skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are using ADP TotalSource for payroll and PEO functions. Though it is nice to have everything in more or less one place, the response time and customer service is extra-medium. By that I mean that most of the time if there is a problem with health care coverage, I end up personally having to call the provider, ADP merely provides a phone number. On the positive side, the prices are reasonable and the variety of plan offerings is good too. They just started up their west coast operations last year.

We looked at Administaff as well and the main reason for going with ADP was a pre-existing relationship via payroll.
Thanks again for the answer.

Put simply: Hecl is a scripting language for mobile phones, which are currently a real pain to program for.
Google exec: Hell no we're not paying anyone to use Google
Paradox: Is There Toscanini's Ice Cream In Heaven?
Absolutely! Just uploading the latest changes to our "stealth mode" startup site right now :) We'll be in invite-only mode by the end of the weekend, and completely public sometime next month. Stoked!

Thinking about these kinds of things, I feel sad for other people who haven't taken a risk on a dream. Caring about something as passionately as a startup you've build from the ground up is something I imagine many people never get to feel, although maybe having kids is similar (don't have any, so I couldn't say...). But as far as the 9-5 goes, I'd rather care about what I built in that time rather than feel it was wasted on something not worth doing.

Ooh, upload just finished, here I go! :)
Good point about the Intel chipsets - they work better with open source drivers than, say, nvidia.
It's not a boat, it's a rusty old battleship, but the guns work :)
There are six articles from moneyandmarkets.com on the 'new' page. Slow down!
Well, what it lacks in specificity it makes up for by way of the lack of finger-pointing that we'd seen in the past from the Twitter team.
http://xkcd.com/243/
raganwald -- Great observation. It's absolutely possible for your biz dev team to force you to take your eyes off the ball. Great cautionary tale.
You're talking entirely about a different computer and a different time. A new Macbook Pro (such as one he might buy) comes with a much better operating system, can run Windows programs side by side, has the same processor and graphics card as leading PC counterparts, does not cost $3,000 ($1599 with Student Developer discount), has an LED Glossy option versus fluorescent matte, has more mac native apps and dev tools than ever, gives many more reasons to use it for programming like for the iPhone, as well as opportunities to create web apps in ROR, Django, and other web frameworks that did not exist at the time that now need to be tested on a Mac since it also happens to have much greater marketshare. All of this means that his computer might last for more years than before, since the hardware is already top of the line compared not just to mac machines released a year prior, but to high end pc laptops, as well, which means he might as well get the MacBook Pro.
Who upmods these demonstratably false statements anyway? The falsehood gnomes? Huh?
Zawinski's law. And the modern version is that every program attempts to expand until it becomes a social network.
try http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp : it was free for 60 days - dont know whether they still run that offer.
They're hiring people which can "Code using primarily Java, Ruby, C/C++ and Scala" http://twitter.com/help/jobs
An oldie but one of my top 10 favorite internet essays.

Whenever a prospect questions my rates, I give them a copy of this.
I propose that we all sign our comments Daniel from now on.
Do you really need to know C? I think so.
Wall-Climbing Robot Spies
Scheme to Let Robot Take Over Brain-Computer Interface
Get both.
I can't remember the last time I heard anything positive about twitter. And yet people are still addicted to it like crack.
Where is Austin's startup district?
Like the Cambridge/Mountain View business incubator, Austin's Conjunctured will soon be opening up a warehouse in the middle of what will be Austin's Startup District.
This space will provide office space, collaboration and co-working for startups, entrepreneurs and other New Media/New Technology professionals...
Who is? Seems like only people who blog a lot or are part of the web2.0 social elite circle.

If I didn't read things like hacker news I would have no idea what twitter was.
That cunt should get a life. Jesus Christ, just go die.

Twitter is right. They shouldn't ban people for swearing.

If this guy has a real complaint he should focus on that instead of his stupid, anti-free-speech complaint.
The Sad State of U.S. Broadband
Why is there so much media coverage of twitter when the average person has no clue what it is, and probably never will?
Interesting point, but that's a slippery slope away from a big community and toward a system of silos for those whose preferences closely match your own. I don't think that's what HN's about.

The uncommon position of this site is that it's a diverse community of people with intermixing ideas and persuasions. Neat things happen when they work together (and when they argue). I'd be worried you'd lose a piece of that if HN started allowing users to establish their own filtering preferences, even if based on something as simple as domain blocking.

For the record I did love this post. Was it news? No. But we stretch the definition of "hacker news" to include topical things all the time. Why not permit it here?
It's really unfortunate that snarky first comments are starting to pop up on so many stories.

Did the article generalize? Sure. But at least the generalizations were entertaining, somewhat thoughtful, and nominally about startups.

Meanwhile, what do these complaints contribute? If you don't like it, don't vote for it. There's a whole page of new submissions that never seem to get viewed. Put some energy there.
xlnt is a cunt and likes viewing kitty porn.
I've heard lots of bad things about Administaff from an employee perspective...I don't know whether it makes up for it on the employer side. But I think keeping employees happy is pretty important, so it's probably worthwhile to figure out how to solve the problems without bringing in a known-to-be-ornery third party. We're going to have to solve those problems soon, as well, and I'm still completely at a loss on how to do so. So, I sympathize.
I was in the same position about two years ago and, due to the high cost of services like ConstantContact/CampaignMonitor, I voted to build my own. After two years, I had built my list up to about 10k users and my web host finally came to me and asked me to move it off to another app/site/VPS.

It took me about a day to implement, I guess, and I think it saved me probably $2500-$5000 even when I consider the time value of my development time.

I advise that, if you can charge yourself less than $150/hr for your time and you will be sending to a small amount of ppl initially, build it yourself.
I love twitter. I think it's an awesome service. The problem is the company behind the service.

You might hear a lot of complaints about twitter-the-company, but twitter-the-service is generally regarded highly.
Rewriting any system does not take much money, it takes a lot of time and a pair of good devoted hackers. If you stuck with bad ones, even money won't help. I believe, twitter's hackers are good enough to deal with the problem and I don't think their system is so complex. It's too young to get covered with all the dust and rust :-).
Huh? I expect ['foo', 'bar', 'baz', 'quux']. I expect accumulation, esp with a list. If I wanted ['foo', 'bar', 'quux'] I would send in a fresh copy of a list instead of a list I'd been whoring around to other functions.

function('baz', list(MODULE_LEVEL_CONSTANT))
function('quux', list(MODULE_LEVEL_NOT_CONSTANT))

I would also change MODULE_LEVEL_CONSTANT to not say CONSTANT cause a list is no such thing and doesn't become constant just cause a label says so. Maybe it even leads people to expect silly things.
Ask YC: Do You Know of a Story-So-Far News Summary Site?
Is there a website out there that provides a summary of the top current news topics. I am not talking about daily headline sites like Yahoo or Google News.

Say I had somehow missed all the news about the Microsoft-Yahoo saga because I was under a rock or something, I would like a site that I can go to to read a brief summary of the best bits or highlights of the whole saga. And it need not be tech news only.

I am surprised that there doesn't appear to be a wiki site or something that offers this. If I am right and there isn't one, I have hopefully given one or more of you an idea for a web app. It's one web app that I would certainly use to catch up on news that I regularly miss.
Another reason why users should leave Twitter and migrate to other services like Pownce. Suprisingly, the author of this post is a staff member of Pownce :)

I noticed an appropriate tweet summarizes this debate: "biz: Yesterday pizza was sent to Twitter HQ by friendly twitterers and
today it's a keg of beer from @Mister_Robotics THANKS!"

The Twitter staff is apparently content eating pizza, drinking beer, and spending a freshly minted $15 million.
Why is this SCRIBDed?

It's got to be the dumbest URL I've seen...

http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://secrethistoryofstarw...

The REAL URL is http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com/The_Secret_History_of_Sta...

Non-linkjacked.

Don't tell me it's for traffic reasons -- this story on YC News is not going to bring down anyone's site.
kiddie porn too.

god, say something mean!
But Evan Williams of Twitter quit Google!
Vinge is damn good. I will.
Not by the "orthogonal and easy to learn" metric.
I'm confused. The linked blog post is about a co-working environment provided by a non-profit.

YC is neither of those things. So, the overlapping set between what this blog post describes and what YC provides is nil.

So, this submission means one or more of the following:

1. You don't know what Y Combinator is, and believe it is in some way similar to a co-working environment

2. You understand that mentioning Y Combinator is the best link bait available on Hacker News

3. You don't know what co-working is, and believe it is in some way similar to what Y Combinator does

No matter what, your title is nonsensical for the blog post that it points to.
I admit their "Something's technically wrong here" error was getting old, and they needed to address the issues that have made that message so pervasive lately. So they did (if indirectly).

But people like to act like Twitter owes them something. Fact is, it's a free service.

In the spirit of building their business they clearly want -- in fact they need -- to build the best product they can; the fact that it's taking too long by our estimation doesn't matter. They're not going to leave money on the table so you can believe they're working hard to fix the problem and start working on their revenue model.

Kudos to the Twitter team for returning critical volleys from some in the tech community without losing their cool.
It seems like a sufficiently intelligent intelligence will eventually "escape" all the way up to the "real world". From this example, if the Einsteinians had invented an AI without having the hardware spontaneously melt, it would have escaped into the Einsteinian world. It then would have moved up into the "undergrad world", since it would be smarter than the Einsteinians and they were capable of "moving up".

I can't quite put my finger on it but something seems wrong about this...something mind bending is going on here.
AT&T Confirms High Speed Rollout in Time for iPhone 2.0
Of course, FF3 was originally slated for over a year ago and it's just now happening, so take the timeline with a grain of salt. On the other hand, delays (within reason) are fine as long as they lead to a better product, which seems the case for FF3.
Ex-eBay/Skype Execs Let You Share Stories With Tokoni
Chicago US city of the year
Preferring the lambda expression because the list comprehensive performs a multiplication operation twice is, I think, misguided. The multiplication probably isn't that expensive compared to the rest of the code.
This seems... strange to me. Users are the life and blood of services like Twitter; I would do everything in my power to keep my users happy and protect them from harassment. I'd rather lose one abusive user than many good users.

The lawsuit explanation, especially, seems strange. I know threatening to sue is a common past-time for certain internet users (even though chances are they don't know what they're talking about and couldn't afford it anyway), but has anyone ever successfully sued a service for banning them?
The deal is bad on all counts, as others have mentioned, but the board provision is simply horrible for seed level investment (actually, I would never accept a board provision like that for any level of investment).

You're effectively selling your company for $25k. You no longer own the company if the investors hold two seats on the board to your one (and if they get veto on who the outsider is, they definitely hold two seats).

You are always allowed to negotiate until paper is signed (or until you've shook hands on the deal), but it sounds like these folks are either testing your mettle or just hostile investors. Either way, it seems a little problematic.
My favorite part here is the idea of using class projects as a controlled (if imperfect) measure of programmer productivity. However, am I missing something or is there a contradiction here:

"No points are deducted for bad style or lateness."

"...the penalties for being late are significant."
Yahoo Investor Bill Miller: Forget The JV, Just Sell
What's wrong with http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ?
I've got all those "Linux only" applications working on Windows and OSX.

You may have to learn new shortcuts or how to configure things in Windows or OSX but it is all doable. For windows you may have to install Cygwin or PowerShell to get a respectable prompt.

I use a windows box at work. I use Mac and Windows at home. I recently switched from Ubuntu to OSX and I ran into many of the same problems initially. I wanted things to work exactly the same as Ubuntu and that just wasn't happening. After about three months I learned many of the OSX shortcuts and finally configured and set up my linux programs for OSX. Now it's all good.
hopefully no one here will rise to your bait.
Ask YC: what CMS do you use?
can u suggest powerful content management system (Joomla, Drupal, Pligg etc.). yes, it has to be open source.
The term "project management" makes me shudder... Fills my mind with boring, borg-like and frustrating memories of working in the corporate environment.
ByDesign, the younger person’s ERP
I didn't say anything in my list was "Linux only". I said, "I use so few "Linux only" applications that it would probably be easier than ever to switch". So, basically, I was saying, there aren't very many Linux only apps anymore that I use regularly, but that my style of working would be uncomfortable on Windows or Mac.

So, my statement agrees with yours, I think.

I have worked in Windows environments quite a bit when doing contract work, and I'm familiar with Cygwin, but it's not an acceptable command line environment--the way it chafes when doing anything outside of the Cygwin environment is too much friction.

Mac OS X is slightly better now that it has bash by default. But its system tools are weak compared to those found on Linux systems. I feel this same pain when using Solaris and FreeBSD. In all three cases, it's possible to install good versions of those tools, but I have to retrain my fingers to call gawk instead of awk, etc.

Again, it would be easier than ever, because vim has good versions on both Mac and Win, and Perl runs fine everywhere. Firefox and Thunderbird, too. But retraining myself to work in the Mac or Windows way would be uncomfortable. And I hate being uncomfortable.
all laptops have one of the highest failure rates in all of mainstream consumer electronics.

that said: i will add to the groups discussion i am a die hard thinkpad guy. the 'stick button' is SO MUCH more effective than a touchpad. they are fantastic machines. X series are small light and about $1k - $1.5k. i never spend more.

downside: Windows. or worse... VISTA!
Hey kids, digg is that way --->
To abuse your metaphor, I can't remember the last time I heard anything positive about crack either, and yet...

When your users are so hooked that they act like twitchy crack fiends, you probably have a winning product, assuming you can execute (which is what people are complaining about) and monetize (eventually).
Don't be mean to kids. I'm an adult. Some adults post stuff like this, and some kids don't.

PS Since you're giving out directions, do you know anywhere above ageism? Digg isn't it, nor YC :(
The need for distributed programming tools
Third red spot erupts on Jupiter
When I say "kids", I'm not referring to your age.
Exhibit A -> Sarcasm and irony gone totally wrong.
Shrug. We can't be sarcastic about useless-looking articles any more?
what frame?
That's like calling stuff you dislike "gay" and saying "i'm not homophobic. i didn't mean the definition of gay that involves two men having sex"
Is this seriously a whole blog post with 190+ comments about what happened when someone was called a "cunt" on Twitter? Because if that's enough to launch a blog with, I'm kicking myself for actually trying to come up with real content.
Even if this was as the title implied, I am doubtful it would be anything worth while without the right people. By right people I mean young, highly amititious, smart hackers.

And I am skeptical that you would find these types of hackers here in Austin. I'd love to be proved wrong though.
Imagine a Twitter with groups. They would need at least another 5 engineers to programm this ! ;)
One thing seems to be missing from the data: where it always the same students who were faster on the assignments? Could be that student A good lucky with assignment 1 and student B got lucky with assignment 2, and they messed up the other assignment in turn.

Another possibility could be that the long hour students did all the actual hard work and the fast students simply got to copy their stuff. At least at my university, that is how most students dealt with the maths assignments.
Ask YC: What makes Twitter so special?
3 Twitter stories in the top 5.
Twitter seems to get so much coverage here, and on other similar sites.
I can understand that if there really are issues related to scaling such a product, then they would be interesting to address and solve, but Twitter itself seems to have become the story rather than their product.

Are people upvoting because they are avid users of twitter, or because the stories of scaling have potential lessons?
I didn't think Twitter was useful until a few months ago. I started using it and completely changed my mind. I see it like a buffet of interesting comments from people I choose to follow. I get updates from people who are working on interesting stuff, going to conferences I care about, etc.

Unlike a social network, I don't need to be friends with someone to see what they post. I can stop following someone whenever and follow them again later. In short, it has the useful content of a social network without the spammy apps, useless profile information and dubious "friendships". It's a better version of irc.
Facebook Profile Redesign Getting Closer
I second that. Daniel's a great name, a fine combination of 6 unique, high-quality letters. I'd love to see it written more often.

Daniel
"What is the probability that evolution would result in a "life form" anything like us? And by anything like us, I mean anything which can understand any of the concepts we understand?"

Pretty good, in this universe at least. Every intelligent creature in this universe has to be able to do the same basic things: reproduce, manipulate objects, fend off predators, etc.

There's a theory, commonly used in economics and international relations, that competitive pressures force most groups at the apex of a system to think, act, and behave pretty much the same. For example, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States, despite their radically different concepts of how to run a government, each behaved roughly the same on the international stage. They built coalitions and acted pretty much universally in self-interest.

The same principle probably applies to organisms. The same competitive pressures probably force intelligent organisms to develop similar mental frameworks.

This isn't to say that ET will look anything like us. Just that he'll probably understand patterns, numbers, and the like, because understanding those things are what this universe rewards.
I suppose you don't want to explain why you think it's gone wrong, or what would improve it.
HowTo: Strategic Collaborations and Alliances
(You know, Canada is kind of an 'Island', and many Canadiens are, too.)
It shouldn't. Project management is even more essential in a startup than in a corporation. Effective project management often makes the difference between an undirected, shambolic effort with no real goal and a focused drive towards a concrete objective. It's particularly important if you have more than 2 people working on developing a product.

Bad project managers abound, but great project managers are as priceless and essential as great coders.

Daniel
What is this whining to Daddy shit?

YC News is full of such a bunch of crybabies -- and that includes a lot of the editors.
Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts Version 1.2
A 106MB archive of Y Combinator posts is available by accessing http://www.rushy.com/ycombinator-news20080522.tar.gz
FriendFeed Launches Rooms
U.S. corporations massively read employee e-mail
Re: the PS, I'm more than happy to buy books via your affiliate links. It's very nice of you to go out of your way to find relevant material, instad of copping out with AdSense or banner ads. Letting readers reimburse writers in such a win-win way seems like the best model to fund blogging as a hobby... do you make enough off the referrals to agree?
It's hard for me to imagine why they're choosing Scala over Erlang. It seems to me like one of their major requirements is to have task distribution.

Erlang makes distribution and concurrent execution semantically identical, Scala doesn't. And there doesn't seem to be a good reason to base on the JVM, they aren't already next deep in Java libraries.

I'd really like to know what they're thinking over there.
Y Combinator Web Search Version 1.3 Released
This version performs phrase search ( http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=%22paul+graham%22 ), boolean search ( http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=-the ), URL search ( http://www.ycombinator.search.xirium.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?p=0&q=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2F ) and the previous version is available as a web service and command line utility ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184707 ).
Is Tosci's even still open?
Both the MacBook and VAIO have excellently clicky keyboards. When it comes to home/end/pgup/pgdown, just configure your editor properly. Moving your hands is a waste anyways.
JavaScript Method Overloading
10 Books You Must Have in Your Library as a Flash Platform Designer
the future is today
I agree. Meebo, for example, works on nearly as complex an architecture as Twitter, but they seem to be scaling well.