skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Simple company policies or guidelines that work well?
The other day there was a great side-discussion on a company's book buying policy (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639193) which seemed so refreshing compared to the ones I have seen. One point that I liked was that it could have been made into a one liner, but in practice a more detailed (but still simple to follow) guide worked well since it made employee's more comfortable on how to use it.

Anyone else have some simple (and real life) examples of policies, guidelines, or procedures that have worked well?
It certainly could be great as a viewer- an interactive blueprint- but are you suggesting they will do actual design on the iPad?
I really want to like ebooks, I really do, however I can't stand the thought of purchasing a device that assumes I am a thief. It's the digital equivalent of employees standing at the door of a store, checking bags and receipts. Except worse. The fact that I can't share books is terrible, I wouldn't be able to read books in open formats even more so.

The kindle is definitely the nicest reader, however it seems to Sony reader is the most open.
Type-checking a Dynamic Language
I've never heard of that, what's the logic there? You drop the ball bearings as soon as you've fallen asleep, for some reason I don't get?

Serious question.
It sure seems like a good fit... Charbeat focuses on real-time analytics while Google delays stats. Adding Chartbeat's real time capabilities would be interesting.

I don't know if Google would take the performance hit of Charbeat's code though. It would make more sense to me for Google to simply build in Chartbeat's real-time block of popular pages into a new section. Add in "conversation" options to track Twitter, Facebook, etc and they'd have a new interesting social aspect.

Chartbeat has a way to go if they really want to be bought by Google. My money is on Google simply recreating the best parts of it with an eye toward performance over features.
It's to save on trying to look at an A0 drawing outside on a windy day :-)
Michael,

I should have clarified; I don't have a problem with SEO... I always try and choose titles well, keywords, categories and write findable copy. It's the SEO shenanigans that get my blood angry. The info graphics that point back to a bullshit affiliate-laden webpage like onlineeducation.net that actually serves no REAL purpose.

What you said here:
====================
The Internet isn't a store front that people are forced to walk by. Without a marketing strategy your site does not exist.
====================

Is really damn spot on... I write and treat it like it is... like Google or whoever will find the content. I just assumed it would, but I can't compete with the noise level created by other sources blasting links to their own articles on the same topics.

I do submit bigger/more detailed pieces to the social news sites. I got banned from reddit for doing it, then an admin reviewed all my links and unbanned me... that was awesome, really endeared me to that community. Digg I'm auto-buried on for doing it for no reason... again, no spam crap links, just stuff I've been writing.

Slashdot I've been fortunate with about 10 times in the last few years which I'm hugely thankful for... but at the end of the month I don't think it really changed much except for the temporary spikes in traffic.

I believe my biggest problem is I just want to write. I don't want to have to have those marketing problems that the current state of the web is forcing me to have... I'm resistant to it because I'm resentful of it.

It is the whole "get good grades in school and you will be a success!" crap all over again. Then you see the kid that kept failing do 10x better than you and you are so damn mad about focusing on your grades the whole time that your ego won't let you see 10 feet infront of you.

I think that is where I am right now. No ETA yet on when I'll be coming out the other site :)
I'm pretty sure entrapping[1] some sad weirdo on the Internet is pretty much the definition of a soft target.

By hard targets, I mean someone who is actually scary in real life. Harassing the guy who's extorting protection money from local businesses, or people associated with organized crime rather than a middle aged woman who put a cat in a bin.

[1] It's possible they did get a dangerous pedophile off the streets but I can't help but be cynical when even the police led operations in these situations are sometimes downright shady:
(http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/sexual-pr...)
One Quadrillion, To Scale
I'm the same way about needing an internet connection- or at the very least a nice thick book referencing the APIs. I'm sure if you use the same API everyday the reference wouldn't be necessary, but that's not true of most of the stuff I do.

It be interesting to see what the numbers are of people who need to be connected versus people who code in solitude.
Drupal Releases New Code of Conduct
Here's a great article on the biggest car service in Brooklyn-- Arecibo (their base station is around the corner from where I live). Many interesting details about the economics, technology, and politics of the livery business in NYC:

http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/54678/

From a safety perspective, in NYC it's illegal (and not a good idea) to hail a non-yellow-medallioned taxi on the street. They likely don't have a TLC license, and may or may not be affiliated with a larger fleet.

Call the service's base station--they might not perform background checks on the drivers, but they'll be licensed and insured. The services have an incentive to weed out the bad drivers-- if they get a reputation for spotty service or creepy guys, then customers will switch to the car service down the block (there is healthy competition in this market-- they are constantly splitting off and trying to poach each others' drivers).
You can switch to Yahoo Asia to forward e-mail for free.
8 Awesome Ways to Destroy a TV
It could easily be a live ATM. Using the methods described by Barnaby Jack at this year's Black Hat and DefCon, they could have installed their software instead of Jack's Rootkit.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9179844/Barnaby...
Patrick, you truly are a boon to this community. Good combination of sense/compassion (my reply to this would have been lacking on the compassion front).

The bummer of the SEO world (which I can't decide how Google will solve) is that the "more pagerank than God" sites can churn out mediocrity and immediately rank higher than higher quality stuff. Mashable is more linkworthy just because it's Mashable. They toss out a Scott Pilgrim review and it gets hundreds/thousands of retweets, likes, and links... More than anyone else on the topic. They get the links, not because it's the best review, but because of the SEO foundation they've built and the link-engine they have in place.

SERP placement seems to be self-sustaining-- to assail a trusted site's position, it seems like you need content that is way more than merely better.
It doesn't require any careful analysis to see that. Even if you look 100% unlike a seal, it's still more risky to swim in the water with a great white than it is to not.
This is the most useful approach to event discovery since Upcoming. I was thrilled to see it in my Twitter list earlier, and I'm thrilled about the amount of attention it's getting.

I have just one request: feeds. Everywhere. I'd love to subscribe to a user, and have new events they're attending show up in my reader - similarly, I'd love to subscribe to a place.

The Twitter integration really works for me as opposed to Facebook; the former tends to be professional connections, while the latter is friends. However, I understand that others might feel differently. (OpenID would obviously also be brilliant, with some social graph discovery etc, but I imagine you've already thought about that.)
Sadly, lots of them are now $13, up from the flat $10 that Amazon used to charge for all best sellers. Those prices seem high. The fact that e-books involve no printing, binding, shipping, distributing or taking back and shredding unsold copies ought to save you something. And it’s outrageous that you can’t sell or even give away an e-book when you’re finished with it. You paid for it; why shouldn’t you be allowed to pass it on? (End of rant.)

Argh. This isn't how pricing works. If it was, Photoshop would cost 40 cents.

$13... for a book! Egads!
Angels put $1M into Udemy; YouTube for the "casual learning" crowd
And making custom binaries for Apple products only is better?
On windows, gvim.

On mac (we primarily do iPhone apps), Xcode, with MacVim as the external editor with keybindings setup to build/build-run, etc.

All this spanned over 2 windows monitors, 1 mac laptop and an external mac monitor, with an iPad sometimes becoming a 3rd mac monitor.
Jose,

Right now the site does about 500-600k pageviews a month and I make just enough from Adsense to cover hosting costs... that's it.

"make it" would be enough income to support family with some extra to take trips occasionally.

"super make it" would be enough to do that and pay 3 or 4 authors that love their job to write. That was always my goal and it just hasn't happened.
Guess I'm going to die early.
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Based off pictures, it's a good deal smaller and by conjecture lighter than the Kindle 2, which is really quite small and light already. So much so I'm having a hard time saying "no" to one.
I've done this and actually find it a bit disturbing.

It's great when I can't solve a problem in the evening, get a good nights sleep, and then I am able to quickly solve the problem in the morning. Sometimes though I actually have dreams about sitting at my desk writing the code that I couldn't come up with during the day. On the one hand it's great to wake up in the morning with the solution to my coding problem. But on the other hand, I'm not sure it's healthy to have my dreams filled with the same thing that I do all day while awake. Whenever that happens I definitely make some extra time for my hobbies that don't involve computers.
The USRP II is ~$1400, plus a PC, plus the antenna/mast I would think no more than 5k?

A link to the USRP site:
http://www.ettus.com/
"When approaching debugging, I first find out where the problem is, i.e. the exact line of code or config file or whatever that is causing the problem. That should not take long, and before you ask anyone else about it you should know exactly where the problem lies."

For crashes: Get backtraces! Knowing the line and the state of the callstack makes many common errors trivial to fix. Some languages (Java, Python) are helpful and generate them automatically. Others (C, C++) require a debugger. I've seen lots of programmers ignore gdb or Visual Studio and spend minutes with printf() looking for the exact line of a crash. Code crashes all the time. Dealing with it methodically and effectively will add minutes - or even hours - to your day.
It will be this way until some upstart disrupts the industry taking a smaller cut for routing authors directly to customers side stepping the old publishing houses.
Mother of God… The Web is Dead. Episode One with Chris Dixon
boxesandarrows.org is way to go :)
I can at least understand the convenience objections to DRM. "You bought it, so you should be able to put it on any device you want." I don't agree, but I understand it.

But this moral objection to DRM I don't get. News flash: actuarially speaking, "you" are almost certainly a thief. It's not like Amazon's suppliers are crazy for thinking their property might get stolen.
A very simple replacement system: unlimited medallions will be issued. The cost of a medallion is the cost of policing 1 driver (e.g., 1 random inspection per month, background check, car safety, etc) + 15% profit for the city. Prices will be set at market rates, but must be fully disclosed to passengers before the ride.
I'll drink to that.

jk
yes that is it... used to be breakitdownblog.com

Thanks for the kind words.
http://imgur.com/37L7Z.png

Django site. WingIDE, two terminals for runserver and test django commands respectively, and the browser (currently showing my tool for viewing and debugging data in the app).

There's a space in the top left corner because I have the left monitor in a vertical setup and the right in a horizontal.

EDIT - View from my office:

http://twitpic.com/23rg8a
No, but AutoCAD isn't used by designers anyway.
Ask HN: Review my idea - fix the way girls shop for jeans
I know this is a predominately male audience, but you are a group of smart people who can hopefully provide objectivity and help develop this idea.

The way girls shop for jeans is broken, IMO. Girls must browse through arbitrary, unstandardized sizes and try on a range of jeans from size 2-4, for example, to find ones that fit right.

Men have it easier. Two simple measurements, waist and inseam. I know that women would need more dimensions like hip and thigh to get a closer fit (us guys don't particularly care if our pants accentuate the right places).

What I want to do is bring uniform measurements to women's jeans, and allow women to custom-fit their jeans by ordering online, with a generous return policy like Zappos did with shoes. It's essentially a new brand of jeans that sets itself apart by making it easier for women to find jeans that fit them perfectly, every time.

Thoughts, suggestions, critiques?
$dff006 is the vertical raster position register, $dff180 is the background color register, and $bfe001 is one of the registers belonging to one of the two CIAs of the Amiga; the piece of code copies 16 bits of data (on the amiga referred to as a "word") from $dff006 to $dff180, checks if bit 6 in $bfe001 is high - the bit that contains the status of the left mouse button of joy/mouse port #1 - and then branches back to the .loop label if the comparison resulted negatively - that is, if the bit was not high.

In plain-speak, it renders vertical green/blue/cyan gradients in the background until the left mouse button is pressed.

(as a side note, I spent 4-5 years coding on the Amiga in the early 90s.)
> Argh. This isn't how pricing works. If it was, Photoshop would cost 40 cents.

They aren't saying it should only cost what it costs to manufacture it. They are simply trotting out the discussion of why, when production costs are lower, an ebook has to cost $9.99, when the physical book is also $9.99.

Fortunately, I've been finding quite often that the eBook on Amazon is a sizable discount off a hard copy.
No more rebooting Fedora machines - Ksplice Uptrack now free for Fedora
Do you have any examples of the kinds of things that libxmljs choked on?
clickable: http://gameplanapp.com
I'll be happy to hear that authors are getting (say) 80% of the $15 that books end up costing, but that doesn't change the fact that book pricing has nothing whatsoever to do with materials and binding and whatnot.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/98449/how-to-convert-an-a...

http://search.cpan.org/~sderle/Geo-Coder-US-1.00/US/Import.p...
Xbox Live Gold Price Increase in Perspective
Pomegranate First Thoughts
Oh totally, I agree. I have such a love/hate relationship with Chris Hanson's work, it's not even funny. Just something slightly more than cats, that's all.
Photos: Aviary’s New Headquarters
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtrencseni/4842660613/in/set-72...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtrencseni/4843277432/in/set-72...
This is one of the reasons I got a nook. It supports the epub format, which I feel offers more freedom than the kindle format.

Hardware wise I like the kindle over the nook, lighter faster, better experience, but I can't justify getting one when the moral cost is too high.
I posted this screenshot the last time similar question was asked:

http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/dev.png

It's more or less the same now, just the code is different.

Usually I have open at any time: SciTE, Notepad++, many browsers, Python shell, XAMPP/nginx, Gimp, Cygwin shell.

Most of times, just one window is fullscreen and I switch when needed (or just use magic hover feature from Windows 7).
The assumption is not that you are a thief, but that some of the people who buy it are thieves.

When you visit the mall, there are security cameras. There are security guards, there are those beeper scanner things at exits. There are ink tags, there are locked cabinets. There are display models while the real item hides "in the back". Why are you not up in arms about how the shopping mall "assumes you are a thief"?
Jersey City has jitney buses which are an excellent means of public transit. They compete with public buses, providing more frequent (but less predictable) service at lower prices.
American Taxi dispatches forty thousand fares a week. They're a wee bit bigger than me.
Very informative and interesting comment - thank you for "go[ing] on and on!"

It seems to me that the pattern you are describing also applies to Big 4 professional services firms like PriceWaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, etc, in areas anchored around accounting and auditing but characterised by an ever-expanding array of allied services. Would you care to comment on any nuances or differences particular to them as opposed to Big Law?
Matters of trust and privacy. I want to be able to change/cancel services without wondering if there's some forgotten dependency.

Often I try something out first to see if it's worth the trouble. I don't want to give out some other account info for something I may not even be bothered using.

I can see offering, as an option, the use of twitter/facebook/gmail whatever, but not to the exclusion of a standalone account. Especially since, as you say, it's easy to add.
Facebook squicks me, and I just don't "get" twitter. I think I have a facebook account lying around somewhere, created to look at someone's facebook content, once, but I'd have to dig it up. I admit I'm extremely eccentric in this respect, though.
That's right, they're not saying that it should cost exactly what it costs to manufacturing it. But they are saying there's a cost basis to the price of a book. Nonsense. Book prices have almost nothing to do with physical costs. _Trading and Exchanges_ costs $75. _The Nature of Technology_ costs $10. Both are hardcovers currently in print.

The difference in those costs reflects supply and demand. Books are priced by the market, not by cost plus fixed markup.
This is a picture of my desk:
http://cool-rr.com/cv/images/desk.jpg

Wing IDE is taking both of my screens.
That's definitely one of our ideas for pushing this further!
reddit is tolerable if you unsubscribe from all popular reddits, especially the front page, and subscribe only to niche reddits with a small following. If any one of those sub-reddits gets too popular you move on, i.e. science->hard science.
How to stay awake in class
Share your stories...
I really love chartbeat. It's very useful and addicting, so you have to be careful to not waste loads of times watching it.
12 work spaces (I prefer not having more than 2 or 3 windows in a work space). Contents depend on what I'm working on, but right now - 4 with emacs (3 different projects), 2 with browsers, 1 with IM. The rest contains terminal windows and one or 2 file browsers.
I might head over to StackOverflow for this as well--they have several threads on GUI frameworks, depending on requirements/platform.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/394039/which-python-gui-f...
From my understanding the iOS versions of AutoCad are in no way meant to serve as a replacement for the desktop version. But rather a very simplified version of the tools and features available.

As a designer, I can imagine being out for coffee or dinner with a potential client and not having my Macbook with me. Being able to pull out my iPhone or iPad and do a quick and dirty sketch of my thoughts/ideas to better convey the message could be incredibly useful. Much better than a standard cocktail napkin.

AutoCad is seeking to simply fill a void in a complete cross-hardware line. This addition will enable users to "CAD" wherever and whenever within certain constraints. These applications will work seamlessly together - so a quick sketch on your iPhone can later be redrawn and upgraded on your desktop.
As mentioned at the end of the article, "The NYT reports that the idea behind the mobile version is to allow an engineer to bring digital drawings to a job site and make notations on them from the field."
The colophon http://lanyrd.com/colophon/ says GeoPlanet: http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/
The one I remember vividly was a bug in a student project - I was writing a set of tools to "compile" lambda calculus expressions to to various sets of combinators and gather statistics about the effectiveness of different sets of combinators (starting with SK).

For some reason any attempt to implement a Y-combinator for recursion was crashing and for a couple of days I had no idea what could be wrong - then sitting on a bus on the way to visit my sister I was looking at a cinema from the bus and the thought came into my head "it's your aggressive re-use of applicative nodes".

Sure enough next day I removed this attempt at an optimization and everything worked!

I've had a few experiences like that and I now know that if I find a really tricky bug the best strategy isn't to sit there all night looking at it but to go and get a decent nights sleep - there is a very good chance you will know the answer by the next morning.
Growing herbs was one of my best decisions (lifehacks?) of the summer. I have found basil to be the most rewarding and robust herb to grow. Although my friends have a mint plant that keeps on coming back.

You also don't need to be living in a rural or suburban area to grow herbs. I live in Brooklyn and have herbs growing on my fire escape, as do many of my neighbors. If you're lucky enough to have outdoor space, a good trick is to take tires and fill them with dirt to grow crops. Friends of mine have been successful with tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers.

I'm an advocate of urban farming and I'd love to hear from other people growing food in an urban area. I'm dying to try Window Farms (http://windowfarms.org), which looks like a great project and has built a robust community around urban farming.

One more thing: cat people, grow catnip! It's ~$1 for a bag of seeds and keeps on coming back. Much cheaper than anything store bought.

EDIT: Currently growing basil, rosemary, cilantro (barely), chives, mint, catnip, parsley. Would love to hear what has been successful or any advice since I'm kind of new to growing.
I don't find the Nook's touch screen to be "balky" at all, at least in comparison to any touchscreen phone. In fact, I think that the use of a touchscreen instead of a hardware keyboard opens the door for a lot more design flexibility.
L shaped desk with 3 monitors on the long leg - 2 24" monitors hooked to a PC and 1 24" monitor hooked to a Mac Mini - sharing 1 wireless keyboard/mouse via Synergy. The short leg of the L has a Dell 10V with Ubuntu.
lemon tree....
Back in the day Sparc was the development platform for AutoCAD and the DOS, Mac and other UNIX versions were ports.

Once Windows took off in the marketplace the writing was on the wall and the anemic sales of the Unix ports in contrast to Windows made keeping those ports unprofitable.
We're working on it: http://fifobooks.com/authors.html
That's interesting. Your workflow reminds me of that Code Bubbles IDE posted a little while back:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm
Google Chrome 5.0.375.125 beta on Ubuntu Lucid