skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
first, you will have to nudge nearly everyone you hire. this is part of managing people. get over it, and learn how to nudge effectively. Note, each person requires a different kind of nudge, but nearly everyone requires at least a little. Employees who don't need those nudges are very rare, and become expensive quickly. If you have lucked into one, keep them happy. (note, though, my experience has been that while these sorts make incredible individual contributors, they generally make poor managers.)

Next, though, you do sometimes have to fire people. this is the way it is. If you don't know how to nudge those 5 under performers into performing well, and you are unwilling or unable to figure out how to do so, you will have to fire them, even though they probably could have performed acceptably under different management. Let them go and hopefully they will find a place where they fit.

As others pointed out, this will kill morale at your startup. Do it quickly and respectfully, and maybe give your best people raises or bonuses at the same time. The big danger here is that your best people will leave at this time, so take extra care with the people you want to keep.

Me, when I fire people, I try to frame it as my fault. I mean, I hired the guy, right? and it's my job to manage them. If they didn't work out, I think it's best all around if I publicly and sincerely accept the fault. And really, it's best if I think it's my fault. I mean, I can change my behavior; if I can learn how to hire better or manage better in the future, that's a big win. Feeling ripped off by an employee, on the other hand, is almost never productive.

It's best to remember that in other situations, these people might be pretty good. I certainly know I'm not the best manager in the world. There is no reason to make this any more painful than it has to be, and really, there is no reason to publicly say anything bad about these people. You will meet these people later in your career, and your employees will maintain personal relationships with some of these people, so the better you can have them think of you, the better off you are.

If you can spare the cash, give them some severance. Even a week or two is a lot better than nothing (and in the startup world, a lot more than the employees probably expect.)

Now, when it comes to hiring; what I do is that I make it clear it's a contract assignment, at first, without any expectation of continued employment. If they don't work out, there's no more work. I pay them and we part friends. If they do, I can slowly work towards an expectation of longer term employment.

As for telecommute vs. office, well, it really takes a specific personality type to telecommute effectively. I recently got an office, and I note a marked improvement in productivity both from my PFY and from myself, on days when we both decide not to work from home.
Top tips for Sales and Marketing on a Budget
Court Finds Bank Security Was Reasonable
Hey Gruber, what about the users?
This may not help your particular situation, but I'd urge you to try VLC (http://videolan.org/) since it has awesome support for playing YouTube videos. It requires that you paste the YouTube URL into its "Open Network Stream" dialog, but is otherwise painless.

Almost anything has to be better than using Media Player Classic.
What people wanted Prolog to do, it couldn't do. People wanted to step away from the control flow specification of imperative language, the message-passing of OOP, and let the compiler solve your problem for you by feeding it a specification of the constraints the completed system would follow. Prolog did not, and cannot do this, because it is not strong AGI. When people realized this, they gave up on it, because it is easier to tell the computer how it should branch than to forcefully guide stupid heuristics around.

When there exists a large, universal library of "common sense", of the kind people build up from years of childhood sensory experience, declarative programming will come back. But not until then.
That's interesting, and actually quite encouraging: it suggests that you do think in terms of abstractions of the problem you're trying to solve, which is arguably the most fundamental skill in programming. If your difficulty is that you haven't got the mechanical process of turning your thoughts into code down yet, that's a much easier thing to overcome.

Could you share with us what books and programming languages/tools you've been using? While there are certainly common ideas, different types of language take a different approaches to describing a program. Maybe whatever you've chosen doesn't suit your way of thinking particularly well, and you would find another tool more intuitive at this stage.
Erlang is a functional language (among other paradigms) but not a logic language. Logic languages are based on relations instead of functions. Datalog and Oz and Mercury are other examples of logic languages.
I had a small telecommuting team once, and what helped us a lot were two pieces of technology around which our development process was built.

The first one was a simple issue tracker. The 'nudging' and 'motivating' bit became almost redundant. There always was a list of issues that needed to be addressed one by one, and the employees could work on the simplest ones, or on the complex ones, depending on their skill level and personal energy level at the time.

The second piece was the idea of short 'sprints' we borrowed from the Scrum process. Each week we aimed to deliver something that worked, so there was a set of issues that needed to be addressed as a matter of a priority. In this way the team stayed motivated and saw results of their work, i.e. there was an (almost) instant gratification.

Interestingly, one of my developers was a 'star', and another was a 'rookie', but they found a happy balance under this system. The experienced one tackled complex/architecture related issues and avoided the boring simple tasks which the less experienced employee was happy to do because that kept him feeling productive and contributing.

The management process consisted of a weekly skype conference call where we would agree on a issue set for the next 'sprint', and then we simply communicated through email to check on the progress during the week and to address problems. Obviously, I had to write up the requirements (in the form of issue tickets) as well.

Again, a simple issue tracker (we used Roundup) was the single most useful management tool for that project.
New free monospace programming font by Mark Simonson: Anonymous Pro
I've got C64 and manual in German when I was 10 (I've only knew Polish at that time, but who cares :)).

For a few years I only played games, and sometimes entered some example BASIC code and tinkered with constans in code to see what will happen. I remember that my copy of manual had error in some magic graphic system initialization code, so I've never programmed graphic on C64. It was very frustrating.

Then I've got PC when I was 15 and I played with Turbo Basic, then Turbo Pascal - then I've understood variables and it all started to make sense. Since then I only feel like I know less, and less :)

PS - the most impressive thing I've seen that encuraged me to keep programming was ASCII art adventure game written in windows batch files. I've thought - if someon can do so much witch bat files, I can do everything with my knowledge of Turbo Pascal :)
Just start using it. With the approach you're taking, you will continue to just read tutorials and never code. If you think you can't code, you can't.

Pick a problem. Something easy. And just code it. Yes, it's going to be hard. Yes, you'll have to look up a ton of things. Do it. Stick to it.

Here's another hint: Tutorials are not for reading. They're for doing. Reading tutorials is just about useless, even for experienced programmers. If you don't actually follow the steps, you won't learn anything.
Raphaël 1.5 Released
Another piece of interesting feedback we received was to place the price plans in descending order so that we can achieve the "price anchoring" effect. Is this true? - to be honest I haven't seen many sites which do this.
Yes, but my mother reads my blog.

My point is that if I put a 'submit to hn' link on my blog, no matter how low-quality my blog entry is, /someone/ is going to click the link, especially if that is the only way to comment.
The fact that a remote root vulnerability existed means Apple doesn't care about jailbreaking? By that logic OpenBSD doesn't care about security because they've had two remote root vulnerabilities.
I’m not really all that informed about the details of the iOS but didn’t Apple do this since day one, long before there even was a App Store? Before the first jailbreak came out? If it has been this way forever I see no way how you could call this ‘fighting’ jailbreaking.
I agree. My current project was turning into a bit of death march (due to a number factors), and I was finding motivation hard to come by. My manager decided that we would begin doing "pre-releases" to QC in order to give them a chance to kick the tires before writing all their test cases. This has been a huge help to my motivation. Now our goals are "get these bits of functionality into the weekly build" instead of "get this massive app done by the end of the quarter."
It is your job, as a leader to make sure the team performs well.

No one, themselves want to perform bad. If I am spending my time on something, or if I am committed to something, I might as well do very well in that time.

But sometimes, performance is bad. Not because one cant or one isn't interested but because there is some thing preventing one from doing it. It could be a personal problem, but more likely a communication gap or some cultural difference.

Most people do something because they feel like it and not necessarily because they have to do it. It is your job as an employer to ensure that they feel like it. This is exactly where the company culture, peer performance review and the like help a lot.

Or you might as well hire self motivating individuals, far too little, generally.
A friend of mine recommended that I read it and find it interesting. He was right.
I hope not :) and AFAIK they don't.

> If I do projects alone at work for more than a year, I start to hate my life.

I know what you mean, that happened to many times when I was working in companies but in my own company luckily I'm not there yet, and hopefully will never be there :)
That's a really good point. I'd prefer to work on an engineering-heavy team, rather than a team that requires lots of management, too.
I guess the point he was making is that making jailbreaking impossible by fixing the vulnerability was absolutely necessary.
I think Gmail has much more than 5% of the market. It may be that Outlook is installed on 35-45% of all computers, but nobody currently has numbers for the use of the application. If I can get away with it, I prefer forwarding mails so I don't have to deal with Outlook.

And so should all sane companies: Outlook waste their time.
Do you know if there are any screenshots of Roundup? Hadn't heard of it before this, and am intrigued, but the SourceForge page doesn't list any images of it in action.
Then, on the face of it, you have poor quality workers, or folk that are the wrong type to work remotely.

For cross-checking, CI (with code coverage), tdd, and pairing helps a lot, I find. And they're cheap to do.
Apple's response mentioned in the post can be read here: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2008/answers/7_13_responses/ap...

Jobs' confirmation of an existing "kill switch" sounds like a technical counter-measure to me: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3358134/Apples-Jobs-co...

The recent patent submission to track 'suspicious activity' seems like a nice detection system that can be used to flip the kill switch when kids try to segfault the iOS, in order to find an attack vector for a jailbreak.

I think Apple may be keeping the status quo for a while longer, to secure it's position in the smartphone market, to avoid a backlash, to benefit from free vulnerability disclosures by the jailbreak community and to focus it's development efforts to more important tasks at hand.

Apple is indeed not openly fighting jailbreakers, but it's in their interest to keep the software under control. Whenever you upgrade from a jailbroken phone, all the unsigned apps disappear, along with the data contained. Given their desire to control the application ecosystem (grossly benefiting from all the developer signups and app sales), if the percentage of jailbroken iPhones ever becomes a blip on the radar, they will take repressive action to disincentivize the user (AppStore lock-out, kill-switch) and jailbreak tinkerers (suspicious activity reports).

I don't find the unlocking US phones in Europe a problem, because legislation here often requires the phones to be unlocked from the subscription plan. iPhones can be bought unlocked at a slightly higher (unsubsidized) price.
You know, that is a pretty good idea. I just might have to do the same thing. Thanks!
Prolog was dynamically typed and in the 80'es that usually meant slow execution (sans Orbit/T I am told). What made C damn popular was the sheer speed in the produced code. When you have 7-20 Mhz computers a slow language hurts.
Correct, just replicate between standalone Couch and Cloudant seamlessly. Replication is a powerful feature of CouchDB, and we also use it internally to synchronize partitions if they diverge. It is pivotal in how we achieve our multi-datacenter capabilities, too.
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No, I mean that the last time they "fought jailbreaking" was by fixing a horrendous remotely exploitable security bug. Not exactly a stunning example of fighting jailbreaking.
It used to be possible to upgrade or downgrade to a forged image through iTunes, regardless of whether you bought any software that's in it. I know a few people that upgraded to 2.0 that way.
I was considering registering it myself and it was available when I checked. Then I decided against it because I wasn't actually going to do anything worthwhile with it (for reasons other people specified here).
Never create a blog post that doesn't have a link to an explanation of the product. The whole point of advertising your blog on here is to get people interested in your work. If you don't explain the work, or link to an explanation, people will just click away.
I wonder how this feature will translate to in the Android Gmail client.
Bring the biggest girlfriend? That can't be right.
I think at 5 out 8 it's not a mere firing, it's a bloodbath. If you've built any kind of team cohesion, you'd be throwing it all away. Obviously, if they're all critically detrimental to your business, fire the lot and eat the hit. Have you considered firing maybe 1 or 2 and seeing if it improves the performance, overall?
I'm not a programmer, but.....

I would gather if you pick something you find interesting, you could work backwards a bit and get ideas.

So for example, I like sound "stuff"

So what I would do first is just see if I can code something that plays an audio file when you click a button - easy enough.

then go from there.

If you don't have a tangible ideal to work backwards from then you will always be lost.

An analogy a friend of mine said was:

If you never opened an apple you would never know there was a seed inside. So working backwards seems to be embedded in the DNA of what people do when we learn.
Cute, but interior decoration belongs on the interior decoration subreddit. Flagged.
Management strategy while hiring a Consultant is Heads I Win. Tails You Lose
Erlang is the only object-oriented language.
I've done similar. Last couple of years I've been using Redmine for issue tracking. (Hint: Run under JRuby with glassfish gem and don't use sqlite.)

IM has generally worked better than email, prefering to keep useful chunky data in redmine as a "knowledge base". IM has also worked to keep the users involved.
Agreed.

I suspect that so long as jail breaking stays at or below 10% of iPhones, Apple will tolerate it. If there is anything which starts pushing jail breaking towards being the norm rather than the exception I suspect we'd see them increase their efforts to prevent it.
Perhaps 'annoy' was too strong of a term. What I meant was the kind of emails that barely interest your users enough not to mark them as spam. Low quality bacn.

What I'm saying is that it's not the death of newsletters. This new feature is really useful and its negative impact on permission based marketing can be reduced by ensuring that the content you send out is really appealing to your users. Which is a win-win situation, because more appealing content usually leads to more conversions.

A high open rate may mean that your newsletter ends up in the high priority inbox for a decent percentage of your user-base, despite being a newsletter (unless Google automatically excludes newsletters).
Ask HN: What CMS can do user management for thousands of users?
I'm developing a site for the biology community, which is in part normal CMS-friendly content like articles, dates for conferences,etc, but also has a feature where (tons of) users can submit and edit protocols.

I'm wondering which CMS is best at handling huge user communities, while still handling "normal CMS stuff" well.

Thanks!
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Very much true. During my education I was massively disappointed in Prolog, because the programming process was something like this:

1) write it declaratively
2) figure out that your program will take days to complete
3) add ugly procedural hacks (cuts) to make it more efficient

To an extent, you have this process in any language (write->measure->optimize) but typically not in a way that it forces you at gunpoint to rape the paradigm you're working in.
Before the iPhone even came out it was obvious people would try to jailbreak them, and signed firmwares are a necessary part of jailbreak defense. You're right that Apple couldn't have been defending the App Store from jailbreaks before it was invented, but back then they did care about the carriers. They had a lot to prove. Now Apple is the darling of the industry and they have no reason to kowtow to the carriers any more, but they continue to fight jailbreaks to protect the App Store.
I think the bullshit you're talking about is a large sacrifice/trade-off when you get rich and happens to everybody so I guess the best strategy is to learn to deal with it, which can be anything from spending insanely until you're back to square one or embracing the fact you're known as rich.

I think the only issue I can imagine having is the enormous pressure by the media to be a philanthropist. It seems to me that no matter how much you do or give, nobody seems happy. However, it's only raw speculation since my net worth is probably that of a single bag of peanuts.
Netflix's vacation policy -- the tip of a radical compensation iceberg
What your users want or what your customers want?
For me it's a 3 step process.

1. Make it, release it, drive 2,000 hits to the site, see conversions. If there are 0 conversions, then the idea is probably crap. If not, I try to optimize and drive another 2,000 hits to it.

2. If I get down to 1:200...then it's probably a good idea. The next step is to see if there is scale. A product that converts at 1:7 is not viable if the entire possible traffic is only 70 a month.

3. If I get a product that a) converts and b) has a lot of potential traffic, the next step is to see competition. If each click costs $5 and the first page of Google results for the relevant keywords is filled with high ranking websites...then I look at the profit margin to make sure I can afford to compete.

Essentially this makes sure that the product can be both profitable and has scale.

If there is low competition but no scale...it might still be a viable side project. Low competition = very easy to get to top of Google...so it might still be good for an extra $1-2K/mo with only a few hours spent a month on maintenance.
the danger is that if you do have to fire 5 people, firing one person a month is going to be worse for morale than firing five at once, then making it clear you are done.

Now, I'm the first to say that I might be wrong, but my feeling, from the original story, is that this guy simply doesn't know how to manage in a way that would help those 5 people work more effectively. I doubt that just upping the fear level a little would change that.

Really, I say that without any negative judgment towards the original poster or towards the employees in question... different people are capable of different kinds of management, and different people are capable of working under different kinds of management. It's quite easy to have a competent manager and a competent employee, and to have a matchup that produces zero work due to conflicts in style.
Hacked Twitter Accounts Spreading Fake TweetDeck Updates
If they fix a security hole deliberately, or change something in the firmware that stops the break from working, that does not mean they are fighting jailbreaking.

And there has been no evidence to suggest that they are going actively doing this, thought they still might be.
I wouldn't worry about any of that pricing psychology stuff until you've nailed down explaining the value of the app.

Making the value clear and selling the benefits will net you more than tinkering with the pricing page, regardless of tidbits we read on HN. The fundamentals still apply.

So with respect to that, flesh out the content first. You need a product tour to explain what the app can do, or you need some case studies to show a real life use-case. I'm not talking about pages of extra content - it could go right there on the homepage... "Here's [Local Soccer League] with 5 reasons why they love our app".
Oh, I see, but that doesn't demonstrate his point that Apple isn't fighting jailbreaking very hard. For that he would need an example of a vulnerability that Apple didn't fix.
A third variable is inventiveness. While such may occur through practice, practice does not guarantee inventiveness. I would argue that it is ultimately the inventive and tenacious choices made during a game leading to a win which people actually enjoy. Such choices can be conditioned by practice and talent, but ultimately are not reducible to such.

Here is a personal anecdote to illustrate my point. I was part of a bowling league for a season. I sucked at bowling, and had trouble breaking 70. Throughout the season my teammates patiently critiqued my style and gave me advice until I gradually learned to line up the ball with the arrows and bowl straight. It was very tedious and boring, but I improved per Scott's observation. At the end my high game broke 120.

Then I stopped bowling for about 2 years. On a whim, some friends and I bowled a game. This time I decided to discard everything I learned and just make up my own style, which was more fun. During that game I invented my own technique of curving the ball. However, instead of the gradual, painful process of "practice" and slow accumulation of points I dramatically improved my game, beating my friends despite my lack of practice and rusted skill.

After about 6 visits to a bowling lane over the course of another 2 years I regularly score in the 130s and 140s. Additionally, bowling is now very enjoyable and the game is intuitive.

The difference between the two techniques is quite dramatic. When I switch back to straight bowling my score drops again and I have difficulty climbing above 100. However, I am more consistent with straight bowling. Curve bowling has a much higher variance in score (from a recent game): X, 00, X, /, X00. So, I combine the two techniques and arrive at an augmentation of Scott's view: practiced skill plus innovation/intuition.
He doesn't really want to start and grow a company.
(how fast it is of course)
Dup (effectively):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648778

Consensus seems to be it's a web mail form. For $19/month.