skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He is right that you want to study 'tactics' -- ways of making code good. More generally, methods of expression, their benefits and drawbacks.

He is wrong that you want to study it by critiquing code and devising your own improvements. This would be analagous to creating chess puzzles for yourself and then solving them -- it is a very slow way to discover things you don't know.

There's a whole world full of brilliant ideas out there; far more hacks than anyone has the insight to devise in a lifetime. Learning specific technologies is a necessary evil; read something like A Simple Guide to LaTeX if you think you'll need to use it in the near future. Otherwise ignore it. But read Programming Pearls to get better forever. Read some nice OSS code. Read a book that talks about, not how to use a particular language, but how to use a particular language well. Find some language smart people love, in a paradigm you don't understand, and really embrace what makes it expressive. Not by yourself; engage the community. Read their books. Read their code. These things quickly make you better forever.
I like the idea of using GMail for messaging. I mean, that's what email is for in the first place, and I've yet to see a site-based 'mail' system that improved on it. It doesn't (yet) allow for email without revealing your email address, though, so conversations with non-friends doesn't really work.

Add Buzz to it to share things with groups of people (like Facebook's wall) and Google's existing Contacts list and you've got a good portion of a social network already.

Add a forum system (Google Groups?) and picture/video hosting (Picasaweb/Youtube) and you've got pretty much everything.

All that's left is to integrate it all a bit better so it feels seemless, instead of visiting so many different sites.
It sounds like Groupon isn't the problem in your case, it's the service making a deal like that with no limit. Groupon's can/do have limited quantities, and the dental place should have probably used that. They cooperated and gave you a refund (I've received a refund as well before, the customer service has been amazing), I don't see how you would point the finger at them before the business on the other end of the deal.

Anyways, that would definitely piss me off a bit as well, crappy deal. I'll keep using Groupon, I can't pass up half off concert tickets and delicious foods :D.

Edit: Oh, this guy says it much better: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1698788
Yes, I think that is an ignorant assumption.

I've hired extremely responsive, very good freelance developers on elance for less than $35p/h.

Although I do agree with the positioning of the site as a 'premium' experience.

If anything, for PR purposes, I'd focus a lot on how difficult it is to get accepted into the site as a developer. May be good to push the rate higher and only accept developers who have a personal recommendation from an already accepted developer. For example, make it similar to how http://www.dribbble.com/ handled their initial invitation process.

This keeps the perceived quality high and will ensure the site has a key marketing differentiator from other outsourcing sites.
Not as far as I know. (Western language speaking) People do tend to read from left to right (and up-to-down), but there's no evidence to suggest that this applies to non-linguistic things, especially as basic as the way they look when they enter a room.

I had the pleasure of some industrial ergonomics/design courses in college, and IMHO web designers would be wise to look at the decades of research that have gone into that field. Much of it remains relevant even in software/web UI.
Big companies collude to hold down pay.
"If you can’t get the client to provide any of these answers, I’d strongly suggest that you consider declining the project."

That's exactly what I was thinking as I read the list. I've dealt with projects where people either couldn't answer those, or couldn't be bothered to answer those questions. They're vital to the project and need to be answered by someone. Unsurprisingly, I (as the developer) rarely answer them correctly.
Most low-end printers are not wi-fi enabled. I am assuming that people not buying a computer are probably going to buy a cheap printer.
The point is not wanting a portable of any sort and just wanting a place to set the iPad so it can sync and exchange what media you have on it.
So you think it's a good idea for Microsoft to continually break crappy internal web applications that misuse outdated Microsoft technologies?

Yes. If corporate IT departments get burned enough, they'll stop basing their in-house applications on proprietary standards that come and go like boy bands. That might not be good for Microsoft but they certainly don't want to be the only vendor offering lock-in as a "feature," do they?

If upgrading a browser breaks an application you wrote, chances are 99.999% that it's your fault, and nobody else's. Either you have a bug, or you chose the wrong tool for the job in the first place.
64bit allows and/or requires different designs to be efficient. While the difference is usually negligible in user mode, 64bit in a kernel is rather different.
Follow up to that on stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c...
The MIT guys have already created a port?/reengineering? of 6th edition, check out xv6: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2009/xv6-book/index.html
Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur: Meet The Ron Conway Of The Middle East (TCTV)
Just went there to check out your website. I must say, it is very annoying that after clicking around for a few minutes I couldn't find the cost. That is, without giving you an email address.
Caleb of JTV here. This is a very intriguing idea. We think location will be a big part of live broadcast discovery. Nothing to announce yet.
I find most the real problems I encounter in my programming job have little to do with code at all.
What’s New In iOS 4.2 – Over 10 New Features
Indeed, there was a great (anecdotal) Slate article about the economics of opening a coffee shop: http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/
Ask HN: how to decently ditch a job
Longtime user here, you know the drill.

Long story short: I took on a project I thought I would like, for a client I've got to be friends with, and which am competent for. 4 weeks later I've barely scratched at it, which is going to cause problems for him (competitive entry deadline) and raise the expense. I am an asshole.

Why? I've been moving away from that area of work, I agreed to do it for too little money which I don't need anyway, and the project arrived to me months late and with stuff missing. I should have said no, but I'm not good at that.

Mitigating factors: I have had some medical and domestic problems, which are genuine concerens. But they are not big obstacles, more like this project was the obstacle to the momentum I had going to deal with the other issues. The more I felt it was a distraction from ym important goals, the less I wanted to work on it, the less I wanted to work the more time I spent perfecting irrelevant marginal aspects (ie sharpening my tools because I'm gonna start on this any time now...), the longer that has gone one the more embarrassed I felt to pick up the phone and beg off.

I am late, the work is not done, I have let someone down, I am largely to blame and have made the situation worse by failing to deal with it. Although it will be hideously unpleasant, I am going to just admit this was what happened rather than cook up an excuse...external problems exist, but the failure to cope is all mine.

My question is short: what should I say besides 'sorry'?

The obvious answer would be to commit to done and have daily checkins or something, but I already loathe even thinking about this project although that is no fault of the originator, it's because of how it makes me feel about myself. I feel strongly that I should terminate my involvement, for both our sakes. In past tight corners I have gritted my teeth and pulled through, and been mad with myself afterwards for limping over a finish line.
You are not expected to understand this.
I'm not personally aware of any specific name for it, but I used search terms in the neighborhood of "SSD hybrid adapter" to find the Phoronix article.
The bigger problem in this case was that there was consensus about the budget before it was made clear what the goal to be achieved by spending it was.

Being in business means being flexible and having a bunch of beancounters on the board that are scared to be diluted is not going to help at all.

In such a case stating your case as clearly as you can, possibly in a follow up meeting (because he clearly was not well prepared for this one) would have been much better, also, and that's another critical mistake here, before you approach an outsider you first agree internally that you will do so, and what the budget for that particular outsider is. That could have saved some friction here.

A ship has only one captain, if the VCs are on the board they are represented as guardians, but not in a decision making capacity, only an advisory role.

Board decision are not nearly always unanimous, and it could very well be that a decision like this is determined during a general shareholders meeting if the board can not find a resolution. 1 share, 1 vote.
Pretty thorough post-mortem.

"we weren’t intrinsically motivated by news and journalism"

This stands out among the numerous issues the company had. If you aren't passionate about something but still want to do it, make sure it's very easy and won't take up too much of your time. That wasn't the case with NewsTilt.
An industry based on caveat emptor, a lack of trust between actors, zero sum games, and the love of a quick buck over all else leads to an ugly future.

That's how capitalism has worked for hundreds of years. It was only relatively recently that western nations have slowly shifted away from this model with the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and the Sherman Anti-Trust act in the early 1900's.

Of course you still have libertarian thinkers paid for by Koch Industries who preach that two greedy people will always cancel each other out, and benefit the market.
Source of empirical fact?
I just think domain names are too cheap. If the price of a .com increased to $100 per year you'll see a significant reduction in squatting.
In the post they say each voucher cost them $8. So it costs them $11 to serve up a coffee and cookie they sell for $13. At $2 profit per sale they are going to need each and every voucher holder to make four additional purchases just to break even.

Seems like this was doomed from the start. I think the real problem here is that the small business owner thought Groupon was working for them. They didn't realise that they're the ones being sold the product.
So, basically an attempt to racket 20% off the money earned by other people failed. Nice try.
People who choose to not do in Chip Elsworth the 3rd are excessively discounting the future utility of taking this course of action. To wit, being undisturbed by whitey in the future and free to go on to find a white woman wearing a navy blue sweater.
"Getting traffic is really really difficult. We completely underestimated how difficult it would be, largely because I’d never had a problem with it in the past."

For anyone else building a startup without a concrete plan to get traffic, remember this post. Getting traffic will ALWAYS take more time and money than you think. The "if we build it they will come" mentality is a recipe for failure.
8:30 AM - 9 PM ? Jesus.
Nearby Friends (a video overview)
Anyone wonder why Redfin is getting so much coverage on HN recently? They don't seem to be a YC company.

I just took a look at their Wikipedia entry and noticed that they received investment from Vulcan, founded by Paul Allen. No wonder they called Bill Gates a hero in their previous blog post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1694538
I'm surprised YC funded something like this.
The only reason someone would give up a significant chunk of ad revenue to a middleman vs starting their own blog/site is if that middleman was an established site and can deliver lots of eyeballs to their content.

Giving up ad revenue for a site that offers no additional value beyond hosting your content is madness.
On Luck and Entrepreneurship
The built-in help for history, unfortunately, is woefully inadequate; this was the output:

i always wondered whether linux had such terrible man pages because nobody read them, or whether nobody read them because they were so terrible.
Don't worry, the next bullet point clearly states they "separated work from personal life."
Paul,

I'm curious. How long have you known each other before you became cofounders?
Where is the "What You Hear" or "Stereo Mix" setting in Vista and Windows 7?
...but only on the weekends.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/945288/saving-current-dir...
Just say you need to move on. The longer you wait the worse it gets. Let them know without going into excruciating detail that it's better FOR BOTH OF YOU (be sure to emphasize the benefits of not relying on someone who doesn't want to be there). In the long run the client/friend will respect you more for being honest and saving them from someone who will do sub-par work.

And as someone who would similarly struggle with this type of problem, I can definitely say you should rehearse what you want to say beforehand and stick to that.

Best of luck!
they'll stop basing their in-house applications on proprietary standards

At the time, IE6 was more standards-compliant than any other browser. The problem here isn't that it was a bad browser, it's because the standards refuse to sit in one place.
Well, duh, it's not like you can afford to spend time with family and friends during the week.
Yes, that's quite easy if the definition of personal life is "Sweet Jesus, sleep!"

More seriously, that's the kind of thing which does creep in to companies. They have a culture already. It's a long hours culture. You may or may not think that's a bad thing, but it's there. It's quite hard to lose as well. People come in, they can't work less than the people already there, so they jump in to it. Soon people that only work 11 hour days are regarded as slackers. Nip it in the bud. It can't work forever, and it'll get harder to change.
fair enough. you should do the jitouch thing though as that is such a win for gestures I was looking for this exact thing. If it did the middle mouse click it would be all that I need.
> Maybe you should figure this shit out before you take someone's hard earned money.

Unless the investors were lied to, I think they're fully responsible for what they do with their "hard earned money". Nobody forced them to hand over their money to anyone else, or prevented them from asking more questions before doing so.
Re: #5.

The referenced "studies" show that users will scroll if they realize they need to access their desired content.

Okay.

That absolutely does not mean that vertical pages provide pleasing UX or good usability. It simply means the user endured the vertical layout in that case.

None of the provided citations support that conclusion of the article. Not only that - sample size, obvious confirmation bias, and extreme extrapolation of data to unsupported conclusions render the "studies" relatively useless.

In the last citation, even though they attempt to wash it away with statistical significance (SD on a sample of 15?) their data actually shows that usability, as defined by comprehension, is maximized by paging.

I think the truth is found closer to the notion that form follows function and the answer to scroll vs. paging is content and site specific.

I am finding the article, overall, unimpressive. The method involved seems to be that of looking for support of one's opinion, not extraction of good practice from objective research.
Scribd puts your old documents behind a paywall, no permanent opt-out
Can anyone track down a non-paywalled story?
There is plenty of hacking going up there, as once you on top, you HAVE to fix the problem with whatever components, parts, and tools you have available.
Term hacker is applicable, considering he fixes transmission/radio towers...

From Wikipedia:
1950s: amateur radio enthusiasts defined the term hacking as creatively tinkering to improve performance.
What's that saying? - If it's free, then you're the one being sold. They make their money by selling to small business.

From the website:

Groupon for Businesses
With an unparalleled ability to drive hundreds - even thousands - of
customers through your door ...
Ask HN: Favorite Javascript Graphing Solution.
I have been browsing around for a good (preferably opensource) javascript graphing library, wondering if anyone has any feedback for the common ones, or one they would recommend. The more graph types the better, especially pie graphs, and if its not interactive, please explain why you think it's better then the google graphs api.
I read that article and I'd really like to read more about this part:

"A previous historic example includes a reported case of stolen code that impacted a pipeline. Code was secretly 'Trojanized' to function properly and only some time after installation instruct the host system to increase the pipeline's pressure beyond its capacity. This resulted in a three kiloton explosion, about 1/5 the size of the Hiroshima bomb."

EDIT:

Found the story, it might not be entirely true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
A heart surgeon once told me, surgery is not about how good you are at staying out of trouble, but how good you are at getting out of trouble. Eg, shit happens, the survivors are the ones who can deal with it.

*nix hacking ~ heart surgery? Who knew.
Shining, Awesome HTML5 presentations
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M For those who haven't had the joy yet.

Also you if you're a Carl Sagan fan you want to watch this! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc
"There was a point when I was over in Cambridge with Nathan and the other developer, and I noticed that the developer wasn’t working on a Sunday... If your first employee doesn’t love what you do, doesn’t wake up each morning dying to work on HIS product, you have likely chosen poorly, and that’s exactly what we did."

I left a company before because I was being pressured to work at least 12 hours a day plus weekends. (I was averaging about 10 hours a day & worked about 4-6 hours on weekends).

I asked the CEO that he should motivate me. He said that I didn't need to since I was already getting paid a lot of money. I gave my two-weeks notice the next day.

It's possible that you hired the person you want for your company but you were not motivating him enough to work long hours.
Why the Chinese Love Lafite
I don't quite know why, but I'm imagining that guy walking in one day and saying, "My name is Tran. Khang Tran. I get stuff done." He sounds like the kind of person I would like to have always behind me, kicking my butt. Also, this was a really well-written blogpost, like a little novel.
Not terribly well. We had met on two occasions before, and had very much clicked on both a personal and technical level. But obviously that's not enough to survive the stressful environment that is a web startup.
Actually I DON'T understand it. If it's EU that means there shouldn't be any "law" problems when it comes to users of this country.

And I'm sure your country has many brilliant minds to offer - same as any other country.
Fair enough, but just to be clear, these were the first five employees (including my cofounder and me).

Now, some of us still work those hours, and some don't. We don't "monitor" hours or tell people they can't take time off or leave early - and a lot of people take full liberty to do so (and they should).

Some of our employees have kids and leave earlier, put the kids to bed, and hop on IRC to help out if/when they can.

I am TOTALLY aware that as we hire more, the avg hours worked by the avg employee will decrease over time. I think that's normal. I imagine that the early employees will always tend to work a little longer - or at least they should.
So I guess that this is the best coverage these guys have had so far as I'd never heard about the site before.

I know nothing about the history, but what about a little patience?
Yes, you can get cheap domain names, but they'll usually be worse that whatever nonsense you think up. Look at those links you just posted. Anything near the going price of a domain name is going to be absolute crap. Here's the first page of the Godaddy auctions page:

formenti.tv, live960.tv, news18.tv, kamerali-sohbet.info, jeong-vs-jpmorganchase.com, watchmadmenonline.info, randy-orton.org, tvlima.tv, youngshemales.info, 3wolves.us, specialq.mobi, b2bmarketplace.us, straightdaddies.com, epiphonesheraton.com, schooltools.tv

The only names that look remotely useful for any conceivable purpose (youngshemales, b2bmarketplace and schooltools) are all in spammy-looking TLDs.
How come? It's always tax payers responsibility to pay the tax to "right place". Not site's - its your responsibility to work legally to the letter of law. It's like saying it's a nightmare to export abroad, yet somehow people do that and are profitable.
we don't apologize for working hard. we're a startup trying to make it in a competitive business.

what rich meant was that unlike other companies, where social & work bleed together (people hang at the office 7 days a week, 15 hours a day but aren't always working) - we come in, we jam all day, we go home. and we take weekends off.
Thanks for the feedback - a lot of useful points there :) Would you like to beta test the app ?
That wasn't the plan. The plan was that we'd do absolutely everything for them, not just hosting. For example, we'd build whatever features they needed, such as tools for deep analytics of their user base; we'd do all their social media marketing; we'd run their events, job boards, etc; we'd spend a great deal of time working on providing eyeballs and on working out how to monetize their traffic.

If we had solved these problems, 20% would have been a very reasonable cut I believe.
You nailed it. He has been an inspiration.
Sounds to me like an ill attempt by the merchant to cover her ass for treating a loyal customer like an unwanted frugal-monger.

Doesn't change that her loyal customer (Lucinda) is out $6, and Lucinda is very likely to find a new place that knows how to serve up, "Thanks for your patronage, we'll do our best to keep you coming..."
And finally, they didn’t expect a cent back, telling us to give all the money back to our later investors. Not once in my whole time at YC did I believe that they valued their investment more than they valued us, and they were OK with us closing down. YC is a class act.

Personally I find this to be one of the best endorsements of YC that I've read. How people treat you when things don't work out is really, really important.