skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is just wrong and boring. For me, in a nutshell, Apple have extremely good taste. They make very well thought out products.

I first used an Apple 1 1/2 years ago. Before then I'd just assumed they were a load of hype.

Out of all the laptops I've had, (Toshiba, IBM, Sony, Dell, MacBook), the Macbook wins absolutely in terms of design, build quality, and functionality. The others aren't even close. It's a boolean for me... Macbook wins, all the others completely fail. Perhaps this is why you dismiss people like myself as fanboys. But there really is that much of a gap between apple and the rest.

MacBooks are just simple. Nicely designed functional objects. When you then look at a Dell or IBM etc, they are a mess. With grills here, extra buttons here, some ports on the front, some on the side, weird slopes here, it's like the design was an afterthought.

Just a shame I didn't try Apple sooner.

It's the same with the iPhone. Name one other phone that has a usable web browser, and brilliantly thought out keyboard.

It's not fanboyism, it's just common sense.
Thanks. I didn't see that when I tried it out. The email timeline and the user ranking weren't so usefull for me when I tried it out.
Yes, but MS Offic Pro goes for $500 retail, less if you're buying a site wide license. Let's face it, the money for Xobni isn't in home uses, the money is in enterprise sales. In fact, $100 might be pretty low for an Enterprise plug-in for Outlook. They might be better off charging $500 a license for it. BigCo likes to pay a lot of money for software.

I don't know tons of people who use Outlook for home use, most people I'm around are using web mail. The people that are using Outlook are BigCo employees. And, if you can can sell a bulk license for the Xobni plug-in to a couple of Blue Chip companies, you're well on your way to $20M per year.
Electronics' 'missing link' found
"Their products, to some significant percentage of their user base, aren’t just computers or phones, they’re a lifestyle. Insult the operating system and you insult the owner."

This is pretty offensive. IF (and that is a very big if), any other manufacturer came out with a phone that had a usable web browser, a laptop that didn't suck, or a decent mp3 player, then I'd buy them. No question.

People really don't just blindly buy Apple stuff because it's Apple. I couldn't care less if it's Apple or not.
People buy MacBooks, iPods and iPhones, because they are unquestionably the market leaders. They are the absolute best by miles in those 3 areas.

If you think there is a better phone/pocket computer than the iPhone you really have to be kidding. Same with the iPod and MacBook.
Dream ofthe Red Chamber!
Social Media and the Band-Aid Conspiracy Theory
How's 128 emacs buffers stack up? Granted, not all of them are files, but then again, my computer has only been up a week. And, naturally, they're all saved - you'd be insane to leave that many files unsaved, IMO.
The Perfect Desktop - Kubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)
Don't count on quick raises from a very low salary unless you've explicitly discussed that with your boss or at your interview. In most places I've seen, they're happy to calculate raises using %, which means you get a whopping 20% raise on a £20k salary - which still amounts to peanuts (£24k is not much different from £20k).

Negotiate your starting salary as high as you can, and don't count on quick raises.

Here's a useful article on the topic from ever-helpful Rands:

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2008/04/11/the_busines...

Daniel
My feeling would be that 2-4% plus a market rate salary would be about right post the first VC funding round. Ahead of that, then the offer feels too low - particularly as you are effectively investing your salary on a monthly basis.

One mechanism you could apply - take your personal valuation of the current worth of the business IP and divide it by your notional annual salary for the next couple of years. What percentage does that come out at?
Dress up Barbie
Create your personal Barbie Doll Collection, dress up online barbies in cutest dresses and skirts. Spend your time online with fun, give Barbie a makeover and create your own personalized doll.
I actually created a version of this in ARC (Yes! ARC!) just yesterday. See the arc forum http://arclanguage.org/item?id=6467

Mine is less faithful to the original though (but still has the visual and auditory component) and is not very fancy or polished. On the plus side, it's only 70 lines of code and runs on Ubuntu :-)
4% non-dilutable (if it really is so) and 8% dilutable may not be so different if there may be more rounds. And 8% is a LOT if they have cumulatively invested 4.5 man-years and you have invested none so far.

If they give large percentages to every new person, the math doesn't add up and they'd have little left at the end.
What areas have intense fanboys and hateboys?

Video games & computers. You don't need to look any further then at the demos.
This is so big, it's tough to imagine our memristor based future. Please speculate wildly about humanity in the Memristor Age.

I don't think we'll have any keeping up with Moore's Law. In 5 years memristor storage will be everywhere. IBM will develop memristor processors for the Blue Brain project.
A year ago my laptop was due for an upgrade, so I got myself a 2nd hand MacBook Pro. I had never used a Mac, and had been using FreeBSD as a development OS and sometimes a Windows machine when I wanted to play games.

I can honestly say that I was not a Apple fanboy. Sure, I liked the way their things looked, but a fanboy? No.

A year after owning a Mac... I would never want to go back to a PC. It's simply the best OS that I've ever used.

So, how did Apple get me to love their product?

Their products look nice. That makes me want to use them and bring them into my "space." It's the same reason I consider buying anything: shoes, clothes, cars, chairs, anything.

Once I started using their OS it was a pleasant and consistent experience.
Are there opportunities for startups designing memristor based circuits?

Are there any patents on memristors?
The Benefits of Being Virtually There
haha ya... my first post grad programming job raise was smaller in $'s per hour than the raises I got as a lifeguard when I was 15 :(
Salary for the summer comes from grants. Universities like it that way, it gives you good motivation to go bring home the bacon.

By the way, even your salary number seems low. Perhaps your numbers include teaching colleges?

As for summers, they are also a good time to build a startup. Most tenure review committees don't mind that sort of thing.
You may well be correct - perhaps the distributed tools are easier - I need to get one of them installed so I can play around with it to figure it out.

That said, if people don't get version control at all (yip, there are plenty of them) then its probably going to be harder to convince them of the merits of both version control and a distributed model at the same time.

I have certainly learned in the last few month that changing the direction of a large team is no easy task, and convincing people to use any tool that is even slightly off the beaten track is going to make that task even harder.

Its sad - I wish there were more curious, keen to learn people when I work!
For Atlanta, salary.com says 53-56K; median for Georgia Tech in 2007 was 60K. This is in line with anecdotal evidence I've culled.
What's the world's centre of population?
I guess I don't really understand the question. My first thought was "Just put the code in your footer in your template(s) so that it is on every page". Isn't that how it's done? Perhaps I'm being a bit naive; my understanding of GA is definitely not great.
do you mean £40 for grads and £30 for consultants?
Italy posts salary details on web
Interesting perspective. As a mostly non-Windows user, I would much rather spawn a lightweight XPDF process than have to deal with the flash plugin not working properly cross-platform.

I guess I'm saying, with PDF I get a choice; with flash, you have to use the official flash player to get most things to work.
Twitter Shitter
Craigslist blanched as eBay eyed marriage: lawsuit
Creativity does not require genius
COLA Tutorial: Brainfuck
In my experience, the thing people have most trouble with using Subversion is moving directories around. They expect to be able to open up the Finder (on OS X) and drag a folder somewhere else - but doing so without using "svn move" results in massive confusion later on as the hidden .svn directory gets moved at the same time, breaking things.

Many (all?) distributed systems solve this issue by keeping repository metadata in one place at the root of the project rather than spreading it around in lots of .svn folders.
I am afraid I did not make myself clear enough. I was criticizing only the safety pin patent, which obviously is superfluous, given the existence of fibulas. The general case, building better (but really better, not pharma-style better) mousetraps still warrants recognition.
Well, it's kind of a blurry line that separates the two. The financial industry existed before all of those products did. Building a financial model doesn't require these products -- one could do it by spending hours pouring over government filings, etc. to compile all the information needed -- so they're all "time saving." And since time is money -- faster modeling means more work can be done in the same time, and/or fewer analysts are required to do the same work -- they're all "money making."

I suppose you could distinguish between the "market data/financials products" and "products that save time and thus money in other ways." Mekko, for example, might fall into the latter group -- it's basically just an advanced charting tool. It retails for about $500. DealMaven, which is basically a workflow improvement tool, would probably fall into that category as well, although I'm not sure what it costs.
Public Flashing: Open Screen Project
Basically:

"Specifically, this work will include:

* Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications

* Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player

* Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services

* Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free."
On the outset if you think the startup would do well, then I would suggest to join even at a 4% rate - the reason being that its better to join a more promising startup at a below market compensation rather than the other way round.

One way of coming with a good figure is as follows:

Assuming your market salary is x /mnth and the founders is y /mnt. Also, assuming that you get funding in about an year. Then finally based on the assumption that the startup equity is a function of hte risk that you take, then each founders total investment comes to:

12y + 18y

and your investment comes to:

12x

So essentially your stake in the company should be around

12x / 3*(12y + 18y) + 12x

Also, there is no basis for your stake to not get diluted and incase the startup goes for multiple rounds 4% might looks like a very high figure which the founders might end up not being very comfortable with.I would suggest, and for other reasons also, that you might consider negotiating a bigger stake and accept dilution.
I think you should let on... first of all, it's honest (I know if I were the founder I would really want to keep an honest problem-solver happy and well-paid) and second of all what goes around comes around.
yeah approximately. And by consultants I mean grads that go and work for IT consultancies like Accenture, IBM, not grads that become consultants (which are relatively rare from my experience)
You can find out the number of authorized shares from the Secretary of State of whatever state the company is incorporated in.

That won't tell you much (most companies never issue anywhere close to the number they have authorized), but it least it will narrow it down. If they have 1,000,000 authorized, 30,000 is pretty OK. But I'm guessing, given the money they've raised, that they have >10,000,000 authorized. In that case, 30,000 is probably nearly worthless at this point.
Don't ask for the number authorized, it is nearly useless. Outstanding and issued are the two ones that matter to you.
Once you get used to it, outlook's standard conversation view is more convenient than GMail's, at least for me.
I heard that Outlook 2007's search is much faster than previous versions. Is that true? Maybe it isn't as fast as Xobni, Lookout, or Google Desktop Search, but people have said that it is fast enough.
Web applications will not solve our synchronization problems

Example: You want to send a mail using Yahoo Mail where you attach a document created with Google docs. When you created that document you wanted to use an image from Flickr. That's 3 different services that needs to be synchronized. What happens when you add other web applications.

When/if people move to web applications, the synchronization problem moves with them.
Yeah, I am trying to negotiate a bigger stake but with dilution.

None of the founders have been working on this full time over the last 18 months, I would say about 50% of their time, it is only now that everyone is coming on board full time. We have lots of customers knocking on the door for the product which is down to them. I am being told the figures being presented to VCs indicate the company may be worth about £6m today, though we have no contracts in place yet.
I founded four companies, and have always made them 'transparent' to prospective employees. In fact, I show them a projected cap table that tells them what they can expect -- 2 more financings to liquidity, the opportunity to pick up an another ~30k options, $10/share exit = $600k and growing -- IF we all work hard and pull together. If they're not forthcoming with you at this point, they won't be down the line.
I think he means the PhDs have been flogged by academia longer than the Masters, who thus retain a modicum of self-worth.

I don't know about starting salaries, but DC-area hiring is plentiful, and you should be able to hit $100k in a few years (if not sooner). Of course if you want to be under the bright lights, and not spend your career backstage, then: Go west, young man.
Infogrames to buy rest of Atari for $11 million
Insoshi, Meet Heroku
Choosing A Domain Name
User Labor Markup Language
User Labor Markup Language (ULML), is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services.
Researchers believe the discovery will pave the way for instant-on PCs, more energy-efficient computers, and new analog computers that can process and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain.

It will also bring about world peace and time travel.
Declassified NSA Document Reveals the Secret History of TEMPEST
Apple fans have always been fervent even during the very long period where the computers very obviously underpowered and overpriced. Apple was putting out 040-based computers at high prices when the PC industry was knee-deep in comparatively cheap Pentium systems. It was only until the Power PC came along that Apple started to release systems where the hardware was hefty enough to match the quality of the interface. I also challenge anybody to argue that the OS, as opposed to interface, was anything but creaky for many years. OS 10 (not OS X) was garbage.
How could you monetize something like Meebo? Virtual goods...advertising?
Adobe, cell phone makers work on Net interface
Because the people who came before you have mitigated a lot of the risk.
HP Labs' find could revolutionize computing
60~70 in Cambridge/Boston. There are some major companies here (Google, Microsoft, ITA) that probably offer more to really good hacker candidates.
Why Facebook ended up in the Valley and not Cambridge Ma
you haven't mentioned what salary ($) they have offered you or whether is it only stock options ... if salary is fair and good then dont bother about stock options - if salary is below par then RUN !!
i don't think the world will ever learn mandarin en masse if that entails learning thousands of characters. that said, if the chinese embrace an alphabet (at least for communication with foreigners), pinyin/bopomofo could become the standard for an "international mandarin." or more likely, the chinese will just learn english since it already has international traction.
... charge 2x for them. Good examples are ... Starbucks.

FWIW, prices are about the same between Starbucks and @LOCAL_COFFEE_SHOPS. I don't think they are charging more because of their brand, they're just charging what people will pay for a cup of coffee.
Try salary.com for statistics on this. -- enter "Software Engineer I" or "web developer".
Technology Blogs Make Less Money With Adsense
read http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/nine_questions_.html
Industry, Stanford hope to fix what ails parallel processing
Forget the paperless office dream, but how about a paperless living room?
They make very well thought out products.

With bugs. One thing Apple does consistently is release buggy Rev. A products. Every. Single. Time. It's almost like they try to do it.

Out of all the laptops I've had, (Toshiba, IBM, Sony, Dell, MacBook), the Macbook wins absolutely in terms of design, build quality, and functionality.

In terms of hardware, they're all the same designs from Intel. Apple uses prettier build materials (metal); but Thinkpads are a lot more solid. (Drainage holes under the keyboard, huge hinge connecting the screen to the base, easy to open up to add things, every screw has a part number for easy ordering, etc.)

In the end, I think people like Apple because Apple likes themselves so much. It's very easy to get excited about something when you see other people doing it. When Apple launches a product, it's a work of art. When Lenovo releases a new Thinkpad... it's really fucking boring. "Yay, it looks exactly like last year's model!" That doesn't mean it's not a good computer, though... it just means Apple markets to the ignorant better. There is quite a large market of people that don't know anything :)

Finally, yeah the iPhone and OS X are kind of nice. Unfortunately Apple likes to add cool features to their OS and then cripple them for The Media Companies; the same goes for the iPhone. When I buy something, I want it to work for me, not whoever is paying Apple this week.

So I use Linux on a Thinkpad, and think about what I do with my computer instead of what it looks like.
Why social software won’t dethrone the incumbents
AT&T iPhone owners may be getting free WiFi at Starbucks and other AT&T hotspots
Exactly, what is he really offering at his company to attract the top talent?

I think he is a pretty smart guy with a successful business - but I am not sure the work environment sounds interesting enough for some of the top grads. Who wants to work on the ASP -> PHP compiler they have, or write a bunch of AJAX?

Unless he has some luring new projects in the work like some sort of cloud based synchronization... :)
May 1, 1964: First Basic Program Runs
But isn't Apple's relatively small market share because most companies (big or small) tend toward Windows?

Cost is obviously an issue for the home user, too--why spend (at least) twice as much on a Mac when you can get a perfectly acceptable Windows machine?
Adobe opens SWF and FLV, wants to create one Flash and one AIR runtime for PCs and mobile devices
Well, McCarthy correctly predicated sometime back ;)

"When architects get prizes, the people suffer."
Great post!

I especially liked, "Why is he stuck at my level at his age?" Probably the first thing most people think.

Then again, does anybody ever wonder all the things that may have gone wrong in this person's life, through no fault of their own? Even with family issues, illnesses, accidents, and many kinds of financials setbacks, some older workers show how resilient they can be.

Thanks for the reminder.
Prometric now offering Ruby certification exam
Prometric is now offering computer based Ruby certification exams
Ask PG: Please reply here or write an essay on:
1. how you feel after successfully helping/mentoring/funding 80 companies?

2. What is the secret of YC's success and the success of YC funded companies?

3. How did you came up with YC business model?

4. What is the most important thing you think companies/founders get from your program? (i know most of them will say VC connection, demo day, mentoring etc. but is it anything else that we are not seeing?)

and finally

5. what advise would you give to the people who wants to replicate your model (as there are few clones already) not to make money but to help grow the spirit of entrepreneurship, employment and innovation?

Pg, your reply/essay will go long way to help - because I think if there are more YCs then there are more successful startups, more startups will bring more jobs in the market, there will be more innovation and it help directly and in-directly the whole economy (especially to the third world countries who might implement your model to get balls rolling).
Roughly the same numbers for Waterloo grads at those places.
"I think people like Apple because Apple likes themselves so much"

Stop telling me why I like my MacBook. I've told you why I like it. Please try and have some respect.

I ran Linux on a thinkpad for a couple of years. I'd spend a lot of time dealing with idiotic things like hardware issues, compatibility, linux updates etc etc. That's not a good use of my time. Since moving to a MacBook I haven't had any hardware issues, or had to spend ages maintaining the o/s. THAT is why people like Apple.

I don't know what you're talking about crippling for the media companies, obviously region coding is a complete pain in the neck, but I was pretty pleased when I hooked up my mac mini to the home network and could play all my backed up DVDs straight from frontrow without any extra hassles.
It is absolutely vintage joel in that it is a FogCreek recruiting ad. Joel has mastered the art of using fanboyism as marketing. "Oh look -- Microsoft is doing something big! I'm sure it sucks! haha Come work for me"
Definitely takes me back too: "Aside from the massive 128MB of storage, this is where the PC kicks the most ass."
The Dumbest Thing I've Heard Warren Buffet Say
The menial job is likely NOT a startup, and is a huge corporation that will not likely recognize your massive contribution.

I don't know that it is exactly good karma to not let on, but it would be something to consider.

Would you really give the honest problem-solver what they deserve though? The last project I did at a large company that saved the company a lot of time and money netted me a 10% raise. Probably less than 1% what I saved them per year.
The term "Killer App" has gotten brutally watered down. And y'all aren't helping.

From Wikipedia:

"a killer app is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it"

Sorry, DropBox (while very, very well done) doesn't even come close to cutting it.

It doesn't hold a candle to Visicalc. Or email. Or Photoshop.
Maybe it's just me but I couldn't begin to guess what the best advice I've ever received is/was. I'm only 37 but I'm guessing that there have been 1000 pieces of great advice that, if I hadn't received, I'd be far worse off.
Online data visualization talks - data visualization & visual design
ECommerce Progress Bars Gallery