skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just upgraded to an SSD in my Macbook Pro. It was easy and has a huge impact.

Full details and benchmarks written up on my blog:
http://blog.wpeterson.org/2010/12/05/macbook-pro-ssd-upgrade...

Overall about 5x improvement.
Modnique.com - All Sales Events - Chaudry
1) Shower in the office: makes it easy to cycle to work and feel fresh afterwards.

2) Smart colleagues: for work and non-work conversation.

3) Fridges stocked with healthy food: junk food is cheaper, but leaves you unable to think clearly.
It's called an "iPad". I know it's not an e-ink device but, for reading any tech book (or, in fact, anything nonsequential), the iPad (with Goodreader) is WAY better.
I don't like free food.

In most cases, it isn't the food that I'd pick myself and it often leads to weight gain.
In Online Privacy Plan, the Opt-Out Question Looms
> if you declared that you didn't want to spend time with your company, socially, that says you don't really love your job

Or it just says that you love your family more than you love your job. That's hardly outrageous.
So this is why they took out application profile tabs...
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nobokov.

Superb meta-literature.
I have more modest needs- I would like to know a few practical reasons why I would choose to invest time in learning it vs one of the other non-mainstream & mainstream languages out there.
That being said, I understand there's always value in learning something new.
Also, may I ask why are you abstracting Array.indexOf away and extending the Array prototype with a non-standard method for such a simple problem?

Mostly a personal preference, I guess, haven't looked into the downsides of extending prototypes.

Anywho, I'm fairly new at JS outside of jQuery, so thanks for your input and critiques. I'll look into the rest when I get back from dinner.
Watch out for that bad ' in "Site’s I designed & built"

Edit: Nevermind, you fixed it now :)
Seeing "the social network" is not universally appealing - sorry.

Restaurant, yeah, I get that. And now and then group activities - sure. But weekly frisbee outings at the beach, etc - too much.

I'm a bit wary of people who love the idea of working for someone else, period. If you love a job, I question what great things you can do.

Of course, many people from all walks of life do accomplish great things in all capacities, so perhaps judging someone based on your own view of what they should and shouldn't love is a tad short-sighted.

BTW, if JC isn't participating in all those group outings, what message is that sending to everyone else? They're socially pressured in to company rah-rah BS while he's above it?

EDIT - just saw a JC reply re: activities. Cool enough - no t everyone can make everything. Got it.
I'm a very casual Twitter user, but I have a question for the power users who are following thousands of people (Vincent, for example, is following close to 5,000 people).

Is that level of information even remotely manageable? How much of their feeds do you actually read, and how much of that is meaningful in any way (most likely lacking any context?)

And IF you're not really reading their feeds... is there any benefit to following them, other than the initial prompt for them to follow you back?
Even if he absolutely hates working for Calacanis, this is a pretty brilliant kiss-ass on his part. I would've liked it better from someone who worked previously for the company - those working for it are a pretty biased view of what might be a blackened company culture.

Surely, having Calacanis on their side is worth this kind of post/long term commitment even if many other factors are absolutely torrid - and that kind of node-network-connection occurs in many other places, too - where the sole connection to a very influential person is pretty much the only factor holding a person at the job.
good questions. not sure. it gave me enough of a vibe that it's like a cross between "vo tech" and a diploma mill that I didn't investigate further. Here's the link to their website if you want to dig in deeper:

http://www.stratford.edu/
Actually, I teach tae kwon do with members of the team, participate in fit club and host movie night. We do movie night at Gold Pass Cinema... which is the most amazing movie theater on the planet... we take over the entire room and they serve dinner in our seats in these huge amazing seats. There are number of folks other than me who have kids, and we sometimes can't make it to everything.... but we make it some of the fun/cult-like things. :-)
Be a Good Jedi: Build Your Own Blog
I read this line simply as: typical 9 to 5 is not required. I'm not sure what you're going on about.
I'm not saying you should do these things daily, but to not do them as a one-off occasionally would be ridiculous, to me. Even if you love your family more - which you should.
Three reasons that I wouldn't recommend it after evaluating it:

1) You can't debug it (afaict)

2) It supports iPhone really well, but Android isn't nearly as nice and doesn't look very native (based on the kitchen sink app).

3) It's unbelievably slow to compile.
three folks who worked for me previously posted to the previous thread.
The place I work now either pays for parking or public transit pass. I take the public transit pass.
I am currently in the process of negotiating an employee agreement that limits IP claims to stuff reasonably related to the official line of business, rather than the more normal "everything you think about until you leave belongs to us".
Go to your settings and change so TAGGED PHOTOS OF YOU are set to visible to ONLY YOU.

Then these photos are suppressed from your profile and from your photos section.
Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes
Ya, http://status.foursquare.com is also on Tumblr. Due to tumblr reliability issues we've been thinking about moving it. sigh
- Free Drinks / Snacks / Lunches

- 20% Time

- Music/Stereo System in the office

- Work from Home Days (where everyone does)
Into Thin Air. http://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/038...

Amazing story, super inspirational, and lots of great history. My wife and I both loved this book and could not set it down.
Delivering Happiness is great. I loved it too.

The best book of 2010 for me
"Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" by Christopher McDougall:
http://www.amazon.ca/Born-Run-Hidden-Superathletes-Greatest/...

There are so many great things about this book. It has an amazing story and also delivers a message why humans were born to run.
Some places take that attitude to the extreme, and for people who just want/need to put in a standard 9-5 and get their work done, feeling forced to participate in extraneous stuff in the name of 'bonding with the team' is awkward.

edit: can't reply to jpwagner again(?):
re: "forced" not appearing in the original text. Have you never felt social pressure to do something, even (especially) when someone indicated something was 'totally optional'?
"Land of Lisp" http://landoflisp.com/

I'm not even finished with it, but it has still introduced me to Lisp, functional programming, artificial life, and web servers as well completely changed the way I program.
Gokhale's 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739607 (thanks, HN). It's not the best presentation or the best science, but it has ended my back pain and given me awareness of my body. Anyone who sits with a curved back or occasionally lifts heavy objects should read it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0979303605/
I spent 2 months last year working in China consulting for "the Facebook of China" (not actually Facebook).

One thing that I loved about the office - every day at 6pm, caterers would come round with lunch boxes for everyone. Plus soup, plus drink, plus fruit. And every day it was different! (and delicious)

Sure it's a far cry from Google's 5-star catering with 10 page menu or whatever, but I remember feeling super happy every day when the food came round. Everyone ate, chatted, played games for a bit, then got back to work. It was good for lifting spirits.

Edited to add: this was for about 1000 people, every day.

(Of course, this was good for the company too as it meant people stayed that little bit longer at the office)
Training for Next-Generation Tech Entrepreneurs
"The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks. I love serious literature, I love non-fiction, and I love business & tech books, but I decided to give sci-fi a shot again and a friend leant me this book: wow. Fascinating, rip-roaring, mind-bending read! If you want to read something but don't want to fall asleep, I highly recommend this book.
I can only offer you the following anecdotal example.

Back when I was doing my compulsory military service, I was really passionate about basketball. I used to play almost everyday, and there was a team in my neighbourhood with a coach I trained with twice a week. Then I met this guy in my platoon who, though shorter than me, trashed me soundly every time we played. I would have thought someone like that would need to constantly hone his skills, but he didn't. He just occasionally joined us for a game. For about a year before he completed his service I (and a couple of other guys in the platoon) trained to beat him, but never came close. The interesting thing was this one conversation we had where he confessed, "I don't like basketball. I only play because I am good."
a quick search on the original post found zero matches for "force"
"Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Saurez. Very enjoyable reads, and chock full of not-too-distant futurism. They display an enormous amount of thinking about how social networks and the massively increased availability of data about our lives are changing the ways we interact with each other. Sprinkle in mysteries that play out in both reality and MMORPGs, lots of interesting devices, and a terrifying peek at what a technology-driven global economic meltdown could look like, and you have the basis for these books.
Man, I couldn't possibly disagree more. I really enjoyed Wallace's voice in this book, but felt like David Lipsky injected way, way too much of himself into it.
why does this get downvoted?
its a free service that probably hosts 98% kids who normally would hang out on myspace if that hasnt lost all its flavor.
How do you figure, even assuming these figures are (still) accurate (many of them are 10-20 years old)? By my reading, "mistakes made by doctors" applies to the "Medical Errors" row in the table at the top of that page. 98,000 deaths per year is horrible, but it's about 0.0319% of Americans. Granted, that's per year; let's assume you have a 0.03% chance of being killed by "Medical Error" every year of your life: with an average lifespan of 80 years, your odds of being killed by "Medical Error" are 1-(.99968^80) = 2.5%.

Now, there are two caveats, other than the (necessarily) very rough nature of the above calculation. First, you may believe that some of the other categories in that row are also things that would be reduced by reducing doctor independence. "Unnecessary procedures" seems like a reasonable candidate for this, though I would assume that since Medical Error is its own category that it tries to be fairly inclusive. Second, you may believe a different number for medical error itself:

"We could have an even higher death rate by using Dr. Lucien Leape's 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million. (14) Multiplied by the fatality rate of 14 percent (that Leape used in 1994 (16) we arrive at an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. If we put this number in place of Lazorou's 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 98,000 medical errors, we could add another 216,000 deaths making a total of 999,936 deaths annually."

Side note: Is it just me, or does the author sound hopeful that we might be able to add to the death toll?

If you believe that 420,000 number (about 4x higher than what's in the table), that'd be about 10%.

Did you get "1 in 3" by attributing all iatrogenic deaths to doctor error?
Tumblr was perfect platform to create these types of blogs. Simple, customizable, free.
Swiss Wikileaks.ch back online
"Shogun" by James Clavell.

Really great historical fiction about 16th century Japan. Quickest 1100 pages I've ever read.
The only bad thing about the post Jason, Travis..is that 99.9999% of all startups do not have enlightened people like JC running them.

In non SV cities its even worse in finding a 'JC' boss to work for as far as prospects..
The chemistry behind the bar-tending staple, rich simple syrup
I finished this recently and could not agree more. I've just started the 1980's miniseries via Netflix (no streaming, unfortunately) - I'm only two hours in, but so far it is a great retelling.
Assange's insurance: Password to a 1.3Gb file of unfiltered leaks
Arsenate-based DNA: a big idea with big holes
Is there a skill set that defines a competent web developer?
"Failure is Not an Option" by Gene Kranz

An awesome look back at the space program in the 1960s.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FC0O7M
This seems a more appropriate response to Alex3917's "at least question the journal articles" bit, as it supports phunel's point fairly well I think.

The "as many as 18%", "admitted to hospitals" and "Iatrogenic injuries" bits make this article say something dramatically different than "1 in 3 of all Americans (not just those hospitalized) die because of an error made by a physician".
How do you become a Product Manager?
I second this book too although I read several years ago. AND it's relevant in our startup life in a surprising way.

I often found myself make much better decision when I'm a bit detached, which is one of 'the' lessons people learned from that accident. So now in our startup, my business partner does all the client/customer/user communication works and I had the precious opportunity to sit back and observe.
In May, he made headlines around the world when he claimed his passport had been confiscated by authorities. It turns out this was a gross exaggeration -- his passport was held by customs for 15 minutes while they inspected it as part of a routine procedure. (http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/australi...)

It seems every few months there's more signs of government harassment. One time it was that two state department employees were on the same flight as him while traveling to a conference. Another, it was a piece of checked luggage that was most likely "intercepted" and not merely lost by the airline.

I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence of these supposed dirty tricks. Doesn't mean they aren't happening ... but I'm personally quite skeptical. I think Julian Assange is an especially gifted PR man.
Hey I'm Travis the author of the post. Thanks for the feedback. You are right that there are people who probably wouldn't choose to spend that time "playing" with the company. A lot of the activities are optional. However, we do our best to make it fun for those people and it really does seem to have a positive effect on the company culture as a whole. I seriously think if you can't enjoy playing with the people you work with, something is wrong with your team.
I'm a systems developer so I'm used to working with "dead" languages but I'm skeptical that someone still programming like they're in the 1980s will do anywhere near as good a job as someone who has continuously updated their skill set. For example, semaphores have been around for 45 years but anyone using semaphores like they did in 1970 would be in for a rude surprise. Any modern kernel developer worth his or her salt knows about working around course-grained locking to avoid slowing their kernel to a crawl.
"Where Good Ideas Come From" by Steven Johnson

I'm fairly stubborn, so it takes a lot for me to change my ways. This book has changed my daily work routine. Johnson outlines 7 environments that have historically produced the most innovative ideas. It's easy to apply the lessons to your typical working day. Best book I've read in probably 5 years.

4-minute Teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

TED Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0af00UcTO-c

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594487715
Paid developers power the Linux kernel
My girlfriend got me a Kindle 3 as an early Christmas gift, and while there are a lot of things I wish it would do better (or at all), I actually really like it.

From worst to best:

1. The Kindle is pretty terrible for textbooks or other things used purely as references (some people supposedly read texbooks, I don't).

2. The Kindle isn't too bad for technical books that you actually want to read, but aren't going to use as references. For example I bought the Kindle version of Douglas Crockford's Javascript: the Good Parts and read it front to back without much issue. Code formatting was my greatest concern, but its not too bad. Sometimes when a code block flows between pages and you want to flip back and forth it can be a little annoying, but overall not much worse than having to turn a physical page back and forth. It can also display PDFs, which I used to read Robert Love's book about Linux Systems Programming. The PDF display functionality isn't the best, largely because it can't re-flow text to make things a good size. But as long as this isn't the main reason you want the Kindle, its not that big a deal.

3. The Kindle really comes into its own for books of pure text you just want to read front to back. My biggest gripe is that a lot of books in the Kindle store seem to have been scanned in with pretty terrible OCR (some books are perfect, but in others its comment for a '1' to be used in place of an '1' or 'i', or for some reason for 'F' to be used in place of 'I'). Since I've been in College I haven't really done much recreational reading, but the Kindle has really gotten me back into it. Since I received it about 10 days ago I've read a Tom Clancy book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Javascript: The Good Parts, Red Planet and the Robert Love Systems Programming book (the name escapes me at the moment).

The real value of the Kindle (or really any e-reader, the Kindle just happened to be really cheap and reputable) to me is the instant delivery of books. When I want to read something, as long as I have Wifi (didn't get the Whisper-Net-whatever-version) I can find something to read. Even better, Project Gutenberg has a huge collection of free Kindle-formatted ebooks. I can't normally be bothered to go to a store to pick up a book, or even wait for one to be delivered, and I don't like reading off of a computer or phone. But when I can instantly have a book on a great screen, and even have a huge selection of free ones, suddenly I find that I can't stop reading.
I use MailChimp and it is rock solid and gets amazing delivery rates.

It's free it you are under 1,000 subscribers and cheap after that (uses a credit system).

It has Rapleaf and Klout built in, as well as templates and a spam checker.

Can't say enough good things about it.
Let’s compare:

http://twitter.com/tumblr/status/11570891053862912 … 130 characters, 21 words, no actual information other than that which could be assumed: we’re working on it (can be assumed), we’re sorry (should be hoped).

https://github.com/blog/744-today-s-outage … ~2,000 characters, 335 words, and an absolute plethora of transparency and information. In fact, more than we probably needed to know, even the techies among us… but nonetheless, quite reassuring and friendly on GitHub’s part.

I’m sorry, Tumblr. You’re failing. Not technically; nobody cares about a little downtime, you’re not Google, you don’t make aircraft stay in the air, you don’t track weather patterns that could tear apart an entire coast, the world’s not going to end. No. What you’re failing at is being that which it is absolutely most imperative for you to be, being which itself being the single impetus for your existence: a friendly, transparent, communicative tech entity that your users can trust.
Travis the author of the post here. To clarify there are required hours, and sometimes we get to use some of those hours to "play" rather than work. I can't say that's always going to work but it seems to work pretty awesomely at Mahalo. Maybe it's because we are a really young team.
Coding Horror: A Visit With Alan Kay
> ... acedemia promotes people and the govt gives grants based on a formula: sum(journal_prestige .* number_articles). Take away the current system and there is no way to evaluate anybody.

Neal Stephenson made a similar argument with respect to the arts in his answer to the second question in this interview with slashdot:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/04/10/20/1518217.s...

Yes, it's a long answer; it is Stephenson after all.
Yes, very very few things at Mahalo are mandated for everyone. And the stuff that is, should be. Thanks for the feedback.
Link above is broken:http://launch.is/blog/2010/12/3/how-to-name-your-startup-and...
Playstation Phone “Zeus” has been revealed [w/ Video]
Keyword, I think, being “was.”
Moniker Deactivated My Domain 26 Days Before The Expiration Date
Thanks for replying. I agree that in general, you need to enjoy the people you work with, and occasional 'outside activities' are fine. I've typically done those with colleagues I've worked with at previous companies. If the company was footing the bill, so much the better. There's a fine line that can get crossed when it starts to feel mandatory, or you're made to feel 'not part of the team' if you choose to opt out (had it happen to me, and seen it happen to others).
Facebook's 'opt in' new profile page
I don't think it's fair to compare those two. One is a while it's still happening tweet, the other is a post mortem from after the incident.

Tumblr's engineers are likely very busy right now working on getting things back up and running. You can't expect them to take time out from that to write a detailed incident report for the public. Wait and see what they release tomorrow before making a judgement.
I figure that any company that offers free food woudl be willing to listen to employee suggestions.
Neal Stephenson's "Anathem". Seriously one of the best novels I've ever read. He's an excellent writer, and after about the first fifty pages I couldn't put it down.
“… scrupulous amounts of text messages …”

scru•pu•lous |ˈskroōpyələs|
adjective
(of a person or process) diligent, thorough, and extremely attentive to details
“the research has been carried out with scrupulous attention to detail.”
• very concerned to avoid doing wrong
“she's too scrupulous to have an affair with a married man.”

What?
That was what I was thinking too. But well, the media has been just addicted to hyping up salaries of the IIM grads who are employed in a similar fashion, and just decided to carry it forward with the IITs.
Ability to pick which projects I want to participate in. Also, being able to provide and revise estimates (as opposed to having someone with a 10 week management course and a fresh install of MS Project telling me that I should have been done implementing an obscure spec 2.5 days ago). Also, having a boss that understands life circumstances. Also, the option to work from home. Lastly, working on interesting stuff with intelligent and friendly people.

Wow, I guess I've been pretty lucky so far...
Free flying lessons -- Avidyne wanted everyone to be a private pilot.
Krakauer can get really, really shrill --- I mean, really shrill --- but he hasn't written a book I've found that I didn't enjoy at least a little.