skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This looks great. I have read many of the writings of Rob and Patrick and would love to meet them and hear them speak.

But why are these things so often scheduled for weekdays?

Conference fee? I'm sure it will be fair.

Plane ticket? No problem.

Hotel room? No big deal. I'll just make it a vacation.

Monday and Tuesday? Deal killer. There will be too many phone calls, emails, and support requests to miss.

I bet that most of the people who would best take advantage of this conference don't work for large companies that will send them. They have to slip away over the weekend and get back to the office Monday morning.

Startup School does it right. Fly from almost anywhere. Catch every event. And make it back to the office before little problems have a chance to get too big.
Is he that Ron, the xoogler, who was forced to use Java on AdWords?

Edit: Yup.

http://www.flownet.com/ron/xooglers.html

So I was a little disappointed when I found out
on day 1 that I had been assigned to the ads group.
But that disappointment turned to dismay when I learned
what my assignment was to be: I was the lead engineer
on a new advertising system code named "adstoo", what
eventually became AdWords. That part wasn't so bad.
The bad part was, this was going to be the inaugural
Java project at Google. Google, which had until now
been a Java-free zone (which was one of the reasons I
took the job) was going for Java in a big way, and I,
the consummate Java hater, was supposed to be its
chief evangelist.

Just peachy.
"Gates earned a mere $1.6 million for shares he sold that day, but his remaining 45% stake in the company was worth $350 million, instantly making him one of the nation's 100 wealthiest individuals."

I'm surprised. I thought that, even in 85-86, you needed like a billion to crack that list.
ok. makes sense. best of luck to you!
* the recruiter will get you the minimum amount needed to get you to sign on.*

Rubbish. Why would we compromise our bottom line for the sake of getting a deal done? Sure I could push you in at your absolute minimum salary but if you get a better offer in the mean time then I lose my fee. It's in my best interests to get you as high a salary as I can possibly get you.
Rob Waller book is worth it "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" & I imagine the conference will be valuable too, especially for those on micro-budgets.
Have you used those magnetic MacBook Pro power cables? Apple can bring something even smaller than a case and have it be the tipping point.
Beefy RFID? Your Jerky is Getting Tagged, Too.
The two routes to that kind of arrangement would be to either organize your immediate co-workers into a union (http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/how_to_organize_a_union) or to get together with colleagues and form a contracting firm.
Why don’t websites have credits?
But they're a demographic that bought them so that they could spend $20+ regularly on video games so you could expect penetration or prices to be higher.
I would downvote this post if I had the power. It's wrong to the point to either be lying or trolling.
great idea! Science and math are where this generation is so far behind, it's just sad how much this is going to hurt us until we fix this.
I would say that he was Steve, I was Chris. Although one of those names is actually one of our names, and incorrectly assigned.

He is the best pure software developer I have seen ever. He could crank code like no one I have ever seen. But we were even better as a team. Until we weren't.
Forrester: iPad 2’s biggest challenger is an Amazon tablet
Hmm, so a raise in no way implies a commitment to stay. Raise your sights -- going from 'broke' to 'getting by' may be motivating, but not quite as lucrative as going from 'getting by' to 'killing it'.

I'll tell you, flat out -- no matter how much you make, you'll feel the pinch, you'll just learn to move the 0.
Homemade Pulse Laser Gun
No offence to the developer who did a good thing at the time, but what you guys are talking about here is the Internet. Consider instead sending your money to the FSF or other groups that make sure Internet is great now and in the future.
Google's Chrome untouched at Pwn2Own hack match
#actuallyWINNING
Which is pretty much the opposite of Charlie Sheen #WINNING
As far as I can tell, it's just a new signup form for an existing company.
Can we just "sticky" this to the top of HN, as a perpetual answer to the (seemingly) daily "How to find a technical co-founder" thread?

Seriously though, that was good stuff. Now how about a survey that goes the other way? One that's directed towards technical types who are looking for a non-technical co-founder (that is, a "the sales / marketing / bizdev guy" type.)
I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems). That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.
I don't want the commitment a big raise would impose on me to stay indefinitely

Why would that impose any commitment? If you’re not under contract, you have no obligation to stay. You can get a raise on Monday, negotiate a better deal with a new employer on Tuesday, and quit on Wednesday.
Founder Diaries: Finding Meaning
"Let me check my confidentiality agreement to make sure that won't get me in trouble and I'll get back to you"
Approving Scratch would've killed the iPad? Are you serious?

Apple is worried that Netflix or Amazon will stream movies and ebooks through Scracth Apps and bypass the 30% cut or what?
Honestly, that sounds like rationalization. Your first obligation should be toward your family.

If actually having a ±0 at the end of the month – or, gasp, a couple bills to throw in savings – is that detrimental to your startup ideafying, maybe it's not what you should be doing.

(I admit I'm getting quite tired of the “fail to succeed”, “ramen profitable” and other lionization-of-struggle memes.)
This and more of the same. One loony (who I now thankfully don't have to put up with any more) was always making changes without merging them back into source control, meaning things were marked as addressed in issues logs but there was no corresponding update in the source tree. Lucky we were using a checkout-and-lock model at the time (small team, with each of us generally working on distcint areas, so this didn't work out too inconvenient as it can do with larger teams) meaning we could see what files he had checked out. And sometimes he'd just edit local copies of files without checking them out/in at all, and often "lost" updates somehow (usually, I think, accidentally overwriting them with the source controlled versions he'd not updated). <Deity> alone knows how much confusion he could have caused with his own local repository. He might have worked for weeks without pushing to elsewhere then lose the whole local repo.

Then again I usually felt safer if his work wasn't in source control anyway. I often thought it might be quicker to stay late and do the work myself from the start instead of staying late fixing his work as often as I needed to...
Real world requirements intrude:

Years ago, in our 100+ coder company I kept finding copies of Microsoft's Developer CDs in CVS. Everything to set up a build machine was in there.

Furthermore, because developers sometimes didn't all have the same build environments, all of the intermediate builds were also checked in since you couldn't assume your machine would build exactly the same executable code as anyone else's machine.

CVS was definitely not built for this, but it worked. And if it works, and a programmer thinks it solves his problem, it will be used.

I discovered this because we kept getting problems with orphaned CVS locks, and people complaining of the slow checkins (CVS did the diff on the server, so upload the slow way over your ADSL line all those giant files that didn't change.) Which led to the day I typo'd a lock removal command and deleted all files with "rfl" in their name. Not a common sequence, unless your software deals with "overfly"s. Hurray for backups!
How Many Americans Have a Passport? The Percentages, State by State
The iPod Store
The easier you make things for people the less likely they are to mess it up. We used to get around by horse and buggy but I think you'd agree that a change in tools has been a benefit that lets us do things we couldn't do before, wouldn't because it was too hard or tried to do but failed often from the same mistakes over and over.
> ALL banner advertising would be affected by this change.

No, it wouldn't. That's what several people in this discussion have been trying to explain.

Banners hosted locally and not by a third party service probably won't be affected at all.

Even banners hosted by a third party service won't be affected if they chose their content based only on the nature of the site where the banner would appear.

The only people who will lose out are the ad networks that track users as they move around different sites, and their business model and working practices are incompatible with my ethics (and, apparently, those of many other people, including those governing at EU level).

We should lose the conditionals, by the way. This has already been approved at EU level, and it will therefore become law throughout the EU in due course unless something dramatic happens. Given that the only people I've seen objecting even slightly seem to be those who are currently doing exactly the dubious things that these measures are intended to prohibit, "something dramatic" seems unlikely.

> Without that ability it will be hard (impossible?) to rate limit campaigns to users, thus increasing the cost effectiveness to the advertiser and eventually hurting publishers as advertising money is diverted elsewhere.

Why can't the advertisers simply re-evaluate the rates they pay per impression based on the expected cost/benefit under the new model?

Or just adopt one of the many pricing models that is based on actual results like CPC, instead of assuming that CPM is always going to be the right answer?
I've been using Instagram casually for a couple of weeks while I've been playing with the API and I never realized this was even an option. A line of text on the profile tab of the app, 'More options are in the Settings app' is confusing.

I wonder what the reason for sticking that option over there is? If it had been on the app's settings/profile tab I would have set it a while ago.
Sending me an email so I can go to the website and submit my email again so I can get another email later on, it just seems a bit redundant :)

Since conference is quite soon anyway I thought it would be a better move to just open the registration and then do the promotion, but hey I'm sure you guys got something in your mind like defining the price based on interest, or something like that.
Activist short seller targeting for-profit colleges
ITA uses Lisp and was bought by Google for $700M.
Disqus to Facebook: "We Aren’t Shaking In Our Boots"
If you made the same thing for your ex-girlfriend, she'd probably be able to get a restraining order against you.
Nice. When I go for the "Flowdock" option, have the focus on the First Name textbox.
So, what do you do (or have you done) if your boss is a fairly rational geek-type?

I'm a geek and am sympathetic to the problems you've described, but for me negotiating salaries is every bit as miserable from the other side of the fence (I run a startup) for the same reasons (introverted, etc.). When I encounter engineers who have been "hardened" by crummy bosses in the past, I often just toss salary negotiations off onto my business and sales-minded cofounder who doesn't mind playing hardball.
You'll also want to investigate Prolog. That's the grandfather of pattern-matching tree-manipulation languages. Also, it is dynamically typed if that floats your boat more than Haskell or ML. ML always forces you to deal with incomplete patterns, but you need to specifically ask your Haskell compiler to warn you about incomplete patterns.

It is hard to beat Prolog for quickly whipping up prototype language interpreters. Besides pattern matching, there are easy to use symbols (just start a word with a lower case letter), declarative semantics, definite clause grammars (for parsing), user definable infix, prefix, and postfix operators, etc
Inside the deal that made Bill Gates $350,000,000
A large raise involves my manager walking up to the owner of the company and laying out a case for why the owner of the company should have less money in his pocket every month, because I'm so important to the company. If I then quit while that conversation is still fresh in mind, say, within a couple of years, my manager will lose credibility with the owner. This seems to articulate best the reasons, but to be honest, it's less logical and more from the gut. In my gut, it just seems like I'm "honor bound" to commit for a long time after receiving a large raise.
The need is simple: The search box sends what you type in it to your search provider immediately. So if they're combined, there's no way to type a url without your search provider knowing what URL you typed.

Now maybe you're OK with that. But a lot of users are not (including non-technical users who don't even realize this behavior exists; once you explain what the unified bar does to them they become _very_ unhappy).
We know most people will be paying out of pocket so we're doing our best to keep the cost as low as possible. Price should be in the $700 range, but we plan to offer pre-launch tix to people on the email list (as mentioned on microconf.com) for around $500.
This is bullshit. Go ask right now. Don't be demanding, just seek the information of whether or not you can get a raise that you deserve. That information may be, "No" for a variety of reasons, but your assumptions about what those are could be complete fantasy. Go seek the information.

Become an "asker". Do it today. People that ask for what they want get told "No" a lot, they also hear "Yes" some of the time-that is they hear it infinitely more than the people who do not ask. I realized this a couple of years ago and it changed my life. Make peace with hearing "No" and start asking for stuff.

Unless it would truly get you fired, come up with three legitimate single-sentence reasons you deserve a raise and go ask RIGHT NOW. You chance is now, it's always NOW.
Git your instant Tweet Convo Wall, supporting 36 Photo Providers
If the biggest barrier to hiring at a startup is that most people think the situation too risky, then anything that might push normal people towards startups is good. I can easily imagine people stressed at large companies that choose startups for better work-family balance (which isn't the same as fewer working hours) that would join a startup just for the family culture.

Maybe one reason big companies get slower is that as they age, the young folks start having kids. This translates to less and worse work than before, but the blame is on the company which didn't shift it's culture. I guess some of these ideas wouldn't scale, but to my knowledge, they haven't been tried at scale.
Reminds me of the post by Mark Suster => invest in lines, not in dots :
http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-line...

I think it goes the same way for (co)founders: partner in lines, not in dots. Your relationship with potential cofounders shouldn't start the day you're looking for one.
This Is What The Happiest Person On Earth Looks Like
While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't exactly "sweep the market"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)
The analogy isn't perfect, but you could say this about any product that gets iteratively improved annually, like cars. Just because there is a new model that is intentionally better than last year's model doesn't mean it is a planned obsolescence scheme. Particularly in the technology world, almost all companies are hoping to have an improved product every year... it doesn't mean they are willfully manipulating you.
>>But why are these things so often scheduled for weekdays?

In our case, a couple reasons:

1. We surveyed about a dozen people interested in attending and nearly all of them said they couldn't do a weekend, but could make weekdays work. Obviously 12 people is a small sample size, but the response was overwhelming.

2. Since we are trying to keep the ticket cost as low as possible, weekdays are ideal since they are cheaper for the hotels we looked at.

But I certainly understand your point; for some people weekends would be better. For others, weekdays.
Because you have more than one person you're working with at a time. You get X% of their offer. If they get a higher offer, you get (X+delta)%. If that delta% of the offer that makes up your difference is lower than the value of your time spent doing other things (finding someone else a job), then it doesn't make sense for you to spend the time.

That's the basic issue. If you're getting 5%, then by definition you should care 5% as much as the candidate what the final salary ends up being, and thus care much less if it's a little bit lower than it could have been.
> With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and it uses the antenna better.

I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.
The employees, as people, probably do want to provide good customer service!

There are other good points in this thread about PayPal's risk mitigation model. I think that this basically deepens the parallel to Google. When the service works, it's genuinely great - that's part of why they're such a dominant force. The problem is that when it breaks, generally it breaks in horrid ways. People like the HN crowd, who are strongly disposed towards trying to do new things that previous models may not account for, are the most likely to find cases where the system breaks, and to suffer the effects of the breakage.
Anyone remember a really old free game that came on floppies (5.25")? I think it was from BusinessWeek and came out around 1989. You ran Microsoft for 5 years and tried to maximize your profits (or share value).

I remember that the best I could do was cut all their product (Word, Excel, Windows, DOS, ?) prices to the bare minimum ($8-20) for a year or two, lock up market share, then jack the prices the $500-1000 range. I thought it was pretty unrealistic at the time.
Sales Management: Company Culture Comes First
I think that the government would like their known malware to be blocked, otherwise they have to deal with potentially cooked information.
Did you file a bug on this? If not, could you do that please? Since people aren't seeing this in general, your help would presumably be needed to narrow this down....
I've had this problem with almost ever pre-2.5 resource. On the plus side, the UI is a tad bit more intuitive, so what would have taken a half hour to find is now just a trip to the bathroom and the inevitable "Oh wait, I bet it's under XYZ, DUH!" moment.
I would rather have Clear Case than SVN. As bad as it is, at least it can branch and merge.
Kids will be growing up with desktop computers for a long time to come, and now they have a fun and lucrative platform they can write programs for. It's a great time to be a budding hacker.

That said, a sort of elementary tool to make toy apps or games on the iPad would be a good gateway drug.
Ask HN: Are online lotteries/sweepstakes/pools legal and can they be successful?
I had a random idea this afternoon for a quick weekend coding session involving online betting pools with a social twist, I'd like to know if these can or have been successful or are they best to be avoided. Additionally for a gambling website are you liable in your country of residence or in the country the website is hosted in? Would HN members ever play any betting games etc
Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.
I don't know if turning off access to a clearly in-progress and not meant for public use SIP project that somehow got stumbled upon means Google hates SIP. I think it means they are working on something and will release it when it is done.

I mean, c'mon, Google is building SIP support directly into their phone OS. They aren't against you. Be patient.
It’s not a question of getting the absolute minimum salary, but of getting less than the absolute maximum.

If I recall correctly, the authors of Freakanomics discovered that when real-estate agents sell their own houses, they sell for a higher price than comparable houses where a non-agent used an agent as a middleman. This confirms the hypothesis that agents are willing to compromise on price to close the deal sooner.
A bit off topic, but during past years I've changed from extremely introvert to occasional extrovert. And in the process, I find that the best mentality is to not take anyone too seriously, especially myself.

In the past, when others behave slightly offensive to me, verbally or physically, I'd duck and paint him as a bully; but now, I take those as jokes and if they are funny, I laugh. Occasionally I act offensively too, (hopefully) in a funny way, and that actually makes people like me more than when I respected everyone.
I hear you, but that's not in your own interest to feel that way. Honor in this case is meeting your commitments, your explicit commitments. In this case, you are -- at least in you words here -- negotiating against yourself. Count on the owner and your boss to act in their own interest, for themselves.
Video: Hands-On With The Quirky Switch Modular Pocketknife
Sweet; see you there.
Besides other good things about shifting teacher's work from lecturing to actually spending time with kids that were mentioned here, I would like to point out that some teachers are really bad lecturers. My most vivid impressions are from early collage math courses but it is as valid for high school as well. The professor can lead the lecture at million words a minute constantly erasing the board so you don't have the time to copy the material, let alone let it sink in. The professor can have heavy accent, so you spend most of you attention just trying to understand his words.
Web Culture: Grid-based Layout Designs
The semantic web has brought on a new generation of Internet technology. As designers and developers work together to redefine the rules of the web, the number of open-source projects and third-party APIs continues to grow. The opinions of web scholars differ on the use of grid systems. Many argue that setting grid points limits the creativity of designers. Others contend that a grid provides a scientific basis for a design to be perfected.
On my last job change I went from games development to a trading software gig. As an experienced games developer I as making less than £30K and I told the recruiter I wouldn't consider anything in finance for less than £45K. When he said that it was a huge jump in salary and that I would never get it I told him that it was a different industry and that game programmers are often underpaid. Turns out the entry level positions were all starting from £40k and I got a job for 2x what I was making before. Now, I have to add that I really didn't care if I got the job or not since I was hating myself for going to finance and I actually bullied the recruiter to work harder to find a role that suited me. Being able to walk out on a deal is a powerful motivator.