skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been on the other side. I'd like to think of myself as an excellent programmer, but occasionally I'm hard to motivate myself.

The main reasons for that is that the job is boring, and the feeling of getting nowhere, being stuck. The thing that motivates me the most is the feeling of getting things done, fast.

In other words: it's a vicious circle. People are demotivated because they are in a rut, and people work fast because they get results, fast.

The best thing to do now, to get them out of the rut, is to stay on top of them. Deadlines are meaningful only if they are real deadlines, like "this feature must be done by next week", and not some artificial goal like "work on this for 30 hours". BTW 30 hours for a single task is much too long, it should be broken up in smaller tasks. Set real short term goals. And if they are getting nowhere because there is something that they cannot finish, you may switch tasks, so they get something new to do, instead of just continuing working on the same old. Let a few people work on one task together, I've noticed that often that is a motivation booster, myself. But always: small, meaningful goals.

And, yeah, I agree with the others: switching to new people will not help, though it might seem to do so temporarily, for as long as those new people are new to the tasks. Once they get in a rut, it's back to the old situation.
That would probably work terrifically if there was an eviction algorithm other than crashing at least once per day. (If you try to comment and get "Unknown or expired link", it's because news.arc crashed between the page load and the POST)
As Chairman Gruber already replied [ http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/30/holwerda ] Thom is misrepresenting or at least misinterpreting his statement and its context. In order to say that Apple are "fighting" jailbreaking we'd have to see them taking active steps in preventing it - e.g. putting an e-fuse, like the one in some Motorola Droid phones, in the iPhone or at least have something on the device verify the origin and integrity of iOS images before allowing them to be installed or run. Just because Apple are patching the vulnerabilities used in jailbreaking and have stated that they won't support jailbroken iPhones, I would not say they are fighting it - not enabling or encouraging it, certainly, but not fighting it.

I also want to take exception to Thom's statement that Apple "fought hard to maintain jailbreaking as an illegal activity". It might not have been "[a] figment of our collective imagination", but without a shred of support provided in the post, it might very well have been. And I don't think Apple care too much about its legality. Yes, we love to poke fun of how litigious Apple are, but I can't remember them picking a fight that they don't have a good chance of winning. Certainly the folks at Apple realize they won't be able to stop the practice of jailbreaking by pulling a RIAA and carpet bombing jailbreakers with lawsuits. As I said, if Apple wanted to prevent jailbreaking, they would have come up with an effective technical measure to do so, not a legal one.
Stuff I've tried is mostly about talking, trying different systematic models (time tracking, semi-micro management, constant reporting or leaving them more space, trying to get excited with new technical bits, giving them bonus, cutting their salary etc., pep talk, pissed-off talk)

Many things, not done in exact science although it was obvious what slightly works and what definitely doesn't.

> Also it is hard to work remotely and many people just can't do that.

That's exactly my point, maybe these 5 guys can't handle remoting but I might find new 5 guys who can (just like I already got 3)
Um. I use sieve to classify mail and filter into different folders. Sieve is about ten years old.

If Google announced that they were supporting the managesieve protocol and/or allowing people to edit sieve filters for their account through a web interface, then I'd be impressed.
Google _loves_ sites that are tightly focused on a specific niche that update frequently containing well written text.

I found this out by accident when Newsley's page dedicated to articles from preview.bloomberg.com[1] (Bloomberg's new look and feel beta ) started getting a bunch of organic search traffic. Turns out, I'm on the front page of Google's results for that search term [2].

By rights, I have no reason to be on that front page. There's 9 Million other results in Google's index for that search term, and my site soft launched last November.

My SEO for that page was a complete fluke. Newsley started out as a social news site, and I simply created a page for articles from a particular source. Google really liked the page, and apparently there weren't too many other sites like that. So, I'm on the front page.

I'm leaving social news behind, and turning Newsley into a search engine for economic and social news. But, even though I'm neck deep in writing the Newsley_bot, a bunch of web scrapers and learning out how to build a real time index of financial news, I'm releasing individual results pages as I have them. I also created a tagging system so the Google_bot has a way to reach those pages as well as I included those pages in my site map.

Since I started doing those things 3 weeks ago, the number of pages from Newsley.com in Google's index has gone from 200 to 17,000, my organic traffic has gone from 3-4 hits a day to 80 hits a day, and My total traffic has more than tripled in the last week. I'm also hitting the first two pages of Google results for 40 long tail search terms, including "What's Popular" [3].

All that really means to me, however is that when I release basic search functionality in a month or two, I should have a decent stream of traffic to use the search features, so I can work on improving it.

Whether it's SEO bullshittery or not, this is how Google (and consequently most of the interweb) works. And, like it or not, that's what you have to do if you're going to get organic search traffic: have to have a page or site tightly focused on a specific topic, with decent text that updates frequently. Well crafted urls, titles and meta tags also help a lot too.

ref:
[1] http://newsley.com/by_source/preview.bloomberg.com/
[2] http://www.google.com/search?q=preview.bloomberg.com
[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=what%27s+popular&hl=en...
[4] clickable: http://Newsley.com
yeah I wish I had 100 upvotes for you
Thanks, but one of the problems I've got talented guys they just don't work properly, when they do (read: when I nudge them) I've got to give it to them, they are indeed pretty good.
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How well does 2.2 run on a G1? I always expected the hardware wouldn't be good enough for a 2.2 experience and it would end up worse than using 1.6...?
I doubt whether this is the actual reason that Prolog was killed off. AFAIK during the 90s there was still research going on with Prolog and parallelization. However, this seems to have been killed off during the end of the 90s because of lack of results.

IMO the thing that killed Prolog is that there has never been a good way to do parallelization without having to massively rewite Prolog programs.
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5. You NEED to know that iOS 4 will turn your iPhone 3G into a useless lump if you foolishly upgrade to it.

The constant harping on about the utopian world of iDevices gets rather grating, even for me as a long time Apple owner. It's just a different business model, it has ups and downs that affect different people in different ways. Do we need all this concern trolling about how some random device is going to ruin it all for Google? And the utterly predictable replies from iPhone owners so distraught at the thought of Android users facing the horrors of fragmentation? What happened to the old Apple-fan way of blaming those who buy Dell devices for their own stupidity and considering them somehow sub-human as a result of their purchasing decision? Why the sudden rush of humanity and fraternity towards these poor souls?

I could perhaps agree that mostly the Apple way is still better for ordinary joes with lots of disposable income but it used to be better for a far larger group (hence why I bought an iPhone 3G) but the rough'n'tumble world of Android seems to be rapidly eroding the historical advantage Apple held with the iPhone. The fact that Apple will probably have stiff competition in tablets before they even get it upgraded to iOS 4 or release the 2nd hardware revision shows how much of their lead has been lost.
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Well, why don't you just click on my flickr link? It's right there on my blog - a little flickr icon. I regularly post photos.
I'd love to be able to just add a script tag to my website, and then log into some web based service which shows me a list of the current sessions on my website allowing me to click on one of those sessions and monitor their progress through the site using this dom mirroring technique.

There must be money to be made in this sort of service?
I am fascinated that in this economy, employees need motivation beyond the length of the unemployment line.
That is so cool I just mailed them to check if they can ship in Europe, according to their FAQ it seems possible.

I'm wondering how long these marvellous creatures will survive in your tank if you treat them well.
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Working remotely is different to working together in an office, of course. It requires different skills and a different type of motivation, ime. It also requires far better communication skills. Weak communication skills can kill productivity.

An observation I've made is that folk who hide their mistakes can be a serious problem. You need the complete opposite, so that when someone shouts for help, then it's all hands to the pump. Those folk they can be hugely disruptive without realising it.

Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

Nudging is usually a sign of poor (or no) communication and lack of confidence.
Same here, but that might not be the best example since there is `pydoc multiprocessing`, perhaps integrated with your editor.
Great example of a false dichotomy. It's not _if_ Apple if fighting jailbreaking but _how_much_ they are.

Apple definitely goes for the low hanging fruits: any avenue that is relatively simple to fix gets fixed. And obviously anything that is a serious security flaw gets fixed.

And, despite how much the hackers may hate it, Apple has (and has always had) a philosophy where they do not care much for side-effects, or annoying a minor niche of jailbreakers. What I mean is that, if you find a way to hack your way around Apple's system, Apple doesn't care, but at the same time if/when Apple is going to upgrade the system or make changes you can't expect _any_ effort by Apple to not disturb your hack. That means they don't care about downgrading, and they don't care if an upgrade makes the jailbreak not work: that's your problem.

How much further than that they go? So far I haven't see much. They could have really pursued it further. And maybe one day they will, but not so far.
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I remember reading a comment on Hacker News about Google waiting for 5 seconds before indexing the current DOM. I couldn't find any confirmation for this, other that the current Google Bot, Caffeine, is interpreting some of the Javascript code found on webpages.
> Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

That's what we've been doing almost for a year now and many failed repeatedly. Secondly when you give them strict deadlines and this kind of tracking I noticed that they might not deliver the best but they'll just fix/do something quickly and in a dirty way. Stuff like programming and Q/A testing is not easy confirm. Generally this sort of stuff bit us in the ass after months and ended up clients to be unhappy.
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It's ok to work remotely but I don't know if I could have a case where it was all remote working and never meeting up, as a long term employee, not sure about the situation here. Even if it was only every 6 months or a year a meetup could put everyone on the same page and identify these problems far better than you can remotely.
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Worked just fine in Safari.
The unabridged OED is basically a boutique product, like the collector's edition of a video game. People want it in order to show it off, or to say they bought it—they just need it to be useful in some way to rationalize the purchase. The physical artifacts (eBook reader + spec manual) would serve to retain the boutique market (to give them something to show off/"preserve in a private archival collection"), while the digital content would reduce O(N) production costs to near nothing.
"A whole lot of memories came rushing back"

Me too, and it was made even more powerful because coincidentally, the running character reminded me of when I used to be on my high school cross country team and would go for runs around the neighborhood at odd hours.
Disclaimer: I am very much a novice when it comes to any kind of programming; I have only been working in PHP, which I know is considered a scripting language and not a programming language, for a few months now. My understanding is relatively limited.

"Programming, as a whole, is far larger than any one person could come to comprehend in a single lifetime (...) And to make matters worse, it is continually growing more complex at a rate no person could follow either!"

Isn't programming, essentially, the writing of instructions and providing them to systems that act upon them? Reading through that statement I wonder whether it's not programming that is complex, but many problems that exist in various fields of business or study—problems that need a programmed solution.

Please—if you don't mind—would you elaborate?
Firing so many people is scary for the remaining employees. Just fire the worst offender and hire a replacement. That might be enough to turn the team around.
And they really aren't fighting it very hard. The last thing they fixed was a remotely exploitable hole which, when combined with another bug, let remote root a phone without the user's knowledge from a mere web page.
>>Stuff I've tried is mostly about talking, trying different systematic models (time tracking, semi-micro management, constant reporting or leaving them more space, trying to get excited with new technical bits, giving them bonus, cutting their salary etc., pep talk, pissed-off talk)

Did you try to share the vision? Set clear goals? Make sure that they really understand and share same values?

To me it looks like you tried to make environment more strict, while it is not the way to go in software development.
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I've been writing code 'on my own' since 4th grade. My school gave a class on programming the Apple IIe and I loved it. My parents bought me a series of computers, starting with a Sinclair 1000, and I wrote little programs for all of them until they weren't good enough and we upgraded. I taught myself several other forms of basic, then started on other languages like C, PHP and Cold Fusion.

Maybe you need to stop 'learning' programming and just do it. Pick a task you want to complete, possibly even a task you've done before, and just do it.

I learned all those other languages and language variants starting with the same program: Sierpinski's Triangle. Why? Because I already knew the logic for it inside and out and it was entertaining to watch. Every new language I came across, I wrote another Sierpinski's Triangle program on it as my first program.
I didn't feel engaged by this at all and would be quite interested to see how other HN users feel about this previous interactive offering by the same band: http://www.beonlineb.com/
I think the 10 minute lectures are a big improvement already. You can skip things you already know and even if you watch them all the pace is quite a bit higher than university lectures.

One thing that would be absolutely fantastic is if there were physics lectures that don't only list the facts but explain how the famous physicist got there. For example in my quantum mechanics course they just put the Schrodinger equation on page 1 and then derive things from that, never even mentioning experiments. Surely that is not how Schrodinger did it. And frankly this way of teaching is not very convincing. You get the feeling you're just learning a bunch of stupid mathematical tricks.

This also applies to mathematical lectures. I'd love to see theorems demonstrated experimentally and explain how the mathematician that got the theorem invented it. For example if we prove that the number of primes less than n is roughly n/ln(n) it would be lovely to have that demonstrated by writing a computer program that counts the primes less than n (or do this as an exercise), or to have some heuristic reasoning as to why it's true. This shows that the theorem is really saying something about our universe, instead of having just a bunch of steps in a proof.
Think about it in the context of if your business was an offline shop.

Think about the SEO / Organic search as being how busy the highstreet is that your shop resides.

Then think about the amount of transport links (roads / trains / airports) that are nearby being the incoming links.

Finally, think about the competition for the keywords on search, as being similar shops on the high street.

Currently you may have a great shop with lots to offer, but it's stuck out in the middle of no where, with no transport links and hardly any passing traffic. What's worse, is that you have many shops just like yours in the area and no unique selling point. You wouldn't expect that shop to thrive.

The technique many use these days, is to work on the keywords / SEO from the start - placing their shop in a busy place with existing traffic passing through. Looking for a niche which doesn't have too much competition. Then they contact similar blogs / media providers and try to get as many links as possible coming in.

They now have the traffic, they just need to provide a good service and convert it to revenue somehow.

'SEO bullshitery' - is the wrong way to think of it. Along with 'SEO' being black art or magic. Ok, there are people out there that are 'gaming' the system, but it doesn't change the fact that for a web product SEO / market competition online for the niche is an extremely important thing to consider.
If you annoy people, chances are that you'll end up in their spam filters anyway. This is for the kind of stuff that people leave in their inboxes to read later (or, if they're organized, auto-forward to some "read later" folder).
have something on the device verify the origin and integrity of iOS images before allowing them to be installed or run.

iOS already does this. The device won't accept an iOS image unless it has been signed by Apple. Not only that, but iTunes now "verifies with Apple" over the Internet that you are allowed to install the update before proceeding. Not only that, but all binaries including App Store apps and even debug builds of apps produced by the iOS SDK must be signed.

I think Apple is using all the "effective technical measures" available to them. The only way to run code not signed by Apple is to exploit a vulnerability, and e-fuses wouldn't patch the vulnerabilities that allow jailbreaking. At best e-fuses would allow Apple to brick a jailbroken device if the owner was foolish enough to attempt an OS upgrade. The only way I could see them making iOS tighter is rewriting the whole thing in a safer language than C to cut the number of vulnerabilities.
> or at least have something on the device verify the origin and integrity of iOS images before allowing them to be installed or run

They do prevent you from downgrading your iOS image by refusing to authenticate old versions on install. I find it hard to interpret this as simply "downgrading is not supported" as Gruber does, as it is an active step on Apple's part to stop you from doing something. Installing Linux on my Macbook is also supported by Apple, but that doesn't mean they actively alter my Macbook's boot process to stop me from doing it.
Motivating telecommuting programmers is a big issue for startups. If you manage to do it properly, please come back and tell us.
Do they have some other projects they work on behind your back? (An old project leader managed an outsourced team that did that...)

Speaking for myself, I'm probably like your bad hires. If I do projects alone at work for more than a year, I start to hate my life. (-: Answer to next comment: "Yes, maybe that would be solved by getting a social life outside of work." :-)