skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thunderbird does do subject-based threading by default. Fortunately there's a way to disable this by enabling strict-threading.

Threading works by using the In-Reply-To: and References: headers in emails. This way you have a direct correlation between an email and what it was replying to. It allows you to trivially build a tree structure for a thread, which is what a thread is, not a flat conversation.

I get lots of emails from our notification systems that have similar or often the same subject. Having it thread by subject alone is extremely irritating here because it combines completely unrelated things together.
I have some friends with an upper end Lexus and a very nice, if smallish, A4 wagon in the garage. And a 5+ year supply of tea, that they bought in one of those Costco-size "box of boxes" units.

It's been over a year, and I still get a laugh out of that.

But yeah, around here, Costco is considered up-market.
Making salary information available is but one, small step towards greater employee satisfaction. If it is the only step - this can be disastrous. You essentially get the problems described in the article.

The company needs to give much more information than just the current salaries that got set by who knows what way.

First, the company needs to make available what the company is making - this is usually available but in some big numbers like earnings per quarter. If you are working on some product you need to know how much it sold and how much is likely to get sold in the next 6 months. You need to at least be able to know how much the company can afford in the end when all salaries together with all the other costs are added together to still be profitable.

Then you need to know the median salary for your job at other companies. These statistics are usually available - and if not can be found from recruiters.

Finally, you need to think about what is fair in your mind - how much does your husband make, how much does the neighbor make, your friends - compared to what they do? This is something you know and the company does not know about - but it does factor into how happy you are with your salary.

Armed with all this you are ready to set your own salary. This then can be seen by all others and a proper discussion can be done. Discussing things with all this in the open is at least possible. Everyone can participate and after a few months everyone will be armed with additional historical information about Joe the Slacker or Jane The SuperStar and if their salary is fair. If someone really thinks they deserve a huge salary regardless - they can always go someplace else if the majority of her colleagues disagree and get her fired.
I read this twice and I can't understand what the writer is trying to explain (I'm very familiar with Techmeme and Google News).

There appears to be a broken image where he says "this is what the tweet looked like" so perhaps that's what I'm missing. Or maybe he's still making no sense.

Care to help?
Great book by Ricardo Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_%28book%29

All companies should be based on this.
No. They can tell you the salaries of your future colleagues, but they cannot know how good their performance is relative to what yours will be, let alone how you will perceive that ratio.
Your story is a little hard to follow because you have both ABC buying Disney and Disney buying ABC.
Companies keep pay a secret because they want to minimize their payroll costs, and there is enough of a margin between value-of-employee and compensation-of-employee that its worth it to pay aggressive negotiators more.
The attitude of spinning your own mini environment to solve a variety of problems using the exclusive set of idioms known best to you reeks of what has plagued Forth and C++.

I love functional programming, but I don't think this animosity towards using known, tested libraries is all that healthy.
Violent agreement, indeed. Can you talk a little about the nature of the application that you're extracting Roweis from? Is there something about it that makes it especially well suited to the (¬M)VC style?
There may be some competition in stealth mode too. They are intentionally hiding from you and me.

But I don't think there is something to worry too much. Treat offerings of your competition as a free market research and validation.

I'll tell you something. It's a secret. I'm aiming at the market where I've found more than 40 competitors in my country only.

Why?

Becuse it validates that there is market.
i think that'd be quite easy, being honest)
i've been working on the same concept to that app, it's hackable in 3-5 weeks :) especially having some great tools such as Weka or Mahout
Nearly all public school teachers are NEA members, and the NEA strongly opposes pay based on anything other than seniority.
Turning down the LAMP: Software specialization for the cloud
Wow, you're right. Fixed it, thanks.
There are lots of uses for this, but my main advice is to not loose these three things:

1. advantage of relevancy within specific domains. The page-rank was a huge value-add to relevancy over other search. But internet wide is now too ambitious. HN is a great corpus because the content is already vetted by a community. The work of integrating other specialized communities content can give density and relevancy.

2. ease-of-use in integration. The less configuration to use this API, the better. Autotagging, done well, is very useful. I have a lot of ideas around this if you'd like to chat some time.

3. ease-of-use interface . Combining browsable, faceted search with NLP is, I think, the sweet spot between getting lots of relevant results, but allowing for discovery.
I like the comments about dice. With one die, an outcome of 4 or 2 is equally likely. With two dice, an outcome of 4 is three times more likely than 2.

So while one and two dice games are both random (as in unpredictable), only the one-die game has uniformly distributed outcomes.
In your blog post (http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/10/27/looking-back-on-sel...), you say "As it’s become one of my favorite parables, I’ll save the details of how I came up with the idea for Gravatar for a future post."

When will that post happen? :-)
sued in small claims court

Did you win?
it's aps.net, running on iis, and the domain is registered on godaddy.com. This must be fake...
I would love to be able to do something like that -- grabbing their credit card details and only charging them if they run afoul of the rules -- but I haven't found a credit card processing service that would give me that flexibility.

The only problem, I guess, is what if you have someone who has a dozen credit cards. Or, more problematic, what if their credit card company offers "throwaway" credit card numbers (as mine does) that you can use for one-of purchases? That would give them unlimited attempts to game the system.
Buy Fraudulent Hits on YouTube
Who are your customers for GitHub FI? It seems that Github is SaaS done really, excellently right: I can have private repos up and running for a cheap cost in minutes. Is FI just for people who are very protective about who has access to their source code, or is it filling some other niche that SaaS can't handle?
The smartest people I know want to do their own startups. It is getting easier, so more people are doing it. How do you hire in the face of this issue?
No, it is his usual humbleness. If you read his letters to the shareholders he is always willing to admit a mistake and is always tries to dispel all of the myths that he is some kind of an "oracle" that can see the future.
It's a private school, so it's relatively free to set salaries as it pleases.
If the markets were actually science rather than the decision making of a few huge players - if the HFT algo writers take this research seriously, I bet it'd work for at least a day or two.
Since you are in the early stages, go with 1/3 each, anything else will potentially cause a lot of headaches down the road.

Having equal equity creates a healthy environment where everyone feels that they should put in as much work as they can. If the others have less equity than you, they probably won't be as motivated as you are. And even if they were, you'll likely start to question whether they are working hard enough, whether they really want the company to succeed etc. This will cause a lot of unnecessary tension.

So I think you should bite the bullet, give up some equity in exchange for better odds of succeeding.

Also, some kind of vesting may be a good idea if you don't trust you cofounders enough yet.

(I was in a somewhat similar situation like you about a year ago, went with 1/3 each and I'm still very happy with that decision.)
In my case some clicks worth over $2 (if I remember correctly) triggered manual review. They sent me canned email about tos etc.

The funny part is that the domain in question was already expired when email arrived because I've decided to stop this venture.
It will be fixed very shortly. I appreciate the comments.

These are some HTML5-ish buttons I borrowed from another site. I had a bit of trouble with the links, so I just added the onclick code. Never occurred to me the different usage pattern.

EDIT: Ctrl-Click now working in dev. I should have it pushed up to production in the next few minutes. Sorry about the trouble. -- Done.
Think from your user's perspective. How is your user going to find out that you exist? Apply that same process. If you find competitors that way, beat them. If you don't find competitors that way, neither will your user.

Being sideswiped by a better funded or better implemented effort you didn't see coming is a problem, but not one worth worrying about. Worry about making your effort the best it can be. If it makes it easier, just assume you have a better funded, better implemented competitor in stealth mode.

Would it make sense for there to be a web service out there that aggregated all the startups, weekend projects, side projects, dead pooled websites, etc. to make it easier to do market research for our new ideas?

Yes, but only so all those startups and weekend projects could advertise. And maybe not even then, because people who have the time and inclination to go around looking for new startups to make their life easier already read all the blogs that announce that kind of thing.
>Your IP addresses aren't (in all likelihood) portable. If you have less than a certain number of addresses, they're actually not advertiseable, because ISPs will filter smaller announcements. Even if you have a portable allocation, you may find it difficult (ie, expensive) to get your ISP to advertise it.

Yes, my home IP addresses are not portable... but IP portability doesn't matter until you have a large number of IP addresses. Ok, so I have to renumber the 8 servers I have in the garage, big deal. Now, if I have to renumber the 1000+ virtuals I've got in the data center, that is a big deal. But my understanding is that everyone filters what's smaller than a /24, and some people filter below a /22... but at a bit over 1000, you are pushing a /22, so by the time that renumbering becomes a really impossible task, nobody filters you any longer.

Now, if you are multihoming for reliability rather than ease of switching ISPs, yeah, you have a good point. DSL has been neutered in that regard, which is really fucking irritating... but I understand why they did it. You know as well as I do that every route eats up a few bytes of ram in everyone else's BGP router, and TCAM is fucking expensive, so having a grand a month barrier before you can start adding your data to every bgp router in the world seems reasonable to me.

On the other hand, the barrier to getting some data center space and a multihomed /24 is pretty trivial by bay area sysadmin salary standards. Over the next week, that's one of my projects. One of my customer has an old /24 of swamp space he wants me to announce. It sounds like a good deal all around just 'cause my BGP foo was never good and what experience I have is old, so I get to practice on something I can break, and he gets to play in his swamp. It's going to cost the guy nothing 'cause I want to play around... It'd probably cost him something around a grand a month if he was going with someone more professional than I am and/or if he didn't already have the swamp space.

But my point was that if you pay for an ISP with good connectivity, you get all the benefits of their peering efforts. You are outsourcing your BGP management to your ISP, which for most people is going to result in better service than doing it themselves.

I think you can get 90% of the benefits of running your own BGP with a lot less hassle out of a $200/month co-lo plan. (just to be clear, that won't get you BGP you control or portable addresses, but if you've only got a few addresses, and the isp you chose is competent, well, that doesn't matter all that much for at least 90% of use cases.)

Edit: I know little of the bittorrent protocol... but my understanding, and this may be incorrect, was that bittorrent from one computer behind a nat (without upnp or the like) to another computer behind another nat (again without upnp or a port forward or the like) did not work well or at all... if you were behind a nat without a port forward (or upnp) you could only talk to peers that were on a public IP or had a port forward.
Desktop Linux: The Dream is Dead
It would still be useful, even if 100% free.

Its the hurdle or having to keep setting up accounts with different credit cards. And the very strong psychological aspect of having to fork over some real, identifying information to a website in order to comment.

I think this would really make people behave much better.

Its a good idea. I'd encourage you to look into it more.
Among my non-startup friends, there seems to be this pre-conception that people are working in some day-job and one day, have some crazy idea that nobody else has thought of and go and start a company and become successful.

Good to see several people writing recently (from experience) about how this couldn't be farther from the truth. While it may happen from time to time, it's clear that most founders of successful (technology) startups have built a long-term lifestyle around working really hard, for a really long time, on a bunch of their own ideas and projects. Especially true given what we know about how much of a role luck and timing plays in the success of startups.

Thanks for the post, Gabriel.
Loop, like structured editing (Paredit), is one of those Interlisp things that's very controversial and divisive.

There's tons of really wild ideas in Interlisp that seemed to be the half-baked acid trip ideas of West Coast hippies at the time, that are just starting to become rediscovered in the past couple of years (pervasive undo -> reversible debugging, DWIM-like autosuggestions in more places), and even the implementation techniques used are still innovative (for example the error-trapping implementation of Conversational Lisp (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:4GnEnGS2XXkJ:c...) is quite similar to how Geoff Wozniak approached auto-defining functions (http://exploring-lisp.blogspot.com/2008/01/auto-defining-fun...)
The NEA opposes it, but they haven't been able to completely stop it, especially since Obama's been a big proponent. The Teacher Incentive Fund allocated $200m conditional on underperforming schools adopting performance-pay plans, which has caused some to switch (e.g. Seattle has a trial program).
Things like not being able to delete files out of your trash because the permissions are set such that you need to sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/
Figured as much but thx. Oh, did you have a previous blog that you talked about design, if so could I have the link?
Scala can give out some pretty elaborate and useless error messages, too - for example, recently I tried to import a Java library in the REPL, and received a 45 lines traceback which culminated in the interpreter exiting.
I actually slipped when trying to highlight his comment for quoting :(
Why Doogie Howser?
He was right about the error, but wrong about it being hard to follow.
I don't have any experience with non-technical cofounders, but I don't think that I'd start an internet company with one unless they were the absolutely most well connected, proven person that was going to be instrumental in getting us into a difficult to enter industry.

We only have one non-technical employee, our office manager Melissa. She's absolutely essential to the team. We have no plans to hire other non-technical people right now, but that doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Who we hire depends on what skills we need.
the startup world continues to exist in a bubble economy propped up by venture-capital dollars. Being clever enough to score backing continues to be seen as proof of brilliance -- and market-dominating chops. But satisfying VCs and satisfying users are often two very different things.

Er, what? Digg had users, lots of users, and they were perfectly satisfied. For a while. So were MySpace's users and Friendster's users. If Friendster had been nothing but a pile of VC money we would never have heard of them, except perhaps as the butt of jokes after a Super Bowl ad or something.

What happened to these former greats is progress. The future unfolded. New things were invented and old things fell out of fashion.

Now, one could argue that the crazy valuations were the fault of VCs. One could argue that some of the crazy decisions were the fault of VCs. One could argue that the value of a user, in dollars, is routinely being overestimated. But the users were real, and many of them were satisfied. Until something better came along.
No SICP?

Also, Javascript: The Good Parts is duplicated.
Hey, we used AIMA (which, oddly, is Greek for "blood") in my undergrad and I loved every page, great book! Thanks for writing it!
The transition from bargain trader to long term investor had a lot to do with the magnitude of his war chest. You can ex: flip houses with time, skill, and a million dollars, but it's much harder to see a large ROI when flipping houses with time and a billion dollars. It’s all about maximizing ROI as your time becomes more limited than your capital.

PS: He once said, I can find plenty of people that can consistently turn 1 million$ into 2million$ in a year, I can't find people that can consistently turn 1 billion$ into 2 billion$ in a year.
Have you looked at competitors like Stockpickr, StockTwits, inTrade, and Motley Fool CAPS? How is your site different from them and what can you do better? When I go to the site it shouts "contests" and stock market game, which has existed in a lot of forms before.

It's not clear to me what the value proposition is - this could use some work. Sites like this essentially come down to one question: "How does this help me make money?" You have a lot of users making predictions about the market - can you roll this up in a more understandable and actionable way? Why should someone be required to log in before they can see the data? If you're trying to create a community, it would also be helpful to actually see community content on the front page (like discussions, etc) not just their cold predictions.
Evan Williams, Master of the Privacy Game
I'm pretty sure this sort of legalese is required for them to be able to offer an API that third-party clients can use. Otherwise, Twitterific, TweetDeck, etc. would all be committing massive copyright infringement everytime they displayed a tweet.
Sometimes I do agree with Arington.
I feel dumber after reading that 'article'. Brushing off information gleaned through referrers because it's a 'web-wide problem' is a cop-off. It's trivial to fix and Facebook will be forced to do it because of the WSJ article.

Dragging Myspace into this is nothing but a red-herring. The leak itself is proper news. I am sure Techcrunch can expose any privacy flaws in Myspace if they find some. Not sure that anyone cares about Myspace at this point though.
> likelihood of searching for a new job increased

This is a good thing for the job market. There might be some companies that have some better use for those employees if they want to pay them more. And if there is no such companies then dissatisfaction from pay might be impulse to improve ones skills.
Obama to appear on TV science show 'Mythbusters'
wow, i can't believe this hasn't gotten a single comment. It's both funny and refreshing and it's also awesome!
I'm not so sure that FP code is so much superior to OO code in terms of reusability as the article implies.
Coder for CIA: Drone Targeting Software ‘Far From Ready’
I agree in general, but there are definite exceptions. Most solutions are mediocre at best. That means you have a good shot if you can do a better than mediocre job.

Sometimes though there is someone who clearly understands the problem as well (or better) and whose solution is genuinely great. If a big part of your motivation is to solve an unsolved problem this is going to suck the wind out of you.

So much of the world's problems are unsolved (or solved badly) that it doesn't make sense to go head-to-head on a problem that's already being solved really well. At least not for a tiny startup that needs every advantage it can get.

Of course just because you don't see any good competitors doesn't mean there won't be:

"Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing. A corollary is that you shouldn't relax just because you have no visible competitors yet. No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there working on the same thing." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Well, what we've done seems to be working pretty well. Have an open source tool (or leverage someone else's) and then sell additional hosted or installable tools that expand the power of the underlying tool.

I know of a lot of places that do well with providing support and consulting for their open source offerings, but that doesn't scale as well as something that you can charge for on a recurring basis and that doesn't derive directly from butts in seats.
I think the important question is what if you _do_ want to share that info, and other people are interested in hearing it, why aren't we talking about it?

BTW, I'm always willing to share, and the result is usually that people are eager to share with me (to varying degrees of precision, of course.) I don't have any issue with it because I never confuse my salary with my worth as a person. It's my worth to the company commingled with my ability to negotiate. When workers share salary information with each other, it smooths the last part out.

I'm not going to stop doing it until competing companies are required not to disclose the prices of their products to each other - and I see difficulties in the implementation of that:)
Mike Cheng (http://searchyc.com) gave me this data dump a year ago. I am currently crawling the rest of hacker news, as well as outlinks, to fill out this index.

Consider the site right now a proof-of-concept. I'm trying to gauge people's interest level, and get feedback.
Might be for Britain, but that is not the case for the rest of Europe - who also use amazon.co.uk.
Can you find the quote? I'd be surprised to learn that.

For my own code, it consists of maybe 10% macros. I would say the same is true for PG's code (for the hacker news app- The arc core libraries have more macros but are a special case.)

Unless, of course, if you mean _calling_ macros- I would agree that Lisp code often has 50% of its calls be macro calls instead of function calls.
I'll tell you what happened: Open plan offices.
Typo: I think you meant "Stunts are an unsustainable way to do press" instead of "Stunts are a sustainable way to do press"
To clarify, are you saying that Canonical can take my code (which we supposedly jointly own) and re-write its copyright such that I can no longer use my code?

Or does Open Core mean that they can take my code and use it for their own means without my permission if they so choose? (But I can continue using and developing mine myself.)