skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like it. As soon as I started using it, it was clear how to do anything. My suggestion would be to change the sample links on the home page to images. Also, it would be nice to try a demo before signing up.
How good is the pay? Can you give some examples?
I've only read the first few pages, but this sounds exactly like Steve Blank's 4 steps - ie. fantastic.
Fear (Part 1)
It's not an aversion. Or anything like that. I make a point to never judge anyone. Ever.

Yet, I sincerely think that the kid that struggle to put him/herself through college and fought against all the odds to sit in the interviewee chair should be hired. It's about determination to make things work no matter what.

Person B has shown that s/he can work within those constraints, but they haven't known perpetual hopelessness with fear about their future. They haven't fought to make things work no matter what. They haven't faced repeated failure and crawled their way up from there.

So, in a lot of ways I will respect person B, but person A is a determined survivor and I would prefer to hire him/her.
Dave McClure's live tweets from the Capital Factory Demo Day
Just another tidbit that bolsters the (to me) obvious fact: Android Market totally sucks and there's a huge opportunity for startups here.

The 2-3 independent appstore websites also have ghastly designs.
Note: most bizarrely, it doesn't let you enable shuffling when listening to music this way. Pink Floyd and Sgt. Pepper are delighted and partying but what about all the 80s one-hit wanders?
Stop writing that legacy code.
nice site, good idea. I use todo applications like Done on my iPhone to document and keep track of long term goals and Omnifocus to tick off tasks against projects but this could be slightly different and work well with these tools.

Thumbs up:
[+] nice design, clean
[+] signup is simple and easy
[+] intuative and easy to use - like the keep clicking to change on boolean

Thumbs down:
[+] echo the upsell
[+] would be nice to have the option of going to the details menu once you add a goal, rather than adding the generic ones and then editing it
[+] the roatating screens are nice but they could be larger and the transitions a bit more smooth (bit chucky at the moment at least on my browser)

Future features:
[+] definately be handy as a mobile app
[+] linking to a todo app or providing that functionality would be great: Don't forget the milk, Omnifocus and Things for the iPhone are my favouries
[+] export reports and get them emailed to you
[+] email and/or sms in values for the day
[+] goal reminders and how much you have left
[+] add rewards for yourself for achieving your goals
[+] timeframe to goals - i.e. life, 3 year, 2 year, this month etc

Commercials: I wouldn't pay $5 per month for it at the moment. If it was $3-5 one off as an iPhone app and had the todo features or linked to my existing todo app I would buy it.
Open-source personal robotics seeks a community to make it affordable
I'm not alone in picking up on this:

> private offices for each programmer,

I refer readers to the comments made by Richard Hamming, quoted here by PG : http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html : about shutting oneself away:

> I notice that if you have the door to your office
> closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow,
> and you are more productive than most. But 10 years
> later somehow you don't know quite know what problems
> are worth working on; all the hard work you do is
> sort of tangential in importance.
>
> He who works with the door open gets all kinds of
> interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues
> as to what the world is and what might be important.
> ... there is a pretty good correlation between those
> who work with the doors open and those who ultimately
> do important things, although people who work with
> doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to
> work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but
> enough that they miss fame.

Adapting this to programming, intra-team communication is already hard enough to establish and get flowing. Don't put stuff in the way. Yes, programmers do need quiet environments, but the gains from good and easy communication will out-weigh the losses. If you really need silence for a bit of hard-thinking work, take your laptop and go somewhere else for a bit.
A lot is going to depend on how really difficult the work is. If you must establish and maintain flow then you need a quiet, no distractions environment (unless you're one of the rare sort who can ignore your environment ... I can when I'm doing intense debugging).

I hope you're statement is based on more than your experience at Microsoft or at least them as of late, it's pretty clear that they've become seriously dysfunctional.

Open spaces "foster teams that talk to each other, constantly, about the product".

Well, that's nice, but when does the actual creation of the product occur? And how truly difficult are the products developed in these sorts of environments? E.g. are you just bolting together existing "parts" and the user visible stuff is overwhelmingly critical? ADDED: or are you doing something like ViaWeb (the extreme level of store customization that was never replicated in C++).

If you have people who absent a panopticon are "sneaking off to some vice website every 5 minutes" then you've got much greater problems than anything related to your environment. They're not dedicated to the project, perhaps because they don't have what it takes, perhaps because you've failed to create the necessary conditions. Either way, I don't see any good alternative to solving the root problem (and if your company is a really bad and dis-motivating place, why are you still there???).
Simple: on your productive days you must have done more than was expected so just don't report it all. Save it for less productive days.
Well, that shouldn't be very hard to reproduce: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/360937/do-that-in-html5-fail.png
I worked with ex-traders for a while helping them try and develop real time approaches to VaR calculations (note this was 15 years ago) for an investment bank.

Not only was the area intellectually fascinating, costs weren't a big problem in terms of infrastructure (Sun Enterprise kit all round) but the people themselves were very interesting - probably some of the smartest people I've ever worked with.
It seems to me that in 99% of the world, business people look down on programmers, so it's nice to see there's a little corner of the world in which it's the other way around.
During the last 12 months, I have personally spent over $200 on Provigil, however I'm not sure it works. I feel smarter when I'm on it but it might be just a placebo effect.
You know, I once went to a doctor to ask about ADD, and was told I didn't have it. Fast forward a couple years later, I was diagnosed with ADD. I used to have motivation problems, and don't anymore because of the ADD medication. My (maybe unwelcome) suggestion: talk to a lot of psychiatrists.
I've been using iTunes since version 3, and I don't think I've ever seen it treat a mass-storage player like an iPod. There was, however, until perhaps very recently, vestigial support for a handful of very dated mass-storage players, a strangely-untouched holdover from SoundJam MP. I never did see what would happen when one of those was plugged in.
I take it this means you weren't around for The Dark Ages? The time when animated GIFs ran amuck, standards were wept for acceptance, and the kingdom of Geocities was strong?
The problem is, you don't know which 50 it is. I mean, we're talking about 22 year olds here, they probably don't even know. You end up having to "advertise" to all of them, which then leads to you interviewing some of them who are 90% sure that they're going on to a PhD, but just want to do the interview [for experience|to make their parents happy|to see if it might change their minds].

Full disclosure: I work for Fog Creek, and went to Stanford.
No, really. The amount of apps that get rejected is minuscule compared to the ones that are accepted. It's just that the rejections are trumpeted so loudly. The only one I heard that was iffy was google voice, but I can understand AT&T not wanting that one allowed.
iPod yes, iPhone no. At least, not in the Windows version of iTunes. I used to do this with my iPod at work, and was pretty disappointed that I couldn't continue to do so with my iPhone. I'm glad to see the option to play is back, although I still can't sort my music by column.
Is this from Adobe, or does someone really care that much?
Nobody's arguing otherwise, just talking about techniques for when it's necessary.
You are complaining that they used your article as a source for theirs - but that's not really plagiarism.

"Steal from one person, that's plagiarism. Steal from many, that's research"

I don't think that you're going to gain anything by kicking up a fuss about this in public. Much better to respond to them quietly and try and get retro-active attribution. But they don't need to do that, and they haven't done anything particularly evil, novel or noteworthy by taking your article and writing it in their own words. I think that you're over-reacting to something that happens a lot in modern fast-paced journalism. You may not like it, but I think that it is normal and accepted so you must either work with TC and ask if they would like to syndicate some of the stuff that you write in the future, write-off the incident as a life lesson or stop writing easily rephraseable articles...
Those may be ideals that we value. But when those values hit the real world, you get The Twentieth Century Motor Company

http://www.conservapedia.com/Twentieth_Century_Motor_Company
Sony Ericsson - Support - Phones - P1i
Would anyone miss "the edits" if they simply vanished tomorrow, like Geocities?
These are all good points. Perhaps the reality is something like physical layout of the office doesn't influence things as much as the team itself. However, something as simple as physical layout still will affect things at least to a degree.
Because, face it, offline happens. (CouchOne Mobile)
The Verizon Droid 2: What's Different From the Original
Hi there,

It's good you've got some web app ideas to work towards, that makes learning a lot easier I think.

Firstly you'll want to learn HTML so you can make your pages.

Next you want to decide what language you'll use in the web server - do you know any languages already? I would be biased in this case and suggest Python. But there are other languages that will suit you just as well - Java, Ruby, PHP and so on.

The above would be enough to get you going and write your web games.

Then later on I would recommend:

CSS - To style your web pages.

Javascript - To add more interactivity/functionality to the browser.

SQL - Initially you can just use plain text files or simple key-value stores that most languages have bindings for (I'm thinking of the shelve module in Python for example). But eventually you'll want to store more data or query it in interesting ways.
Piece of white bread toast with grape jelly, three or four small bites of a sausage patty (I prefer the edge), and a glass of milk. Yum!
No, I don't believe I will. I'd rather my users know the button is a button, and will behave like they expect, all without taking up 50% of my CPU...

(Aside: I went back to the page to double-check CPU usage, and the button wasn't working this time. Yup, behold the awesome power of flash!)
ericschmidt on Twitter

I predict big things happening today at Google.
We're already fast.. fast is about to get faster.
No. Not really.
That surprised me as well. I really respect Joel for

a) treating his programmers well

b) not taking external funding for something that doesn't actually require (I suspect points a and b are connected too).

but writing a bug tracking system in ASP.NET seems a lot less
intellectually challenging compare to what's involved in a high frequency trading system (even if you don't get to use Erlang, Haskell, OCaml and C++ -- and you frequently do). Of course that's also nothing compared to many Silicon Valley companies (you get to work on hard problems and you're in a place where core competency is software). I'd imagine, this is related to his point about Stanford (or any other Bay Area school for that matter, even San Jose State): if given other choices, graduates will tend to work on projects that are more interesting or "hard-core" (to borrow a phrase Joel himself has used in terms of of what sort of he experience he looks for on people's resumes).

(Edit: Had a point about GPA, but since others are talking about this, I'll remove it. That said, does Joel (or anyone else) have any hard data on this, in a statistically significant sample?)
That's a really neat app. The inline quiz is a great feature.

Which python framework did you use?

Small "bug": when you navigate to the login page [1], there's no link to go back to the home page or anywhere else but the TOS.

[1] http://www.memobuild.com/login
Roughly 30 - 40% more than you could expect to get working as a programmer outside of finance. But considering that the hours are longer, it's not much more on an hourly basis on a straight salary basis. However, if you're an employee, you can also get substantial annual bonuses.
I don't think the author knows much about html5 or the concept of canvas in general.

If he goes to http://www.chromeexperiments.com/, he'll realize that all this is doable.
Then why bring it up here so soon? At least wait for a response :/
Carrot/Apple smoothie (home made) + porridge (with blueberries)
It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers is recursion.
A Beer Drinker's View of the Venture Industry
Well, that certainly sucks, and I e.g. in 1997 worked for a new grad who had interned at Microsoft and either had an offer there or had accepted it before his elder brother convinced him to work full time at the brother's startup, for which he'd programmed their prototype. (The other guy they really wanted was in SV and still happy their, until his company went poof much later).

Anyway, what you're staying is that it's difficult to qualify your sales leads at MIT and that results in a lot of critical wasted effort. So much it's not worth trying (hard)?
But I wasn't forced to download the voice instructions. That's included as a separate package, and although it bugs me every time I start navigation to download or skip, I'm always free to choose "Skip" and use the turn-by-turn navigation without the voice instructions.
thank you for the advice.
thanks <sigh>
I'm not sure if you're trying to be sarcastic... In the real world, we get fictional companies? I'll be first to say that modern unions are horrible, and there's lots of problems there. But there are also a lot of successful, democratically run business places.
WTF is Interchange?
If you want a "simple link directly to your app", then use the market:// schema so that users clicking from their phone can go directly to the market page to buy it. For users on a desktop computer, show them a QR code with the market:// link so they can grab it from their phone. I'm not sure how much simpler it could get?
The answer is actually in the question. The questioner is accustomed to paying $10 for one gram. There was a time when the traditional "dime bag" was 1/10th ounce, or nearly three grams.

The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?
I wish there was a way to play with it initially without giving up my email. I hate getting automated 'haven't seen you for a while' app-spam. It's pretty standard though, so maybe it's just me.

I'm using App Engine too; seems to be a good choice. And oddly, the performance stats for Python vs. Java seem indistinguishable. I would have thought Java would pull ahead on repetitive server-like tasks.
$10 is how much a bag costs, how much a bag contains is the variable I would think. Kind of the opposite of gasoline.
I'm not sure why someone downvoted this comment. They said it was their opinion, and personally it mirrors mine. It is quite a nice little web app when you look at the demo, but I cannot imagine that people will pay for it - there are just too many other options available to people.
Printed by LuLu
to be honest, i didn't even think HN would notice...i came here for advice, and that's what i've gotten.
All fair criticisms to the points brought up in the post. I was nodding all the way to your last sentence, where I think you missed the mark.

It isn't true that this generation of twenty-somethings has it better than most. In the US specifically real wages have been declining since the early 80's, even as productivity has boomed. The economic benefits of automation and computerization have gone disproportionately to the top of the income ladder. The recession has little to do with the sentiments the OP expressed. In fact, the decline in housing prices, as crass as that may sound, is a form of wealth transfer to the current generation of twenty-somethings as they will be able to get a house cheaper than what their parents would have paid for it a decade ago. I think the point the OP was getting at was that this is a generation more aware of an economic reality that is worse than it was twenty years ago. This perception is correct, however misguided some of the other points may be.
Exactly. Quoting the comment the article is about:

>> if your first reaction to that slogan is anywhere in the range from “that’s an exaggeration, but yeah, it’s mostly true” to “HELL YEAH!”...

Then the article:

> (4) Has a strong opinion: “HELL YEAH!”

The original comment is quoting someone. They don't have that opinion themselves.
The audio recording of the talk is certainly worth listening to http://huffduffer.com/dConstruct/25256
Gulf Stream And North Atlantic Current Dying
The expected value of working on a startup is positive. The social value is also positive. And I don't think anyone would argue that, on the margin, you can't do something extra to raise your odds of winning disproportionate to the extra contribution.

So lotto tickets appear to be a terrible counterpoint.
Historians. Historians who aren't yet terribly interested in this sort of thing because the Iraq war still isn't very "historical", nor is Wikipedia.

Fortunately, the historians of tomorrow will probably have better tools for analyzing this stream of text than we do, too. Sure, no human is going to simply read the changelog of Wikipedia, but I absolutely think historians will be able to extract a lot of data from it even so, things we can only dream of extracting from our historical record. (We're lucky to figure out what color something a thousand years old is.)
Moving over this button resulted in no perceptible CPU impact on my machine (crazy fool).
Isn't the comparison supposed to be to his parent's generation? They would have been in the military in the 80's.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus model
I sometime go back and look at edits, especially if it is a controversial topic that someone might have vandalized. Of course I don't mean blatant vandalization but the more subtle kind.
I don't think book creator grabs history pages.
No, in the text he says the $10 refer to 1 gramme.
Replace Oracle with Google, and HP with Oracle, and it still makes sense. Pot, meet Kettle.
I tried to sign in with my google account only to get a 500. Please check google sign ins. :

http://www.memobuild.com/_ah/openid_verify?continue=http://w...
Startup Profile: Smackages (Capital Factory #dd10)
Single page: http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/67966/
Its nice to see a company have fun with the more boring pages on most sites, usually its 404 pages. This might even re-convert people to reverse their decision.
I believe the acronym was for "Commercial Off-The-Shelf", not 'components'....just a nit.
here is the message:

Error: Server Error
The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.

If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it.
This is an exciting problem space for the right entrepreneur. I'd be wary of dealing with government, because then you have political issues in addition to business issues, but I'm sure it's nice to have government contracts ;)
It's the iteration sensation.
You are correct. Most of my physics books are at least 2 times as expensive as that book :(
Thanks for the links. Evernote is a really nice service for keeping notes, but not really for goals tracking. Joesgoals is also nice, but not maintained currently. Excel... well, one can probably do pretty much anything there. And of course, I'm not trying to compete with paper, pen and friends.
I remember when a candy bar was 1/2 today's size. Everywhere you go it's "supersized this" and "supersized that". Even snickers bars are 2" longer, 1/2" thicker, and 1/2" wider than they used to be.
Mozilla Labs Game On 2010: open web game development competition
Your age is showing.

There was a time when a dime bag was 1/4th of an ounce.

And I'm sure somebody even older than me is going to chime in with a recollection of an even more outrageous price.
10 PRINT "It seems that the only thing that consistently amuses hackers ";

20 PRINT "is the only thing that consistently amuses hackers ";

30 GOTO 20
Of course, the problem with that approach is that it punishes everyone who paid for the app before it was free.
You forgot about Political Correctness. Despite all the intellectualism, we can't discuss things that are:

- Outside of the realm of rainbows & unicorns
- Inconvenient truths (about the world we live in)
Is cannabis routinely cut, as hard drugs are?

I can't imagine it would be terribly hard to find similarly-burning vegetation to dilute the amount of product in a fixed-weight bag at a level undetectable to the average buyer.
Contracting.

It's like a job, but with fewer false promises and expectations.
I love one-click demo too, and hopefully I can add it later. About Java vs. Python, from my experience datastore RPC are often the bottleneck anyway.
I don't see what the problem is here. Git should manage project dependencies? WTF
You need to take it down, hire a designer (/copy writer) to redo the UI and add pricing, otherwise everyday you are missing out on customers/revenue.

Although I have not played with the app, it seems to have a great potential. There is definitely a need for this product.
I love seeing exchanges like this: People having fun while working in the tech world. They warm the heart :P
Man, reading this and the linked-to Gibson talk just gave me some sort of weird sense of like... not-deja vu. Like, remembering something that happened tomorrow.
It seems like HP's board made a horrible miscalculation with this whole situation (going back to Hurd's firing). All of this is essentially brought on by the board's decision to take the advice of a PR firm and let go of their best performing CEO in ages over expense reports. It's still unbelievable to me.
I'd like to see evidence that real wages have been declining. (Note: I'm not asking about CPI-adjusted wages, since I think CPI doesn't reflect real prices very well. )

People of my generation, in terms of goods and services, are considerably richer than in my parent's generation. This is true for both the rich and poor - the poor today tend to have more material goods and services than the middle class of the 70's. If real wages (i.e., wages measured in terms of the stuff they could purchase) were going down, that would be impossible.

Can you name a single good or service [1] which fewer people today have than in my parent's generation?

[1] Note: I'm asking about specific goods or services, not categories of goods or services, since the composition of a category may change over time. E.g., compare land line 1970/1980 to land line 2010, not "telecom 1970" to "telecom 2010", since "telecom 2010" is much broader than "telecom 1970".