skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If "python for linux sucks" I don't know what to say about python for mac or windows.

I have a lot of python programs that use OpenGL, matplotlib, and a lot other libraries. No problem or very little problems on Linux.

On mac 10.6 you have a limited python version and is very difficult to add matplotlib and other libs, with Windows is a similar pain in the ass, unless you buy it from a commercial scientific distro.
Tip #0: Blast annoying popups in the face of your readers, then tell them that you sold your company for a million.

>Tip #3: But They Still Are Your Employees
I will fetch my boss a sandwich exactly once - then I he can find another employee.

You want me fetch a sandwich - either I am hired as an admin or I have significant equity.

>Tip #4: Make Sure They Give You Status Reports

You can read the log from my checkings if you want - any decent system should be able to send you an email about this.

>Tip #5: Never Be The Only Interviewer
>Tip #6: Always Hire for a Trial Period

Do so if you can get away with it - but given the choice between two different employers, don't be surprised if a good portion of your prospects will choose the other.

>Tip #9: Three Employees? Time for an Office
That would depend on the situation - but this seems like a good rule of tomb.

>Tip #10: How to Beat the Big Companies at Their Own Game
Worth reading for this point alone, except it doesn't say much that Joel had said. You are properly better of reading his blog.
Empty promises...
hmm, somehow it seems, your view is based on a blind skepticism of new technology than facts. I could be wrong, and wouldn't mind being proven wrong if its based on reason, lets see.

Can you list some things that take more time now than before? Things that take more effort now than before?
Ask HN: I recall PG saying "the limit of open source is design", where?
I recall this being attributed to him, but can find it on google. Any ideas?
If you're mandating a specific OS then you're going to risk losing talent that prefers other OSes. On the other hand you will attract people that like said OS.

At our place we don't give a rat's behind about what you run in a VM, but your main OS is either Windows 7 or OSX because it has to run PGP WDE or Becrypt, and neither play nice with multi-boot OSes.

Having said that I know one guy in the office who just boots up his Win7 box, fires up an OpenBSD VM and does everything in there, and no-one has any problems.

Virtualisation on the desktop is mostly free. Let people who have a valid business case for Windows use it, in a VM if you're uncomfortable with bare metal Windows support.
We are just in the process of hiring a new programmer, so this popped up in just the right time. Tip #1 is very important and we are already very aware of that one. Right now it's a 3 man shop, and I can't imagine working with someone I can't grab a beer after work.
> What is software, really?

The part you can't kick, of course.
Firefox's BetterPrivacy addon defeats all of these techniques. I just tested and confirmed this myself.
His overall package isn't $110k. It's that plus GSUs, which apparently vest at about 1/4 of the units per year, so an extra $25.7k/yr for a $135.7k package not counting bonuses.
Tip #0: Blast annoying popups in the face of your readers, then tell them that you sold your company for a million.

I never made it to reading the article since I closed the tab after seeing that much. Spammy and tacky - no thanks.
Hair Loss and Propecia --- What are The Options?
Did your visa application cost $20k? It seems extremely high. I heard it's usually around $5K (fees + lawyers).
I also have Firefox clearing all cookies and all history on exit so that probably helped during my testing. BetterPrivacy dealt with the lso stuff though.

I don't know why people allow cookies to persist between browser sessions. I've been clearing them on exit for years now and it really doesn't make it more difficult to use the Web.
that isn't "meat".
Personally, and I've learnt this the hard way, micromanagement is often a bad idea. Perhaps rather than status reports once a day, because work becomes piecemeal if this is done and not interesting. Instituting status reports once a week is better. Firstly, because it will then actually give the employee the opportunity to see their weekly body of work; and secondly, it will also be more meaningful for seeing what has been done, as it will focus on results, as opposed to: spoke to so and so for half an hour regarding xyz.
> You can put 20% into a startup and get 10000% out.

Really? I don't know anyone who does anything with 20% focus and effort put in and gets 10000% out. Then again, maybe we're talking cross-purposes as to what gets put in or taken out.

As for DHH, he wasn't at 37signals until 2003, so I'm not quite sure where you're coming from with that. I'm not even sure DHH is a good example as it wasn't like he came in as a partner (at least AFAIK, but please correct me if I'm wrong), so clearly he had to put some effort in in order to become one.
From that same thread, someone was downvotted to oblivion for saying Facebook would overtake Yahoo in 5 years. I think that prediction came true within 2 :-)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24616
What do you mean about consulting being good for recruiting? Surely you don't poach employees from your clients?
Ask HN: Who do you go to for brochure design?
We have an existing set of templates that we need some jazzing up on. They're functional, but not as aesthetic as they should be for marketing docs.

It's not a redesign, more an augmentation and continuation of existing design principles. Also, we use OpenOffice for a lot of our work. Any ideas/recommendations?
Take a look at waste energy. That doesn't require anything like the startup costs that solar/wind/water requires.
Maybe the contracts they sign match up with what you say, but the reality is that in many cases the record companies go out and find 'talent' which they then mold into 'stars'. I'm talking specifically about the artists who have other people write their songs for them, etc.
Personally, I prefer to allow websites to use those things, but to then clear them between browser sessions. Just use the Firefox BetterPrivacy addon.
I will take a contrarian position here in thanking Aaron for his write up. Maybe he should not have posted it here to a community that might be very familiar with the details that Aaron describes. The piece in the HuffPost is targeted to an audience that probably is less familiar with Aaron's story and timed to coincide with the release of the film abt FB's early days. What society may value is less important than what society should value. Aaron thanks for exposing your story and helping us to keep a focus on behaviors that we should value. Maybe you should try to propogate a case study for use in ethics training in business schools.
I would like to know what a blog post like this does for sales.
Thanks for sharing this template. I'm not sure if the OP is the writer of the CV, but I just have to comment on the CV itself. They've done some good stuff, but this CV doesn't show it off at all. To wit:

4 pages! The last page only lists an almost certainly irrelevant security clearance? And it looks like one solid wall of short snippets. Where's the meat? What did you really study? Why should anyone care which conferences you've been to? I'd rather see a three sentence abstract of your three best papers. Which scholarships are you most proud of and which could have been awarded to a bag of lettuce?

I know you will have a cover letter with it, and a CV will be skim-read, but as the reason to create a CV in LaTeX is to intrigue and delight, so the content itself should also titillate and ultimately, sell!
"moving from microsoft to google": 2870 hits, most of which seem to be about changing jobs in that direction. "moving from google to microsoft": 7 hits. only one of which seems to be about changing jobs.

Perhaps I'd have got different results with Bing?

... Always keen to spoil a joke, I tried, and actually the answer is yes. 37 and 4. Perhaps half of the 37 were about job moves; none of the 4.
I thought you had quit everything to work full-time on Peashoot… now everything makes more sense!
IT firm, Cerebra to open e- waste recycling unit in Bangalore
I don't think I saw it mentioned here, but one thing that you should consider is that restricting the platform can give the impression that you are standards Nazi's. I left a company for just this reason. I ran the web shop and could not even put a Mac on the network "due to security reasons" to test Safari (back when it was a mac only product). Later when I wanted new software (CMS, Source Control) I had to comply with company standards so that we could leverage purchasing agreements and political deals. There was never a focus on the right tool for the job but rather decision by committee and back room deals.

It was a painful experience and one that drove talent right out the door. I literally saw the best and the brightest no showing for work, never to be seen again (not on my watch). At the career level of a senior developer, if you have people no-showing with no notice you have a serious problem.

Anyways, point being, when I see we use platform X and only X. It translate into my mind that a company has clueless management and a bunch of lazy admins who don't want to do their job. Nothing will drive developers away like admins putting restrictions on how they get there work done.

Be very careful of the image you present to prospective hires if you restrict their system choices. Developers and designers cherish their freedom to create, if you restrict it you could drive the best and brightest away from you company.

Also, don't take this as I am saying this is what you guys are doing. I just want you to be aware that it can send this message, as I am sure a good deal of senior technical people have similar war stories to my own.

Personally I would adopt a virtualization technology and tell the developers it has to work in you officially sanctioned virtual. How you get there is of no consequence to me, so long as it is a reproducible process. Tell people what to do and not how to do it, the how is what you hired them for.
NerdCore
I stopped working for a company because they forced me to use MS Visual tools.

I could work with MS tools, but I want to be able to choose it if appropriate, I want to be the one who takes the decision, not someone that hardly ever codes a line.

BTW, I program mainly on MacOS and Linux, and every piece of software has to be multiplatform (work on windows too). The code is way more robust if you force yourself to compile in several platforms, you discover bugs early with very little work.

In my experience working on only one platform means letting bugs grow that will byte you in the worst moment later. For me is penny wise, dollar foolish strategy.
There's already an API. http://www.instapaper.com/api

The read API is based on RSS, there are RSS feeds for all of your folders.
this particular list accentuates and celebrates it.

It doesn't do that in any objective way: that's your interpretation, which you use as a stool to easily climb on a hobbyhorse.

Can you imagine a similar piece writing about the woes of
Terminal Cancer or Business Failure or Having An Autistic
Child?

Yes I can. Actually, I think I've read those and they were equally inspiring as a reminder of my wealth and health and how small my problems really are. What of it?

people who are actually suffering don't write this way.

But people who have suffered may. Survivors of any traumatic experience can reflect on their experiences in a wide variety of ways. Your typification of the author in this way is not supported by any evidence.

As to the rest of this piece: I find several of the viewpoints commendable, but you're conflating them by interpreting this list as 'self-serving bigotry'. The problems of generalisations, pity and lack of understanding really don't need to have anything to do with this list. Only the author can tell.
With other video formats on the horizon it probably won't be too much longer before reliance upon proprietary video codecs is a thing of the past.
The IE Team.

Must... resist.k,;l;lm,, ARGH

I DON'T CARE ABOUT MY STUPID HACKER NEWS POINTS

I HOPE THIS GUY BURNS IN HELL
The Six Strongest Drinks You Can Find
There are six candidates for your alcohol induced brain scrubbing pleasure.
OK, then it's just sloppy journalism, because that's not 'breaking the encryption of the code', but rather 'snooping on the execution of the code'.
200 Google Stock Units ~ $100,000 over 4 years (probably).

$110k + $25k = $135k.
Well, I certainly don't agree with you being downvoted into oblivion. It's a valid opinion and one that I may subscribe to if I had any reason to believe that you were right about the personal situation off the thief. But without the personal history of this thief, I have no reason to suppose he differs from most criminals, who often haven't really tried to make a regular living.
What are the privacy laws surrounding conciously cirumventing user intent like is? Is it legal to use this in the USA? In Europe?
Putting IE in private browsing mode defeats it btw, so it's definitely doable.
That sounds weird. Are you sure it wasn't a "Recommends" instead of a dependecy?

If it really was a dependency, I think a bug should be filed against the package. :/
Use dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/

Not only is each version of your documents backed up but they are accessible from anywhere you choose to access them.
LHC observes a potentially new and interesting effect
Oh wow, putting Firefox in private browsing mode did not defeat it. That'll probably get fixed pretty quickly, I hope.
can scandinavians sell apps yet?
Great idea. The bookmarklet is just a bit big IMO.
Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career
Mini-WWW as Y Combinator's startup
Meh. I don't consider myself sexist but I had a similar reaction as the author of the comment you replied to.

This is the first time I've read something this profoundly insightful and moving about the music industry, and Courtney Love is the last person I would have expected to see as the author.
It sounds like we both read lesswrong. Good. :) I now understand your notions of "ideas" and "legal fiction", and I obviously agree with you on those points.

Now my moral judgement is mainly about freedom. More specifically where you draw the line between the freedoms of different people. Basically, I try to draw a reasonable one, where no one can significantly restrict the freedoms of others.

I can exemplify this best with the BSD vs GPL dilemma. Individually, the BSD licence gives total freedom, while the GPL doesn't. So at this first glance, the BSD licence is "more free". However, when you look closer, you see that the only important additional freedom the BSD licence gives you is the ability to proprietarize the licensed software. In other words, the freedom to take away the freedoms (1, 2, and 3) of your customers. Using that freedom is crossing my line, because I mostly care about individual freedom for the masses. Therefore, something that forbids you to cross this line is perfectly OK for me. I would go as far as accepting a law that would forbid proprietary software (private and custom software would still be allowed), at least when it comes to "useful" software. I still hesitate when such software is mostly art (like games).

Now, about selling software, well… The way we understand "selling" only applies to scarce stuff, like groceries, or books (the book itself, not it's embedded content). So, the only way to effectively sell software is to make it scarce. Scarce software is necessarily proprietary. So I view the sell of software as an immoral activity. Now I don't mind if you sell the labour of producing the first copy (as is the case with custom software). I don't mind if you charge $much for the privilege of getting a copy from you. I don't mind if you ask for donations. And I certainly don't mind if you sell support or hand holding (your time is scarce stuff).

If I use your car (even when you don't need it), it will get… used. Which mean you will be less able to use it in the future. Your car is scarce stuff. For your book, it depends. If I need to "use" your book (piece of paper) to reprint it, obviously that means you will be less able to hold it in the future. Also, even if I can get a copy of your book from you without damaging it in any way, you could still want to keep it secret. That's privacy, and I think it's crucially important. But when the state forbids me to reprint your book (piece of knowledge), of which I have a copy that I have legitimately acquired, then it's a direct restriction of my freedom to do something that doesn't directly restrict your freedom. In this case, the state better have a damn good reason to forbid me to reprint your book (like, otherwise you would write much fewer books).

In the end I'm not categorically opposed to IP systems. (I am opposed to the term "IP", because it's confusing.) But I think an IP system must have the burden of proof. It should present strong evidence that its benefits outweigh its costs, which in my opinion are quite high.
I don't think that IE6 was actually evil, although Microsoft paid scant disregard to anything resembling a web standard. The problem was probably more that by the time IE6 came along Microsoft just no longer cared about the browser, and let entropy take its toll in the form of all sorts of popups, malware infestations and security crevasses. By the time they got a clue it was too late, and all the folks that mattered had moved to other browsers.
Gentask & Professional Web Design
Gentask Interactive Agency is a San Diego based Web & Graphic Design firm offering a wide range of outsourced IT services including web designing & development, software application development, internet marketing & advertising, SEO services & e-commerce solutions for organizations worldwide.
Mini Web
Linux is a plus in general. However, in my experience, standard custom development configurations always suck - my experience is for Eclipse configurations, but I am willing to bet the same holds for Linux or any other predefined and locked down development environment.
The problem with requiring an update to something like Python may break other programs. Not everything in Python (or Perl) is backward compatible.
> You can read the log from my checkings if you want

If I were a boss and wanted a quick update on how things were going, the last thing I would want to do would be trawling through your git logs and diffs.
It's a terrible counterpoint. If your stuff runs on linux, it's perfectly possible to install a second python and use that (if you need any of the features added recently. Which most of the time, you probably don't).
> Although launched with a zero funding, the business model for the Mini-WWW is highly scalable: The more you invest into it, the more reviwers can be hired.

I don't think this is what we usually mean by scalability. If you find a good algorithm to measure the "simplicity" of a page, it could be useful, but relying on a manual review process is a recipe for failure.
But that is exactly what I have been working on.

If you just want to see where we are going, look at the number of closed bugs, burndown chart, etc.
>>> There's no mechanism for identifying such minimum possible dependencies.

>> Yes there is

> What you mention is a manual mechanism

I agree, they should ditch the automatic ldd method. I justy wanted to correct the inaccuracy of saying there wasn't a way to specify min versions.
>In what way is this not a work for hire?

The difference, I think, is in the "who fronts the risk" question. The guy writing the standardized test is getting paid by the hour or the month, and makes the same regardless of if the thing sells one copy or a million.

A recording artist (or an author writing a book, in most cases) only makes money if they sell a lot of records. In most cases, they won't see any money until the publisher has sold enough records (or books) to pay for the printing. your 'advance' is a loan, and you've gotta pay that back. In some cases, if your creation sells poorly enough you could end up owing the label or publishing house money.
I'm sorry, but that isn't correct. California employment law is the most liberal around when it comes to protecting an employees right to perform works on their own time. As long as you don't build a competing search engine, write a competitor to Google mail, etc you're fine. In fact, even if you did, it is likely that Google won't care and won't sue, because the law leans towards the employee in this case.
Installing the 'python26' package doesn't update or change the installed Python in any way. That's why it was created.

* 'python' remains installed, at version 2.4

* 'python26' is now installed, into separate folders.
India and US to strengthen trade practices before Obama visit
It seems nobody liked having a full language for default config file format anyway, so ditching it for something simpler may make people happier.
Sometimes you need a brief, human-friendly report of the general state of things. I suppose there are tools that can provide something similar, but that's assuming that everyone uses them, which for some types of employee, they certainly don't.
Ironically? Have you actually heard his "music"?
Just tested in practice the N instances approach with Redis: what I get in similar hardware is 100k SET/GET operations per core, so using the same box dormando used for the test we should get 400k operations per second.

Note that you'll see this numbers for both SETs and GETs, as with the single process approach of Redis there is no contention. Instead with memcached you see different numbers for SETs and GETs, I guess this is due to some kind of locking happening. It's a tradeoff, with threads you have more power against a single "object", but at the cost of more complexity and less linear scalability. Anyway it's still possible to run a memcached process per core, I would like to see this results as well.

Currently I don't have access to a box with 8 different cores like the one used in the test so I can't fully replicate the test, so I hope dormando will update the results adding the test that uses four Redis instances.
The MiniRank algorithm is described here:
http://mini-www.com/blog/mini_rank_formula/
Absolutely, and indeed in the past I have worked for startups who were nearly entirely Linux based.
Dealing with link spammers?
I've been working on a project to allow website viewers to talk to each other in real-time based around any particular link .eg. people could be on HN and talk to each other live.

The problem i've noticied is that every now and then we go through a phase of being hammered by spammers who just stream out link after link.

Has anyone experienced this and come up with useable solutions to stop this sort of behaviour.

Currently they are firing out from multiple IP addresses over wide ranges so IP isn't really a good option.

Has anyone got any ideas?

Cheers HNers
Starting GSUs? Apparently they're topped up every now and again.
Collusion (Fred Wilson's thoughts on the Bin38 meeting)