skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if it is common strategy to have an export feature but willingly leave it broken. Some users will think they made a mistake and stay with the service out of inertia (?). I have seen broken exports in suspiciously many online services, most recently in everyone's favorite commenting engine. After filing a bug report, they quickly sent me my data and told me they are working on the issue. I want to believe !
If you thought the bank bailout was bad, wait for the mortgage defaults
Yes, but it might not restore the state of the Web page at the time it was closed.
I think that many big companies are aware that bureaucracy is a problem, they're just not aware how big a problem it is at their company. Everyone knows that bureaucracy is bad, but if you ask a decision-maker at a big company what steps specifically they could take to reduce bureaucracy, you'll probably draw a blank.

A lot of this, I think, is because of a meta-problem. Bureaucracy is basically a restriction in information flow within the organization: at some point a while ago, the right information didn't reach the right people, and so the organization instituted procedures and rules you have to follow to prevent the problem from occurring again. But over time, information flow adapts to follow the rules instead of the shortest path from A to Z. And that prevents the people in charge from ever knowing that there's a problem. After all, the bureaucracy developed because there was too much information to fit into any one person's head, and then if they wanted to reform it, the only thing they can see is the path that information and decisions currently takes.

It's like Dunning-Kruger for organizations.

This'd explain why bureaucracy only seems to grow, never shrink, despite the best efforts to reduce bureaucracy. It also makes me a little pesssimistic about the long-term survival of any one institution, and optimistic about the long-term need for startups. It seems like organizations are like Microsoft operating systems: they need to be periodically rebooted to function effectively.
A contrail webpage with the "jet contrail looks like missile if you look at it from one angle" theory. http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/
The better programmer is aware of the system are multiple abstraction levels and can determine where his/her priorities are and choose the right abstraction. Not everything is a nail, sometimes you should be in assembly, sometimes you should be in javascript. (Sometimes both)
"you can learn to be confident"

I agree and if you give someone detailed, effective directions on how to do that learning, you may have indeed authentically given them good advice.

But if you only tell to "be confident" then you haven't really given them the details they can use for anything.
They say "Google isn't sticky" because they think that search engines aren't sticky (they just happen to be doing the analysis relative to Google); flatline's father "sticking" with Ask is a counterexample of a search engine being sticky.
GP post was using 'Google' to mean 'search', as in 'search isn't sticky'. But if someone has stuck with Ask for a decade out of habit -- that's a small example otherwise.
Hmmm, interesting idea. Lets say I have a 'change product price' task. ASP MVC will generate controllers/views for CRUD operations and a list. Those don't look very useful.
Yeah-- looking from an angle at my laptop screen, at first I confused the "Strongly Agree" and "Strongly Disagree" shades of blue.
Growing up in Greece, I was more afraid of bureaucracy than of death. Bureaucracy (and some corruption that went with it) drove many scientists out of the country. I believe it is incredibly difficult to eliminate this beast once it has infested an organization, because people don't appear to be as creative in eliminating rules as they are in setting them. I'm glad to see a positive outcome of the bureaucracy problem: it drives the best people to start their own shop.
This just feels like the next generation of SEO tag-spam if they need so many twitter accounts they have to farm out the creation.

Twitter should nip it in the bud before we see stuff like Engadget's monster tag lists becoming twitter accounts spewing out 80 different tweets about the same story.
There are a lot of interesting Javascript frameworks to explore. Contributing to those is challenging, so I would start with writing plugins for those. Learn how to make a simple jQuery plugin. You must have worked with some in the past. Look it up on Github. They usually have their issues listed, pick an easy one, and try to fix it. Start with small fixes. Read a lot of code. Poke around.
Exactly. Do you want to force the interviewer
to spend 45 minutes trying to divine, unreliably, if you know what a pointer is, and that you
won't go into the fetal position when you see your first segfault? Or do you just want to email some links to the online discussion of your patches in advance and spend the interview talking about something else?
Bureaucracy is entropy for companies.
RenRen is your key to the Chinese Market
Also, when 9/11 happened, I was still a kid

Wow you just made me feel old. To me it still seems like a recent event.
Google did break the Orkut data exporter, then completely removed it when people were trying to switch out of Orkut. I'm not sure how that's accusing them of committing a crime they didn't commit - it's a fact.
Check out the diverging color schemes in:

http://colorbrewer2.org/
Here's my problem: Since when is my email address your information? Why is it okay for you to hand it over to a complete stranger, just so you can play Farmville? I understand that there's always a risk that my email address might become public, but when the recipient is responsible, it's a violation of trust.
Fair enough. We'll suck it up and do the detailed financial projections.

It just sucks from the perspective of pivoting the product/tech if the first version doesn't work out as planned.
I personally know several people who have moved back to India, both to start up Internet companies and to work at senior levels in multi-nationals.

Given the increasing amount of outsourcing going on at Silicon Valley companies, it's harder for experienced people with high salaries to find a new gig here; many of the software centers in India, conversely, are in the middle of a major boom.

Having said that, working conditions and norms in these countries are quite different, and it takes quite an adjustment to settle down there.
Wait... it's actually not a raise! They are raising the base salary of everyone by 10%, but offsetting it by reducing the equity compensation. I guess the net result depends on where the stock is going, but it's not as "cool" as it sounds.

From the alleged e-mail:

we’re moving a portion of your bonus into your base salary. That’s also effective January 1st.
This is interesting and I think you're right that language interop will be important. I think .NET has a CLS (common language specification) profile that defines a minimal subset you can design your API against and be confidant the other languages will be able to call your API. For example, VB symbols are case insensitive or something like that -- the CLS checker will complain if you design your API in C# with overloaded methods of different case.

Does the JVM need some least-common-denominator thing like this?

I just remembered -- the JavaFX stack is being rewritten as a language agnostic API. I wonder how they are designing that API.
The logics are all there. For each app, you are supposed to put the <uses> line to indicate which resources the app requires. The market will automatically filter out any applications if that resource is not available on the device.
They do give a free trial, so I'm not sure if all 20,000 are paying customers. Still, they are doing a fantastic job reaching out to the developer community.
The industry has changed and is continuing to change into a world that suits Apple better. Getting in early and big (eg iphones & ipads) is letting them influence the change even more in their favour.

What caught my eye in this article was: "Nobody knows what kind of CPU they have in their phones." That's a world that suits Apple. Interestingly, PCs are unique in that people take an interest in components. Do people know what kind of wood and textile is used in their couch (beyond the external, visible components.) The only products I can think of that compare are houses and cars at many times the cost.
Limit of Statistics - Don't be a Turkey
I'm using an F# domain model assembly. A problem is that MVC's model binding infrastructure assumes model types with mutable properties (I had to write custom model binders to get around this).
Awesome! It is best practise for web owner.
> Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But a list of friends is useless without their emails or at least, their facebook ID which the dump doesn't give. Why can't you give a hash version of their friend's email?

Also, if I'm able to import emails from gmail or yahoo into facebook, I should be at least allowed to export those friends emails as it is proven that I already have them! If you allow users to import emails but you don't allow them to export those same emails, I'm sorry but that means Facebook is a closed silo.
I think while the most performance-critical portion of your data fits in memory you should be alright with this method. The rest of the data can be consumed using normal SQL approach.
That says Sept 11, which is 2 months ago. Is there another one sometime? :-)
Not a YC founder, but I was the first employee at a startup that was acquired by MSFT in late 2001.

The founders and I were college friends and we were all quite green, having graduated in 1999. As a result, I had a ton to learn. For the first three years, Microsoft was a fantastic engineering training ground. I worked with, and learned from, truly brilliant engineers and architects.

The _next_ three years at Microsoft taught me how not to design management hierarchies, how not to determine customer needs, and how not to structure incentives for individuals and teams in large organizations.

I'm no longer with Microsoft, and I'm quite excited about my current work, though leaving was a difficult decision given how great my co-workers were.
Why don't you provide that in your dump?
Obligatory DRM argument, check. But why even have privacy settings if you're not going to try to enforce them? Just make everything public, resulting in people hardly posting anything, and then the whole social networking thing can just shut down.
Anyone here just laid off from Ask.com?
If so, interested in joining a search startup?
The problem is that for a lot of big companies, their brand is worth an order of magnitude more than the actual work that gets done by the employees. And the cost of paying lots of people to do nothing is trivial compared to the risk of destroying your brand, especially if you can find some way to cheat your employees out of health care and pension.
What? The new nook has a 16-color e-ink screen. They don't even ship a frackin' web browser because they admit the experience is clunky.
Interesting. A couple of follow-ups, if you don't mind:

Where did the acquisition lie on the talent-/product-acquisition spectrum?

Also, how did those perverse incentives seep into the former start-up's culture? Was it a result of working closely with people already at the acquiring company who bought into the system? Were the executives at the acquiring company directly to blame? Or something else?
Are you sure C# dynamics are built on top of anonymous types? My understanding is that they are actually more like an untyped IQueryable, with syntactic sugar that turns dyn.Blah into the (rough) equivalent of dyn.Select(Blah).
Ironically devised to reduce it, but in most cases merely hides it from upper layers. An api that loses data at each level of abstraction.
@Redgirlsays, you mentioned Campfire, but I'm curious if you and your co-founders use other tools to try to make things seem "closer?"
Heroku for Facebook Developers
It's far easier to be the person writing and enforcing policies and procedures than it is to be the one who must accomplish something within the bounds of all of those policies.

At the last startup I worked for, management loved to hire heavy-hitters from big companies. Almost universally, they spent more time writing proposals, calling meetings, soliciting approvals, and gathering input than they did working on actual solutions. Not surprisingly, they accomplished very little and had a hard time keeping up with the demanding schedules of a startup.

Within a big company, it would be easy to mistake all of this bureaucratic churn and superfluous paperwork for progress and hard work. In a startup, it becomes obvious to all that it is anything but progress.
During my last earn-out, after the honeymoon period, the bureaucracy piled up very quickly. To take an extreme example we hired a rather insecure engineer who proclaimed himself a "UDP expert", and successfully petitioned management to put in place a rule that anyone wishing to implement even the simplest piece of UDP code must talk to this guy before every commit for his stamp of approval (the result being that the rest of us tended to stick with TCP even when UDP might have been a better choice).

My first day at justin.tv was quite a contrast. Justin and Emmett pretty much just said "go implement a very scalable chat system - the one we have right now is breaking. And try not to interrupt anyone if you can, we're all very busy". That was quite a breath of fresh air.
The story implied the NLRB took her side. She trashed her boss, not the employer, in a public forum. She should get fired. If you don't like your boss you can tell his boss or you can quit.
Duly noted - the next set that go out will contrast more.
Electronics: Designed for the dump
It's a technique, but not so applicable to say "you should" do it.
We hire cloud sysadmins. The trucks drive themselves: Your
job is to manage the fleet of tow trucks (filling in as mechanic when necessary), to figure out which brand of tires is 0.5% more reliable, and to make sure the trailers are optimally loaded with the correct packages.
I've often heard it said is when you want to do X but have no plan on how to get there your dreaming, if you have a plan on how to get X that's a goal. There's nothing wrong with dreaming, but it doesn't happen until you make it a goal.
Having been through that with you (different company which was acquired by the same company) I wholly agree with you. Way too much focus on being a politician instead of really focussing on getting ahead.
In my original post I said everything you can do with c# you can also do with perl when it comes to building a SaaS. Is there some kind of website that can only be built with c# but not perl? I'm curious.
This is a question a friend of mine has been closely researching recently - more specifically:
Where do you search for Software Executive jobs [Sr Dir/VP-level] at small-to-midsize and larger companies?

His answer so far: Monster (good), LinkedIn (ok), CareerBuilder and CraigsList (poor). YMMV.

I realize this doesn't exactly fit the startup context at HN. I apologize if it's considered off-topic, but I thought it might be of interest for some.
> the human eye starts to get strained if reading columns wider than ~60 characters

Weird, I had no problem reading your comment even though HN is formatting it for me at around 180 chars.
Heroku Launches Facebook App Hosting Package
ctrl-x p
An interesting article... applies very well to the LINQ2SQL / EMF / ADO.NET quagmire. Not so much to fairly mild iterations of MVC.
Great idea. I've generally had a poor experience hacking on existing jQuery plugins, but mostly because of the situations I find myself in while using them. Most of the time I'm under a time crunch for a client and simply need to get something working. Unfortunate reality. I should take a plugin that I think needs work, and either rewrite or contribute back to the project.
Do any PC vendors have anything even remotely comparable to the in-person support available at an Apple Store? Being able to take a device to the store and physically hand it off to be fixed without having to wait on the phone or deal with shipping is a huge plus in Apple's favor.
I'd just like to post that I agree with the comment from 'Russ' in the article.

This article is a one-sided exploration of the buy-vs-rent debate. It doesn't explore all of the emotional connotations of owning something durable, and overweights certain experiences from the point of view of the author, when this cannot possible apply to a population of people.

Finally, as Russ comments - it's wrong to sneer at the purchase of a handbag or BMW - the person might be spending their money on a combination of quality product and brand, but once you start getting into the argument of purchasing x is right, and purchasing y is wrong- you're arguing simply from a relative point of view. As long as the transaction was not done under duress, where is the problem? My neighbour spends all his money on sailing. I find it a waste of money, but he clearly gets enjoyment from it. Who is right? Is it remotely possible for me to suggest that buying a sailboat is wrong? Wrong to who? As compared to what? Free choices are just that.

Owning a house in a falling market may seem like a foolish position, and for many, perhaps it is. But that goes to assume that the person owning a house does it for purely financial reasons, which, again, is wrong. Another neighbour of mine is an old lady in her 80's who owns her house and lives by herself. By any object measure she'd be better off selling the house and both investing and spending the considerable cash that would generate. But she enjoys her garden and the memories of a house that once contained her husband and family over the span of 40 years. Is she wrong to hold this position? Financially perhaps, but perhaps the currency aspect means very little to her in comparison with pleasure of her little piece of land with a house on it. She could sell her house, rent a nice retirement apartment and afford a around-the-world cruise. A rental-is-best mindset would recommend this view. How can I tell her she is wrong and someone else is right?
Fine, then Facebook should give me the option to allow my friends (who I have approved one by one as such) to export my e-mail address. Why does Facebook not do even this much?
Tigram Screwdriver (for NDS screws) USD$0.01 w/ free shipping (everbuying.com)
everbuying.com, a Hong-Kong based free shipping site just like DealExtreme is selling tigram screw drivers for USD$0.01 with free shipping:
http://www.everbuying.com/product37465.html?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_campaign=Everbuying_Oc221111t_261_2010_Email_Copy_Copy_Copy&utm_medium=email
There seems to be a limit of 1 per customer. Tigram are those annoying screws Nintendo uses on the casing of their portable consoles.
It's interesting to me that so many people in the startup community hate the bureaucracy and overall attitudes in big companies, yet for quite a lot of people, the high-paying exit is the ideal fate for their startups. Exits normally involve one of these big, bureaucratic companies swallowing your company whole.
The universities are generally very good, but of course, it always depends on your specific field of study. Unless you're shooting for an academic career path, I don't think the competitiveness is likely to be an issue. In fact, because of the high level of cooperation with industry, it may a better match than many US universities for somebody interested in business and industry.

I know a number of people who continued to work in Sweden after they graduated without any problems, but I don't know the details of their visa arrangements.
It should be noted that Tim wrote this near the peak of the housing bubble in Seattle (Kenmore neighborhood). The house he identified for $425k in that piece would now sell for about $300k, which puts monthly costs at about 25% more expensive than renting instead of 78% more expensive.

In a completely average, non-bubble housing market, buying (counting insurance, taxes and breaks, maintenance, etc.) is about 20% more expensive than renting in the short term, but after 5-10 years of inflation and rent increases, renting becomes more expensive. There's a definite tradeoff between short-term savings with no equity but high flexibility vs. long-term savings with equity and permanence. That tradeoff was slanted heavily in favor of renting in Kenmore, WA in 2007, but as Tim's conclusion notes, it is not always so; whatever your situation, "run the numbers ... and do what works for you."
What you're describing is essentially the computer turning into an appliance, and I agree this is what Apple is gaining tremendously from (and of course encouraging).

I think you'd find that most enthusiasts or hobbyists have in-depth knowledge of the components of their hobby and that "computer people" are no different.

Most people have no idea what is inside their computer - I think the majority of PC owners don't even know the size of their harddrive, for example, and that is something they might actually need to know, let alone RAM or CPU specs.
Mobile site for public person or private file share for secret person by one app
Mobile site for public person or private file share for secret person by one app #iFMW http://bit.ly/bEBVsR
Great summary, and what you're describing is a good practical/social example of information theory[1], where the entropy[2] is increasing with the unusualness of the phone number/backpack/whathaveyou, causing the efficiency of your ability to recognize the widget in question to decrease.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
I think you shouldn't over-think the question. If you already know C# but are new to Ruby/Django/PHP, it's probably better to go with ASP.NET. I personally go with ASP.NET for the intellisense and refactoring support of Visual Studio. The main drawbacks for me are that deployment is more difficult and expensive than other frameworks.

If only I could just "azure push"...
Clickable: http://is.gd/gSCvo
The acquisition was done for a number of reasons, but most paled in comparison to obtaining a particular piece of software (web browser and JS VM for tiny feature phones) and the team who wrote it (and went on to maintain and extend it). In addition a couple of the founders of the startup went on to be important members of the management team at the new company, so I guess both.

The folks who came from the startup got scattered into every corner of the new company both organizationally and in some cases even geographically and as a result the values of the startup just sort of diffused into the larger company and when we wanted advancement we quickly learned to play by the new rules. At least I did.
You sure? I interpret the "there’s more" at the beginning of the paragraph and the "also" in the part you quoted as meaning they're replacing the equity with a base salary raise in addition to the 10% raise.

But we should probably wait for a confirmation from someone who actually works at Google. :)
PG, may I distribute my scrape of HN?
This is definitely one of the things we're trying to fix with Rahfeedback.com - we imagine the world a far more transparent meritocracy than is currently the case.