skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you have a team size of only 4 people, I really feel you should target continuous communication. A weekly meeting just encourages each individual to "go dark". I'd suggest a daily 'stand-up' meeting.

I've used this format when forming new teams and the 10 minutes the meeting typically takes is more than paid for by the increased communication. Plus it helps motivation - everyone can share daily progress and trouble spots.

The key to this working correctly is you've gotta drive it. There is a general agenda (share progress and discuss issues) but no minutes or note taking. This means you've got to keep track of everything in your head (the big picture). Then you get to decide - "Hey this is taking too long" or "We need in-depth discussion of this" or "X isn't communicating/contributing enough" etc etc...
I've heard of a company with a similar concept, although not utilizing toilets.

Mashavu enables medical professionals to e-adopt children in the developing world using modern technology and communications infrastructure.
Mail is horrible. As I just commented, I much prefer the pattern of using a wiki to organise a meeting agenda.

That way, everyone can contribute to the meeting's purpose (beforehand, obviously)
Good thread from 6 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=104977

Some of the tips given there took my pain away.

In particular, the Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboards with negative key pitch are awesome, as are ergonomic mouse pads.
Nice job on the write-up in RWW.
Where I work, we have a stand-up meeting every day. It only takes 10 minutes and everyone is on the same page.

Fortnightly, we have longer, sit-down meetings, generally for planning.

I think it works well, although the sit-down meetings sometimes draw out too much discussion, I think this should be avoided to keep the meeting on point and not to bore/waste people's time
How trustworthy can OpenID be if Six Apart doesn't even trust it?
I haven't used it, but TextMarks does have a system for responding to users' messages:

http://www.textmarks.com/dev/docs/recv/?ref=devsb
Innovator's Paradox
Why innovator's question everything and often innovate in the wrong places. In comments, Kelly's criterion used to derive optimal burn rate for a startup.
Charlie Munger: Turning $2 million into $2 trillion
I am not sure about Bulgaria, but Russians seems to be winning most of the ACM programming contests.

I'm an American. As a high school student, I was never interested in programming contests, because I found solving the same problem as everyone else rather boring. I would rather solve a problem that doesn't have an answer.

So I think Russia wins these things because their mentality is different. In America, the really smart people want to do something new. In Russia, the really smart people want to get a high ranking on the programming contests.

I haven't done any real research, though, this is just something I think is true :) One other thing I should mention is that I don't really like losing / failing, so I tend to pick activities that aren't zero-sum. If you don't win the programming contest, you've lost. If you don't solve an interesting unsolved problem the first time, you can try again until you get it right, and nobody will ever know.
Yes this is f-----g offensive. It pisses me off tremendously.

I hope not only Belgium will take us to court for this.

What kind of braindead imbecils come up with stuff like this.

Too many decisions being taken over our heads.
"That’s partially why I want to spend a month in Europe and will do that starting tomorrow."
I can't wait until I can offhandedly toss out comments like this and follow through on them.
Yeah, maybe Google has a spelling section in their interviews ;)

But seriously, I think he likes the "rigor" of the Microsoft process. It is very formal. There is lots of documentation, lots of paperwork, and a very long chain of command, etc. And, it appears he wants to "lead" rather than program. There's nothing "wrong" with this, but I think most of us would rather die than deal with all that. That's why most of us would prefer the informality of Google to the formal corporate structure of Microsoft.

Then again, Google might be "too much" for most of us. I work at a company with 4 other people. That is big enough for me.
Things I've done:

-switched the mouse to my left hand
-installed WorkRave, actually did what it said
-switched the caps-lock and ctrl key
-switched to dvorak
-use the ergo microsoft keyboard
-avoid laptops
-learned to sit up straight and not cross my legs
-stopped using the mouse scroll wheel

These days I'm trying to pay attention to my keystrokes. For example, using the right shift to make (){} results in some stressful twisting, so I'm trying to cut that out.

If you spend a lot of time coding, try to spend more time with a pencil and paper designing before you hit the keyboard. That gives you a good break and reduces the amount of typing and deleting you'll do.
Usually simplicity with correctness
It's true. He doesn't claim to know anything about the code. He is just trying to expose the "secret fixes". His thesis (for all of his blog posts) is that the Ruby community sucks. He did all this digging in the name of "proving" that, not to help make Ruby better, nor to prove that he knows anything about security.

Read the last line -- "I guess we’ll find out after the Ruby guys passively aggressively kill me for looking at their open source and …. telling people things."
There's no one 'proper' way to conduct meetings, it depends on your team and situation. You'd probably be good to ask your (conveniently small) team about the issue, they'll be able to give you a better answer than any HN user.

That being said, 37signals "Getting Real" has a chapter on meetings (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php) that is probably worth reading (though most of the points have already been made in comments here), as is the rest of the book.
well i think theres a lot of room to mix the two together

web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it allows us to do two main things: move information a whole lot faster and with people anywhere in the world that we may not have known before. similar to what zuckerberg refers to as information flow. if you could leverage those concepts to help do good in the world, i think that would make a huge impact. some companies that i can think of:

a) causes by sean parker and joe green. helping spread causes youre passionate about with your network

b) terrapass. helping buy carbon offsets and green products.

long story short, but my niece and nephew had a fatal disease. my family was told they had no more than 6 months to live. first thing we did was use the internet and find other families who were afflicted with the disease+ doctors trying to solve it. Theyre now 11 and 10 years old, because we were able to connect with other people who knew otherwise. This was back in 1998. If it were 1988, they would be dead. that right there is power. Think what we could do in 2008. Thinking about this sometimes makes me think that although I love what I do on a daily basis, the world doesnt need a software company. What ive learned could be used to build an application to help connect doctors, families, companies with cures,etc. more easily.

hmm, and my hacker news comment has now turned into a blog post.
Summer Activities for Kids
Summer Activities for Kids
Ask around. Find the professors who are the best at teaching Introduction to X (where X is any field) and take their classes. The teacher is more important than the subject matter, almost every time.

Useful values of X: statistics, biology (esp. molecular biology), linguistics, statistics (I mention it twice because it's twice as important), economics, first-year chemistry, physics. Skip organic chemistry unless you want to be an M.D.

Keep practicing the essay writing. If you can get good at that, or at least comfortable with it, it's better than a second major.

Which brings me to my radical suggestion: Drop the double major. Double majors are a waste of valuable time: You could be taking a sprinkling of intro and second-year classes in a bunch of different fields -- including at least one class from every excellent prof on campus -- but instead you're spending time taking boring classes from bad lecturers just to check off boxes for your second major, which will not matter to anyone, ever. [1]

(My school made me have a minor. I minored in history, which was a nice change of pace from physics, and was enjoyable, and made me practice all that writing, and I found an excellent history prof and took three of her classes. All of which was good. And yet... if I hadn't been forced to take the fourth history class, which was required of all history minors, I could have done the econ class instead, from the really good econ professor who was recommended to me. I regret missing that econ class to this day.)

Make a choice: e.g. if you like to program, are leaning toward startups, are aceing CS classes, and are not feeling "clever enough for pure math", major in CS -- that's where the marketability is, anyway. Then dump the math major -- just add math classes to taste. Then, add other classes to taste. If, as you say, you're "quite bored", you need to try something different. Mix it up a little. Archaeology. Japanese. Music Theory 101. Accounting. Something.

[1] There are only two times that double majors make any sense. One is if you're a premed. Another is if you're so hopelessly fascinated by the classes in your second field that as a senior you discover that you've accidentally come within two credits of your second major -- might as well finish it off.
Start a website or blog. It is the single best decision I have done in the last decade. I have found many interesting people online that are interested in the same things as me and many interesting people have found me through it.

And yes, go out with as many women as possible too. I made the mistake of going to an all-male college.. well just about (~30% female at Georgia Tech).
If you find yourself wondering if your code is sufficiently clear or appropriately maintainable, then you already know the answer.

When there is doubt, there is no doubt.
Now all we need is an API...
Too bad the original qmail is nearly useless these days. (I had a class with DJB in college, and used qmail for quite a while. Eventually I got overrun with spam and switched to something that would reject messages immediately after virus/spam scanning them.)

The point is that writing simple software in C is possible. But writing complex software is very very hard.
Architects vs. Agilists (1 - 1)
I've also used D for various tiny scale projects over the last year and have found the documentation wanting - D ain't Robinson Crusoe here though.

Once you get past the Tango/Phobos dilemma, you'll find a great little language if you put some effort into it.
Database Performance 1: Huge Inserts
I'm trying to, and planning to, take as many hard, hard courses at college as possible, for precisely that reason. When is the next time in my life when someone will hold me accountable to learn something really hard? I don't think it'll happen again.
I was wondering the same thing. I wish the article would have focused on what was novel about this design compared to other solar-thermal dishes like Sterling Energy Systems, (http://www.stirlingenergy.com/) which is putting up 850MW worth of dishes in the desert.

Also I have to wonder if they could benefit by using a different working fluid than water. A lot of solar thermal projects use low melting point salts as the working fluid, since they hold heat for a long time. You can heat the salt all day, then hold vast amounts of superheated salt in holding tanks, and heat exchange it with water to drive steam turbines. This allows you to produce power well into the night.
Exactly.

Do whatever you want, and don't let others stop you. If you enjoy going to parties - go. Someone deciding to get out of control and funnel a pitcher of beer doesn't mean you can't be standing 20 feet away having a great conversation with interesting people.

The same goes with joining a club of any sort. I mildly wish I joined the entrepreneurship club - but didn't since the majority of people there were all talk and no action.

That suggests another point - you will likely regret NOT doing things more than doing things. It is the time to experiment and potentially make some small mistakes.
Minimize meetings.

Limit most meetings to "actionable" items. (Person A does task X. Person B does task Y after task X is completed.)

Keep meetings short. (If the information can be given 1 on 1, great, if you can cover it over email or a phone call, even better.)

Maybe once weekly have recap/planning meetings, and make sure they are scheduled and sacred. Use them to look at what got done that week and what needs to get done next week.

Limit "vision & direction" meetings to conversations over lunch. You're the CEO, and your job is to get version 1 out the door. If you think that there is a fatal flaw in the fundamentals, don't pull everyone out of what they're doing.

Most of these tips only work because of the small number of people (who I assume you are very familiar with) involved.

Subscribe to the "Manager Tools" podcast (http://www.manager-tools.com/). There's lots of good information there, though it is designed for larger corporations. Just keep the ideas in mind as you grow.
Ask HN: Critique my startup
I am the co-founder of Skribit.com along with another developer and we also have substantial help from an active news.yc member and a business advisor. It started out from Atlanta Startup Weekend back in November from my frustration about finding original content to blog about. Skribit aims to help bloggers cure writer's block by allowing their readers (through a variety of ways) to suggest things for them write about. The most common way is a widget. We are doing ~4M pageviews/month including ~1300 widgets. Analyze that how you like, we realize counting widget loads as pviews is odd.. need to find another way to show our growth. We have been trying to lay low until we have a core set of features out, so users don't try us for a week, leave and never come back.

Fairly simple in concept, but we plan to do some advanced data analysis/etc and find related blogs/users and automatically suggest suggestions for bloggers - particularly useful if your blog doesn't have many readers. I've also pitched it as a "tomorrow's news" idea. Down the line we will be more of a portal highlighting today's hot suggestions in various groups/categories which could be tomorrow's news, or what have you.

So I'm here to ask what you guys think - of the idea, our implementation, feature requests, and so on. We are all developers so we are quite aware we'll need design help in the next few months. In the last few weeks we have been meeting with local investors to get advice on what we should do to take the next step and in result we have been hashing out a product roadmap and are beginning to think about market analysis. Financial model is three-fold with freemium being the core. I don't think I can talk about the other two yet, but we have a prov patent on one.

For those wondering, it's a rails & nginx app on an ubuntu box at (mt).

thanks

http://skribit.com

on an unrelated note, I find Satisfaction to be _great_ for getting user feedback. http://getsatisfaction.com/skribit

update: and people are already poking around for XSS exploits. :-P
Pick up skydiving!

I did during my military service (compulsory between sophomore and junior year at my engineering school in France), and there's nothing better for your ADHD. Seriously, it looks very ballsy from outside, but it actually would fit super well with your craving for learning and discovery - plus it will help solve the women issue, see comment #1 :-) And it's the best way to meet people as crazy as you are but completely outside of your usual circles (kind of saved my life when I moved to MA ;-).
Dvorak solved this for me permanently.
Give ASP.NET MVC a try: http://www.asp.net/mvc/
Thanks for the advice. It rings very true - lately, I've begun to bias for good profs, and good profs only. They make everything worthwhile.

Actually, I'm taking intro to islam this summer quarter, from a really good prof (though some say he's just really arrogant). But the class is extremely well organized and he really knows his stuff. Should be awesome.
Fewer lines of clearer code: I reject the dichotomy.

So first you have four lines of comment explaining a completely unnecessary helper function--px2num(el,'top') doesn't save a lot over parseInt(el.css('top')), and the later is clearer. Then you have all packed into your return something that's technically one line but actually takes seven lines to display in a way that it can actually be read.

So could this be written clearer in less than ~12 lines? Oh yes. First, why are we working in seconds when JavaScript uses milliseconds natively? Assuming that's really necessary, you must do myDate.getTime()/1000 an awful lot. So let's assume you added a getTimestamp method to Date.prototype. And I'm going to assume that el.style.left actually has to equal one of the members of hSpacing--it doesn't make sense that you'd allow dropping without snapping to the grid and that you'd only want the right result if they happened to drop left of the day column but not if they drop one px right.

And it looks like you've got jQuery mapped to j instead of $, which is weird but ok.

function domStartTime(el) {
var week = this.parent;
return week.timeStart.getTimestamp() +
week.timeslice * j.inArray(parseInt(el.css('left')),this.hSpacing) +
(parseInt(el.css('top')) + this.borderWidth) / week.rows / this.vSpacing;
}

function domEndTime(el) {
return domStartTime(el) +
parseInt(el.css('height')) / this.parent.rows / this.vSpacing;
}
"... i'd like to say once more for the record that this conversation should be happening (or at least replicated) on my blog ..."

Hey Fred, I note from your comment getting modded down indicates not too many readers care about where the conversation occurs ~ http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2008/05/a-vc-web-discus.htm... and thinking about it I sort of agree.

Quite a few hackers, entrepreneur types have figured out there is value to be extracted from "aggregation" of links and the associated attention. The comments here and at other places like friendfeed ~ http://friendfeed.com/fredwilson/comments

"... 10 people liked it but nobody commented ..."

are the result of someone else working on building the software, creating the community and collecting this information. Maybe even making a business out of it? Downstream attention collectors are gaining the advantage by collecting your ("and many others") articles. It's not really fair, but it is also a "free market". Working for a rival VC firm does not help either. If you want your readers to benefit, do something about it. Manually summarise the best bits on your blog. Better still get some tools written to scour the Internet to do this automatically - a process that scales better.

If this attention leakage, the inability to maintain and capture attention is happening to your blog, a blog with readership and attention most hackers would readily kill for, it could also be happening to others.

An "itch" that needs scratching perhaps hackers?
From their website:

> "RawSolar's patented design flexes flat mirror into precisely the right shape without any special tooling or skilled labor"

So I think they just use plain flat mirrors and flex them with the frame, which would keep the cost down.
I was in a similar boat as you 2 years ago, and I wish I did two (seemingly contradictory) things different: 1st, go outside of your majors - take some acting classes, some poetry classes, some philosophy classes. 2nd, understand your majors - take a couple of hours to research every class your major offers, and decide which ones sound appealing early on - at Rutgers, I finished a CS BA without taking a compilers or OS course, which was, in hindsight pretty clearly, a mistake.
How did Dvorak solve this for you? And, how was it permanent?
Yes, but beware: Additional smartness does not always stick.

And smartness can be highly conditional. Clever code is often written by calm and well-rested people, but its showstopping bugs are often fixed at 3am by panicked people who are losing thousands of dollars per second.
Beyond the Dollar Sign: You.
when i said 4hrs/day I didn't mean reading stuff.. I meant actually writing stuff or working on things that I would write about
Here's a recommendation on what not to use, Ace Project. Too much clickety clickety click.
Male bonding activities are never wasted time. Seriously. Even something as small as going along on a beer run, might get you a position on a board twenty years from now, or a great job in an amazing place, or, by far the most valuable of all possibilities, crash space on a sofa in San Francisco.
Be careful avoiding things that other people enjoy because you think they are vapid. Try to enjoy them instead.

Travel a LOT-- long trips (3-4 weeks per trip if you can swing it). It's very hard to pull this off after college for most people.

I'll echo the "meet women" sentiment. For some, it can be hard to meet women after collenge-- especially if you get a job at a startup (most people meet women at jobs and women are notoriously absent from startups).

Career-wise, if you want to do a startup someday... Either find a cool startup that you can work at (be picky) or build something that you'd really love to have yourself but no one has made yet.
For one thing, don't be too quick to underestimate the value of socialization. You don't have to be a vapid partier just looking to hook up, but making social mistakes is much less costly in college than it is in the business world. Find some groups that interest you, and there are probably girls there that share that interest - it's much harder when you're out.

Is there some programming project you're passionate about? In college, it was horse racing and poker for me. Always trying to make a quick buck, I know. Anyway, the only real way to learn about writing code is to do it. Your first project will probably fail, so don't sweat it.

If you like this craze, pick an easy language and write a web application. You can get a VPS running for $20-$50 a month, and you could install SVN on there as well. Anyway, have fun and observe yourself - and make sure to study your algorithms!
I've been using hiveminder.com for sometime. Its super easy to add tasks, delegate, tag, set due dates, etc. It also handles groups nicely, and its free.
I have had the beginnings of that unpleasant tingling at 27, and I make a conscious effort to keep my wrists straight. After a few years, it didn't even feel like an effort. Remember, it's compressing this little tunnel through which a nerve runs that is the problem - that doesn't HAVE to happen while you type.
Two weeks _paid_ vacation.
I also love FogBugz. As far as FogBugz and time tracking goes, it works great. It goes beyond just tracking who did what and for how long, it translates that into pretty accurate estimates of how long your project will take to complete.

They also have a free Student and Startup Edition of FogBugz on Demand for up to 2 users.
Ask YC: Notable People On YC
Just a simple thread to post notable people in the industry and their usernames/ comment streams. My contribution: Fred Wilson

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fredwilson