skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, what?

You mention 150 clones, they say 800. You mention 100k people in reference to one particular occasion at one particular school. They mention 50k people and don't mention the same occasion, even though they mention the same school. They mention a mob mentality, the closest you have is "flash-mob deals," whatever that means. You mention the importance of a vibrant college town, they say nothing of the sort. You talk about other services likely to pop up. They focus just on Campus Dibs. They mention alumni, you don't.

What exactly do you feel they plagiarized? I don't see a single similar element between the quotes you gave except overall topic.
Joomla jumpstart: 8 tips and best practices from Joomla developers
Ellison to HP board: "Go ahead, make my day."
How about offering them free accounts for a fixed period, like 3/6/12 months? That way you could reward their support without having to carry a bunch of free users in perpetuity. If they like your product they probably wouldn't mind paying for it, and this explicitly communicates the value you're offering.

Also, for any given product I'd expect a small group of very active testers, and a larger group of semi-active to inactive ones.
Not arguing with people who are unable to competently argue doesn't mean stewing about it, then running to the safety of my blog and writing my own rant.
Yeah, we've all had times where we're just burnt out... That would look to an unenlightened observer like "motivation problems" and it is completely recoverable from.
I wonder if those programmers typically do better on their own projects or in their own startups. I would suspect the answer is yes, and they're probably a similar class of people to those who are good programmers with mediocre GPAs in school.
The guy does have a point worth making, but didn't someone already beat him to it using only four words? "Don't feed the trolls."
I respect Joel for sure and he's got way more experience than I do, but I strongly disagree with private offices for developers. I had that while at MS and at first I thought it was just amazing. It didn't take long before I realized how much it stifles communication and even how territorial it can make people. Sure cubicles or even big rooms with open desks aren't nearly as glamorous or prestigious, but in my experience they foster teams that talk to each other, constantly, about the product. The overall team knowledge goes up dramatically. It also fosters an environment where people are more on the ball and productive, instead of sneaking off to some vice website every 5 minutes.
and can you couch the copy on the homepage in terms of benefits rather than features please?
I've also found that turning off all push notifications of emails to my phone helps me ignore emails until I actually get to them. I pick a few times per day to go through them in batches and immediately take care of anything I can do quickly, and star or archive the rest, depending on whether I need to follow up or not. I do my last check at about 9pm.
I believe you are right if... HP and Hurd wrote an agreement not to go to work for HP's competitors. Several companies do this, so they may very well have (in which case Hurd is in a world of pain). On the other hand if they haven't, I am not sure what claim they can make.
USPTO publicly releases its Data Visualization Center and Patent Dashboard
Was 38, 39, 40 and 41 all taken for something else?
A few minutes with John Cleese on creativity
There are compiler intrinsics that can do that but it is not pretty.
New app: TheCommentor
I do laundry about once a week, and it takes about 2 minutes to load and start the washer, and after an hour (or whenever you get back to it) another 2 minutes to load and start the dryer. After that, you can just get clean clothes out of the dryer instead of dresser drawers. My girlfriend doesn't like this life-optimization.
I found it interesting that he claims Wall Street offers dull problems compared to most startups. I've never worked there myself but I know people who do (and in London), and they tend to work on awesome and seriously hard core projects. Stuff right on the cutting edge of math, CS and technology and often far beyond what most start-ups deal with.

Sure I'm not doubting that there are plenty of dull jobs on Wall Street as well, but I'm surprised he writes off the entire sector.
Is this B2B or B2C? The pricing just seems too low.

I think a problem many of us face is knowing when to take off the techie hat and put on the CEO hat. Don't price like a techie. ;)
HP's board had to know that this was going to end up like this. Hate on Oracle if you must, but in a deathmatch for business dollars, HP will get destroyed.

That said - if HP is really going to be a consumer-focused company (like Apple), a deathmatch fight with Oracle might actually encourage and expedite that transition.
Sean Murphy on the first dozen enterprise customers
For example, I wrote:

These are places where populations can change dramatically (think Game Day at Penn State when 100,000+ people come to see a football game) and could take flash-mob deals to a whole new level. Look out for daily deals on campus at schools with large student bodies and a vibrant college town"

She basically changed "populations can change dramatically" and "large student bodies" to "fanatical" and vibrant to "hopping"...not to mention almost the exact same list of college towns + her alma mater
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as "the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

I do not see this as plagiarism. They might have read your article and used it as one of many facets to their own but does not look like plagiarism.
Sounds exactly like Dan Rubin's mailer from justdropped.com. His is free, you pay when you buy a domain name (usually in the $60-$200 range, sometimes more). The email comes out daily, with about a couple dozen domains, quality very similar to your list.

My observation from being on that list for the last couple years: it seems like a great idea but nothing ever pans out. Just so you get an idea, a few examples of my targets: personal domain for a generic computer consultancy, budget around $300; publishing company e-reader, budget around $20k, friends' projects from yoga studio to nightclub to astronomy, budget around $100, etc. Criteria: relevant, easy to remember, easy to pronounce, no competitors in the same space... the usual.

Try it for yourself. Make a quick list of 10 real-world businesses. Then take a week's worth of your mailers, put yourself in a prospective owner's shoes, and try to match them up. I suspect you would see that it doesn't add much value. There are kinda sorta cool names on your list for sure, but nothing that a few friends over beers (or thesaurus.com) couldn't come up with in 15 minutes.

Sorry to be a downer... I very much agree that domain generators suck. A better offering would be killer.

Perhaps it's just not a "computer problem" (i.e. a repetitive task with well-defined parameters). I'd love to be wrong on this one.
PostgreSQL :)
I agree. I definitely don't see any basis for claiming that this article was plagiarized.

TC wrote a similar article with similar points, that doesn't mean that they stole from you.
i @replied Alexia and Arrington -- but it's 7am and I don't expect a response for hours.
If something doesn't contribute to HN, how is it worth any of my words?

Even smart well meaning people are wrong sometimes. And when they are, they are likely to remain wrong until one of their peers takes the time to step back and explain where their facts or reasoning went off the rails.
Once again:

1. Google Market requires account. You needed Market to download the updates to Google Maps.

2. Google Maps itself does not require google account. It will work with one, if available (for Lattitude), but for navigation, it is not required. If you have invalid credentials, for example, it will give you info "Login failed" and that's it.

Yes, I understand, that when it was downloading updates from Market as a first thing after turning on, it is not something pleasant. However, that's what users want, they want their system as updated as possible and Google obliged (see also flames here, on HN, how Google does not care and does not force the vendors to provide current Android releases. Removing apps from OS release cycle and updating them independently is a part of sidestepping the vendors/carriers).
Ask HN: Review my webapp: memobuild
Hi all,

Hope you won't mind if this is my first post, but I was told this is a good place to get advice for a new web business. So here it is:
http://www.memobuild.com

It's basically an editor for large online documents (e.g. documentation, reports, e-books).
It follows the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean paradigm: authors just need to input the contents in a structured way, the layout and design are automatically taken care of by the application. There are some e-learning features too.
The app is powered by Google App Engine / python, and hopefully it can scale nicely.

Please have a look and let me know what you think.

The next step will be to get in the Google Apps Marketplace to reach out to businesses and schools.
Meanwhile I'm trying to get some early adopters. I plan to contact bloggers discussing learning technologies. Any other idea on where to concentrate my marketing efforts?
Wow, it's pretty surprising to see such a rant get so many upvotes. Your rant is about a bad company (good on you for quitting) but it has nothing to do with Scrum.

You're right that there is for sure no "one true way". For me, I like (the parts I use of) Scrum because (a) it puts a low limit on how long a project can veer off track without anyone noticing (i.e. you can only lose SCRUM_LENGTH time at once, not years) and (b) it puts up a wall that stops business from just coming over interrupting me everything some bright idea pops in their head (they can do this if they wish but it means canceling the current scrum. Usually this is enough to make sure they don't do this for trivial stuff).

Maybe one reason I like it is because I'm the kind of person who always sees "rules" as guidelines, not things to be followed rigorously in all cases.
Best business Apps 2010. What's your favorite?
USB mass storage players also fail nicely at being usable for most normal people. Plug it in, get an Explorer window, now what? Open another Explorer window -- reposition windows so you can see both. Navigate to your music collection. Find the first thing you want to copy -- hopefully your music folder is well organized by filename. Copy (don't move!) files. Make sure there are no incompatible filenames. FAT32 isn't very forgiving about this. When you're done make sure you safely unmount the volume by right clicking on the green arrow in your system tray (the thing by the clock). If you have multiple green arrows just try right clicking on them all until you find the right one. Now enjoy your music and start preparing to repeat the process tomorrow when you want to add a song.
Ha Do That in HTML5
Previous thread

http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=1604148
That's what I thought so too. Remember that Russian programmer who worked for Goldman Sach (or was it Morgan Stanley) that got caught for stealing his own code when he moved to a firm in Chicago? He's coding in C++, Erlang and a bunch of other things doing hardcore Math and CS.

Has Joel ever worked for a Wall Street firm?
clickable: http://www.gmbhnews.com/make-mobile-site/

http://www.gmbhnews.com/
Campaign against Craigslist reaches absurd heights
>>>GPA is really good predictor of good programmers (this surprised me). You can have great programmers who have bad GPA but that often means they are great only when working on super interesting projects which won't always be the case in real life.<<<

I think that this is a bad line to draw. Sometimes, it's about bright kids getting bored with dull teachers, but more often it's about troubled kids who need to escape. This is quite important because I would hire someone who has crawled his/her way up through adversity in a heart beat. As compared to someone with a cushy resume with an equally cushy life.

Think about it in this way. Person A has never had anything to take for granted and has to fight for every inch s/he has gained in life. Person B has a much more impressive resume, but grew up in a comfortable life with an entire army at their beck and call. Who would you choose for a startup fighting against the odds?

[edit - I haven't judged someone on the basis of their financial background, or something like that. In fact, what I was trying to say is that until you understand the context of what a person has achieved you cannot judge them. Kids who have parents with large bank balances can also face a far from ideal childhood. Moreover, kids whose parents struggle to make ends meet can have the perfect environment to grow created by their parents.

It's my observation that you can't judge if someone will be good, or not on the basis of what lies on the surface. You need to truly understand the struggles of the person in front of you to make that decision.

So, as a rule of thumb I would pick someone who has struggled more in life vs. someone who hasn't felt the world crash around them.]
Thanks for the good point, I will have to populate it more.
That's not clear. US military deaths in the 1980s were higher than in the 2000s, in spite of the fact that the active military in the 2000s was considerably larger.
The GPA thing always bothers me to hear it admittedly because I wasn't a great student in college. I typically always had my own thing going on that I cared about more. I can see where he's coming from though and I consider high GPA to a good sign when I'm looking at a resume. Often when I look at resumes I'm just looking for anything good.

My career outside of school is considerably better than that my work in school would have ever suggested. Before I started my company I was always the programmer who everyone hated to see leave and who was offered a lot of money to stay. I was glad to hear people talking about my younger brother who is also a programmer the same way. I figure that's the final measure of how good you are.

I never really cared much about what I worked on though. I always just wanted to be kept busy. Part of why I wanted to start my own company was to stay busy.
If You Want To Know How to Write A Term Paper, Get Practical
Writing a term paper is a challenging and often times stressful task. However, in order to get a good grade, you need to be able to submit one which is of good quality. Simply writing a paper on theoretical knowledge will not suffice. You need to have practical knowledge as well.
B2C. "Don't price like a techie". Food for thought indeed.
Wikipedia defines plagiarism as: "the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work"

it doesn't have to be verbatim. even if she got some bit of inspiration from me, when in doubt she should source her story.

i agree that i can't really do anything, which is why I'm asking HN...
Real popcorn material here. On one hand I like HP and their products, on the other hand - if there is a major fallout between these two companies, there is a chance Oracle might resurrect Sun within its ranks for hardware manufacturing. Maybe that was a plan? Who knows. Interesting nonetheless.
The Pros and Cons of Rebranding
A troll is someone who is deliberately attempted to derail conversation and waste people's time for his own amusement. A 'peasant' in this guys nomenclature is merely someone who is too opinionated for his own good.
The advantage of Hacker News exposure: I bought the meditation package that Alex mentioned and the company that sells it just emailed me asking if I knew why they had just received a large number of orders in a very short time period. I let them know.
clickable : http://www.memobuild.com
I get that it doesn't have to be verbatim, but it seems pretty vague to me. I think you're wasting your time. What outcome do you really want here? Why did you write the post in the first place?
Ok so my honest opinion is that this, although it can be nice for certain things, will not turn out to be a success. My reasons:

1. The people that like to track everything probably can also use custom spreadsheets, e.g. in Google Docs.

2. Keeping track of your cigarette or food consumption will probably not help you quit smoking or loose weight.

3. There are already competing sites that look more polished and seem to have more features.

4. (For me) the best way to remind myself of something is putting a sticky note on my monitor. :)
What interests me is if there's any correlation between objective ability (as in programming 'skill') and GPA. I'm not surprised that programmers with good GPAs make better hires for Joel - it means they're more likely to do work on somebody else's project even when it doesn't particularly interest them (which is good for an employer in a small/medium size firm like Fog Creek, as opposed to an early-stage startup).

But is there any correlation with programming ability? Or is GPA just an indicator of 'obedience'/employability?

Nonetheless - great insights, all of them, as is only to be expected from Mr Spolsky.
The Real ‘Stuff White People Like’
> Checking out a Git repository involves downloading not only the entire current revision, but the entire history. So this creates pressure against putting two partially-related projects together in the same repository, especially if one of the projects is huge.

See git clone's "--depth" option. There are limitations to what you can do with a shallow clone, but you do not, in fact, need to pull down an entire history.

Regarding the rest of TFA, the author should look at git submodules, as already mentioned here in the comments. However, submodules should not be used without understanding their implications and limitations (it is worth searching the Git mailing list).

There are at least three alternatives to submodules I'm aware of:

1. git-subtree - http://github.com/apenwarr/git-subtree

2. gclient - http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/install-gclient

This is part of so-called "depot_tools" used by Chromium and ChromiumOS, and can tie together subversion and git repos.

3. repo - http://source.android.com/source/git-repo.html

This is used by the Android project.

The latter two are not really designed to be used outside of the projects for which they were created, but both are Python code so they can probably be adapted pretty easily.
As can I in Nova Scotia
And a twenty-something's father who was in his 30s when they were born (not at all uncommon) was draft-age back then.
Google Bypassing "Search" Button: More "Streaming" Search Results
> Password Gorilla is a Tcl/Tk application

is the bit I found interesting.

("pwg" -- is that you, Frank?)
Not a day goes by when I don't see some no-name blog or other scraping a post of mine word-for-word. That's plagiarism. Unless there's more to it, this complaint seems entirely without merit.
But using Agile allows you to show this in concrete terms. Waterfall uses the "man hours/months/years" metric which is useless given the difference in productivity between developers. Agile, on the other hand, shows the output that is occurring on average, i.e. what you're realistically going to get.

What I tell people is: what do you want? Do you want to never be told no, but never get what you were promised? Then use waterfall. Do you want to usually get what was promised, but be told you can't have what ever you want? Then use Scrum.
Capital Factory  Demo Day 2010 Live Feed
I think he meant that it should have been prematurely optimized so that it could have handled the traffic from hn and there would never have been any problems with performance.
You have very selective hearing.
AGirata, Brazo Hidraulico
I prefer an office, but for those without I think there should at least be "quiet time" or consideration given to where different types of workers are located.

This helps avoid the "talkers vs. typists" problem--don't mix the two. For example, don't put me near the support guy who has loud and frequent speakerphone discussions about resetting passwords, his personal doctor visits, etc. ;)
iTunes used to handle USB mass storage players just like it handles iPods. I think they killed that feature in iTunes 9.
The fact is she presented the ideas as her own...and since it was covered on SAI, and I sent the blog post to them as well, asking if they would like me to provide the excel doc, they were definitely aware of the article.

I'm not trying to burn Alexia, Arrington, or TC, but I think she conveyed my ideas as her own, and would think she'd source her idea...

I wrote the article as my own analysis of the Gap Groupon campaign because I'm fascinated with local commerce (last website I built was a local events finder -- deadpooled, but http://www.prximity.com)
Some really great advice in this post, I am going through the same thing trying to price my security application SaaS, have settled on £20/month at the moment.

It is currently in development and I would love some feedback on the frontpage: http://db.tt/LHjMnwy

I actually started with costs and considering it is all on Amazon infrastructure and I am outsourcing development offshore the costs are pretty low. I had not fully calcuated the cost of customer aquisition though so that is something I will need to do. Thus far I was working on £10k / year on advertising which consisted of Google adwords, social media and niche print advertising market mix. I was also going to promote it directly via presentations to my contacts but I had not priced that time as I can do that while still doing my consulting role (at least initially, and if it goes well I can hire some sales guys).

I am concerned about what glenngillen says regarding the perception issue. Security products are expensive: e.g a few competitors such as Archer (http://bit.ly/9Z7Xyq), RSAM (http://bit.ly/cSjzDz) and riskwatch (http://bit.ly/bhlzYY) are well over $10K per year for most companies.

If I price at £20/m is it too low and will it be percieved as "cheap" and non "enterprise" or will I be able to undercut the competition and appeal to the smaller merchants who still needs security software for PCI-DSS level 1 and 2 compliance?
Besides building the Internet, which arguably grew from funding started in the 50s under DARPA (making it more an achievement of their parents, the greatest generation, who funded it), what other legacy or accomplishments have the boomer generation made?
You make quite the leap from GPA to a person's financial background. I would still lean toward the individual with the higher GPA, as it really is a solid indicator of how hard someone is willing to work. Joel makes a great point that academic projects are frequently uninteresting, but a high GPA indicates that the candidate can complete these tasks regardless.

Judging someone on their financial background instead is heavily subjective, prone to all sorts of prejudices and pre-conceived notions, and doesn't actually tell you anything about the person's abilities.

After all, a driven and motivated person from a troubled financial background can achieve a high GPA. Your theoretical 'Person A' who lived a cushy life yet isn't motivated won't be able to achieve a high GPA without working for it.