skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once worked for a company that adamantly forbid telecommuting. Our city's transit system shut down due to a strike, in the middle of the cold and dark Canadian Winter. The snow and the flood of cars on the roads, ground the city to a halt.

My 1 hour daily commute took 3-4 hours total,... the entire team was tired and demoralized from sitting in traffic for so long.

Yet our CEO completely forbid telecommuting. He wanted to see asses in chairs, even if it meant wasting our energy in traffic. We were forced to work in the office, and everyone directed their grumpiness and anger to their job. It made the cultural environment toxic, and people left as soon as they could.

It demoralized me, and I had animosity towards the company. My performance suffered and I cared less about my work.

Eventually the CEO almost drove the company into the ground, until he quit before he could get sued for not completing his fiduciary duties.

He eventually fired me, and it was probably one of the best things to happen to my career.

TL;DR: anectdotally I can agree that companies that can't trust their employees to telecommute are toxic places to be avoided.
We use these at our office:

http://www.sitonit.net/home/product-overview.asp?product=foc...

They are not as good as aerons but they are significantly cheaper, around $250.
It might be extremely healthy for economy. Market works because consumers make thoughtful decisions. Poor people have to put much thought in their purchases. Increasing money available to poor people without making them feel rich increases market ability to prefer more efficient producers and service providers.

Of course curbing commercials a bit to allow people to make less brainwashed decisions also would be good for market.

You also need safeguards in place so companies in search of greater efficiency won't release harmful products.
Great point. Although Newsweek could make a similar argument about its content, couldn't it? I mean, the Historical Jesus never gets old, does it?
if renting were so much better than buying fewer people would buy, and nobody would be dumb enough to buy and then rent the place.

Correct, which means that renting isn't clearly superior to buying either. (Except during insane housing bubbles). Again exactly what we should expect.

But obviously buying is better than renting because a lot of people choose to go and spend their money buying extra homes beyond the one they need and renting it.

And obviously growing your own food is better than buying it because lots of people grow extra food and sell it. The point is that the profits you can earn in either case aren't so great that it's foolish not to do it.
"What total utter crap" passes for an up-voted "well reasoned" comment on HackerNews. Spare me please.

Unlike many in the political class, this man actually PAYS his taxes and the payroll taxes of his 80+ employees in pursuit of private enterprise.

Considering he has risked his own private capital to create jobs, he has earned some right to "whine" about the current trend of taxation.
I don't want to sound like a financial advisor because I am not. Your financials are different than mine but I hope that the below can allow you to relate so as to choose the best strategy for you.

My approach is a bit more traditional. I take each salary as the static factor (i.e. I will not get a raise in the future). This way if I get more money later on that would be a good surprise, otherwise I have my plan set.

The key factor for you at the moment is to get out of debt - all debt. I sat down and wrote my income. Then from that I subtracted the necessary expenses i.e. rent, utilities, transportation etc. I also subtracted a relatively small amount for food allowing a bare minimum of eating out and socializing. I cut all unecessary expenses and then paid the bare minimum on all of my loans and whatever was left was the money that I could spend on anything. Let's assume for a moment that this amount was $500.

I then opened a savings account and put that $500 there. I did the same thing for the next 3 months until I ended up with $1500. That money served as the immediate emergency fund. The number is arbitrary and I have since increased it to $2000. Your interpretation will depend on your own situation.

Say you had a problem with the car, unexpected expenses etc. - that is the fund that would help you get out of a very unpleasant situation later on. So if you needed say $200 for a car repair you could get it from there but you would replenish that amount as soon as you can. The emergency fund would need to have $1500 at all times. This gives you also a sense of accomplishment and security.

Once I had that done, I started attacking all the credit cards and loans. I started with the first one, the one that had the lowest amount. Once I paid that off, I went to the next one, the next one etc. Once everything was gone, I made sure that whatever I would spend I would be able to pay it off the next month. This way I would never pay any APR and would use my money for myself.

The next step would be to set up a 401K. A Roth IRA would be a nice place to start and you can choose a conservative strategy to minimize your risk. After this is set up, you will need to start setting a long term emergency fund. This would help you in the chance you lose your job and have nothing. Some people set aside 3-6 months of pay to help with any layoff. If this is set up, you will be able to pay your bills for 3-6 months and have a bit of time to find another job.

My point is that you cannot rely on the future since you do not know what will happen. Work with what you have today and you will be better off in the future.

I hope the above helps.
Yeah, that's a good one too. I learned that lesson the hard way a while back. Checklists are a great idea.
Actually, health insurance companies refuse to insure a band of neighbors collectively since they deem the risk of insuring everyone in the same neighborhood too great, due to everyone being exposed to the same environment (power lines, contaminated water, etc.) A friend actually tried to get insured for him and 30 of his neighbors and that was the rejection reason given. So collective bargaining has to fall to a more spread out organization like an employer or a union, with all the politics therein, instead of closer knit locals, which tends to work out better.

This is one reason I'm in favor of government health care: The profit motives of private health care favor denying care, since not paying out money is a good way to make money. So you have case where nobody will cover you for arbitrary reasons, or deny you payment due to a "pre-existing condition" or some other nonsense.
Whether his kids go to "state school" or not, he is still taxed as if they did.
Health and food are two different things. He said he pays $12,000 a year for health cover. There are people there who get $12,000 a year to live on. They can afford food quite fine, but if they get some health problem they would be in deep trouble. Life and death sort of trouble, which you hardly get with food in the west anyway. You only need a dollar to survive at the bare minimum.

So food is not a problem. Nor is housing or transport. The latter are very different from health. You can afford very much not to travel. Walk instead. So too you can afford to not have your own house for a month but live at a friends house. Besides, the vast majority would not want to be provided a free house if they can afford it finely.

But with health there is a matter of principle also. The same principle that each life is precious applies to it. A person should not be free to die because of money in such a rich and prosperous country. Also, there should not be a two tire system whereby the rich can afford first class health care and the poor just enough to get on with plenty of annoyances or worse die.
This is little but a thinly-veiled attack on Obama.
That just reflects the fact that you probably don't operate in a workplace where it isn't clear what mode of communication is meant when someone sets up a "call." At my multinational, explicitness is requisite since the requester could mean POTS-to-POTS (legacy PBXes), VOIP-to-POTS (Nortel softphone for the VOIP, connecting to older PBXes), VOIP-to-VOIP (Asterisk), Skype-to-Skype, or Skype-to-Voice (via VoSky).

When someone says "let's Skype" in my world, they either mean Skype-to-Skype (which is implicit if they are in your Skype contacts) or Skype-to-VOIP using one of our VoSky appliances that's tied into our PBXes. The verb "to call" is almost meaningless these days.
Discovery, not re-discovery. The upper bound of 20 (that no position takes more than 20 moves) was not known earlier.
I'm sure the author blames that on Obama too.
Down with Legal Tender
He has a n900, one of the most "open" phones there is. If he had a "normal" Nokia with DRM, he'd probably be able to download that app mentioned in the comments.
Are new IETF switching, routing specs needed?
I've had success going the other way--having a meeting about making software for a company and then figuring out it makes more sense if I retain ownership and sell it multiple times. They save money up front and I can get paid while still having something to sell down the line. Everyone wins.
In Crackdown on Energy Use, China to Shut 2,000 Factories
I don't think many people would disagree that hypnosis works in terms of changing brain state. Where the doubt lies is in the claim that you can plant some kind of repeatable cue that will cause a person to involuntarily perform an action. Or that you can help somebody recall events from previous lives. Or that you can cause somebody to loose weight or quit smoking. It's this type of associated claim that shrouds hypnosis in disbelief, not the actual hypnotic state itself.

So I guess it depends on what is meant by 'works'.
I am working off my credit cards now, but delayed them literally years (at the cost of ~1k in interest) when I was making less money.

I definitely understand compound interest, but it works both ways. If I put 1k into a 401k now that is 1k is no longer liquid. I think, (and I may be wrong about this.. but my whole strategy is based off it), keeping that 1k liquid will offer a higher short-term return.
I require all of my programmers to be on site, not because of any need to monitor what they're doing (Pivotal Tracker, source control, IM, and email take care of most of that for us, even while we're in the office) but to have the kind of conversations that can only happen when you have a bunch of engineers around a white board trying to solve a hard problem (no, IRC is not the same thing).

I still haven't come across a tool that allows telecommuters to replicate this process.
Looking for your help with my startup, SeqCentral
Hi all.

In about a month I'll be launching my first company, SeqCentral (http://www.seqcentral.com), and I am hoping that you can help me test a couple aspects.

First and foremost, we need to verify our mantra of "your data is your data" by testing our security. Yes, we have beta testers, but we are also interested in having some white hat testers try to compromise the data stores. By the way, anything goes.

Second, we're curious to see how our system behaves with 10's (or 100's) of simultaneous users. The back-end is inherently scalable by spinning up EC2 machines, but the front-end is currently a single Apache machine serving PHP pages.

If you're interested in helping us out, simply go to http://www.seqcentral.com and request an invitation by entering your email address and putting "hacker news" in the "Name" field.

Thanks a ton. The other SeqCentral co-founder, Jeremy, will be at the DC HN Meetup this evening (Aug. 9), so please say hi if you bump into him!

Matt
Nobody should store information that could get them jailed/hurt/killed 5 or 10 years from now.
I am definitely comfortable with risk at this point. I am not taking any at the moment really, but I am trying to set myself up to take some big gambles in the next year or two.
I think you mean an oligopoly. In NJ, the top guy has 34%, the number 2 guy has 25%. Is that an oligopoly?

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/06/pdf/health_co...

Oligopolies do tend to be correlated with monopolistic pricing, but I'm not sure they allow it in an otherwise competitive market. Most oligopolies which successfully raise prices tend to be in uncompetitive markets, e.g. cell or cable service, and the price increases may be caused by the hindered competition rather than the oligopoly itself.

Consider the case of an oligopoly in the DRAM market: when they tried to raise the price of DRAM (2001-2002), they succeeded for a short time. They also collectively lost 3.3% of market share over those 2 years and members of the oligopoly (Hynix was the first, I think) quickly broke ranks in pursuit of increased profits.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2002_Dec_17/a...
A list of all-time highest voted links--let me know if I'm mistaken and that it exists already
Thanks. And while I am still thinking about it - you might be interested in reading about Linus Pauling's take on nutrition and health. Something like this book: http://www.worldcat.org/title/vitamin-c-and-the-common-cold/....
Pun not intended?
I have a customer's CC info.  What now?
Him: from the UK, can't seem to use paypal.
me: selling him advertising space.
him: left me a voice mail with his CC info
me: what do i do now?

help!
We were doing the same, if not more, at massify. We used Panther Express which doesn't bill on amount, but instead on how much of their pipe you are using.

It was super cheap, around $55.
The Startup Diet: How I Lost 35 Pounds While Working Overtime
really? crap, i must've misread something then. my fault. looks like you can use skype on most android phones anyway, though, just not as easily/freely as on verizon.

regardless, though, i think my original point still stands. skype hasn't been stagnant, they're making some moves.
Besides Apple, you mentioned no companies that actually sell products so this advice isn't applicable.

Both Apple and Microsoft famously had orders before product, but that's really common in product oriented businesses. Dell made a whole company around that philosophy.
This is what the USA looks like from socialist-land (aka Britain):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLfghLQE3F4

Whilst the idea of the government paying for healthcare may seem ridiculous to you it seems just as ridiculous to us that you might be ill and not be able to afford treatment.
Thats sort of the idea we were going for by explaining the background - that there is a reason the bay area is filled with a million product obsessed early adopters. It is cultural. It has deep roots. It cannot be easily reproduced, so you'd better work with what you have instead of copying silicon valley.
Plight of the Dwindling Honeybee
With that said, we we need a balance of the two. "Immaterial" assets are, in many ways, necessary prerequisites for an economy with enough liquidity to finance entrepreneurial ventures.

(Though I'll gladly leave that to 'the other guys.' Creating value is much more fun than providing for it.)
Prestige and perks and not living in a Gulag don't mean lack of coercion. The central planning economy itself was fundamentally coercive. How many Soviet, say, Andy Groves or Woz's can you think of?
It's your responsibility to argue your position rationally and eloquently. Your opinions are not a public good that others aught to participate in perfecting.
They are not obligated to reply to you in any way. While the registrar can technically cancel the registration because of an invalid email addr, I don't know of a single registrar who will. Certified mail is the best way to contact them, but again if they aren't looking to sell don't expect a reply.
C++ as far as I know. Skype has its roots in Kazaa's file sharing technology, they use a proprietary P2P network to get around routers and firewalls - something that VOIP services lack. It also does direct high quality connections where available.
I suppose it's the height of hubris to suggest cochlear implants might be able to improve on nature's own deafness as well?
I just wish I could have Spotlight be a Google search instead of searching my phone. Then maybe I would actually use it.
And here we find the real complaint. His tax burden compared to his health insurance is probably much higher.
Nettuts+ Screencasts for PHP, JavaScript, RegExp, jQuery, WordPress, HTML/CSS
How Not to Install LNK Update (KB2286198) on Windows XP SP2
I think that there are important distinctions between incremental and revolutionary products, and I agree that this advice may not work for the latter... now, how do you stop founders from thinking their latest idea is revolutionary just because they haven't done enough research to know any better? (This is what I wonder about with my ideas)
I have heard "let's Skype on Webex" and "let's Skype on GoToMeeting".

Also common are VOIP conference lines where everybody dials in.
> If you're still not convinced, think of it as project risk management. In a big software project do you tackle the high-risk, ill-defined stuff first, or do you postpone that to the end? Obviously you address the unpredictable stuff first — most of the project risk is due to the unknown, so the earlier you can sort out uncertainty the more time you have to deal with the consequences.

That definitely opened my eyes a bit. I usually do the difficult parts of a purely software fun app first, but when it comes time to making a bigger public facing app I just build it too.

Good post.
There are a few things:

1. Suppose the restaurant owner is not playing music that BMI/ASCAP are authorized to collect royalties on. What gives them the right to demand it? The answer is a law which effectively assumes the restauranteur is a liar and is playing music illegally.

2. BMI/ASCAP-collected royalties rarely are paid to the artists. Most of those royalties disappear in "operating expenses" and executive bonuses. Few artists ever see a dime.

3. BMI/ASCAP know that their activities are harming businesses and don't care. Their royalty schedules often far exceed what is reasonable and, in many cases, force small businesses to fold entirely. I know several people in this position.

4. Many artists are aware of this and strongly disapprove of it, but are powerless to stop it.

Nothing BMI/ASCAP does is justifiable.
> I mean, if it's interesting, why wouldn't you want to hear about it when it's released?

(a) Because I no longer give any e-mail address to a business unless I'm starting to deal with it Right Now. Insisting on one is a good way to make sure I never deal with you again.

(b) Because I wouldn't trust a company anyway after I discovered that it was advertising a product or service as though it were real but actually it was just messing me around and wasting my time.
What kind of desks are you looking into?
Tell HN: Today is 8.9.10
Soviets/successor states led in many instances. Larg(est) helicopters, Larg(est) cargo planes, Larg(est) nuke, hover transports, AFV (BMP series), hypersonic torpedoes, ground effect ships(not deployed), stealth ICBMs (to counter Reagen's Star Wars pipe dream).

They aren't always the inferior that cold-war propaganda has claimed.
http://www.fec.gov/DisclosureSearch/HSProcessContributorList...

Appears that Tim Gobble paid some cash to BornDigital o.O
So, I think my biggest problem with this app is the UI. The layout is okay, but there are lots of places where the spacing is really far off.

Especially the enormous yellow bar on the front page. The type is way too big for the box, and the facebook connect icon is way too big. It needs to be displayed in its natural size - or an appropriately sized one needs to be found.

In general, little issues like that plague the UI and make it feel unpolished. Fixing them will go a long way towards making the app feel like something I'd want to use.
That's too bad--some of the most interesting parts of the book are analysis of Western religions and their common conclusions about the role humanity plays in the universe. Pretty eye-opening stuff
Mini Skirts, Bikini Can Cause What
Any professor worth their salt will guide a debate among the classmates, and try to get students to argue about the interpretations of events, instead of spoonfeeding them from a history book.

So, what do you get? A set of different views coming from your classmates. An exposure to methods of debate. And so on.
I would love to see treatment of this material added as part of standard "AG" class structure.
Ask HN: Launching a startup from within a "parent" company?
I'm currently gainfully employed at a smallish consulting company. I like the company and the owners a great deal, but I've got the startup itch. However, I know my company would be very sorry to loose me.

Rather than branching out on my own, with all the risks associated with that, it strikes me that it might be possible to reach a mutually beneficial compromise: I stay with my company, keep my salary (possibly with a pay cut), spend ~70% of my time on my own project, and we split the profits.

Advantages:

* Low risk (for me)

* Moderately low risk for my company (my salary is small relative to their resources)

* High reward for both (profit ceiling and distribution should be about the same as with a funded startup)

* Zero overhead - my company already has accounting & tax infrastructures, a nice office with plenty of space, etc.

* Easy pitch - my company knows I'm capable and motivated

Disadvantages:

* Loss of control (maybe not, with the proper contracts?)

* Hard to sell the company for an exit (maybe not, if structured correctly?)

It's worth noting that I definitely envision the "growing a profitable business" type of startup, as opposed to the "building buzz and exiting quickly" type. Though I'd definitely want to work something into the agreement where I could "buy out" the whole company once it became self sustaining, if I wanted to.

Any thoughts? Anyone have experience with this? What would you assume a reasonable ownership/profit distribution ratio would be for this kind of arrangement?

(using a throwaway account in case my boss reads this prematurely).

(edited for formatting)
clickable http://jummpp.in
I'm looking forward to 10/10/10, or 101010, or '42'.
Joyent partners with Basho on Riak hosting
after using facebook connect to log in I clicked 'find friends' (either in the to do list or up top) and it appears to log me out and take me to the front page...
Frash puts Flash on iPhone 4
There are always exceptions to every rule. This also relates to a big point in the article, you are not your customer. What matters is if _enough_ people are willing to do this, not if all of them are.

This kind of thing won't work for every business, but it's a hard lesson to learn: most people are not you. I was reminded of this the other day when there was an IAMA Netflix Employee, and they mentioned that they get a fair number of phone calls asking about how to return their DVDs 'to that box outside of the gas station.' Yep, people think Redbox is run by Netflix because they both use red, and both sell movies...
If the founders don't know whether the product is revolutionary or evolutionary, they don't understand the market. If they don't understand the market, why the heck are they building a product for it in the first place? Get some experience first by working in that market, using someone else's money.
Read the last sentence of my previous post again...you think of those people because they're the rare ones who can succeed based on their gut alone, allegedly doing no customer development or validation. I'm not even sure I buy that part...didn't Jobs and Woz spend tons of time hanging out with computer hobbyists in the early days? Seems like a good way to learn what your market wants. And Fried was scratching his own itch, which as I've already said is a separate thing.

I just don't get why you wouldn't try to find out if you'll be able to find customers before you spend all the time and money to build the thing.