might seem like benign feedback, but not when your user was on a projector in a meeting. No seriously, people, kill them damn notifiers when you speak publicly. Nothing distracts like seeing a nastygram from your speaker's wife flash across the screen.)
Not bad, needs more margins at the top and the bottom but otherwise looks quite good.
For the fifth time on HN:
Manhattan is the most dense housing in the US. The vast majority of Americans and most visitors to the states don't live in anything comparable. Further, unless you live in a prewar, lots of housing in Manhattan is pretty inexpensively built -- especially anything dating from the 60s and 70s, of which there is a lot. Little concern was paid to sound insulation, and often the walls between neighboring apartments are no thicker than the walls between rooms. Thus, people are much more circumspect about the noise they make and their behavior in order to live and get along in such housing.

Further, long term tenants know they will have to see and get along with each other so there are further incentives to not being noisy or obnoxious.

On the other hand, short term tenants often want to party and have no such incentives not to be shitty neighbors. This isn't merely theory but also my experience living next to a short term place in SF. Thus, many denizens of NYC and SF do not want such neighbors.
Forensic accountant Tampa
Hetsler Mediation & Valuation,CPA firm specializing in Business valuation divorce,Expert Witness accounting, and Business appraisal jacksonville in family law and civil matters http://www.forensiccpafirm.com/
Tell HN: I want to design Facebook pages for 2 startups.
I'm starting a new specialty portfolio just for a Facebook fan page building as it's becoming a frequently requested service. I've got a few good examples but I need to make a couple more to feel like I've got enough on there. I could just design them myself on fictional companies, but if I'm going to be doing it free anyways, I thought I'd see if anyone needs them. If you want one, leave your email or email me directly (emails in my profile).

Things to know: It's free. I'd like to briefly discuss what you're looking to showcase but I'm not going to spend long hours on communication. If you don't want to use it, you don't need to. You'll receive the final code, images (including a profile picture) and simple instructions as to what you need to do to get it up. I can't create it live and transfer it to you because Facebook's current process would leave me an admin of your fan page as well. Also, you'll have to be OK with me using the design including your company logo if applicable in my portfolio (just a screenshot).

Hope there's some interest. Today helping you out helps me out. Example: http://imgur.com/YZokX.jpg
head desk I must learn to look in the Comments after reading the link but before upvoting. I wish I could take it back now.
I have absolutely no data to base this on, but I would expect that for both brands the net effect on sales will be positive because these campaigns have raised brand awareness. In this advertising filled world standing out amongst the flood of stimuli is more important than anything.

What is pivotal in the buying decision of the mentioned mom bloggers is more likely if their husband or child asks for the product (in this case Dr. Pepper). Not if they are angry about one of their marketing campaigns.
I agree with all except the last; I think "someday" comments are very useful.

If behavior is strange, you want to know if it was expected to be that way, and why. You can use the developer's line of reasoning to prioritize. If you understand the conditions that brought the hack, you are better prepared to maintain the code.

The article suggests that most problems should just be fixed right away, instead of leaving "someday" comments. But, a few weeks of maintaining a large code base will cure anyone of this belief. Not everything can be fixed right away, for many reasons:

- Maybe there isn't time, due to pressure to complete X or Y.

- Maybe it's risky to just hack in the first solution that pops into your head, and you need time to come up with the right fix.

- Code bases can be very complicated. You're not usually working on your own brilliant creations, you're working on things that many other people did, and some of them had no clue. You are tinkering with an engine you didn't design, and you have to be careful.

- The bug might actually be important in the short-term. One of the evil realities of large code bases is that "bugward-compatibility" can matter, and "fixing" something may cause more immediate problems than it solves.
They could also fine you or use it as an excuse to audit. Both of those things are pretty unattractive for a small business.
He could use binary keys instead (if his client library supports it)
I have 2 Rails apps you might be interested in.

Big Help is our company's help ticket system. I'd like to get it up to Rails 3 and prettied up. Also would like to implement macros/canned responses and allow them to be inserted via jQuery.
http://github.com/bigfolio/big-help

Subby is a starting point for a subscription based web-app that uses subdomain-based accounts and Chargify for billing. It could use some layout/CSS love.

http://github.com/bigfolio/Subby
Uhm, no. If you read that post you'd see that I was mainly interested in the per-key overhead. I'd seen it spoken of as being in the 100 bytes/key range but never saw confirmation of that. So I did some back of the envelope calculations and then decided to try it for real.
Pretending that something that went on mostly via word of mouth between neighbors or at least acquaintances is comparable to a scaled business on the internet is silly.
When they come up with breakthrough technology like this, another company is developing an anti-aircraft weapon against this as well.
Redmine is really in need of people for the UX Team: http://redmine.org
Let's see, I've worked where source control was not allowed (yay management). So #1 and #2 were necessary for communication. Also been in situations where non-programmers make small changes to certain pieces of code. Yes, that means you have to explain loops. (#3) I have never seen an example like #4 in the wild and other people have already argued against #5.
> Running my own business, I now find that passive voice is the most diplomatic way to discuss user error. The customer didn't do the wrong thing, e.g., "you made a typo in the shipping address" becomes "the shipping address had a typo". The wrong thing just happened, with no agent bearing direct blame. :)

Great observation. My rule - when I screwed up or something even peripherally related to me got screwed up, I took full accountability. "That's 100% my error, that's not acceptable, and steps A, B, and C are being taken to fix it. Do you think that will fix things?" When a screw up was on the client side, then it was, "Yeah, things get messed up sometimes, things get broken, it happens..." followed by switching to active voice to work it out.
Ask HN: Gaining users trust via face to face marketing?
Ok so here we go... my startup adsreloaded.com has had interest from several developers but it's been surprisingly hard to gain users. I literally pay people to download iPhone apps, but marketing is still a big beast. (Yes I realize there is the argument of people who can afford iPhone's don't need a few extra bucks... point taken, but I think there is a huge audience still especially the younger age group)

Here are a few ideas I have had that I think could work and was wondering if people have had success doing it:

1) Rent out a mall kiosk (Expensive)
2) Rent out booths at flea markets (generally not my target audience)
3) Try and find tech expos and grab a booth there (Are there any resources for tech expos in the bay area?)

Building trust seems to be a big issue for users... I could even pay people right there in cash if I was physically at a booth.

What kinds of direct marketing have you found to be the most effective for your startup?
If you look for Indian or Chinese restaurants you can usually find some good vegan ones. I really like Kingdom of Vegetarians in Philadelphia. It isn't a super nice restaurant, but the food is great and there's lot of options. I don't really go for fake meat stuff (seitan, TVP, etc.), but I'll try a little when I go there.

Being vegan sucks when you're eating out with normal folks.
Your requirement that certain features be "built into the core" seems to rule out a lot of languages which happen to be extensible.
Oh sure, blame me.
You can learn rails and learn to program at the same time. I knew how to hack PHP, but I learned Ruby on Rails as my first programming language/framework. I admit I copied and pasted snippets of code probably a dozen or so times, but you learn from that. I learned from those examples, until I didn't need them.

Just because you learn Rails first doesn't make you not a developer, though I would agree that if you're still dependent on copy and pasting then you're really not a developer.
Sowell quotes him heavily.
That isn't a contract its a law. A law that I'm arguing against in favor of contracts.
Yes, please. No offense, but launchpad really needs some extra UI/UX help. :-)
I just (soft) released my .net open source project/task tracking system. not much to look at but if you want you can grab it and pick it up. i'm unsure of the future of the project mainly because the field is so crowded. demo here: http://scrumbly.mobomobo.com (u: test p: test) -- source soon to be put up on codeplex.
Hi, this is Nicole from vWorker.com (formerly known as Rentacoder.com). vWorker.com is a 10 year old online employment marketplace as well -- providing access to programming, writing, illustration, even data entry jobs. But the services available at Elance could limit success as described here: http://bit.ly/9z03Fn.

You should give vWorker a serious look. vWorker employers select the lowest bidder only 19% of the time, (see http://bit.ly/av0S4R for details) so some workers earn $50,000 and more (enterprise business projects are priced at $50,000(USD) and above).

By providing quality work and remaining dedicated to your skill, you'll soon attract high paying buyers without you having to make any bids.

Nicole
Why? Despite his obvious lack of social charms, he is absolutely correct about Sencha (IMHO).

I don't like his attitude either, but the headline is accurate and the article (such as it is) is informative.
The biggest gap in expectations seems to be that people think they're buying a share in some sort of underlying commodity, as opposed to a rolling series of 1-month futures. It'd be as if S&P 500 index ETFs, instead of holding a weighted index of the S&P 500 stocks, were just buying and rolling over SPY options.

Any particular reason they're 1-month contracts, though? It seems the treading-water aspect would be greatly reduced if these funds could trade, say, 1-year futures. Do longer-dated futures just not exist, or at least not exist in markets that are liquid enough?
I used to tell people not to comment their code. Mostly as a reaction to articles stating that you should document your code down to every line. "The code should be readable enough to make it clear what goes on", I would say.

Now I just seem to write comments where the reasoning isn't obvious. Which is often, but not that often. And they can be of all the kinds described in this article.
This is actually true. Some languages use passive pronouns to tell a story while English mostly uses pronouns in the active format. That alone can transpose a meaning to a whole different level. While English does have a wide array of lingo to explain ideas and circumstances; languages such as that of France's can intricately indicate the gender modality of a sentence by the linking of pronouns and verbs.

Interesting, indeed.
Rails is not a programming language ...
This article is useless. If you're the sort of programmer who wants to write those comments, this article won't stop you.
In Common Lisp (without cheating or handwaving; this is it):

(defpackage :add-nums
(:use :cl :hunchentoot :cl-who))

(in-package :add-nums)

(defmacro with-html (&body body)
`(with-html-output-to-string (*standard-output* nil :prologue t :indent t)
,@body))

(define-easy-handler (add-nums :uri "/add-nums")
((a :parameter-type 'integer)
(b :parameter-type 'integer))
(with-html
(:html
(:head (:title "Add two numbers"))
(:body
(if (and a b)
(htm (:p (str (+ a b)))))
(:form :method :get
(:input :type :text :name "a")
(:input :type :text :name "b")
(:input :type :submit))))))

(defparameter *site* (make-instance 'acceptor :port 8080))

(start *site*)
I find it frustrating that votes are permanent, if this were reddit you could remove or switch your vote. (This mostly comes up for me on touch based devices where my fat finger can accidentally hit the wrong arrow.)