skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but we who spend most of our time working on the "invisible" bits on the backend generally don't have the minutiae of our decisions subjected to a whole lot of scrutiny by the average client.

In contrast, the cliche is true: everyone thinks he is qualified to critique front end design.

I don't think this is always a bad thing -- certainly the client is the ultimate keeper of his brand, but I can appreciate that the constant second-guessing might get tiresome.

To the OP, all I can recommend is to choose your clients carefully, know them well enough to anticipate the issues, fire the ones that are incompatible, and become expert enough that their default instinct is to trust your judgement. Good luck.
Enjoyed the article, but I've learned to just be a little rude. Rejection is part of life, and you can't live yours just trying not to hurt peoples' feelings. In fact, if you actually care, you should find a time to talk to the person about how they can improve themselves. If you don't, the more honest you are with your interactions, the better, IMO.

People who play the game this author plays are a big reason I want to get out of Seattle. It's passive aggressive niceties like this that quickly take over the fun in life and drive me nuts.
He who has the gold makes the rules. You don't like how VCs operate, then don't take their money. The choice is yours.
Sometimes in a casual conversation it is convenient shorthand to refer to a use of a hosted app as "on the cloud," even if technically speaking "hosted apps" don't qualify as "cloud." It means basically "running on a system where I don't have to care about administration of the computing resources," and hotmail certainly qualifies.
> The tax was beloved by pro-government tax-raising types and lovers of economic theory and hated by pretty much everyone else.

From a 'web startup' point of view I can tell you it seemed like a lifeline to have some downward pressure on the aussie dollar (as this tax did) as well as a small decrease in tax rates. As mining heats up it becomes more difficult to operate any other export business because of increased exchange rates and pressure on wages. The danger is that we will become over-reliant on mining as it tends to squeeze out other export industries.
This kind of stuff shouldn't be allowed on HN ... couldn't stop laughing out loud like a maniac.
A friend of mine bought one of these because he thought it would be cool. And it was pretty cool, though keep in mind, it's just a phone. so my friend ended up getting an iphone (well, a friend of his broke her iphone, so he got a free broken iphone, and being that sort of person, he successfully repaired it.)

Anyhow, once I visited the guy and I left my phone charger at home, so after my nokia e90 died, I borrowed his third world phone. My t mobile sim 'just worked' and it seemed like a fairly competent phone overall... but really, voice communication is only about 10% of what I use a phone for, and that's all this thing can do, so for me, it's of limited utility.
The services a university provides are mostly not related to education. They're related to credentialing. Like it or not, a degree is evidence that someone is going to be a better employee for the median modern job--if nothing else, just because they had the determination to finish.
Not like that. That's buying the leading competitor and putting your brand on their product. It's still competing on a pretty even playing field with all the others. What people here are talking about is bundling a clone of your product in with the main product. When Microsoft made IE a part of Windows, it killed Netscape and basically the entire market of for-profit browsers forever. When Apple knocked off Karelia's Watson and included it with the system, it killed that product. Ditto with Konfabulator, which was destroyed by Dashboard.

The danger is that when your app can be absorbed into something more popular. They don't compete with you — they just destroy the market for what you do.
I have to say, its pretty incredible, but I imagine its kind of expensive. Might be able to convince the boss you could offset the cost with the fact your not taking up a seat in the office. Depends.
I agree. A private cloud should also have a standard API, so that applications can be conveniently moved to a public cloud when it is secure and cost-effective to do so.
Yes, this is a good point.

But I don't think the demand is going to stop (for a significant period of time anyway).

While the Chinese standard of living keeps increasing their domestic demand is going to keep increasing.

If their standard of living stops increasing then you'd have to question the stability of their government. If that happens then the world economy is probably screwed anyway.
It's a neat idea, but I don't quite trust it:

http://skitch.com/dlsspy/dieqd/prime-birthday
Google maps won because they provide accurate directions and maps in a really simple, clean, fast interface. Competing products have caught up quite a bit, but I still cant bring myself to go to mapquest because of how much it used to suck.

I don't think most people switch to satellite view, or care if those views are consistent.
Here's my somewhat similar homebrew GTD system:
http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/6109/progressb.png

You see time spent (in minutes) coding (+) and anything else done at the computer (-) taken from RescueTime, along with basic efficiency score and stuff done / to be done for my main project (game) and everything else (misc). Coloring is manual, blue = "worked well", red = "could have done better".

The file sits on the desktop and is the place where I keep my general to-do lists, so it is always open. Works well for me.

Note: censored some "misc" stuff, so don't think I normally work 4 hours a day :)
I'm not a spammer, I just need to blast these potential customers
Great point - port knocking would have provided a separate line of defense when that horrible Debian/Ubuntu keygen flaw hit a few years back.
I am only guessing but I suspect the binary will be tiny. The earlier article you mentioned described how hello world is surprisingly large with libc overheads. It then sets out to eliminate those overheads and concentrates on the problems involved in doing that. But it doesn't mention how small the binary gets once those overheads are successfully eliminated, My expectation would be just a handful of bytes.
Otherinbox is on this track. They can create calendar entries automatically from emails.

I stopped using them because I didn't like the opt-out style of filtering, but the technology is cool.
Of course, I enjoyed the post as well, and I'm always interested to hear how good companies are solving their problems. I just wanted to emphasize their point that the situations where it's appropriate to roll your own are usually pretty specific and obvious once you're down in the prolem you're trying to solve, and if you're a young startup that never thought about it before, there's probably no reason to spend the time and effort when there are a bunch of other things you need to be worried about.
I don't know how much we disagree - except that using the term "cloud based" denotes that your infrastructure is "elsewhere" and your application rests on top of it.

It does not, however, make your application "the cloud" - hosted applications are just that; hosted applications. Hotmail is not a cloud application, it might have a cloud back end, it might run on Azure, etc, etc but it's not "the cloud"
I don't think I've met anyone who can sell a design philosophy as well as you can. It's definitely a talent that requires skill and practice.
What's the insurance liability for somewhere like that?
Mandatory retirement is banned by the 1986 Age Discrimination Act. Perhaps universities could try and get around it by offering newly "tenured" professors a thirty year contract, rather than "tenure". But that might be inviting a law suit.
heya Kyle,

This is great. Just signed up. I am familiar with the Seinfeld calendar. (Though not because I've seen it on the show, but it was explained to me in some other geek GTD blog/system/something.)

I have an idea for a visual aid that might appear in two places on your site for folks who might not know the basic idea behind the Seinfeld calendar, and for those who do know it, but might want to an incentive on their Streakly page:

A visual of a calendar week with a streak (or 2, or 3) through it.

This would appear on the front page, and in another form, on an individual's Streakly page.

I realize you probably already something similar to this already sketched out (along with many other features). So as you were, take your time!

I respect the MVP process :D
In the end, to my mind, the thing that pisses people off the most is the consistency with which tuition increases outpace inflation. (http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml) After that, all issues like out-of-control costs, expensive research centers and sports facilities just raise the question, "Are these things paying for themselves or are they just translating into costs that need to be passed onto students in the form of tuition?"

Just look at the comparison to a 2-year college and do your own analysis. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-skyrocketin...
Alternatives to Disposable Diapers
> Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do.

My guess is that universities would also find themselves having to replace that incentive with monetary incentives, at least in areas where industry options exist. Universities currently get away with paying below industry rates partly because of the lure of research freedom: once you're tenured, you get complete freedom to define your research agenda (well, universities still have a lot of levers they can use to put pressure, but it's at least relatively large freedom). But if you're never going to get to that point, and have to continually justify your research in light of current grant opportunities, what's hot versus out of favor in various fields, how much your output was this year, etc., you don't necessarily have more freedom than you'd have at an industrial research lab. So I think universities would find it harder to attract researchers unless they started paying salaries on par with industry research positions, which may not make abolishing tenure a net money saver.
it's easier for some people than for others. Especially for introverts, the skill of leaving gracefully is a non-trivial skill that needs to be learned.

I mean, most people are capable of saying "fuck you leave me alone you asshole" but usually, you don't want to come off that strong. In most cases, you don't really have any desire to hurt the other person, and hell, you might even want to talk later, or talk about a different subject. I just want to be very clear that I am not interested in hearing about how all 50 presidents can be traced back to some 13th century English aristocrat, or hearing about some other crazy political idea or theory that doesn't lead to something implementable.

It's the ability to make it clear that you aren't interested in this conversation right now without sounding like you aren't interested in talking with this person ever that is the tricky bit for those of us who are not particularly skilled.

I used to be really, really bad at this. I'm getting better, but I still use crutches and props like my laptop or cellphone, or simply making up something I've gotta do. (well, really, there's /always/ something useful I could be doing, but if I'm at my local hackerspace, if someone wants to talk politics, I'm far more likely to actually start working as an excuse to avoid the conversation.)

Part of it is being willing to be a little rude... but like I said, the hard part about that isn't so much the being rude, the hard part is being "a little" rude - enough to get the desired result without completely alienating the other person.

This, I think, is what the author of the article was mentioning. In the introduction, he says "You need to find a way to end the conversation without making it seem like you want the conversation to end." - which is wrong, I think. My opinion is that you should find a way to indicate that you wish to end this conversation without indicating that you don't like or never want to talk to this person again.
I can't buy that "hosted apps" qualify as "cloud" - that means Hotmail, Yahoo mail and every single rich application on the internet, ever, qualifies as "cloud".

Yes.

We have a word for that - Internet.

You noticed that? :)

I think a much more apt - and something more applicable to SFDC, is anything which exposes "architectural resources" - such as Platform, Storage, or Compute as a service/hosted system is a much better, and cleaner a term then throwing applications built on cloud technology into the mix. The cloud is the dynamic, elastic, "on demand" of resources, not the utilization of those resources.

I think you are right, kind of. Developers talk about cloud computing, cloud storage etc to distinguish it from their traditional services.

However, non-developers don't see it like that. They see "email" as a resource, and the ability to elastically grow their email service as making it "in the cloud".
Yep, needing to use Twitter account for login is a major minus. Maybe I am too old-fashioned, but if I click on Sign-In and it automatically logs me in, this is more of "WTF has just happened and where did it get my login credentials?" rather than "Ohhh, very cooooool, dude. Just saved 5 seconds and not needed to press 20 (twenty!!) keys. Awesome.".
There; I disagree - if there were a standard API for clouds I might agree - otherwise, it makes sense for internal clouds to adopt the API most convenient for the end-users of that API. Sadly, that might mean something like SOAP, which would make me sad.
LoginGraceTime can be greatly decreased to 5 seconds in most cases. I recommend this unless you are connecting over extremely slow links.
It's too bad it's so much to attend $200 sounds unreasonable to me.
the art of innovation is a very good book
How is that an 'international' version if it only supports the two bands used in North America?
I've worked with a lot of Salesforce.com partners and customers and the acronym SFDC is universally used.
I find designers often assume things which are trendy/etc do not actually have a factual basis in what works better, nor any sort of references to back it up.

I admit they often make prettier things (and I'm talking UX designers), but they often do not deign to come down to the level of us mortals who have to implement their wireframes with cost considerations or the like. It feels like they're unwilling to put constraints on their process, so it can make it largely painful rather than helpful.

It feels like the architecture astronauts you get some times in corporate walla walla land in software. Some people have grandiose (and costly visions) and do not feel they can be questioned on those; refusing to accept questions makes everyone else think they're full of crap, because it's usually the guy who doesn't know what he's talking about who starts going off when challenged.

Perhaps you're doing the same sorts of things? You're regurgitating popular layouts, etc, and not really making decisions which can be explained well nor taking into account an economy of development resources.

It's great working with designers under you. But as equals, it's very taxing to work with people who won't articulate reasoning. Questions which may figure that out:

Can you explain how much time different things take to do?

How do you know this?

Do your developers agree?

How much of your dev's portfolios have you gone over (and therefore know what they can do easily/cheaply)?
It is embarrassing that some of the most otherwise socially capable people do not know the proper technique to extricate yourself from a conversation.

First, what you don't do:

1. Never ever say "It was nice meeting you" and walk away. Worst case, you've made an enemy.

2. Do not say "I want to go to the buffet/bathroom". They may want to go along with you.

What to do:

1. State what you want. "I'd like to go meet those people over there."

2. Give them a choice. "Come with me"
It's a reasonable enough way of protecting hosted websites, especially if you're running more than one server. You can monitor multiple logs for abuse from different sources, and then update all servers to drop traffic from those sources. So, if someone runs a WordPress vulnerability scan on a hosted website, you can detect that and immediately refuse any mail/ssh/dns/www/ftp/other service from that IP.

It requires a little bit of kludging to do this though. :-( As packaged, it's not much more useful than a hacky shell script.
>Never ever say "It was nice meeting you" and walk away

wait a second... I do that all the time. what's bad about it?
Seattle is one of the worst cities in the US, nay, world for this!
Maybe I didn't understand something, but it seems to me that companies like Blippy would have to change something in their code to link with your server instead of Gmail. If it's the case, it would be hard to get everyone to adopt this system.

Or if it's not the case, could someone explain to me how linking the startup server with other companies would work? (Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with the technologies mentioned in the article.)
I can sort of see the benefit of using it as a serialization format. Use it to replace the db for some things or instead of a configuration file. It might be nicer to send it to a data store then have to write into a file...

However, doesn't this turn it into the mother-of-all global variables? (Actually, if it's outside of the globe, and outside of the system, can we call them galactic variables?) With in-memory lists, the scoping is relatively well defined. It seems like the temptation to take this too far would be great.
Computers as Invisible as the Air
Glad to hear it!

There are indeed plans for a more visual display of your completed days. The cool thing is that it's built in such a way that gives us a ton of cool data to play with. Just a matter of displaying it well.
Visual Basic is Turing-complete, so you can write C with it.
What Soldiers Eat, By Country
Robots at Work
This is actually refreshing to hear; I'm usually used to seeing the exact opposite - "what do you mean another account?!?". I wonder if adding an interstitial page with something to the effect of "you're signing up with Twitter FYI" would be a decent intermediary step.
I've used Paypal in the past for online sales and it worked relatively ok. However there were issues I found including:
- Bugs in their API
- Inconsistency in the operation of their forms
- Poor customer support via email

But the speed of setup, relative low cost fees and ability to gather US dollar payments from outside of the US meant it was, at the time, the only viable small scale solution.

In the future for anything larger I'd do more thorough investigations on looking for alternatives. I also wouldn't want to have my business completely depend upon the whims of Paypal based upon their lack of good customer service.
Tectonics of the M7 earthquake near Christchurch, New Zealand
Paul Bucheit & co at Facebook discuss Tornado, Hiphop, and more
Was it really nice to meet them? Or are you trying to ditch them? When someone pulls the 'it was nice meeting you' gambit on you - are you relieved or do you like being ditched?
Gregg Pollack's talk at http://confreaks.net/videos/285-lsrc2010-decyphering-yehuda is fairly accessible and gives a good overview of some of the newer refactorings.
Remind HN: Check your Twitter app connections
Massive Startup Opportunity In India Ignored?
I see this idea as a massive startup opportunity in INDIA. But I dont know the reasons why its ignored. Certainly I think there would be some. Could you let me know ?
I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this box is too small to contain.

;)

Seriously, though - I think I can solve this in Wolfram Alpha (at least up to the point of getting the key).
Yeah but it MUCH rarer that an integer can be written in consecutive powers of 2.
Protip: Buy Art
5 ways to make Android 2.1 work like Froyo
PDFNote
Good idea, Kyle. I don't mind Twitter or Facebook OAuth logins for non-sensitive consumer apps (sensitive = apps dealing with financial info, dating sites, health, etc.). Just tell me upfront that you're using the service, and I'll be happy that I don't need to create a new account.
you know what I don't like? I don't like not knowing if a person is genuinely interested or just being polite. I mean, the last thing I want to do is to trap someone into a boring (to them) conversation. I'd much rather they tell me they aren't interested. On the other hand, I don't want to avoid talking to people out of unfounded fear.

Really, the best solution is to have people leave when they are no longer interested in talking to me. (I mean, it'd be even better if I could get actual feedback so I'd know if they were bored or if they have other things to do but that sounds like too much to ask.) I mean, I try to leave people places in the conversation where they can leave if they aren't interested in my 'tales from the computer janitor' or whatever, but that's hard to do without sounding like I'm not interested in talking to them, so really it works out best when people are direct.

So yeah, speaking as someone without much by way of social skills, I depend on people leaving, or as you said "ditching" me when they are bored with me- I mean, sure there are subtle signals the socially skilled send so others can tell when someone else is bored. Sometimes I can pick up on those... but sometimes I can't. Like I said, I'm not very socially skilled.
Insights Into Gilt's Business Model
nice idea. i'm sure you know about http://www.freshapps.com/streaks/ already. wonder if there's an integration point, there, where you could leverage their app with your data.
"there's then a required level of protection from themselves that must be in place in any Decent Society"

Bullshit. Strong words to follow.
The first page of the article uses various journalistic tricks to make the Australians seem like nice homely people, while the Chinese seem like faceless big corporations.
In an Age of Voices, Moving Beyond the Facts
yea, I really dig what they're doing but wanted something web-based. Streak.ly's got an API coming soon; would be awesome to integrate somehow.
The $131M Ford Rollover Death Verdict That Twitter Broke
This app looks rad, I've been using [calendar about nothing](http://calendaraboutnothing.com/) for my opensource hacking needs and the seinfeld calendar way of being motivated definitely works for me, I saw some of the teasers on forrst and am eager to give it a try; keep up the awesomeness!
Great point. I'm going to make it a top priority.
Thanks so much :) Looking forward to hearing your feedback.
feedback re: the reminder portion of the app - would be nice if:

1. i could get the notice as a tweet (DM) instead of an email. since you're using oauth, i'm betting you're facile w/the twitter api.

2. you offered a fuller range of hours for the reminder. the first task i added to streak.ly was, "cook breakfast", but 10am was the earliest reminder i could pick in the list, which is too late for me ;)