skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stay at one manager for as long as you possibly can. Until they cry, beg, plead, and threaten to put in another. As soon as your hierarchy goes from MGR->everybody-doing-work to MGR->Leads->everybody-doing-work. If you're a startup, you shouldn't need the sets of services those intermediate leads provide in a large organization -- shielding from upper management, negotiating deadlines/resource-sharing with external teams, HR's performance review madness of the quarter, etc.

In practice, I've found I can handle up to about 13 or so directs and keep steering the development boat before things start getting too hectic and I start to drop things on the floor. YMMV, I am not an investor.
I actually think it's also due to the immaturity of the field and the rate of change for the technologies / practices within it. We seem to be in the only field where a freshly minted PMP can get a job even if they have no real experience. Why else would we have so many people who have never written an LOC managing developers? Engineers generally don't.

Job security and employee loyalty is also at an all-time low so make sure you're billing enough to cover your retirement.
The thing he doesn't mention is that some companies can be a "6."

What I mean is that a company can seem to be a good enough fit to the prospective employee but turns out, after a period of working together, to be a poor fit from the employee's perspective. During the hiring process maybe they spotted some weak areas or got an inaccurate picture of the work culture and environment. Maybe after hiring the job is not quite what was advertised. What matters is that they decided to take the job, even though it's not an optimal fit, because the potential positives outweighed the potential negatives.

What I wonder is what's the best way to deal with this from both the employer and employee sides of the table?
For odd historical reasons, when an employer purchases health insurance for an employee, they get a huge tax deduction. So having employees buy their own is significantly more expensive, even for the exact same coverage. In addition, in most states in the US, the individual insurance market is a disaster: prices are outrageous, there is no common market where you can look up prices so you have to find and contact individual carriers, you can be denied coverage for just about anything, coverage standards are non-existent so there's no way to compare plans based on price, etc.

The end result is that many developers aren't willing to take jobs where health insurance isn't included.
Apple iTunes Remains Dominant in U.S. Online Movies in 2010
I'm paying for COBRA, and it's $540 a month. I could have opted to change providers when I quit my job to start up, but the other options I saw were only slightly cheaper and provided almost no coverage.

You should check out the Freelancers' Union, too (I wasn't eligible since they require that you haven't been employed full-time for the three months prior to joining.)

It's my understanding that part of why NY health insurance is so expensive is because we've had many of the regulations from the new health care bill (e.g., about discrimination based on preexisting conditions) here for many years and no individual mandate.
I have a friend who's obsessed with all things airlines, and he insists that airlines were losing money on ticket sales all through the'90s and '00s, and that all their profits came from selling frequent flyer miles to credit card companies, who could use them as incentive to spend money.

Given the financial collapse, I wouldn't be surprised if the airlines are hurting and need to pull money from somewhere.
Being overqualified refers to employers turning applicants down, not job seekers considering themselves too good for the job. It doesn't make sense for an employer to spend the time/money to get you trained and productive if it's obvious that you're going to leave as soon as possible.
Has she tried working with her college's career services? Most of the major colleges that I know of have a separate set of people (from their undergrad folks) that are dedicated to helping alums get re-employed.
An Open Letter To PC Makers: No matter what you do, I will never trust the software you put on my machine, so I couldn't care less what bloatware you package or don't package; I'm reformatting first thing anyway. Thanks for finding this clever way to make my machine cheaper off the back of someone else.
Not all of it, and what did wasn't enough to fix much of what's broken.
Not everyone who should go to college can afford a prep school.
I do judo. It definitely works. I have better cardio, I'm stronger, more flexible, thinner and more confident. And it helped and inspired me to lose even more weight and try out other sports as well (alongside judo). Having a good trainer, and a good group of colleagues, helps a lot.
I look on government programs to help startups with cynicism for exactly this reason ... the guys who put things like that together often have little idea what the guy on the frontlines is dealing with.

Personally ... if Obama announced that Startups would only pay 10% in taxes (or something like that) for x amount of years and gave us access to (heavily discounted healthcare plans) ... I'd be content.

As it is currently structured, Startup America doesn't factor into my life one bit ... and I'm working on a startup.
Three Phase Power Measurements
Canadian SEO Data Protection: Sophos Rocks, eh
Startups would be wise to consider 'middle-aged', 'experienced', or 'old man' developers when forming their team. Sure, they may cost more than a couple of college kids, but you are basically getting 4 employees in one:

1) A normal application developer who can code to whatever stack you are using.

2) A system level developer who can push aside whatever application stack you are using when that stack becomes problematic. She can do this because she has been building these applications before the stacks existed.

3) A process consultant.

4) A business consultant.

Numbers three and four are the keys here. I typically turn over 5-6 mid-sized projects a year. Even if the 'old-man' developer you are looking has only worked on large projects chances are they have completed at least half a dozen in their career. This right here is what you are paying for. The ability to pick their brains about what processes and practices were successfully internally and why. What clients were successful and weren't and why. What kind of long term problems you are going to run into based on your short term decisions.
I think it's fascinating when someone physically gets outsourced themselves instead of replaced by an outsourcer. Where did you go?
I've heard people claim that employers will put out jobs with ridiculous requirements to fill some "we tried" quota for a regulation with a name that escapes me.
I am interested in hearing more about these four types of entrepreneurship and analysis on each.
Considering we are rediscovering things like RISC, Lisp and noSQL, I say it moves very fast, but in circles ;-)
I fail to see how this will have a "green" effect by cutting down on sold chargers. Will they start selling phones w/o chargers?
I have thought that something like this would be great for a while. I wonder, is there any DRM like to prevent piracy on grey-area blogs that won't respond to a take-down notice?
CampusSplash Launches AdmissionSplash Facebook App
> Nobody does corruption like Italy.

Aaah my daily dose of generalizations. Feel better now, thanks.
On-chip nanolaser highlights the work still to be done
I certainly feel the same pull. My time on Hacker News has led me to pursue Python vigorously and I have found that there are certain things that Perl is just less verbose with. The thing that I don't like about it is that is so easy for n00bs to screw up and it's very easy to write poor Perl code. CPAN/easy_install... it's two jelly bellys in the same bag to me.
I have trouble believing that anything that has Steve Case's leadership will be a failure.
Hiring and firing is so very hard. I have yet to see any good techniques to do it. It is nice to see an article that owns up to the fact that even if you make them write code in the interview and have really good brain teasers and... whatever other interviewing technique, you'll still get bad apples. So many articles are written that basically say, hiring a bad employee is so very bad, you must make sure it never happens. So it's good to see discussion of what you do when it does.

This article reminds me again of how the whole job process is a lot like the process one goes through with relationships. When I saw this bit - "What would your visceral response be if they quit? Relief? I think that says it all." - I realized it would fit perfectly as a relationship advice column.
Thanks for the inspiration. I needed it.
The easiest way of getting rid of bloatware is to just format the drive and install a fresh retail copy of Windows. It’s astonishing how well that works.

I recently tried that with a cheap Compaq laptop (that’s a HP brand) which comes with loads of crap. When you install a fresh copy of Windows, it is clever about which drivers it needs to download and everything just works. Special buttons, sound, Bluetooth, wireless LAN, webcam, SD card slot, you name it. I didn’t have to hunt for one single driver.

You obviously need a fresh copy of Windows and I’m not aware of any computer that comes with one. (All this is assuming that you want Windows and not Linux.) I’m a student and get Windows for free but others are not so lucky. Reinstalling the OS is not really a practical solution for the average user, anyway, but it is illustrative of one thing: The manufactures wouldn’t have to do one thing – just ship their PCs with Windows as is — and there would be no more bloatware.
Taking any fraudulent clicks from Google out of the equation, you can generally assume that everyone that clicks on your ad is a "qualified" lead. They are interested in your product or service because they searched for it. You may also want to do some A/B testing with your site as well, including adjusting pricing. You may find that you can increase your conversion rate dramatically and spend less on your Adwords campaign.
In Mexico they are called nini's (_ni_ estudian, _ni_ trabajan). They often find "better" opportunities joining organized crime/drug cartels. This, in my opinion, is one the main challenges that need to be resolve in order to end violence in Mexico.
Let's just ask this the other way around. What would he gain from people knowing how much he makes from that app ?

On the other side, I think that some people, seeing he is making some money, would feel he's charging too much (or something else). It may not happen, but why take the risk ?
Alexey Voznyuk wanted it removed - My point is that obligatory "(optimize (speed 3) (safety 0) (debug 0) (compilation-speed 0) (space 0))" is totally wrong.
...and as CEO he might have been able to do that
Hipparchus a pretty well-known (pseudo?) Platonic dialogue, and this is not the first time I've seen it. The parent seems to suggest that the friend's distaste for greedy men is related to the situation of money supply at the time. For anyone familiar with the other Platonic dialogues and the history of 5th century Athens, it seems much more related to the timeless distaste of Socrates' young rich aristocratic friends for the nouveau riches traders and speculators of the time.
It's actually quite a hard way to earn a living. GETTING the contracts is next to impossible, as despite having the FAR in place, they generally are wired for a particular company. Most government work is, of course, only eligible to companies who have 'past qualifications' of doing similar work for government agencies, meaning that new companies have an even harder time breaking into the network of opportunities and that even if you've built a 100 'websites & cms systems' for government agencies, you're not qualified to build a system categorized as 'web portal' unless some of the work you've previously done was labelled as such in the contracts.

After you've gotten the contract, it's difficult to work with the government's red tape and still live up to the terms of the contract. If you've ever worked on a project with a prolonged or contracted management life-cycle, you have _some_ idea of what it's like, in a very small sense.

Changes requested are shot down by government lifers on little basis. "I vote no, until we've thoroughly thought about the security implications," was a valid rejection on a project I was running that involved, at least partly, replacing plain-text passwords stored in configuration files with Kerberos Keytab certificates. Infuriating, at best.

Meanwhile, slips to the project schedule don't affect your project's contractually obligated deadline. The government is generally happy to trod along at a tortoise pace while contractors run sprints in spurts -- weeks waiting on an approval for a change, then sprinting until it's done.

Add to that the required overhead of having somebody able to meet incessantly about every single line item in every single invoice.

Add to that the fact that in most government agencies, their IT staff is comprised by a heterogenous mix of slow government employees and other contractors that would love to see you fail (as they likely also bid on the work you won, and would love the opportunity to see it rebid in the event that you fail).

Add to that having to get approval on every single change in any product, no matter how trivial, by a committee of stakeholders -- the size of which shrinks and grows as the project moves on, and knowing that no change, however firmly approved, is ever REALLY approved until ship date (aside, months after development on a renovation had begun on a portal's backend infrastructure, senior government personnel were still arguing over the look and feel of a mockup that had been approved and finalized prior to the beginning of development.)

Again, red tape, red tape, red tape.
No need to overengineer. Server side scripts are not needed in their case.
Is the amount you pay for health care because of specific issue that you have or is it a regional thing?

I've been paying ~$80/month for high-deductible (but 100% after the deductible) health care for a few years. My HSA account will now cover my deductible if I ever need it to.
What name is more real; one you give yourself, or one your parents give you?

And anyway, nothing is stopping you from photoshopping your drivers' license to say whatever name you want. When Facebook asks you to verify your "real name", just give them a photoshop. Or don't use Facebook.

Incidentally, I have a friend whose passport says "Ingy döt Net". Yup, an O with umlauts. And that's his legal name.

So I don't really see an issue here.
Violinist plays duet with radioactive particles
Agree. For a good portion of 20th century majority of such population has been able to find jobs in manufacturing or some sales role. While competition from Asia eroded the first sector, Internet slowly eliminates the middlemen in other sectors. Travel agencies and newspapers first, retail associates, car salesmen and real estate agents next.
I did a few years ago, but it went poorly. Might have just been my implementation. Either way I removed it.
One of the original demotivational posters: "Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people." http://www.despair.com/demotivation.html
That's what screencasts are for. ;)
Don't limit this call to action to computer configurators. Handset manufacturers and mobile carriers are just as guilty of this. AT&T has a suite of apps that charge fees for what most handsets can do for free out of the box. Samsung removed default Android widgets (notably, Google Calendar) from their Galaxy S line so that users would be coerced into using their widgets. Verizon V-Cast. I don't mind if they make these things available. I dont' even mind if they're marketed to users in ways that don't violate my privacy and aren't spam, but to install them by default and bar their removal is unforgivable.
I think it was SequoiaView but I've wiped my Windows laptops so can't be sure.
Socrates is side-stepping the issue, as he always did, taking advantage of his friend's inability to articulate himself well.

One can see from his friend's meandering talk that he was trying to describe how excessive love of gain can corrupt, and later how evil men would deceive others so as to make gains by things which the violated party will later realize (or perhaps not realize) are worthless. Think snake oil merchants.

However, Socrates, in his usual style, takes advantage of imprecise language to twist meanings around until he's altered the topic of discussion (as his friend suspected, but couldn't articulate) into something where he can be demonstrated to have the right answer (all men love gain) with a notable absence of discussion about his friend's concern about excessive love of gain and dishonest gain.

There's a reason why they killed him: nobody likes a smart ass.
Show HN: Real-time Team Collaboration on top of your LinkedIn Social Graph
Surely they can just download a copy somewhere, the whole point of software is that you buy the license, not the actual code, right?

If you bought a PC and it came with Windows, then you should have a windows license (and associated product key or whatever) so reformatting should be fine.
5 Things Every Business Can Learn From In-N-Out Burger
ADHD Adults Perform Better on Some Measures of Creativity
Not unless everyone decided to sell all their assets at the same time. If the money supply is fixed, and the market size is constant, prices should fluctuate very little even as large amounts of fixed capital are accumulated and total wealth is increased.
Doesn't work on Android? Sometimes Google confuses me.
I've been going after some big schools and entire districts lately, so I worry that they'll be less enthused if they knew I was just one guy doing this on the side.
Conversely, I use links2 (http://links.twibright.com/) which - for news based sites - is actually MORE usable than a mainstream browser. Say goodbye to adverts, Flash, javascript; and welcome ultra-fast browsing. It works well for night-time viewing (on a black terminal), or for day-to-day stuff running in graphics mode, under X.

Love it!
>>I am puzzled by all these old-timers who feel the need to say they "aren't into Perl anymore." That's fine. I'm not into Windows anymore, but I don't go around telling everyone :)

Some of them are language war trolls.

The rest... well, read some _old_ Perl code from 1999 or so (Nagios, maybe?). :-)

Modern Perl with the Perl 6 backports like Moose and other CPAN stuff is totally another thing.

I don't really know if it works better for most people to treat your computer language like something extensible, that can grow -- but still force people to learn old cruft, to handle that?

I know one thing: I love it, because it is fun. And I need that -- I hated my life when I worked for money in Java.

Edit: Grammar.
New source (type?) of startup capital debuts in Austin
Animoto adds HD, 10x faster rendering thanks to Amazon GPU instances
If you want to complain about the behaviour of children, you should simply do so: masking it with a shallow comparison to a for-profit retail chain is more than a little silly. Any child is entitled to attend a public school for free, and that entitlement is protected by the government -- what can I get at best buy for free, and why would I ever be entitled to anything there?
'tude fail.
I hadn't heard of retawq before. I've been using w3m for a while (esp. w3m-emacs), but w3m doesn't have support for concurrently loading/rendering multiple tabs. It looks like retawq is multithreaded.
But if you design it well enough, it does. Here's a copy-pasta from a reddit comment of mine from a few months ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b2u6t/twitter_o...

------------------

Color me unimpressed.

At some point, I was collecting 40GB/day of financial data (and that's after bzip2ing them .. probably 200GB/day before); This was done on hardware costing $30K (which was two equivalent machines with 4GB, each having 20*1TB in a raid configuration -- this was a hot-backup configuration) and the operation run (coded, supervised, administered) by 2 people.

I'm extrapolating from your numbers: Let's say you have 70GB over 14 days = 5GB/day; Let's assume Twitter has 100GB/day of text twits (which, incidentally, means ~1 billion tweets per day which I highly doubt, as they took few years to get to the 1 billion mark, and last I heard they were at less than 100 million twits/day)

Then, at this day and age (numbers selected for 2 years ago, when they had their last infrastructure revision), what you do is buy 20 servers with 8GB of memory each (for, say $5K each), plus a little redundancy, and store all the latest twits in memory, and the most popular user's older twits as well; everything else on disk. Throw in cheap web front-ends that don't even need a local disk, load balancing, and a gigabit ethernet backplane. You're still under $200K in equipment.

Yes, the code is not going to be trivial, but for $100K and 3 months you can get a stunt programmer (I know a few who can do it and won't charge as much).

A run-of-the-mill RDBMS is the wrong tool for this job; Basically, run of the mill anything; but that does not make it incredibly hard.

I think $300K for hardware and software, you can get a Twitter clone that performs as well.

Twitter is successful, but that's not thanks to good engineering.
New Website/Game, Spent, Guides You Through the Homeless Experience
What's the point of this comment? Since the first two years of Obama's administration, has health insurance become less of an issue for startups? Is health insurance not on the table right now as an issue in the House? What does it matter how much "political capital" was spent?
Well, actually i did work at the library, but i changed for one reason to my local coffeeplace: taking and making calls.

Thats the one reason i've left the library. I tried a starbucks for working but he is right, the tables are not big enough etc, so i actually went to a local coffeeshop and talked to the owner about me liking to work at his place.

I made a deal with him, i did all the quick-wins of online advertisement for him, (it's in germany so: qype, facebook, twitter, simple page with a fair amount of seo).
For this i got my special table, big enough for everything i would ever need(i could easily place 2 macbooks + papers on it) + a coffee and bagle flatrate for a year.

I think we both made a good deal.
I've noticed that to some extent among grad students, though that's a weird variety of union. But the most militant, adversarial grad-student unions tend to be paired with the most dysfunctional, adversarial administrations (not sure which came first).

I was fortunate to be part of one that had a mostly symbiotic working relationship with our administration (we weren't even officially a "union", just a "student association"). As a result we negotiated using "soft power" rather than things like strikes; e.g. made sure the administration was aware that having happy grad students promoting the school was critical to their own success (in recruiting students, say, since we voluntarily ran the prospective-student visit weekend, and gave them candid information on what life at the university was like).

One of the important aspects was that there were people we could negotiate with who: 1) at least sort of cared and were willing to talk to the student association; and 2) actually had the power to agree to things.

The worst examples are where you have a fairly bureaucratic UAW-affiliate grad-student union negotiating with a faceless-bureaucracy administration, where neither side sees the other as part of the same team in any way, and it's not even clear who on either side has any authority to speak for anyone or make concessions.
Don't forget the cyclical centralisation / decentralisation of infrastructures. "Cloud" is the new old Mainframe.