skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IDE's are handy if you do not know how to setup your local testing environment, however, it is not hard to setup that local testing environment, there are several options online to have an installer do all the work of installing a webserver and a dynamic webserver language like PHP.

The pro's of that are that you develop directly into a setup that is comparable with the real deal and issues that come floating to the surface will also do in the production environment.

Second, a finished product just needs to be copied to the production server to simply work.

Third pro is that when you use a development environment you simply do not need an IDE, a relative simple editor with syntax highlighting and snippet management will suffice.

The downside of IDE's are that they tend to make the development road overly complex and most have their own quirks so you have a relative steep learning curve for that and it's hard to switch so you are more or less jailed to a particular IDE.

All this time on learning your IDE and learning to deal with it's quirks are better spend on your web project.
James Hamilton's blog is excellent for anyone interested in data centres: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
What A Management Team Does
This whole thread strongly convinces me that this approach was an excellent one. I'm sorry, Jarek: you may be an excellent software developer, but I'd rather hire someone else. Because in my OWN years as a software developer I have found that my willingness to do whatever needed doing has made as much difference as my skill at writing and maintaining difficult programs. Sure, most other people didn't have the skills to do the latter. But most people didn't have the WILL to do the former, and both have made a huge difference for one reason or another.
Just to clarify it's not just mobile streaming, but offline mobile support. I carry around 1500 tracks on my Android using Spotify Premium for £10 / month. The transparent wifi syncing and social aspects of the service (collaborative playlists, music inbox etc) are awesome too. If it's available in your country, I urge you to try it.
100% correct, at least as it pertains to me. The concept of "owning" music has been dead to my generation since Napster. I'm not even sure what that concept means, nowadays. Music is like water, you can get it from a million sources, paid or not. Getting it isn't the problem.

My real problem is finding what I want to listen to at this very moment, and managing it. I don't want to spend forever finding my music, downloading it, arranging payment, organizing it, backing it up, copying it to my iPod or other computer, etc.

Spotify gets this: search -> listen -> add to playlists. At work, home, wherever... just login. Girlfriend's music? Switch user. Throw away my iPod, it was just a shipping container, anyway.
A hit, a very palpable hit.
This reminds me of how the Atlantic turned a profit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13atlantic....
China building a city for cloud computing
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yes and no - different bucks have different costs. Every dollar you spend is an investment, so you should be asking what return you're going to get for it. For example, if I add another developer, how much value will be created by the extra expense? If I buy a new sofa, how much value?
So, on the one hand, I agree with you that every dollar should be invested for maximum return, and it doesnt matter where it came from, but on the other hand, there are decisions to be made about going out and getting more capital above and beyond your retained earnings (i.e. debt or equity financing). That money comes at a much higher price, so the return on it has to justify the cost.

To put it in terms of an individual rather than a company, the decision to take out a mortgage to buy a house is connected but somewhat different than the decision of where to spend or invest your salary dollars. The mortgage is a loan that comes at a cost (the annual interest), yet it enables you to do something (buy a house)that you could not have done out of your earnings. So, many people choose that the return on owning a home (whether financial or otherwise) justifies the decision to seek out a source of capital beyond their earnings, even though that capital comes at a cost.
Interesting, thanks. Does "browsers have improved significantly since [2006]" mean that we still need bottom scripts for IE?
Very good point.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't seem like Jean has actually read the book.
Check my profile :)
Wrong. Imagine the economy took a downturn and the company was having trouble finding placements for their consultants. Imagine that they decided to hang onto the employees even though they didn't have billable work for them (try hard: you may sprain your imagination). Imagine that the company's finances were in trouble over this, so they stopped the janitorial service. And then they asked you to take out the trash and clean the fridge.

THAT is when it would be appropriate, and a team player would pitch in. Abusing employees is abuse whether it's excessive billable hours or excessive fridge-cleaning.
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Definitely, impressive stuff. That said, the Atlantic had rather a lot less than 130,000 employees to steer into a new direction... And Nokia needs to find a new niche where it will make some €40b of profitable business, if it is to avoid being acquired... in the large, public corporation world, it's grow or die.
From a technical point of view the OS is actually the best out there, imo. It's developed from the beginning with handsets in mind and as such has quite some really nice features.
Augmented reality, Autonomy, and the cleric
Zappos employs the same strategy by offering up money for someone to leave. People who take the money aren't the type of person they want at Zappos. They won't fit in.

The military does this as well. Basic training is more than just training. If you can't get through basic training, you aren't the type of person that will work out in the military.

As for cleaning the bathroom: It's not cleaning the bathroom. It's shared ownership in the upkeep, presentation, and workings of the company. It's a small company, so everyone knows everyone I imagine. Someone not willing to clean the bathroom would probably not fit into the company.

You seem stuck on the fact that it's cleaning a bathroom.

What about committing code the first day you're on the job? Being forced to take ownership. What about being handed a computer and being told to put it together?

Lots of companies have rituals their first day. Things the new guy does that essentially boils down to the final test to see if they'll belong. If they'll fit in.

Don't make the assumption that the strategy is only cleaning a bathroom. Don't assume you have to clean a bathroom.
I heard a talk by Andreas Ehn (Spotify's former CTO) last year and he actually mentioned in his talk that piracy was the benchmark they were trying to compete with Spotify.

Piracy still is the market leader in catalogue size and ease of use for consumers at large (just see the AVC post in another comment). This is actually a fantastic way to look at it - Spotify didn't set out to beat iTunes or any existing market player with a business model, they wanted to beat piracy.

Now that's an ambitious goal, even though many other services aim at doing the same indirectly (by beating existing market players).
> if you do something that other people don't want to do, you're now the "that thing" guy for life.

There are ways to manage your career to avoid this. My favorite is to be quite up-front about it: tell my manager that I'll take on the urgent/bugfix team role for a couple of months because it's in terrible shape, but that I really don't want to be there any longer, and I want to train my successor around the time it starts functioning well again.
Not really. Nokia wishes it were a startup, what they have is far harder to fix. Startups are usually trying to construct a platform in some capacity (eg: releasing as early as possible and making something someone wants as a stronghold to expand from and take over the world) before they run out of cash.

Nokia has legacy junk (products, technology, software, patents, brand perception) all of which is declining in value. Nokia is still profitable - for now.

The idea that Nokia will be able to change, is, IMHO, hilarious. Most leaders can assess why a company is dying, but understanding how to fix it - is exceptionally hard. His memo states the same advice any idiot would tell you (why yes, we should focus on something and crush it) but what?

It took Nokia over 3 years to realise this? How long will it take to resolve it? A decade?

Nokia will never convince stakeholders (being a public company and having 130,000 employees) to scrap products that generate billions of dollars - even if it is in decline. It's like asking news orgs to stop printing newspapers.

this is why big companies die to startups

You probably think you can continue your mediocre efforts and products and also do something new and innovative, but when you put it like I just did - it sounds impossible. It is.

I could go out and raise $10M and do a better job at doing what Nokia wants to become, than Nokia itself. True story.
The license doesn't matter that much, it's the principles - one of them being that you don't get sued by such and such corporation if you use the code. Or Google doesn't change the terms if they lose on trial. No one has patents on C or C++ AFAIK...

SMS and web browser are core mobile OS services, they're not simple programs since connectivity is very important for a mobile phone.
Kevin Butler is a fictional VP who appears in multiple adverts for the PlayStation 3, usually in a different position each time (such as "VP of Add More Awesome"). My favourite is the ad for Modnation Racers, in which he appears alongside the (non-fictional) CEO of Sony, Jack Tretton [1]

The battleships reference is because that code bears a resemblance to a sequence of moves for the guessing game battleships [2], where players take turns to choose squares on a grid to "attack", such as B4. The opposing player will announce either "hit", "miss", or "you sank my X". The most iconic potential phrase from the game is "you sank my battleship" which is referenced in various songs etc.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EinxqwJCK8o
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(game)
Does anyone know of a tool like Mnemosyne for the iPhone/touch/pad?
Wow, another winner for Slovenia. We're really killing it!

Congratz to the vox.io guys and tomazstolfa, if you happen to be on HN, congratz to you too!
Why do you guys think Apache has made such an impressive comeback in 2010? Explosive growth of VPSes?
OK - I'll bite :)
Could you qualify why you think it is easy to get 100,000 pageviews a month? I am intrigued.
That is most likely due to GEMA (the german collection agency) having very high fees for internet streaming. Same problem in Denmark with their collection agency.
Thank you, initially I thought he was a battleship-playing bot or something.
Very true, but the Atlantic also has a steeper history, which may or may not be advantageous to it's ability to pivot. On one hand, the management probably realized that publishing has changed so much over it's 135 year lifespan so it was only natural for them to pivot. On the other hand, it may think that the company has been able to survive for so long by selling content. I don't know enough about the history of change within Atlantic to really give my opinion on it.

At the end of the day this has to do with breaking a company's embedded culture and at least Nokia's CEO is taking the first steps to doing that.

On a different note, I wonder if Microsoft will take a hint here. They essentially need to do the same thing.
> You can then use JavaScript on the click handler to mangle the URL into a hash-bang, and then proceed as you wish

I wish, unfortunately this is only supported in the very latest browsers (I've literally seen one website do this [1]). You can only change the portion of the address bar following the "#" with javascript, which is why you see URLs like "/content/30485#!content/9384" in some places.

The short of it is, if you insist on using AJAX to load your primary content, and to power your primary navigation, then the way they do it is the best method at our disposal at this time.

Personally, I don't think the best method is good enough, but right now there is no better solution - imo, the only way to avoid this nastiness is not to load your content using AJAX in the first place! I don't see the benefit in throwing away half of HTTP, all of REST, breaking inter-operability and SEO, requiring javascript, and having ugly URLs, in order for... what? It's hard to see the plus side to be honest, this is categorically the Wrong Way to make a website and I wish people would stop doing it!

[1] http://www.20thingsilearned.com/
Maybe it is just me, but I am really uncomfortable with the term "winners"? What did they win? Who "lost"?
I think people worry overmuch about signaling in these situations, people said the same thing when the Sequoia-YC partnership was announced but it had zero impact of YC companies getting funded.

It's generally known that Seedcamp only has the resources to finance a limited number of startups, so I don't think investors consider it a huge deal if you participate in the the program without getting funding.
Unless I intend on writing my own software to strip EXIF and geolocation data from JPEGs, at some point in the process I have to trust a third party. May as well be one under a lot of scrutiny!
Well, if you want to let them tell their story, that's great! But perhaps keep the cash incentive out of it. Perhaps offer something else, like a meal or a cup of coffee or something tangible they can use. Also, establish a really really interactive informed consent policy. Make sure they really understand what you're going to do with their information and story. A standard form probably won't be good enough, since you have to be particularly cautious when it comes to potential for coercion.

The problem with the Ted Williams story is that although he got the big breaks, the story didn't stop with the happy ending, and his life spiralled back down again. He went into rehab but checked himself out after only 12 days. I'm not saying that homeless people are not able to be helped, but that it takes a much more structured support system than a video going "viral", and there are lots of good people working to help homeless people back into work, building up their skills, etc. I'd recommend, if you still want to concentrate on homeless people, to go volunteer/work with a charitable organisation for a while and get out amongst the people so you can get a bit more of a perspective on things.

To be honest though, I think the more general approach to interviews is a much better idea.

I'm always happy to chat about ethics, since it's something I am quite passionate about (especially research ethics, vulnerable populations, and informed consent - so you really hit all the targets for me with this project! heh) :)
While I agree with most things you said, I don't agree that nokia has no chances in pivoting. They've got good engineers and they can start a new brand with a fresh new approach to products.
I didn't meant that Nokia has all the benefits of being a startup. Clearly, it doesn't. But it has most of the drawbacks of being a startup (i.e. limited runway, need to innovate or die, etc).

I also suspect that it will fail, but you never know... your analysis would have been correct for Apple 10 years ago - and yet, things turned out very differently. This Stephen Elop is an unknown quantity at this stage. This memo is certainly a decent start in the right direction. He's only been there for 6 months or so, and it takes that long before you have the credibility to make this kind of statement about a 130'000 people profitable company.

So yes, they have hurdles, and they're very hard to jump over, but it is technically possible to do so.
That's fair enough. That's your decision. I would rather work for someone else. The original test is a false indicator with only mild correlation to any characteristic useful in a professional work setting and plenty of room for false positives.
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Thanks for mentioning Mnemosyne, looks really useful!
Congratulations to everybody who participated. A lot of courage is needed and you all deserve an applause.

I'm especially thrilled for http://www.vox.io, which are turning out to be a serious contender in the online telephony business.

Also http://www.psykopaint.com/ is just cool.

Disclaimer: This is my first post. Provoked only by an awesome winning team being from Slovenia, which is my home too.
Why do they have good engineers? Surely even people internal of Nokia are aware their products have been shockingly poor for the past few years? Why would you stay?
Let's say you're writing an app like Google Docs, which does a lot of work on the client.

Before long you're going to have a real mess of Javascript variables, DOM elements and arrays of stuff, which is why it's useful to have MVC structure on the client as well as the server.

Your server models sync automatically to your client models, you can hit model.save() to persist your client models, and your client views represent the data in a way which can be quickly adapted if requirements change.

For a less dynamic app you don't need it.
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My LastPass is set to 20 characters, alphanumeric + specials. I don't have to bump it down that often, but the majority of sites I register on are quite geeky. It's generally less geeky places such as shops, government services, online banking that don't accept my passwords (yes - exactly the places where I WANT a strong password). Maybe I've run into issues less than you because mine is only 20 characters not 30.

Here's some raw numbers:

Passwords: 336

Average password strength: 97.5 %

Average password length: 17.9 characters

Number of weak passwords: 3

(For reference, a 20 character password with specials is 100%, with just letters and numbers it comes in at 98%)
Well, theoretically. I've tried this with an amplifier and the signal is still weak and unreliable. The magnet needs to lie against your eardrum to get a good signal and the sound is very thin. I'd be impressed if someone has ever used this method successfully during an exam (even solving the reception problem, you'd still need to have a way to get the correct information played back).
TL;DR The OP is of the opinion that Groupon's (and the group buying sector's) bubble will burst. No facts I think.

Groupon must be super-confident in themselves to turn down $6billion.

I suspect they have some very good metrics that indicate they will continue to grow to a considerable extent to justify that decision. I doubt it was made on gut feeling or whim. Or without facts.
In my opinion, the most important word in this post is 'phrase'.

I'm learning Chinese and the only way to translate English to Chinese is complete phrases / sentences. You can probably cheat much easier if your languages are more similar, but don't get lazy, think in phrases or you will never reach fluency.
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"Groupon and other group-buying services let consumers eat their cake and have it too." To me, that doesn't sound like something consumers are going to abandon very quickly. The notion that collective buying will somehow fade in the eyes of users strikes me as pretty odd - it's a flat out better way to buy, and groupon does a great job of getting worthwhile products to consumers at deep discounts.

Of the points you mention, I think Groupon's greatest worry is probably that retailers may not make the margins they'd like when using it. But even that's a difficult complaint to make work - fundamentally retailers compete with one another and Groupon is a great tool to leapfrog your competition, even if just for a temporary period.
The funny thing is that for me it IS a switch.

About a year ago I travelled to Ireland and England on vacation.
While I did mostly general touristic stuff, I added some geeky points of interest to my itinerary such as Bletchley Park, Alexander Fleming's lab and planned to attend a StackOverflow conference. Meeting fellow programmers is always fun.

Now, I'm an Hebrew speaker, but speak English fairly well.

After about 3 to 4 days I made the "switch" and generally thought in English and spoke pretty fluently.

Towards the end of the trip (after about 20 days) I went to the StackOverflow conference, where I saw two of my programming idols, Jeff and Joel.
At some point at the conference I approached the couple and we started to chat. Now, I hate to admit this, but bear in mind I was as ecstatic as a little girl meeting Justin Bieber in person. I was about 22 at the time and liked a lot of what they wrote on their blogs.

I know that generally people feel pressured when being treated as "idols" and these days I'm much better about these things, but at the time I couldn't help myself.
All of this lead to me "forgetting" some of the English and (what I felt was) a much less fluent conversation, on my part.
To make things more ironic Joel tried some Hebrew with me and I insisted to speak in English (which was a bit broken due to anxiety).
After 20 days in English speaking countries it just felt too awkward for me to speak in Hebrew. Maybe it was awkward for me to speak in a language foreign to the rest of the group or just the anxiety that kicked in and I'm making too much of it. I don't know.

Why ironic? Here I was, a native Hebrew speaker from Israel, unable to speak in my native tongue while a former Israeli, practically his entire life living in the states, tries to speak with me in Hebrew and unable to.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of plain capability. When thinking about programming I can think simultaneously about how to express an idea in different programming languages/paradigms. This is another point of interest, how is thinking in other languages compares to thinking in different programming languages.

tl;dr: It seems to me there is more to the switching metaphor than developed in the article. When getting into the flow of a language it may be harder to operate in a different one. Moreover, as programmers we are all too familiar with thinking in different programming languages and it's interesting to see how it all relates.
Anki is also worth checking out (an app similar to Mnemosyne, available on Win/Mac/Linux/FreeBSD/iPhone).
In this context guru means "overpaid, full-of-himself cargo-culting consultant plugging his commercial vendor of choice".
Graceful degradation becomes increasingly less relevant (except for the "degrade to internet explorer" part).

When was the last time you used a browser that had no javascript? When did you last time manually confirm a cookie?

User Experience trumps Graceful Degradation.
Legitimate question: Would Apple allow you to put the lightest possible wrapper around an HTML5 app and charge for it through the App Store? Or would the review board tell me that I should just make the app available through the browser instead? I ask because customer expectations are set up to make it far easier to charge for a native application. Even if that isn't your primary source of revenue, charging a dollar or so for the application could help recoup development costs.
Finally created an account here, since I've been on the homepage a few times.

Thanks for the submission, Oscar!