skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'Social over substance' here most likely means that people on Stackoverflow, esp the ones who have reps in thousands tend to treat simple questions (also fundamental ones) as 'not enough in substance'. Which I think is wrong. Substance is knowledge and transfer of that, not who can ask a star-studded question.

SO has a badge which says excellent question and I think those with awesome reps (who generally are ace in their fields) tend to feel bad about such 'naive' (according to them) questions.
Make sure to give your intern a raise. Seriously.
The final nail in the mercury-autism hypothesis?
This code was released to developers as an incomplete preview. I'm not sure why people are holding it to the same standards as a finished product that's being released to end users. Seems like a pretext to talk trash.
Jason Fried was right. All the hype and pressure before launch will cause some serious problems.
This is interesting. We've got a lot of feedback just on that phrase. We were just having a little fun with it, but since it seems to be a distraction to a fair amount of people we'll just drop it from the UI.
There's only so much you can expect in such a short period of time from a few guys with little experience. I want them to succeed, but they need to develop or hire better engineering talent.

Hiring the UX firm to get that piece right was a smart decision, since UX sells products. But, the product they're selling is a secure, distributed social network--my hope is that they realize this and get help from an outside security expert.

The real value these guys provide is their vision and initiative.
This all seems to me that you were trying to hire a machine. They will work on weekends and evenings without too much complaint, but form my experience as an employee, there are very few humans willing to work those kinds of hours and be happy about it. On an odd occasion when needs must, yes, but every day and every week will always lead to the inevitable. For most people (and maybe even more so in the UK), working at a startup is just another job, maybe not to you, but to them it will be. I also found as a PhD student those who worked longer hours never finished any quicker than those who enjoyed their time a little more - this is only my personal experience though. Maybe one of your biggest mistakes was not understanding people as well as you think you do - I dunno.
Couldn't agree more strongly. Of course in a startup you'll occasionally put in extra hours (I once spent 60 hours straight writing copy for a deadline), but if you think this should be the norm, then what the hell are you supposed to do when there's a real emergency??

Smart dudes who go four-wheeling in the mud only turn on the four-wheel-drive when they get stuck.
In general, you often see these types of labels when two groups collide (e.g. "Pro-Choice" vs "Pro-Life"). I think "viral" is the counter to the redefinition of "free" used by the FSF.
Most of my coding is hobby or university assignments because of that, my structure is pretty simple. I also compile a lot of programs and install them to my local/ prefix within my home directory (minimize system-wide clutter and restrict apps to just my homedir).

~/src - All of my personal projects, project structure varies depending on language/type of project. Most directories/project top-levels are scm directories.

~/build - any apps/libs not made by me that I compile and install local to my home directory

~/local - items from build/ get compiled with --prefix=${HOME}/local and install to here, ~/local/bin is in my path

~/www/(sub.domain.tld)/ - apache vhosts for local testing stuff (not production)

My $PATH contains ${HOME}/local/bin:${HOME}/local/games and in some cases other local/<bigprogramwithlotsoffiles>/bin entries.
Why airline loyalty programs are poised to make a comeback
The question should be, "Why don't you know where to find good developers?"

If you want good developers to join the market, you're asking them to be good at two things: development and noticing economic opportunities. They don't always go hand-in-hand. You could wait for some "this is the last straw!" event, which may never come and even if it did, the developer still has no idea who you are. Or you need to recruit good developers and tell them they have a better opportunity at your company. Google seems to find candidates this way, just by sending people to universities, using recommendation systems, and trawling the web for people who post good work.
Requiring approval of apps for Windows Phone 7 is awful. I was excited about the platform until that announcement, and have since jumped ship to Android.

Microsoft, in my mind, has always been a champion of developers. Above all, I would protect that legacy.
Maybe he had something really valuable to add but passed out thinking about it and his head hit the reply button?
Most likely, not in JS execution. Probably rendering and 3D stuff.

It would be cool if it naively supported GPU calculations. (Which is available for Firefox via jetpack: http://groups.google.com/group/jetpack-to-cuda/?pli=1)
agreed. not sure what direction they intend to go in
Death march is about overworking: http://www.amazon.com/Death-March-2nd-Edward-Yourdon/dp/0131...
xor stands for exclusive or. Basically it means that if 1 and 1 are passed to it, it will return 0, while or would return 1.
Ah, didn't know about that one. Thanx.

(But it still doesn't address the main issue.)
Yahoo is "still big in middle America", myspace clung to the fact that they were the biggest social network in America to for a long time. I saw something from Nokia that had some statement about how strong their market share still is.

In all cases like this while the current performance is good their is a downward trend. While a company as big as microsoft isn't going under overnight long term if they don't address certain areas they will become increasingly irrelevant and from there it isn't hard to see fast moving companies like Google and Apple eating away at their market share in the core product lines.
Being a mac user my $HOME is /Users/$user.

So I have

~/Development/svn_root - my working copy of the svn repo my group uses for all code related to project work.

~/Documents/$Company_Name/Projects/YYYY - All non-code related project documents are artifacts are stored there.

~/Documents/Reference - All documentation for everything since it spans time frames and projects

Everthing is backed up to an external drive via Time Machine as well as synced somewhere external.
"How Life Imitates Chess" - Gary Kasparov
IE9, FF4, Chrome 6 Browser Benchmark
Sorry that is a little too flow of consciousness for me. Has anything been killed off in .net? From the outside it seems like it just keeps swelling. Sure WPF came out to replace WinForms, but WinForms were never removed etc.
I can't up-vote this enough. Prediction: If Microsoft were to fix all of this in a new version of Windows, 1,000,000 IT support jobs will disappear within a year or two of its release.
I haven't looked at the code, so I can't say this is the case, but...

There's some stuff that good/experienced developers do upfront naturally. There are some security, design and performance things that are clearly a case of bad development versus "this is an early release".

Fundamentals.
Build everything around Xbox Live. Identify what makes it work exceptionally, apply it to everything else.
Specs are almost useless, but the process of writing a spec is invaluable.

Disclaimer - Ripped off from my favorite Douglas MacArthur Qoute:

"I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable."
They could've really saved themselves some grief is they'd been far more explicit about saying that it's Alpha and months from being production ready. All this 'there's bugs! omfg!' hoo-ha could've been headed off at the pass
I get that a lot too. It's why I've stopped targeting a lot of small (10 people or less) companies. Too many conversations seem to go like this:
"I just bought a copy of Microsoft Office for $500, why should I pay $1500 for <much simpler piece of custom software>."

Even worse is when they didn't buy Office, but had it come "free" with their PC's.
It's really more that it seems to be self serving, because you weren't really asking a real question. The StackExchange model isn't really a Wiki, or a blog, or whatever. If you want to write user friendly documentation there are lots of ways to outlet that. SE is about people who have real problems that are really searching for some help, IMO, or maybe the just want to learn something they didn't know about (e.g. what's your favorite editor might get answers that included editor's and reasons you'd never heard of).

I do think this adds noise to signal, because what people who answer questions are there for is to help people who need it. You didn't, and thus it seems more self serving.
Agreed. I'm sending this to my co-founder!

Also, Jason, for an app (padpressed) that promises increased usability, the text on the homepage is awfully hard to read. Here's how it renders in Chrome for OS X:

http://pimen.to/difficult-to-read-text.png
That's definitely a good point.
Mobile Ad Services for App Developers
About half of my employments started because I knew someone. Many of my coworkers, likewise. Almost everyone working for my dept at previous employer is now working for the same new company because their old boss got job at new company and hired most of his old team.

Getting position in your father's, relative, inlaws, etc. company is common in my experience.

Vast majority of political appointments (practically by definition).

Networking events (a couple a month for tech industry in Austin and Seattle) are all about getting the right connections.
The trouble is that they were so ambitious but lacked any experience from which to chart those ambitions. They're just a bunch of young twenty-somethings just getting out of school. They haven't built any large-scale real-world security-hardened software yet.

More than the fact that the code isn't production ready (by a long shot it seems), I'm just surprised the released anything at all. Perhaps spending all that money on those consultants was a good thing for them. I doubt they would've been able to get by on their own given what was released and the hype they set in motion. It's a lot to live up to. They made some really bold claims.

Just goes to show that you can't just talk the talk and watch your dreams come true.
They could have saved themselves some grief if they didn't over-promise in order to get money for a project before they had a single line of code.
When does Reddit stop being a "YC startup"?

Yeah, you never see anyone use the term "Reddit (YC 05)".
I don't think anybody is "holding it to the same standards as a finished product."

I haven't read the code myself, but the OP is claiming "really, really bad security holes", and calls out the encryption code.

Security is not something that can be bolted on after the fact; it needs to be baked in from the start, in a product like this. And, remember, security/privacy was Diaspora's raison d'etre.

No one expects the first code dump to be polished, or feature-complete. But if there are serious flaws there, of the magnitude described, pointing it out isn't just "trash talk."
I would look at either making the source code available to the forensics community, or pivot and release a program geared towards forensics.
There is a market for tools to pull data off mobile devices. Currently its somewhat fragmented with a lot of players, but (having used your software, and working in digital forensics), I'd say you probably have the codebase to distinguish yourself in pulling data from blackberrys.

If you want to see what else is out there, look at paraben forensics, guidance software, and cellebrite.
Advice on Finding a Technical Cofounder
If it takes "10 years" to learn to program, and you hire a guy five years into his ten years, and the average duration of employment is two years, and all of these clauses are "common knowledge" regardless of whether they are actually true, you can see the problem.

Training is a real long-haul investment, and in an at-will environment and culture even strictly considering the employer's side in an environment where the employee can leave literally at any minute makes this a very risky move. Train people to some extent, sure, but like actually give them the equivalent of a college education "on the job"? Sounds like a fast way to bankruptcy to me.
As other people have already said: this is just an early code drop. It would be good to have it transition into an open source project with many developers, especially because the developers are I assume starting their fall school term.

I enjoyed building and playing with the code, and I hope that there is a much improved version in the future.
I think there's a big difference between "omfg bugs" and "The bottom line is currently there is nothing that you cannot do to someone's Diaspora account, absolutely nothing" from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/16/diaspora_pre_alpha_l...
You mean HN?
In high school I learned 6502 (Apple II) which prepared me for the college course that was in 6809. I enjoyed the 6809 more, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for 6502. I also had a course on 8088 in college and really didn't like it at all.

Looking back, I had college courses on assemblers for 6809 (EE dept), 8088 (CSci), and IBM 370 (CSci - the banana book rocked). I wonder if that goes on anymore today.
ha! typo. Thanks for the correction. That's what I get for typing without coffee.
Get a copy of "The Elements of Computing Systems"

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...

http://books.google.com/books?id=THie6tt-2z8C&dq=the+ele...

which will seriously take you from logic gate/chip design all the way to scripting languages and an implementation of tetris on a java-esque language/vm. Totally awesome!

You can download the simulation software which is used in the book here if you want to play w/ logic gates/HDL etc. more http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/
your nand function is a nand or'd with a nor... Why did you do it this way?
And more importantly, if you're going to rewrite, why help Diaspora, and not a more mature option?
Is either of the two cultures successful in monetizing?
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 public beta 2 released
Hmm silverlight isn't really like iphone sdk. IOS has a visual consistency that means that apps look generally nice across the board. Silverlight is a stylistic smörgåsbord.

I guess I worry if MS are going in the right direction with their web stuff, as silverlight has been out for years and I don't use anything written in it daily at all. All the popular & useful websites use html & jquery & flash.
Antimov Robot Competition
Indeed. These guys should be lauded for getting something out. It's a very non-trivial accomplishment.

I'm afraid that Diaspora might be in an impossible position. If they release something early, they'll get a lot of bad press from knuckleheads like this one that the quality is no good. If they release late, everyone will be clamoring over the wasted $250k in the interim, demanding: "when will we see something?".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Long story short, the bad drives out the good.
They (Diaspora staff) said this as they released it:

"Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs..."
// Don't even ask

Found years ago in Adobe's ActionScript core classes.
Idk about you but my blogs return quite quickly on google if you search for something I wrote about. This seems like a more appropriate outlet for this kind of thing. Of course if the dev's around you have forgotten how to search... well I doubt they are worth what they're paid.

You need enough rep to edit a post, but really the question isn't the problem. It's the fact that you didn't actually need an answer.
Yes, HN can have a different value model, because building a community of knowledgeable, start-up-oriented hackers builds Y Combinator's core business.
I'm surprised it has such an impact on an N900 signing on to Jabber. I had no idea it was so reliant on d-bus.
You hardware is excellent (Xbox 360 death-rate excepted). Love the natural keyboard, love the mice. They are all essential to me.

OTOH, you software is terrible. Completely FUBAR.

My suggestion: keep the hardware division, abandon the software.

(burn, karma, burn)
We are considering "seeding" the integration front using our public API. What type of third-party integrations do you think would be the most useful to you guys and which do you think we should we tackle first?
Off-topic, but I wonder if Jon Stewart realizes how easy it would be for him to get elected to some political office. Not saying he'd want to, I'm just wondering if he's ever thought about it.
Just curious, what type of account you have on Dropbox?
Security is not something that can be bolted on after the fact

In fact, this is how it happens in the vast majority of cases, including the case of Facebook.
sometimes truth can be found in movie quotes ( sometimes, not )

THE MATRIX
Agent Brown: Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions.

Ever since I started starting companies I have been looking for co-founders, engineers, hackers and developers.

It seems to me that the best co-founders are not the greatest coders, but they are relentless and extremely open-minded. In fact they probably will write crappy code that needs to be fixed later, but it got done and the company moved on. They don't care about code quality, they care about relationships, about milestones. They read books, and they like a variety of tasks, each requiring focus and effort. They are happy doing stuff alone, and getting people to come along.

As for developers they can make a good thing, and make it better, even great. They take a vision and make it possible. They are usually shy.

Engineers seem to be about the truth in process or systems, and they are one step away from idealistic scientists.

Hackers are more like artists. Code, and computers are just like a paintbrush for them. They need to be inspired, and they bend the perception of what is possible. Impossible is not in their vocabulary. They are OCD and love focusing intently on one beautiful problem at a time. Maybe hackers should never be employees. Hire them as consultants. Give them their freedom.

The best employees have always been developers, but they are risk adverse. Engineers should only be hired for a 20+ sized company.

Hackers and cofounders are the best people to start companies with as they seek risk reward scenarios.
I love this sort of article. You know, the "Researcher Gets Patent on Urine-Powered Battery", that sort of thing. Gee whizz! A fuel cell powered by Rat's Blood! I'm going to get into the Rat Blood business on the bottom floor! There's gonna be a Rat Blood boom, just like the Oil Boom made Texas and Oklahoma into Big Money places, New York City's gonna power the planet with all the Rat's Blood!

Sadly, the fuel cell in question just uses Rat's Blood because it's too risky to try fuel cells out in Real Humans. There are no fortunes to be made in Rat's Blood.
I find when they water down the message for mass market advertising they usually end up with selling points that aren't particularly unique. You end up thinking, so yes you can play movies on another device from your laptop, or you can remote desktop to your PC back home but these aren't exactly unique to windows or even new features.

I think they need to really find a better way to differentiate themselves from the competition, it doesn't have to be feature based as OS's have been able to do most of everything the average used would want for a long time, but rather the feeling people get from using it and how it makes things simpler for them.
I understand where you are coming from, and I did hesitate for a moment before I submitted. However, here we have a link sharing forum, that evolves into a community, and that finds a voice with national scope. I believe the medium and management of Reddit played a role in this.

IMHO, there are learning opportunities here for HN folk.
duplicates
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1700792
The source is Mobile Business Briefing.
One of my biggest issues with Tumblr is the way they handle analytics. If you don't spend a couple minutes ahead of time setting up filters, you end up seeing all your own visits to a ton of admin pages like edit, themes, new and a few others. They make it pretty hard to accurately track your metrics.
Ask HN: Most effective way to provide feedback on Google instant search?
I've previously attempted various means for providing feedback on Google's search interface and it seems to fall on deaf ears. One bad sign is that they don't have any feedback link on the page. But I just found out that if you enter a query into the instant search, and give it a few seconds, it retains that search query in the title of the page and tab, even if you erase the query and there are no results. This seems like unwanted functionality (a bug), but I would really like to use the proper channel to provide this feedback. Does anyone know the best way to get Google to pay attention about issues with their main search web interface?
Fully support server-side automation of Office.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757/en-us

There are a lot of use cases for automatically generating Office documents. There are so many developers who want to use your products that way. Why not embrace them and use them to drive additional sales? We are actually doing server-side automation of Word right now in an internal work flow application — even though it's unsupported — because there's no good alternative for what we need to accomplish. But it involves some ugly kluges and when things break we can't call up Microsoft support.
"Release early, release often" (an open source mantra). Here on HN i also find the 'getto launch' being preached -- "if you not embarrest by your product at lauch-time, you should have released earlier".

Judging from the noise their release makes here on HN i think the diaspora guys did well opening up their repo 'early'.

And to steve: i think you hold 'professional programmers' (which i interpret as programmer that get paid) waaay too high..