skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes I wonder whether I'd have be better off if I had a low paying second job rather than wasting countless hours outside of my 9-5 trying to boot strap start ups.

I'm lucky I just love hacking.
Just a little perspective, the 2 people at the top of the list (do search all) are football coaches making $2 million plus each year.

And as an inspirational aside suggesting anyone can make it big, one of them coached in the Canadian Football League. He was probably lucky to make $40k a year there.
I think it needs to go further. I don't think users tend to form mental models, at all. To them, as I argued in http://d-flat.dylanlacey.com/2010/the-parable-of-the-magic-b..., computers are a magic box, not deterministic in any way.

To assume that File->Print prints in all applications, based on it working for one, is forming a mental model. Time and time again, I've seen this NOT be the case.

I think you need to form a decent balance between not surprising the user, and having an interface that's just different enough to make them form new mental models.
Two things that I can think of. Either it's retiring officers cashing out unspent holiday time, or else being injured and getting compensation. eg. This guy:

http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/salary-details/?firstname=Mic...

has only a 70k base pay for 2009 (1/2 pay), and a 200k other, compared to the two other years.

If you look a few pages down the list, you'll get more 'normal' salaries, like this one:

http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/salary-details/?firstname=Jer...

Which is still pretty astronomical, but then he is doing a lot of overtime...
until they start arriving with an apple on them, that is =)
Then when it does rain, they come after you with tar and pitchforks.
micro-transaction possibilities ... obviously this would have to be worked out with banking institutions (how, I do not know) but I believe the first one who can make this happens generates an enormous shift in market share and will be on the upswing for quite a while.
You know a cynical person could suspect that the state wanted to claim that it was freezing or cutting public salaries - while paying the police a lot more!
Here in Toronto, Canada, we had a subway toll booth collector earn somewhere about 140K. When the top public jobs salary list was published, his earnings stood out like an eyesore. There was plenty of hub-bub about it, but it eventually went away.

That report doesn't take the cake though. This year, our province of Ontario instituted a new tax called HST. Tax collectors that were previously hired by the province would get transferred as federal employees that would be reporting to the federal government. Guess what ? Instead of getting a plain job transfer, they got job severance payments upwards of $45K and all they had to do is show up at another government building on Monday morning. When it comes to tax payer's money, there is no logic applied during contract negotiation. It's cowardly politicians and greedy unions.
Can "Agile in the Large" Succeed?
haha I was wondering the same thing:

http://esploded.com

edit: I have the code for expiring files in my local mercurial branch, and I've been wondering whether to push it

edit2: I don't think your design is so bad :)

I was thinking of the file expiry as more of a way to push people onto paid plans.

I was planning to expire the file after a week, but allow the uploader to re-enable hosting for that file for the next year (so I'd have the file on the server for a year, and if the person comes back, they can pay a couple dollars and the file would be hosted for some more time.

This is a very half baked plan, but I think it could work.
Does the angry blue bird multiply its mass?
Infographic: The Astronomical Growth of the App Business
Our Antagonistic Relationship With Computers
I've spent most of my adult life in failed startups in some form or another. Some were funded, most were bootstrapped. Probably 6-8 man-years if I subtract my dances with full-time employment (I'm doing contract work now and working on another startup on the side with a partner).

I have no regrets. I've asked myself a couple of times if it was worth it, and to be honest I can't think of anything else I would have rather been doing at the time. It's not like playing slot machines, hoping someday to hit the jackpot. It's more like an obscure artist trying to find his niche—you do it because this is who you are.

If I never have a big success, I'll die satisfied knowing I was doing what I felt I should be doing. I read a quote from a post on this list some years ago, I wish I could remember the source. But it was something like, "When I look back on my career, I want to say, 'Boy, that was a fun ride!' not 'Boy, I sure felt safe!'"
No matter how many precious post-work hacking hours are burned on things that turn out to be a dead end, it probably adds up to less than the average person spends watching TV...
Windows 7 Late? Or is it like a startup opportunity?
The problem with Microsoft and leadership is the same as in every big company. To truly do something different and innovative you need a benevolent dictator that can put down their feet and say "I don't care what you think, we're doing this and it's going to be great".

You need both the political power within the company to get things done and have the visionary skills to know what needs to be done. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both obviously has/had this to some degree and could coax, bully and motivate people to see their way. Radical change needs radical leaders.

Ray Ozzie is a great technical visionary but he probably wasn't enough of a dictator to accomplish the radical changes Microsoft needs to stay lean and current. If you could put Ray's technical acumen into Steve's bullying body you would have the perfect CEO :)
It also includes being a first responder to accidents. And watching over the cleanup of said accidents. People burned alive in cars. Children strewn across highways.

And knowing every violation stop is a potential end to your life. Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?

Do I want the job? No thanks. They're more than welcome to those salaries for what they deal with.
Getting Started With Python for the Web
Could anyone tell me what exactly Ray Ozzie has done since bill gates left? I honestly can't think of anything, but I don't think that is true. I just think he's been a bit more low key. Everything MS is coming out with has Ballmer's face on it.
Steve Jobs speaks (On Android, tablets, and the future)
German "heatball" wheeze outwits EU light bulb ban
interesting product. How does it differ from vvvv or pd/gem, aside from the price?
Latest version: "Stormpulse delivers high-fidelity weather intelligence."
Mongrel2 BBS
Sounds pretty similar to Drop.io (without the notes and chat features), but with a shorter download timeframe. Not to say it can't work, just saying that there are similar services.
I disagree (but I don't think your comment is worthy of downvotes). For instance, you and your hypothetical school-age children know the most about relative teacher quality within their schools outside of the schools themselves. Presumably, relative quality should be proportional to relative pay. Many people call asking us[1] to list only positions and salaries and leave the names out, but without having the names of employees, there's no way for you to see how effectively your tax dollars are getting spent in the ways that affect you the most. The only real harm done is to the ability of the government to underpay people. There's also the embarrassment some people feel when their friends and family find out their salary, but given a job title, you can guess someone's salary with sufficient accuracy.

Tools like this allow citizens to find out if exceptional employees receive relatively exceptional pay, and if certain positions are over- or underpaid in general. There is actual virtue in these tools, though admittedly most of our hits probably come from the salaciousness factor.

[1] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
Thanks for doing this. Just a point about the site itself: scrolling seems to lock up while items are loading (which it does for some time). Maybe you could make it less aggressive with the async loading of items (load a few, load more when I get to the bottom)?
Are you a finance academic? (username + public employee)
Fair - I should have said just launchng their contemporary OS
The real problems with PHP crop up when you get to the margins, like when you're trying to tune various routines, particular wrt memory usage. Sometimes, it's more efficient to take arguments as (&$foo), and sometimes, it's not. This is why I've written (PHP 5.2.x no less) abortions like:

public function catalogue($str, &$str2, &$str3) {

depending on whether the parameter is a frequently referenced string, and the type of the parameter altogether. It seems like it's completely trial and error with these sorts of things, and when you note that it takes (iirc) ~70MB to store a million one-char elements in an array, it really matters.

Also, sometimes, PHP will patch through returning results of a function, but sometimes, it's actually cheaper to create a temporary, a la

$str = strtolower($foo);
return $str;

These are just a couple of gripes off the top of my head.
FOIA is only for federal information. Most states have some sort of equivalent, but the restrictions on what information is released varies.
Did anyone tried last page?
====
PUBLIC SAFETY DISPATCHER, CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATRO
2007: $0.00
2008: $80,814.55
2009: -$80,814.55
====

What does negative salary mean?

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/?name=&agency=CALIFORNIA+...
I don't see the "Consulting Company" being in any way a prominent force in the software industry any more, but on the other side "Individual Consultants" (the good ones) will probably continue to thrive and make big bucks as long as they keep the appearance of being a force to be reckoned on their specific niche.
What's really wrong with BlackBerry (and what to do about it)
Excellent summary of the challenges facing RIM. Worth a read even if you don't care about the smartphone wars.
I really don't see Apple buying Facebook. It's just too far away from what Apple does best.

Unless they're planning on buying Wal-Mart, they probably will end up dividending pretty soon. There's nothing better to do with that much money.
It obviously can be dangerous at times but considering how many people want to be police officers this pay level seems corrupt.

This is just anecdotal but I've met far more people who want to be police officers / fireman than engineers or doctors; surely there is a large supply of eligible candidates, I can't believe that there is any shortage of capable labor to justify this almost CEO level of pay.
Give the Programmer as Much Control as Possible.

See: http://paulgraham.com/langdes.html

Let the programmer shoot himself (or herself) in the foot. I do not believe a language's job is to hold a programmer's hand. A programmer will write good code or bad code. A language cannot change that.

Variable variables allow for easy class reflection. I'm curious to hear other uses of variable variables.
Raising money for a Startup explained
By Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/)
New drupal.org is live.
Google's main search algorithms are well-known and essentially open. It's all the little bits they keep adding on that are unknown.
Failed projects don't necessarily mean projects that failed to provide money, fun, and/or experience. If your getting at least one of those factors you are turning a "profit"
The author writes:

> Scheme comes with too little in the language to use easily for much beyond teaching programming.

This commonly-cited reason seems to ignore implementations that include much more than what the standard specifies.
True, however EMTs get paid less and see similar things, as do volunteer firemen earning $0 in my part of Pennsylvania.

FWIW in most areas police are statistically less likely to die a violent death than the populace at large.
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How many of your guys' startups didn't get off the ground? Because of project creep/funding/lose of interest/other
Mobile Co-Founder/Chief Hacker/CTO
CodeIgniter as a request dispatcher is OK, but as a framework it's not very clean. Single instance of every library + methods that mutate the global instance (see the bundled mail library)? No way to trap database errors (unique constraint violation,etc.) and if debug is enabled it simply die()s?
I think what you're getting at is that a willingness to sacrifice in order to achieve a goal is essential to achieving that goal. All greatness has a cost, of course. There are literally not enough hours in the day to have a normal life and achieve amazing things.

My feeling on the idea of greatness is that we need to keep things in perspective. There's nothing wrong with a person who doesn't want to risk their family's well being to pursue their dream. We all choose our path based on the cards we're dealt. Some people decide to go all in over and over until they get it right. If you've got a good hand, by all means go for it.
I don't see why this went on so long. so you can have variable variables, and by using curly braces you can do inline evaluation of a expression.

It's no different from just evaluating any expression, no matter how complex, that returns a string, storing it in a variable then sticking a $ sign in front of it.

This is not a rabbit hole. It's just a bucket someone threw up into and then posted onto reddit.
Something that's kicked around here a lot: fail quickly.

If a project doesn't fit success criteria I give it about a month before it's pivoted or done.
Blue Ugg Boots Woman Classic Cardy
>But my point was that with all of MS under him, he would push to consolidate redundant projects, rather than taking them head-on.

Which is something Microsoft desperately needs, IMO. Just look at their mobile division -- WM6.x, WP7, and the Kin were projects that should have drawn from Microsoft's strengths and just went totally disparate directions. In the Kin's case, Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring Danger Inc only to totally squander the Sidekick brand, drive off many of the developers from the acquisition, and then ultimately ditch the entire project shortly after launch.

Then you have things like how they're only just now trying to integrate Zune into their handset strategy after they've all but killed that brand, as well.

Microsoft has just struck me as an incredibly schizophrenic company for some time now. They tend to develop multiple overlapping technologies that really ought to be approached as a single platform, but at the same time try to shoehorn their existing technologies into places where they just aren't going to work.

Frankly, what Microsoft desperately needs is somebody that can step in, say "this is going to be the Microsoft Way of handling X" and get the company on the war path. Microsoft owns so many genuinely great technologies that it's almost heartbreaking to see the way they perpetually fail to come up with any real, cohesive way of bringing it all together.
I think it's quite simple. If I'm a taxpayer in California, I want to know how my tax dollars are being spent.

Specifically, I'd like to know why a football coach is pulling in $2M a year while state employees are being threatened with furloughs and we're running the biggest deficit ever.
I do cringe every time I see someone talk about how the Wii is beating the Xbox. Console sales are only part of the battle, and not the big part.

People buy a Wii, play Wii sports and maybe another couple games for a few weeks, and then it collects dust. Xbox owners subscribe to Xbox live and buy new games quite frequently.
Depends how you define 'failed' -- I spent about 20 months (and all my money, and some other people's) on a startup that has ultimately gone nowhere, but has taken me to some fantastic places and will undoubtedly be part of the reason I succeed.

It'll take me another year or so to pay back all that I owe, and to get to financial break-even; and another year or two to save enough to start my next big project, at worst, but that's not stopping me doing stuff on the side, oh no.

Lessons:

Build a product. I turned out to be awesome at selling an idea, and myself, but got too caught up in that to actually execute on a product. I'm only now turning the work I did over that time into something useful to hopefully recoup some of the money, sweat and tears I poured in.

Follow your instinct. (YMMV. I've learnt over the last two years that my instinct is usually spot on, and spending months convincing myself otherwise is entirely fruitless.)

No experiences are ever wasted. Coming to YC to interview (we didn't get in) was absolutely worth it and was part of the reason I've ended up in the Valley.

Pick a landlord who won't mind if you pay your rent a little late.

Pick advisors who understand your business and who understand business itself. Running a web platform startup I had an advisor who had never started his own company and who didn't understand Twitter (a core part of my technology).

People will evangelise you if you impress them. Do it.
I agree that the Facebook idea is implausible. I think dividends are unlikely too. There's no reason anyone at the company would be worrying about the stock price right now, so the question is whether Steve Jobs thinks he might be able to find a use for $50b at some point in the future. That might be to buy something he has a use for, or it might be just to intimidate any potential partner or competitor.

Has it made a difference to Apple's recent history that everyone knows it could buy Adobe? Do the CEOs of AT&T and Verizon have to face the possibility that Apple could buy Sprint and run its own network? I say yes, and I say Jobs likes it that way, and his comments should be interpreted in that light.
> Who knows who that driver is and what they're going to do?

They're in much greater danger of being killed in an ordinary car accident than by a driver with murderous intent.
Windows Phone 7 you mean?
WP7 is as late to the game as Android was.
Heh, someone found their hacker news password.

ssh is a network service just like any other, one which can potentially be compromised, via any means (exposed key, social engineering, remote exploit, etc). Why expose things like passwordless keys and make it easier to be compromised? One machine that exposes inbound rsync to transfer files is more secure than a cluster of machines that allow passwordless key inbound ssh. ssh is also harder (more error prone) to secure for limiting commands that can be run or only allowing file transfers. When you configure rsyncd, you already know it's only supposed to allow file transfers, so it's straightforward to audit. ssh has many more capabilities thus making auditing more difficult. The security of the files themselves are already not an issue because they are distributed to the entire cluster, so transferring them over ssh doesn't gain any security advantage.

As for it being directed at you, this has occurred more than once in our environment, I suspect because something/someone set a precedent early on. If this is a serious problem depends on the environment. These are the things that keep systems people up at night. I mean, you don't actually expect me to say "put a passphrase on your ssh key" and "it's okay to have passwordless ssh keys scattered around the cluster" do you?
A friend of mine recently opined that "I never imagined I'd live in a world where Bill Gates is practically a walking saint and Steve Jobs has become The Man."
What's working in music
I'd be interested in working on this project --- it's a problem I've come across quite a bit. There's even an academic contest for it, called CLEANEVAL, although the way they set up the problem was arguably not quite right.
We disagree about a lot, but this is one thing that I do agree with. On both counts... Sharepoint doesn't seem to be very good software. But the competition is even worse. If some bright YC company that gets enterprise could come and do stellar document management, they'd easily have a $100M company. With potential for a $1B+ company.
Jobs lashes out at Android, RIM, tablets
Here's the engadget link. It contains some audio from the call.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/18/steve-jobs-drops-knowledg...
I really like the animations (except for the arm, I wish the words just "appeared" sort of like the music video for "heartless" by the fray). Does anyone know of a tool that can help us make this easier?
The theory is that the football coach, via increased advertising dollars from a successful football program, is bringing a lot of value. Say what you will, but big college football programs pay for themselves, and then all the other sports at the college too. At least, this is what my brother, a college sports nut, tells me.
anyone care to enlighten me how exactly these guys are making money?
"... My first thought was that he would be terribly disappointed by our bizarre topic and my second thought was that he would be about the right age, Stanford is just down the road, I think he is still at Stanford -- could it be? ..."

I've often wondered why McCarthy has never been asked to Startup school to talk about developing and using Lisp and the advantages?
Very clean site. The new logo is cool. Pages open pretty fast. I am impressed!
I have 20 years of startups. A couple moderately successful...quite a few failed.

Some startups were done more as side projects...and just never got the full dedication.

A couple startups were solo endeavors...quit jobs to run...ran up credit cards.

Still paying 20K from the last one.....

No regrets. Best education I could ever have.
Good books on UI/UX design?
Ok so the title should basically describe what I am wondering here.

A little background: I have been a hacker of some sort since the age of 12 when I taught myself C reading a few books (Im now 23). I generally retain information I read pretty well and find myself with an impressive collection of books on a multitude of programming languages, however as someone who is very technical, I often find that I have VERY little creativity.

Ultimately I would like to become better at UI/UX design, So I am looking for suggestions on some good books that could help me with my lack of creativity and give me some insight into how to PROPERLY design a UI for my user base instead of continuing to use un-original ideas or depend on other (often undependable) programmers.
Tivo? Hmm, that's just a rounding error ($1B) for Apple's cash balance.

Netflix? Quite affordable: $8B.