skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you identify someone who is 10x more productive? The difference between good and great is not always apparent in an interview.

Perhaps developers with significant amounts of open source work could be identified but I'm sure that for every one of those there are several amazing developers who are instead working on proprietary stuff.
What sort of deal? What could the advantage be of negotiating a deal off the market? Deals are zero sum, right? If you and I make a deal where an item is transacted for above market value, or below market value, one of us is going to lose out as a result.
Angie's List prices vary greatly by market, so we don't emphasize the cost too much to anonymous users. However they are available through the FAQ: http://www.angieslist.com/angieslist/visitor/faq.aspx#whypay
I work for a Skydiving company that has, to GREAT success, ran two GroupOn promotions. We sell three different types of jumps, 10k 15k and 18k. The 10k goes for $169 and is out of a 5 seat Cessna, available only on some weekends. The 15k and 18k are available weekends and most weekdays and cost $199 and $259. Our 15k and 18k jumps are out of a large, 15 seat aircraft.

We sold 10k jumps for $99. The COGS for this product is about $130. We cannot disclose our cut with GroupOn, but assuming the average 50/50 cut, we're selling these things for less than half of what it costs to produce. Why did we do this?

1.We know that 50% of our gift certificates are never redeemed.

2. We know that 60% of our customers purchase video and/or T-Shirts.

3. We know that about 90% of our customers will jump from 15k or 18k. We just ask that the GroupOns pay the difference in price. $30 to 15k, $90 to 18k.

4. We know that many of our customers bring friends, sign up for our solo training, come back for a second jump, post their video on YouTube, and tell the world how much fun they had.

Our first run sold 800, our second sold 1000. GroupOn customers aren't awful, but they seem to carry a higher percentage of snooty, complainy people. The vast majority of our poor reviews on Yelp come from GroupOn people whose experience really wasn't horrible, they are just particularly nitpicky.

GroupOn is a very dangerous game. I can TOTALLY understand how someone can get their ass handed to them. However, that's part of the numbers game you play. I agree with other comments, if you find a way to get 1000 people to walk in your door and spend money, and you can't figure out how to turn that into a positive for your business, then, well... Maybe you should do something else with your money.

GroupOn is crazy awesome. We love them! We have so far sold 1800 skydives through GroupOn! To put that in perspective, our busiest month this year we put 400 tandems up in the air. In two GroupOn promotions we've sold almost one year's worth of business. Staggering numbers.
it's easy to maintain these hours when you love your job and you believe in your company (and have great teammates). you can't let equity and/or salary be your sole motivation; you have to actually enjoy what you do.
Flot doesnt have pie graphs, but other then that it does seem quite good, I had seen it before, but pie graphs are important. Highcharts is new to me, and looks excellent.
"Motivation" is mentioned several times.

Reminds me of that quote, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but the overcoming of it."

Maybe you could say, "Success does not come from motivation, but from overcoming the lack of it."
Precursor to H.I.V. Was in Monkeys for Millennia
When did Facebook release an open source version? And where is it, if they did?
See Jeannette Wing's Computational Thinking:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing0...
The only thing you're really missing out on would be the automagic serialisation you get with GWT-RPC and Java on the server.

On a side note, Sinatra would probably be a better fit than Rails given that you really only need lightweight web services on the server. Runs quite happily on App-Engine too!
Congrats on being quoted, by the way!
At least one exists (and probably more):

http://slideme.org/
Someone has. There are plenty of 3rd party app stores. They just offer the same software as the Google one.
I'm not anti-Free Software. I'm all for it. I make my living off of it, and I contribute regularly to open source projects. I'm anti-Overly-Restrictive-and-Innovation-Stifling-Licenses. You'll note that I recommended that the BSD license would be way more appropriate for this project.
uh... "Wall Street" not Walstreet
I'm sure you'll get a lot of developers sign up, so the supply side is fine.

But how are you going to generate demand? I know a number of people paying ~$20/hour on elance for developers (usually from Eastern Europe or the Phillipines). None of them are complaining about paying too little (or about the quality, or the language etc).

Your site is right when it says "Great talent does not work for peanuts". But $20/hour is great money in many places - why would someone want to pay more?
Open source has nothing to do with it. First of all, these devices ship with Google branding. There is licensing and restrictions involved. Secondly, I'm sure google owns the name "Android", much the way Mozilla owns the name Firefox. You can fork it all you want, but you can't call it Firefox. Third, I'm sure Motorola and company get it under a special negotiated licence. They would never want it as GPL, as that would mean they have to release all their code. I don't know the details, but those seem like three very solid reasons why they would have to play by Google's rules.
Diaspora will be fine, now it's on Github it has so many skilled eyes on it. All they need to do is deal with the flood of pull requests effectively. A lot of people want this to win. A lot of hackers will commit code to it because it's a project with the world's eyes on. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook picked up a few people who commit really good code to it either.
You alluded to one danger of ignoring culture: that your company will develop a culture that you don't like. However, there's a bigger concern when you ignore culture - the possibility that your corporation develops multiple cultures, which conflict with one another.

You're already starting to define responsibilities and divide the work accordingly. That's good. However, you need to make sure that there's still a lot of communication between the groups, and not just between the group leaders either. Otherwise what happens is that people get isolated in their own group and begin to think of other groups in the company as the "other". Things only go downhill from there, as these divisions slowly drive the groups into working at cross purposes.

The real job of company culture is to remind employees that they're all in business together; that its not their group against the other groups at the company. If your culture manages that, then it almost doesn't matter what sort of culture it is.
I imagine if any developer wanted to release a custom rom, they can do whatever they want.. that is the openness.
My biggest issue is that people will complain about Google being too open .. for example how Verizon locks down their phone with Bing as search, and how they will start their own app store. Then in this case John is pointing out how google is not being open enough. Either way consumers do have a choice in the end by installing a rom they want that fits their needs, and again this to me seems like the best alternative.. which is one not give with other devises/platforms. [edit: remove trolling remark]
No matter how many programmers this attracts or momentum the project has, if the underlying software design is bad, people need to either do a rewrite with a better design, or make a patchwork mess of it all until it becomes unmanageable, in which case you do the rewrite you should have done in the first place.

The problem is, there's a lot of eyeballs that are looking at the code right now, and that does help to identify bugs, but if the bugs we're seeing are deep seated architectural issues, then it's not very easy for someone to just go in and fix them. Then Diaspora has to determine if the fixes are worth including, and whether they fit into their system design (assuming they have one). Basically, in order to actually utilize the community interest in any practical way, they need to be solid managers. At 20 years old, with no real world software development experience.

This is something open source doesn't seem to understand, and why even the biggest projects end up being a small-ish team of dedicated professionals, instead of the "bazaar" we imagine.
Ask HN: Techniques for achieving *flow*
Basically, how do you get back on task after a break? E.g getting straight into work when you start, straight into the next task when you finish something?

I tried using an alarm that went off every 15 minutes, not so successful - pulling out my Ethernet cable works pretty well though.
I'm not sure why all these commenters here are going with the knee jerk, mind-numbing "apple fan boy" response. This isn't about apple or whatever the app store policies are.

The point of the law suit is that Android doesn't give everyone the "choice" that they think. This is a story because Google says that they are unlike Apple and give everyone a choice, but they (allegedly) use their weight to force carriers to use Google software instead of theird party.

(Apple, for the record, doesn't do crap like this. You know up front that you need to join the mothership, and they clearly upfront about shutting you down as soon as you deviate.)

Basically, Google ain't no FSF.
"They are going to get burned in a very serious manner very, very quickly if they actually succeed in doing what they're trying to do."
And by "burned in a very serious manner" he means someone is going to see their vacation photos and change their username to "Ima Douche."

If someone totally took over my Facebook account I'd be minorly annoyed and that's about it. Unless you're putting your social security number into your Diaspora account, who cares?
You're bang on with #1.

Our company was on Groupon NYC and they took their 50% cut of each Groupon sold (plus the merchant pays the credit card fees - don't forget about that. Your take is actually less than 50%). Luckily we had a bit of a math on our side as our markup on our products is pretty big so even after Groupon's cut, we still made about 15%. As of this writing, only 28% of our Groupons have been redeemed, so we're quite ahead. But I think our case is the exception - I have yet to hear too many stories about businesses thriving because of these social deals.
In theory, this is great, but it's really hard to do actual work while wading through 6 separate reports of "It says the db can't connect to this host and port, what do? Derp!" The mailing list is even worse.

It's really hard to separate real, actual issues from a few hundred people who don't know how to run a ruby-based website.
Heh. The reasons given also explain why the GNU project has failed to release any influential software like GCC, the various GNU shell utilities, GNU Emacs, GDB and other such insignificant projects.
> The best thing diaspora can do is to take a look at that open source facebook release - and just run it on a server - add some federation functions, and voila

I want to live in your world.
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The only time I recall them giving anyone a hard time was in the case of the Cyanogen project, because it distributed Google's branded apps with it. But they backed down even with that.
how would this method remove the slew of security vulnerabilities and other development issues?

there's nothing wrong with green field dev. especially in this case. fairly sure slapping on some 'federation functions' would result in a hell of a mess.
Snarky translation: I'm all for embrace and extend of other peoples, just like late 90's Microsoft. Look at how well that worked for everyone.

BSD licenses are great and all, but often lead to a situation where the original developers get used with little to no compensation in return in terms of code improvement or financial benefit. A great example of how annoying this can be to the original developers - look at the bottom paragraph of http://openssh.org/

My take on the whole thing - they should have published a spec, with hard and fast guidelines for interaction and preferably a protocol verification test suite, rather than code. Then release an implementation with a license that is GPL or proprietary or whatever - just make it so that 3rd parties can write interoperable code if they want.

To put this succinctly, we need the "HTTP" of social media, not the "Apache" of social media.
> She goes out of her _way_ to make those customers feel loved, and would never, ever, do something so insane as to jeopardize that $1K in annual profit over something as stupid as a $13 comp.

I used to live in Brighton, Massachusetts in a place with no internet and I'd go work at a cafe. The nearest place was called CafeNation, and it was pretty good. I'd go in there 5-6 days a week when I wasn't traveling, and usually got a crepe and then a coffee or tea. I was a regular, most people knew me.

One day I was in and out real fast to confirm something on email, I set my computer up, jammed away for 30 minutes in a hurry, didn't buy anything that time. Very, very unlike me, I was just absorbed in work. Whatever it was, it was semi-urgent.

The girl at the counter was new and didn't recognize me, and as I was packing up, she said, "Excuse me, are you going to buy something or what?" I was kind of shaken by this. I bought a juice to go, but then I started going to CafeNation a lot less.

Thing is, in retrospect it was totally silly. It shouldn't have made a difference - one employee who didn't know who wasn't even that rude from her perspective. I didn't even reply to her that I was a regular, I just gave her $2 and grabbed the orange juice and left, and then I started going to CafeNation a whole lot less. Kind of irrational of me, actually, since I see how her actions make sense from her perspective, but I just had a bad vibe about the place after that.
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Open-source licenses have nothing to do with trademarks ... and articles from daringfireball.net have zero insight while being biased to extremes.

Why do people read it? Probably because most people search for approval, maybe?

The conditions were pretty clear from the start ... if you want to use the Android trademark and have access to its marketplace, you have to play by Google's rules, which are actually pretty relaxed and many people complain that Android is too open, allowing mobile carriers to load crap on it.

This is the Achile's heel of "Free Software", and GPLv3 won't solve it because you need the cooperation of the mobile carriers / phone makers.

I actually think that personal computing is were it is today because Microsoft/IBM commoditized hardware, with all personal computers running the same OS.

Google is copying the same recipe.

No matter how good iPhones get, people have different needs and different styles. There are always going to be pinkish phones around or phones with physical keyboards, or cheaper phones that you can buy for $100 without a contract.

Creating an OS that attracts phone makers, which in turn drives customers attention towards software, which in turn lowers prices on phones, which in turn sells more Android devices, which in turn makes Google's search engine ubiquitous for mobile phones ... Google is practically solving the chicken/egg problem here :)
Poor international connectivity.

Small country, where do you hire a lawyer with expertise in Icelandic IP law? How much jurisprudence is there?

Do you trust the government given that they just basically walked away from their bank guarantees
Paul,

Thank you for writing this article.

Why would you have to build there tools instead of using ones already built?
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I would love to hear from any mobile developers about their own experiences.

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*As long as no additional apple accessory will have to be purchased.
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I've personally felt (as a consumer) that tech & internet development have stagnated in the last year or two, notwithstanding the existence of new things.

I can't reconcile those two clauses.
It's pre-alpha. I've yet to take a look at the repo, but any software that isn't full of security holes, bugs and flaws at the pre-alpha stage is probably ready for an alpha release. In other words: No duh.

It would actually be surprising to read the headline: "4 students develop bug free, totally secure social networking platform in 3 months"

That being said, I'm excited to see how the project develops -- it's the kind of project that I wish I had the time to contribute to.
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You could always sacrifice yourself (you have to be in the boat to throw someone overboard). So baby vs doctor is actually a false dilemma.

Also, I'd like to point out that if you make your opinion known that you plan to throw the baby overboard, everyone else is probably going to want to throw you overboard anyway.
I've used JSCharts quite a bit and it works as one would expect. Pretty on the eye as well.

http://www.jscharts.com/
That's a good point, and I totally agree that would be a good solution. It needs more than just one working implementation out there, or it will just turn into Google Wave part 2. The good thing is the Diaspora protocol is much simpler than the Wave protocol, so hopefully it won't take very long before good alternative implementations start showing up.
If anyone thinks that, they would be best served talking to the Joomla or Drupal (or any other popular, large-scale, user-facing, and general purpose open source project out there) and get their perspective on how that actually works out in reality.

I know we have this sense that open source software development is one big happy stone soup where everybody pitches in, but at some point, people have to make architectural and system design decisions and map out a direction in order to make any sense of those changes.

In other words, "many eyeballs" don't make all bugs shallow, they make them more noticeable. Which in Diaspora's case, is more of a problem than a benefit.
Too much blah-blah-blah. There are two completely different cognitive tasks - ability to read a foreign language, and ability to speak. Improving your ability to read doesn't affect your ability to speak. You should train both of them separately.

The ability to read other people's code doesn't help you when you must write your own. You can read, say, tens articles and blog-posts per day, but it doesn't affect your ability to write one. OK, in the long run it does, but only after long practice of writing.

Resume: Reading a book or watching an online-course without doing a home-work or exercises is a waste of a time, because writing (composing) is a completely different cognitive task.
> any software that isn't full of security holes

Bugs sure. But not security holes. Sure no one plans for security holes, but I can say with decent confidence that the websites I write don't have any obvious security holes.
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That isn't stopping tons of people from creating hosting services, and tons of other people from signing up.
Does a human being have the right to contract with whomever he wants to sell his labor to?

Seems to me that these agreements might interfere with that, although the article does not seem to give enough information to tell exactly how they were structured.
Any word on the actual formula?
Point being, though, the "standards" that are causing trouble today were proprietary to Microsoft (ActiveX, for example).

I shouldn't have used the term "proprietary standards" at all -- it's a bit of an oxymoron.
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Rails 3, Ruby and JQuery documentation into Mac OS Dictionary
> a few hundred people who don't know how to run a ruby-based website.

Point them towards Hackety Hack :)
Thanks, but it sort of tastes like ash. Locally we have a engineering tradition of Big Red Buttons. If you know a process is out of control, you have to hit the Big Red Button. All work stops, the company starts losing huge amounts of money instantly, etc. The reason we're taught to hit the Big Red Button is that quality issues quickly propagate past the point where you can stop them.

On the Internet, with a highly anticipated release getting mainstream media attention and a dedicated community, quality issues propagate quickly indeed.

But nobody ever wants to hit the Big Red Button. I would greatly have preferred getting a solid eight hours of sleep rather than spending several hours checking if errors were exploitable (yes), sending four emails to try to find someone on the inside, and getting quoted in a piece which is sure to ruin several someones' day. But there are people putting data into Diaspora instances as we speak, so Big Red Button it is.
You are, as usual, a voice of uncut pragmatism. But if nobody cared about what was in Diaspora, there wouldn't be much point to Diaspora. I agree that this is mostly a logic puzzle and not a practical issue.
I think the speed limit should be 45. If you want to go to work safely, take a train. Just saying.
... and so it begins
:
:
down-vote, if you must, but remember what you read here.
Maybe if the author started with the premise that Diaspora is more about offering an open source, secure and decentralized alternative to Facebook rather than zomg facebook killer h8 gpl mindset they might understand the situation better?

Diaspora is about choice, not market share.
Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. I've added in code that will also annotate the first point. See:

http://img.skitch.com/20100917-c7yqhxg74hq6tr97sfubshc441.pn...
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Although HN was described as an "online hacker discussion" (6th paragraph)
I think the poster above is suggesting that the new things, though extant, are not sufficiently many/various/innovative/useful/delightful to constitute satisfying progress.
1. They're allowed to make $200,000 off of the community but other developers aren't?

When you can demonstrate to me how the existence of GPL-licensed web servers prevents the creation and sale of proprietary web servers, and additionally demonstrate to me that people will not pay other people to host stuff for them, I will accept that you "aren't allowed to" make money off of this.
Regarding compile times, a few things I've found that help:

1) Reduce the number of targets (even if only while you are doing development)
2) Increase the number of threads doing the GWT compiling (-localWorkers).

Also, try running your compiles from a SSD. I haven't done this, but I've heard really good things about it (and GWT compiling sure is IO intensive so it's not surprising)
I have only one thing to say to this:

~O:-(