skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For a really excellent, far more comprehensive and much better articulated series of articles pertaining to ratings/rankings, check out www.lifewithalacrity.com

Some of the articles include: Using 5 Star Rating Systems, Experimenting with Ratings, Systems for Collective Choice, Rating Systems, Competitive Ranking Systems

The ratings users choose are certainly influenced by the presentation of the rating opportunity. The result of forcing "Come on guys rate everything!" down users' throats is that if people really dont have an opinion or feel strongly, most likely they will indicate neutrality. If users have more of a choice about contributing a rating then only the users who have a strong opinion will take the time/effort to complete a rating and so you will end up with a bimodal distribution.

The good/bad or star ratings are always useless to other users without the accompanying explanation of the review.
I enjoy his posts, though apparently they aren't for everyone.
Well, the post is about what's necessary for a programmer to know. So your question "is it necessary?" is answered in Steve's post :)
If you are interested in compilers, you might also enjoy Wolfram Research's 2,3 Turing Machine Research Price: http://www.wolframscience.com/prizes/tm23/

Win 25000$ and eternal fame if you can prove that the Turing machine described there is universal, or if you can prove that it is not universal (in the latter case, I think eternal fame won't be included in the price).

It is a beautiful problem.
Oh, I enjoyed the post.. I was more commenting about the style of the presentation. There's many ways to break up a wall of text into brain-compilable sections. Joel on Software has an article that mentions one or two. http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000033.html
Ah, but, sometimes the '.com' pool is just completely void of anything useful. Shelling out half your startup budget just for a domain name seems silly to me.

Disclaimer: My startup went for a non-.com name: tipit.to
Anything that is not directly related to your work. For example, who cares if you get free soft drinks or not? What really matters is what the work is like.
Are there any Y Combinator Companies' Facebook Applications apart from Socialmoth?
socialmoth: http://apps.facebook.com/socialmoth/ - Like the integration idea but it looks a bit rushed.
iminlikewithyou: http://apps.facebook.com/iminlikewithyou/

Found another one. Yet to investigate its functionality.
and scribd too
i can't see it
At first, my reaction is: Easy for Larry to sit there and demand it!

Second reaction: But then, the only way things improve is for someone to have unreasonable expectations!
Sorry about being off-topic. I posted it in a flash without really thinking, and it didn't even occur to me that it was off-topic. The reason why I asked is because I am still trying to figure out what kind of program/service I would want/need to use.

Anyway, here's why it could be related to start-ups:

If you examine Steve Job's history, it's worth noticing that he was influenced by East Asian writings. Apparently at one point he travelled around India for 6 months.

Also, the company 37 Signals has a very distinct philosophy (I'm thinking of their book "Getting Real") that's focused on minimalism and the path of least resistance, etc. It sort of reminds me of the Tao or something like that.

Thus, I think adhering to some philosophy can be useful in a start-up.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2349954053&b
P.S. This is a founder-level role for the right person.
Taking your definition of frivolous to be anything not directly related to my work, no, I don't find it insulting. Being happy at work makes you more productive. For me this comes first from having a sense of purpose and importance.

After that, the little things start to matter. I'd be happier working for a company that had an on site gym, free food/beverages, and weekly draw for some gizmo like an iPod. Some things may strike me as a waste of money on occasion, but never insulting.

It's not like they're holding a can of jolt over your head asking you to sit. They're trying to make you happier at work and carve one more notch to differentiate them from another employer.
nice, though there application page looks a bit cluttered. Seems like they are loosing branding by calling themselves Docs instead of scribd, but I see why they do it.
It's almost never the case that you would have two companies that would give you similar sense of purpose and importance. There's always one that's better in that regard and that's the one you should pick regardless of perks. And so the perks are irrelevant, and indeed, insulting.
Ask The VC - What Is the Standard Number of Shares to Create in a New Company?
Nonsense. The "perks" have a lot to do with improving the culture and atmosphere of a place. I've worked at a number of companies with different "perks" (MS, Sun, Intel, and Google), and I can tell you that it is very important. At this point, I would say that any tech company that _doesn't_ offer things like free on-site food is stupidly shortsighted.
Social Picks: http://apps.facebook.com/socialpicks/

Summer 2007 yc startup
You would need to perform a controlled experiment. It may be that some places were better simply because they had smarter employees or more interesting work irrespective of the perks. Moreover, you would need to define the sort of "culture and atmosphere" that you would like to obtain and consider its impact on individuality.
That was hilarious. I still can't really gauge how serious that guy was. From the article:

"Situation 7: you have a small, lightweight startup company filled with cool young people with long blue-tinted hair and nose rings and tongue rivets and hip black clothes and iphones and whatever the hell else young people have these days. You use Ruby on Rails for your site..."

lol
Paul Buchheit: Not getting health insurance is a really bad idea
I like this post because it shows what it's like in a different part of the world. Reminds of Bill Gates's recent talks on global inequity.

I liked this quote: 'I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game, he said. They are playing. And we are making a living.'
My mistake on Java - frankly, I haven't written any in quite a while.
Yes. Email me (richcollins@gmail.com)
How well is the "Tell a friend" feature working out for you? (http://www.fluther.com/tellafriend/) How many people use that?
I hope that some day I'll be smart enough to have an idea that can't be expressed without a semicolon.

Writing well is easy. Just use shorter sentences that don't "take advantage" of English's more esoteric features. You don't really lose that much, if anything. Plus, it forces you to think (and write) more lucidly.
Insulting? No! I agree that the work should be interesting too, but given two companies that have technically interesting work, I'll pick the one with the better culture/attitudes/perks.
Nice -- I love the design and feel.
The smart employees will go to the places that have a better atmosphere, so those places will have both things.

It really isn't that complicated. It's like asking whether you'd rather spend your time in a maximum security prison, or a tropical resort (with good internet access).
Yahoo! Answers is doing quite well.
If you're in NYC, check out Freelancer's Union. Like Paul, I saw a guy lying face down on the street the other day after he was run over by a truck crossing a perfectly normal street corner. Made me glad I had my coverage ($150/month)
I just read you blog entry about classifying things by their rank of importance. Top 10, 100, 1000. An effective way to look at things. Although in asking this question I wasn't giving in to a worry, merely curiousity. I think it is much harder to rank things by how fruitful the curiosity about them will be. For instance, because of my question, and your response, I read an interesting post and learned a little about an interesting, successful guy (you).
As a storm chaser, This sounds like a great way to track incoming storms!
Track the Next Hurricane Katrina With New Web Tool
I can't really relate to this. I'm pursuing my own startup precisely because the sort of work I do is infinitely more important than atmosphere or any other perk.
I enjoyed this essay, but still didn't get what the big benefit is of learning compilers past the point of creating a parse tree. He seemed to imply that situations 5-7 could benefit from the later part of what compilers do. I can see that you're doing something with the parse tree after you get it, but in each case it looks different from what a compiler would do.

If all that matters is being able to get a parse tree, then maybe more languages should provide a parsing function, just as Lisp does.

I wrote a source highlighter without really knowing compilers, but that's just because getting a Scheme (or BRL) parse tree is trivial.

http://brlewis.com/source.brl?q=/map.brl
This is the usual digital sharecropping that attracts about 95% of developers but repels the 5% you'd really want.
Most churn is unnecessaryand deadly to your business
After watching SiCKO, I'm less convinced that insurance is really the answer. You get denied treatments even if you have insurance.

The whole system is messed up :(
i like to believe that if you offer your customers great service they will bring you more customers.
there is also Catastrophe Health Insurance
Will You Change Your Web Site For the iPhone?
Virtual goods worth $1.5 billion; success stories speak
Do you know how much a lawyer has to lose if (s)he even says a word about confidential stuff he just heard from you?!

You should worry more about your mom/dad/brother/girlfriend/boyfriend/best friend saying something to someone than worry about a lawyer stealing anything.

My lawyer doesn't even allow anyone to look at his laptop's screen and he never mentions his other clients.
Tell a friend has been a great boon to our traffic -- especially because we present an interstitial after your third visit. It's significantly boosted our new user registration.
It's obviously not perfect, but the notion that it's worthless is dangerously wrong. I can confirm from experience that it covers treatment at least some of the time (nobody I know has been denied).
I'd heard 10,000,000 as a standard number by one of the Startup School presenters. We incorporated with one million. Just don't issue them all right away!
A few months back, a friend and I got hit by a car.

We were minding our own business, talking about our startup activities, crossing on the green, and some idiot ran the light and hit us. Neither of us saw it coming, and it hurt really, really bad. ER bills were big, I'm glad I had insurance.

Two weeks ago I was walking to work and saw a guy collapse against a building. I called the emergency number and tried to help him, along with several others, but the guy was completely out, he died right there. I wish I could say differently, but that's what happened. He wasn't particularly old, either.

Ready or not, you might as well have health insurance.
State Farm will approve you over the phone for catastrophic health care for $40 a month. That is what our startup is on. If something goes wrong it's a $2500 deductable but everything else is taken care of. So if you need stitches, you're hosed, if you need a new kidney, it only costs $2500.

Godspeed.
Perks don't make a soul-stealing job less soul-stealing...but if I have a choice between gourmet food three meals a day (Google) and a coffee maker that no one ever cleans (several companies I've consulted for--at $125/hour) I'm picking the gourmet food every time.

It shows a lack of respect for your employees to treat them poorly. It also shows a lack of foresight to not realize that if you don't feed your people, they will go out to lunch most days. Have you ever been out to lunch with people who don't LOVE their job? It's an hour, with drinks, much loudness, etc. and they all come back a bit dazed and don't get anything done for the rest of the day.

Anyway, free snacks and drinks (healthy ones please) is the minimum I'd tolerate. I'm cantankerous, of course, and don't play well with others--I've worked for myself starting businesses since I was about 22 and don't have any plans to ever work for anyone else (except in the event of a nice acquisition, but even that isn't high on my list of desires), but I think a lot of nerds feel the same way. We can make good money doing all sorts of things, including working from home in our underpants, why would we put up with a work environment that is any less enjoyable?
you can't display ads on the profile pages. they encourage you to display ads on the canvas pages and you keep 100%, although they could change that for certain apps, or all.
I answered a question, thus I had to register. Twenty minutes later, my answer has not appeared.

Did I do something wrong? Doubtful.
This article resonated with me a lot. On Tuesday I wrote a custom build app for my games, something that'll take my game dir filled with crap, preprocess the source code to create multiple versions, filter out unnecessary files, auto generate an inno setup install script and spit out setup files (or run the game in auto play test mode, etc).

Back in high school I wrote a similar thing in C#. I wrote custom code for every window and literally every control - lots of redundant code there. It was a big horrible mess and took two months to develop. For various reasons (cross platform high on that list, but also lack of flexibility and a horrible source base) I decided to rewrite it. I used to think I was a pretty good programmer (Dunning Kruger effect?).

This time around, I instead built a system which automatically generated a GUI around RTTI and handled loading and saving - very similar to Rails' Scaffholding. A day instead of months, because I chose to build a domain specific library with which to construct my application out of.

It's not exactly compiler writing (a parser wasn't needed thanks to RTTI, but if it was I would have written it) but I think it's very analogous to what he's talking about - problems that appear big and nasty can be abstracted down and become trivial by solving one hard problem instead of a larger amount of slightly smaller ones. This is true of compiler writing, frameworks like RoR, layers like HTTP/TCP/IP. It's the very reason why the spread in programmer productivity is so high. Better programmers don't attack problems faster, they attack them from a position of higher leverage.
But if you HAD to work for someone else, wouldn't the perks make it better?

You're comparing the infinite satisfaction of working for yourself to doing banal work for the man. Even with the free food, your startup will offer vastly more personal satisfaction to you.

Forget startups. If you're an employee and choosing between two companies, all other things being equal, why not take the free food and gym and childcare? I love those $4 a bottle pure fruit juice drinks. I certainly wouldn't find it insulting to be allowed and even encouraged to drink as many of those as I wanted. What's the problem here?
He's just too verbose. If the content took 40% of the words I'd be interested.
Here in the UK I've heard of people "running lights" in the USA. It doesn't happen very often in the UK. Someone driving through red knows that they're likely to have an accident or mow down a pedestrian.

I've long wondered if it is the USA's lack of roundabouts compared to the UK that causes many Americans to grow frustrated sitting at red lights when there's no traffic driving across them on green that makes them conditioned to drive through red.

My neighbouring desk for a year for a hotdesk to the visiting American on a two-week tour of duty. For many it was their first UK visit. The majority liked roundabouts after a couple of days, preferring them to junction lights.
Why the iPhone Will Fail
I'm not sure I agree with him, but his thesis isn't entirely mistaken, and the guy (Al Ries) has been around the block a few times. I think the main problem with his argument is that the iPhone isn't primarily a convergence device.
OpenId Integration, definitely.
Also add Yahoo Browser Based Auth.
- Isn't that like a safe job with a 100% chance of low income vs a startup with 10% chance of jackpot? With health insurance, you're assuming bad luck, but with a startup, you're assuming the opposite.

- 77$/month is still quite a bit of money. Even if you absolutely want to spend it on safety, it's not clear that insurance is the best way to go. Upgrading those frozen dinners to bio food might be a better bet for long-term health. Or buying a bike helmet, living in an unpolluted area, taking time to exercise daily.

- When you're twenty-something, there is a rather low number of incidents which are not a) low-cost enough that you can take care of it and b) curable at all

I have health insurance now, but I'm not sure that it's such a wise investment. I find it hard to make an honest assessment of how much it is really worth. Anyone have hard data on this?
I randomly got sick and then developed bad pneumonia. I ended up staying in the hospital for almost a week while recovering and then was fine. Total cost for diagnostic tests, medicine, and my stay was ~$30k. I was in disbelief when my HMO covered absolutely 100% of it. Because I had insurance I was only in pain for a week instead of a year.
It's pretty safe to be fed up with politics and not participate, but it might be dangerous to give up on medical care altogether :-)
I want my office-office to be as similar to my home-office as possible. Not even the perks at Google get anywhere close to being as nice as my own modest home-office.

Technology companies mine mental energy from programmers and perks are the water they use to soften the earth. :D
Ask someone who's used a non-.com what they think :-)
Apple now third-largest U.S. music retailer: survey
I was talking to one of the Iphone sw team members last weekend, and according to him, what is phenomenal about the phone is the UI - unlike anything out there. A complete change over all other phones on the market. He says the tv commercials do not come close to capturing what it is like to use the phone. We'll find out soon enough.
I notice that the author does not touch on the success of the Blackberry devices. Further, the reason "convergence" devices never work is that only failed products are tagged as being about convergence - if it creates a new market segment, then it is not a converged device.
not true. everybody has a price at which they´d sell. if you are approached for acquisition talks, why would you decline? it´s almost always worth your time to just talk, even if you aren´t really interested in selling -- you never know how things work out.
Great post Paul. Concise and to the point.
I think the trick to preserve the "old reddit" on a new site would be to allow people to choose whose stuff they get to see, i.e. filter by users. That way the early elite doesn't have to get washed out.
"Do they think they can buy me with $4 juices? Mmm But I must admit this free juice really tastes nice..."
I had no insurance a couple of years ago and needed a minor outpatient surgery. The surgeon worked with me on the price and charged nothing for the follow up office visits. The cost of the OR comprised about 90% of what I had to pay as the hospital only gave something like a 10% rate reduction.

Taking everything in to consideration, it cost me about the same out of pocket for that to have insurance versus not having insurance, including the cost of premiums for a couple of years. Afterwards, I decided I'd be better off with insurance in case something bad happened.

I've only known one person who had a huge medical problem without insurance, and, after spending some months filling out forms for the hospital and various programs for uninsured people, he wound up paying only the bills from the doctors. All but one of them offered a decent reduction in their fees, and I think a couple dropped them all together. All said and done, he was relieved of around $250,000 of debt.

From my experience, I think it's a good idea to have some type of health insurance just in case you hit a worst case scenario.
Google, eBay kiss, make up -- sort of / Auction site will resume ads but reduce spending
Introducing WiTV Browser Based Joost Competition, Apple TV Friendly
Roundabouts.... hrm. I used to work near the one of the few in San Francisco (8th & Townsend) and occasionally people would take the shortest path around it. Kind of scary. And what's really scary is being a cyclist in a roundabout somewhere like Italy. I much preferred the traffic lights before they replaced them with roundabouts in Padova. It's bad enough playing chicken in a car, let alone a bicycle.
iPhone buzz index booms to 8,225 going into the weekend
Well, obviously Michael Moore isn't going to film a happy family getting taken care of by a friendly company. There wouldn't be much point in making a movie about that.
Google boss shows off iPhone
At the first place I went to work, they had a masseuse come in once a month for 15 minutes with everyone. That was a nice perk. Free sugary glop isn't really that good for you in the long run, but 15 minutes of good massage was absolutely wonderful after being hunched over the computer all day.

The only downside was when on a whim I asked the masseuse if she could do hands - she did, and did such a good job that I couldn't bear to go back to typing and went home a little earlier than usual:-)
Verizon's fiber-optic payoff
No Magic Behind Google's Magic?
I don't think eBay had any problems growing for the first 6-8 years before AdWords even existed. eBay started using Google AdWords simply because their affiliates were using them. They figured they may as well prohibit AdWords in their affiliate TOS and do it directly.
This is relevant:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9302718
Best Search Engine for Hot Deals
My experience is that people are much more likely to remember .com . That's the default in people's brains, so if you end in .net or .org or .whatever , it's extra work for people to remember that.

For example, I've mentioned justin DOT tv to several people, and they still try to go to justintv.com .
Also, I recommend doing some basic testing for domain names. Just buy the domain names you're considering, put an email signup or something on them (or have them redirect to a functioning site, whatever), then run identical ads for them and see which gets better click through.
Any idea (from anyone) on how easy it is to use while not looking at it? Muscle memory, tactile feedback, sounds, mistake avoidance/forgiveness?
Who do you think will end up buying all the successful run-off companies? Its much easier just to pick the winners than mess around with a ton of investments.
Well I guess roundabouts to someone not used to them are dangerous, just like traffic lights.

I'll see your Padova roundabout and raise you The Magic Roundabout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)

It's five roundabouts arranged in a circle with connecting roads between them on the edge of the circle. It effectively creates a bigger roundabout in the middle with contra-flow.
That would depend on the value you put on your health/life.

For me P(illness)ValueOfLife exceeds P(startupSuccess)ValueOfStartup
A couple interface suggestions:

1. Let me disable live preview. It seems to slow down my entire system.

2. Show me a list of all questions I've answered, not just those I've asked or that I'm specifically monitoring.
Precisely. Products do not fail because they are converged. A product will fail or succeed based on how well it is able to satisfy users' needs, etc.
It's not at all the same. Do you understand the difference between buying a lottery ticket and playing russian roulette?

Your strategy should be to seek upside while limiting downside.
He neglected to mention a massive convergent success: phones and digital cameras.
Paul Buchheit: Three types of ideas