skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maintain context outside of your head at all times

I have a terrible memory and this is what I have learned to do. Long coding sessions? No; I design, then plan out a short amount of coding at a time. Especially if I'm modifying unfamiliar code, I'll make notes about what functions I need to change and what changes need to be done and in what order, and the possible side effects that may result so I can test for them. Leaving for the day, I'll just write down what I was last doing and what's next on a post it note and that removes the excuse of staying at work "just a few more minutes until I finish up this method."

In the end I find it's far more productive than sitting down for hours coding away. And a nice side effect is that it really doesn't matter if I'm interrupted because where I am and what I was doing is already documented.

Doing this forces me to think at a higher level about overall data & control flow instead of being down in the weeds all the time where it's hard to see the big picture.
The problem with HN is that it shows comment rating as MAX(-4,commentRating). Some people are not aware of this and downvote the comment further, thinking that -4 is not good enough punishment for it. If they saw that the abusing comment had already accumulated 40 downvotes, maybe they wouldn't bury it further.
Indeed I do, the handle I am using is the one I was assigned on the systems of the University of Oslo and I even link to my personal page there from my profile here - and link back to my profile here from there, thereby proving that I am who I say I am.

My reason for doing so, is that I have no reason not to it. Furthermore, I tend to take people a bit more seriously when the info they have provided about themselves can be verified (although thats not to say that I despite anonymous users in any way - they have their reasons).
I think that's a double edged sword thing. OOo while similar, is still somewhat different than 'old' Offices. You might think you know it well because it feels similar, but the little differences makes your work inefficient, as you try to use it like old Office. On the other hand, new Offices forces you to relearn some things, and because of the visual dissimilarity you (hopefully) don't try to apply your old knowledge to it.

Note: I don't have anything to back this theory of mine up, so take it with a grain of salt.
Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy
I'm not sure I want iTunes any bigger.

iTunes already wants to be too much. It has a store (with credit card management), your local music library, a social network, movies that you are supposed to watch via Apple TV, podcast management, the app store, low-level device management, a set of ratings systems for apps and music and movies... It's too much in one package. It violates a lot of good design principles. For example, because it's got so much going on, they can't optimize it for any one task. A lot of people think it needs some decoupling, not extra features.

I think if Apple wants FaceTime to be on Windows and non-iOS phones, they need to promote the protocol and not just one application of that protocol.
For some reason, it's strangely gratifying to know that I have a much lower Slashdot ID than Mark Zuckerberg.
U.S. tops list of spam-relaying countries
Number 52 (SoftBricks) reminded me of Bug Labs.

http://www.buglabs.net/products
Note he said "designing" not coding. When you design things, a lot of relationships and entities are in your head. If you are just fixing some unit tests or looking to do small cleanups or tweaks then yes, you can do that while chatting with your friend about the weather, and at the same time banging away at code in front of you. Your context is just 100 or so lines of code.
Is there some public info on FastSpring's beta subscription service? All I can find is: http://www.fastspring.com/faq.php#twentyone

I am currently debating between FastSpring and rolling out my own PayPal based payment processing for a e-product site. If FastSpring will meet my future subscription needs, my choice would be easy to make!
I use a handle because my name isn't particularly unique. I'd be far more anonymous if my HN login was "jreeves" instead of "weavejester".
The article reminded me of that book too.

GG&S's explanation would be that the environment for certain regions of the world produces technology a lot faster than other regions. So yeah if one region was tech. advanced 1000 years ago the advantage would snowball over time.
Along with dfox's reasons, IRC is also mainly intended for group conversations, while Jabber seems to mostly concern itself with one on one conversations. While both can do the other's task, it's not as pleasant an experience.

The issue of critical mass also plays a part. IRC has been around longer, so developers are used to going to IRC rooms for chats. When they start their own projects, they use IRC because it's what they are familiar with.

Then there is the fact that in the IRC chat, there are usually devs and users in the one room, and if someone asks a technical question, it's quite likely that there is a user in there who can answer the question, saving the dev work.

Finally, there is another advantage of IRC: It doesn't need registration. Anyone can hop on, without going through an account creation process.
So I taught intro CS for CS majors. I can totally believe that for a subset of non-CS majors this could be more problematic.

My old submission program wouldn't let them turn in programs that won't compile (nor will it let them submit without it passing the example tests I gave them).

This was about eight years ago... Maybe students just aren't as smart anymore ;-)
> Maybe, but he did so without even a hint of how those advantages could be achieved in an alternate way

He pointed out that other attempts haven't worked as well. Maybe he's wrong, or maybe there is something new that would work better, but that's a very different complaint.

> or any mention of the disadvantages.

he said that they existed.

> To me, it sounded like he was implying establishing decentralized imperial republics.

implying->recommending ?

There are two ways to evaluate decentralized imperial republics, on an absolute scale and on a relative scale. On an absolute scale, they're bad. On a relative scale, they seem to work better than the alternatives.

You seem to think that "they're bad" is the end of things. Unless you've got something better, it isn't.
Should we standardize on a single language for the server-side as well?
In recent times, I have noticed that a comment that tends to diverge from the major trend of comments on a submitted even though article tends to get down voted to oblivion h that diverging opinion makes sense. A community is made up of different people with different mindsets and points of view, not everyone see's things the way others do, so I do not see the reason why HN cant just accept that other people can be different.
The 14 Biggest Companies You Didn't Know Were in the Solar Industry
The integration costs thousands of dollars. It is not worth thousands of dollars to Chargify. Building (anything) is part of your cost structure. It is not reasonable to project your cost structure onto other companies.

Any software developer capable of doing multiplication and division can work out what it's going to cost to integrate someone's API into their app. It is also not reasonable to suggest that you are taken off guard by a pricing change and are thus entitled to consideration for your sunk cost.

If you are worried about not earning back your sunk cost on someone's API, that's what promises are for. Businesses spell the word "promise" c-o-n-t-r-a-c-t.
>Unrelated, but I often wonder why people insist on a program that prints a string to the screen as the universal best first program. It's very practical, but it's also so tangential to what programming is.

The point is that the first step is getting your environment set up so that you can write[, compile,] and execute code. Printing a string is just a conveniently trivial program.
@tptacek

I am saying is that Chargify falsely presumes companies under a FREEMIUM account are worthless. My point is that they are unlikely to leave [since they have invested their own resources] unless the trust is broken or perhaps, they go out of business...
This is an excellent tip. Sometimes something that I need to be careful about occurs to me on the way out the door. If I had the list accessible on my phone, I could just enter it when it occurs to me and have it at my desk when I return.
I link to some website instead of the study
>Go read the actual study rather than a press release about it.

you link to another website instead of the study
>http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabet...

reminds me of the old Marx joke "I would never join any club that would accept me as a member"
Truly amazing. Facebook's initial obsession with privacy and ensuring people used their "real identities" might have been the reason for its subsequent success.
Does this mean we're going to see a FB + MS pairup vs Twitter + Google? Is this the new battle over the long haul?

Seems like the cultures somewhat line up... FB is a super hacker-centric company with world domination ambitions, and Twitter seems to be more open-ey what with its main product being pretty utilitarian until recently... not to mention the whole Ev connection.

Granted, I'm sort of grasping at straws here, but would love to hear what HNers think.
I think I'm most surprised by ALCOA and Hyundai...
> It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business

It's scary that people may actually do and allow others to do it.
Errm, not in China. They've got a centrally planned economy. There actually is someone who's figured out exactly the minimum conditions for workers to keep the foreign currency flowing. And RMS for all his talk of freedom is advocating propping that up.
I get the impression that this is heavily influenced by everyone else's analysis of Steve Jobs. Disappointing but not surprising.
Raising prices without notice.
Bleh, left a comment and forgot about it, bad of me.

Depends on how the fields are added/removed from the page, but if they're dynamically created (I don't think they are in this case) then they wouldn't exist at the document load time which is when the manager tends to fill in fields, to my knowledge.

While I can at least see the argument of form fields possibly being intrusive, it seems like a long stretch to me in this case. Were it a multi-field form collecting data, I get it, but for a login form on a site where 99% of the activity takes place behind that login it seems damn silly to me to hide it so much.
Interesting how facebook was inspired by friendster and grew to eclipse it.
>but it's still a large gamble.

I know it seems like a big gamble room your current vantage point, but it really isn't. You are an entrepreneurial developer in a tech economy where that skill set is at a premium (at least in startup hubs like the bay area). It seems like the worst case scenario is that you end up getting a job at another startup if your projects don't work out.

Good luck!
I had the same gut reaction, but after some consideration changed my mind.

Look at it from the "average bootstrapper"'s perspective (whatever that is). They needed a recurring billing system, looked around, found one that was good because of its free plan (fully intending to pay as soon as they got enough users to cover the costs). After choosing Chargify on the promise of their free tier, they then spent 1000s of hours of work to integrate it.

Now, I'm not saying Chargify necessarily owes them for their development costs. But there is an implied contract: I'll implement Chargify's api and start working with them until I make enough money to pay, and as soon as I do, I'll start paying. This was the point of Chargify's free tier, and was probably advertised as such. I can understand why people are upset.
Wasn't that the film that profiled MIT's Rodney Brooks? (robotic subsumption architecture, Roomba?). I think we watched it for a graduate class in AI. It was good.
This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck's success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air?

There's no good reason to believe that Zuckerberg is lucky at all. Saying he was in the right place at the right time has this tacit assumption that if he were somewhere else at the wrong time he would have tried the same thing and fell flat on his face.

It seems because Facebook is an outlier, people feel safe talking about the luck factor, but that's meaningless because we all exist with individual circumstances, and by that measure everything every one of us does is based on luck. Instead, I prefer to ascribe luck to things that the individual actually had no control over, such as winning the lottery.
There's also JCommander - such is the myriad of random Java frameworks for achieving the same thing.

http://beust.com/weblog/2010/07/13/announcing-jcommander-1-0...

It's annotation based though and looks to be a bit easier to use Commons CLI - which is what I currently use on projects.
The uncensored version: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/10/13/be-careful-not...
Everyone used to say this about Microsoft.
Chargify made a business decision that the "freemium" accounts weren't worth what the freemium tier cost. You are entitled to disagree with that decision, but I'm entitled to say that to call it a betrayal of trust is hyperbolic and naive.
There is nothing about Jabber group chat that requires any frequent distractions, and group chat Jabber apps I have used seem to behave somewhat identically to irc clients (granted, this was ~4 years ago).
Care to list the missing 20%? OOo developers may find the list useful.
I think there are many other factors that will attribute to scaling and growth beside the exit strategy.
Oh boy. Seriously? Take a look at Chargify's pricing. It's like 10 cents per customer per month up to 15000 customers, beyond which it's a flat rate.

If this pricing change breaks your business model, you never had one in the first place. The Chargify CEO has my sympathy, as this poster is a classic example of why the customer who pays nothing is so difficult: they feel your product has no value.
You are already at the bottom of that slippery slope. Businesses can, do, and should raise their prices, and may do so without notice.
That's really difficult for applicants. How can they possibly resist the urge to prepare for it, and to do retakes till it's 'perfect'?
What Design Can't Do
I do, because this is one of the few Internet forums on which I really take the conversation seriously. I've met interesting people here, and had conversations which have helped me in "real life". HN would be substantially less valuable to me without that real-world connection.

Elsewhere I use a name which would be trivially identified by close friends (nickname from my fencing club) but which is opaque otherwise. The system works.
If you create a benchmark that measures X, it will be used to measure Y. It's the rule of benchmarks.
Yet another example of a flawed patent system in need of reform.
> It's deeply flawed, both for methodology (it has no control group)

Why do you require a control group for observational data?
>Microsoft, Oracle, or Google

All IPOs, which are getting scarce. Certainly some founders are kept around for a long period of time, but if you never take investor money, who is going to force you out?
That's what contracts are supposed to prevent.
I've had the same experiences with all networks on trains, but for what it's worth, 3's mobile broadband is by far the worst in terms of both coverage and speed (from personal experience and that of numerous friends). I'm with vodafone now and they're great (trains excluded).
We (http://platform.newscred.com) might be able yo help. Drop me a line (email in platform).
Yup. It's startling how many corollaries can be drawn. But I have to hand it to redmond: they had the better UI design, if not the better UX.
Well it was only serendipity that I came across it yesterday.
>>Quite frankly, as a customer currently under the ‘free’ plan, I was insulted.

Well written post and good points, but .............

If you're not paying for a service or product, are you really a "customer" of the product/service ?

Companies like Chargify see free users as "potential future customers". Companies like Google see free users as "products" that they sell to advertisers.

imo free users need to understand that "user" and "customer" aren't necessarily interchangable and that the two have distinctly different meanings from the perspective of a company that builds products/services (iow not all users are customers and not all customers (e.g. Google advertisers) are users)
Why is this here? Is this release unusual in some way? They release once every couple of weeks or so.
It seems, from the outside, like Jobs could not have succeeded as well in his second act at Apple if he had not had the tempering of his days in the wilderness at NeXT. He had to learn, just a bit, how to work with people when he didn't have an easy cashflow to lean on. He seems much more disciplined and pragmatic this time around.
Where are the results?
I was using Capistrano too but, like you, couldn't get my co-workers up-and-running with it so we switched to using Phing. I didn't want to be the only one doing deployments at work.
This patent is filed February 1990, issued October 1993 - wouldn't that make it expired? Or am I naive?
>>>According to Law.com, Webvention acquired the property from the great patent gobbler itself, Intellectual Ventures<<<

Why do I have this funny feeling that this is a front for intellectual ventures and lots of people are going to bought off?
It's really more of a Google thing to do, though. Heck, they're already getting into robotics with the self-driving cars.

Apple's only interest in robotics would be in automating its facilities, and Steve already did that at the NeXT factory.
Skype works. Sometimes the sound is hard to deal with. However, consider that there are probably 20 other people in your same situation who will hack out a quick skype video.

Keep it simple don't overthink the stuff.
Can anyone explain what phenomenon they are referring to? I'm not familiar with it.
I chose to quit my full time job for the benefit of my own startup, the difference was I hated the company that I was working for and I hated the job... In your case I would suggest to look into a part time deal. It seems like you have a good rapport with your employer and u have the integrity and the dignity to realize what is fair and such... See, if u can reduce your involvement with your employer to say 30%.. Just a thought.
Good Luck!
Ask HN: Mobile Framework for Android?
I'm looking for a solid cross platform mobile framework that works well on Android. I've looked at the following:

* jQTouch - I like this, but it's really slow on a G1. It also appears to have been abandoned and/or left in the hands of a developer that might not have the chops to bring it to the next level.

* iUI - I like this one too, but as it currently exists is rather buggy and there are a few "janky" things about it I don't care for.

* SenchaTouch - Performance is fine, licensing is awful. I also don't care to define my entire app in JavaScript.

I was thinking of just rolling it up myself with jQuery and keeping it real minimal, though that is an option of last resort.

Any thoughts?
EXorithm - Play and share with PHP without building an environment
Hey there, our mobile analytics startup http://percentmobile.com can help you with your needs pretty quickly. It's not real-time though, but we are soon rolling out an API to plug into.

Give it a spin and let me know if it works for you!
Anyone know if there's any kind of common repository for Go projects? I like what I've read and am ready to drink the kool-aid but it needs something like CPAN or the public maven repos (preferably more like the maven ones).

Until then, it's awfully hard to get behind - if the development is going to follow Google's Java open source process (release a shiny gem every 4 months, zero community involvement), it's hard to justify making any investment in it. Guava's just a toolkit and is useful by itself, Go needs an ecosystem.
>What does it mean to drive an innovative consumer app?

I know, I know!

Let's say we have a car named 'app'. Now, what we need is someone with a driver license who can drive it in a new way (e.g. stoned). The car also needs to consume large quantities of gasoline, so perhaps it will be a bus or a truck.

So what they need is a stoned truck driver. How can they be more clearer?
Irony:

Zuckerberg said that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com, a website he created in the fall semester.
The EU has a 65$ cap past your standard bill. So you don't get bill shock over there. Instead, you get a message that states you are this close or exceeded the "loan".

Here phone companies literally give someone unlimited credit to hang themselves. Add that to 45 day period before you know about the bill. Yeah, its stacked against you.
Critical mass (or the lack of it) would be my guess. Social tools are not very useful if you are using it alone. And switching IM requires quite a lot of momentum imho.

And there are some technical stuff too. Jabber is much heavier and noisier protocol. And afaik there isn't a Jabber client comparable to irssi yet.
Login to hotmail for free |
Lscache: A localStorage-based, memcache-inspired library
Google checkout is about to start recurring payments and subscription billing

Source?
As soon as I saw the word "startups" -- plural -- I thought "he's doomed". However, while the popular wisdom is to focus soley on one thing, one startup, I often find that leads to imbalance. Perhaps having two ventures is a good thing.

What I'm doing right now is a 5-6 hours/day job for the bills and working on my projects the rest of the day. Balances out pretty well -- I get physically tired from work and get some social interaction/out of the house/out of my own head. And the rest of my time -- and all of my headspace -- is free to write and code.

But, to get back to you, it sounds to me like you really would rather be working on your projects.

Here's what I'd suggest -- you don't want to leave your boss in the lurch, and you still need some money -- so why not just talk to your boss about working reduced hours, say half-time, so you can help them and have more time for your startups?
Thanks, I am a mechanical engineer and worked on a DARPA challenge autonomous vehicle in college. These control systems get complicated very quick and I have much respect for the people working to conquer them.
"When the tech-bubble burst, the VC on the company’s board left the VC firm, the firm decided not to invest more money, and the company was forced to sell."

Any explanation as to why they were "forced" to sell? This is the weak link in the post. Not many companies are forced to sell in that position (unless they give up more than 50% of their company to their investors, which would be a bad business decision in general). If you really believe in your product/service and your product/service is viable, you can certainly fire everyone, buy out the investor for mere pennies on the dollars, and continue on. I'm guessing that it was more than just the VC investment that brought her to the point of being "forced to sell," but that's just speculation from someone who has been in a similar position.
It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business.

It is a lot scary that an average of 1 formula in 10 in Excel spreadsheets is wrong.