skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not about identity, it's about choice. Alex has made his choice, now he's trying to force it on others as if it is in fact gospel.

I don't care what people call me. I don't care personally that Alex slammed my business. I know what I'm doing is right for me, because I get to reap the rewards every day.

But what I do care about is that this further stifles the discussion of choice. There is so little presented about bootstrapping. There are so few role models. It's an information wasteland, like I wrote in "Drawing Back the Curtain":

http://unicornfree.com/2011/drawing-back-the-curtain/

Most people don't realize that "tech business" and "funded startup" aren't the same thing. Most people truly believe that they couldn't start a company on the side. They may believe that they are a caged lion because they have a job (as per your metaphor [1]), but that there is nothing for them between being a caged lion forever and having to have some kind of earth-shattering idea that will get funded by somebody so they can develop it full time just to see where it goes.

THAT is what Justin Vincent is railing against: the lack of choice, the "soaking in it" issue, the conflation of "tech business" and "funded startup". The lack of apparent choice. That's what I write against, too.

Justin never wrote about "This is what you should do," he said "This is what you see everywhere but look, there's a totally different way." Alex, on the other hand, slammed my work as an individual. And told us all that merely seeking happiness is not enough for the world, because he's a secular humanist.

Tack-y. Chilling effect. Just like labeling somebody else's business a "lifestyle business" just because it is bootstrapped.

That is the core problem: the attempt to discredit anyone who does things differently. The attempt to stomp out anyone trying to pull the "norm" over from one extreme. Labeling -- such as "oh, that's just a lifestyle business" -- is a way of trying to shut down the discussion.

And witnessing THAT behavior is why everyone is so engaged.

[1] By the way, if we're talking about matters of identity... caged lion? Hackers are like painters? If those aren't appeals to identity, I don't know what is.
France and the US start attacking Gaddafi's forces: Operation Odyssey Dawn
Frankfurt – Germany
Did you work at the same place I do now(small-town paper in the Pacific NW)? Being the sole developer there, I can absolutely confirm this. And since I was hired to write the website CMS, most of my days resemble the assembly line segment from Chaplin's Modern Times.
In general, I think that this is not good advice.

It is not a bad idea to buy a modest size home that meets your family's needs for a reasonable price.

As you get older and have hopefully had a good career, try to own at least two modest homes and become a landlord.

There is a good chance that we will see a lot of inflation in the next 10 years or so. If this happens, owning rental property may help to protect your assets.
Even though your vision is probably right, I'm not entirely happy with it. I love choice, I love being able to choose a certain processor and GPU and upgrading one of them after a year.

I'm probably the minority though, so business wise it makes sense.
Similar to http://www.synchtube.com/
I don't know what you imply with fever

Let me help. The "fever" line is an offhand reference to this fairly famous piece of American culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_cowbell

You should obviously not feel ashamed for missing the reference completely. ;)
U.S. launches first missiles against Gadhafi forces
You're right, a lot of things take years of experience to learn, which is why solving a difficult problem is not the only way I evaluate a candidate. I definitely look at their previous experiences.

But someone who is so specialized that they can't solve problems outside their area of expertise would worry me. I don't expect a programmer to learn heart surgery, but if you've been doing C++ for years, I'd expect you to pick up Javascript in a month or two.

Now, in terms of "knowing who we actually need to be hiring for," I know exactly. I want someone who can do their thing well but shift and learn as technologies change and as the business grows, and potentially do things they've never done before well. It's integral to have people like this in any start-up (any of USV's portfolio companies) or a fast-growing company like FB.

The trick for me is, how do I evaluate this?

Lastly, here's a real-life example that hope illustrates what I'm looking for. At an old job we had built a web app that monitored an embedded device via ajax polling. The client liked the solution, but found it impractical to always have a browser window open. None of the engineering team had any experience w/ XMPP, but our research and discussions with the client led to an XMPP-based solution. We didn't have time or money to hire an XMPP specialist and we didn't want to lose the client. We had to learn and adjust.

I've already brought my partner on that project aboard my new company. But every time I step into an interview, I am wondering how I can find someone like her.
I'm still not sure if giving TechCrunch negative attention is a good or a bad idea, because it almost seems as though they have something to gain from the added spotlight (even if it is negative). It seems that the best way to go about doing things is blocking TC from your Google results using that handy Chrome extension, not bothering to visit TC links, and not posting TC links to HN.
not in reference to http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/19/rip-digg/ ?

ObWhine: To my mind, Hacker News is more about innovation and information (verb), so I felt the need to inform.
Why I Won’t Pay For ‘The Daily’ And I Will Pay For The Digital ‘NYT’
Yearly Leaf: “It’s A Coffee Table Book Meets A Moleskine For The Facebook Set”
Thank you for your feedback! To answer your observations:

About importing contacts, I think you don't need all your contacts on it, but I guess you might only import a few, so I'll add it!

The site uses your nickname because that's what you ostensibly want to see when you get a link, "Stavros has sent you a link!" rather than the email address. You just stumbled on a weird corner case :) To clarify, the site uses the nickname the recipient has set, so your friends will see "revorad has sent you a link" (or whatever each person calls you) rather than "me".

The email you get has both a link to the site and the original link, a bit further below.

I hope you find the tool useful, thanks again!
What if you earned badges at work instead of job titles?
U.S. Launches Missile Strikes On Libya
Wired for Distraction: Kids and Social Media
Thank you, I hope you find it useful!
The point of dunning-kruger effect is not that there's no correlation- it's just not linear. Studies show there is a tier of most competent people who tend to rate themselves lower than the secondmost tier of competence, who rate themselves higher due to a combination of signaling effects and dunning-kruger ("too dumb to know how dumb you are," or more accurately, "not quite smart enough to know that there is a lot you don't know").
I like it. A more fun way to spend your time if you're a person who watches videos on youtube all day.
What? All I had to fill out was my name, email address, country, company and username/password. Took me all of fifteen seconds. It brings you direct to a download link, so could use a throwaway username/password/email if you wanted.
Split it into ten groups of ten with a mouse per group. One mouse dies. Split that mouse's group into ten groups of one with one mouse for each group. There is a leftover group since one of your mice died, but it doesn't matter. If none of the other mice die you can deduce that the untested bottle contains the poison.

Two poison applications to find the right answer, so it only takes ten minutes. Lock the door and tell the guests who arrive you will be there in a minute so you have a bit of breathing room in which to prepare your bottles.
Android already supports Theora, WebM, and H.264 -- what do you feel its native support is lacking?

Manufacturers put Flash on tablets/phones as mindless "differentiation", an extra checkbox to wave in front of consumers. There's no technical reason for Android to support Flash, and (as this article demonstrates) numerous good reasons not to.
Nice work. Voting for the next video is great! I can see this becoming really popular.
What is with the photo chosen for this article? Some random dude signing a girl's chest?
I found out after I bought it that this design as been rolling out of china for nearly 20 years under hundreds of different names. There's a giant community built up around modifying this thing (and its cousin the mini-mill) in order to get decent results.

Start drinking from the firehose here:

http://www.mini-lathe.com/
Memories of System 7.5
Given the constraints (10 minutes total, 5 minutes for poison to kill), you can also divide the wine into 10 groups and assign each group to each of the 10 mice. The mice then drink samples from every bottle in his group, and after 5 minutes, the one that dies has the group with poison in it. You then assign each of the rats a bottle from this group, and then see which one of them dies. If they all live, then the remaining bottle is poisoned.

Granted, your solution is better, but you can solve this problem without binary tricks.
Poor Digg staff.

I hear Reddit is hiring engineers...
I had a similar idea to this with some minor differences around 2-3 years ago but never ended up implementing it.

Instead of doing this for streaming videos, maybe you could do stuff for TV programs (such a primetime TV or news) so that people could chat with other people in real time when watching TV.
The reason for #1 is because fluid layouts can force text lines to stretch on wide screen monitors. As such, the line becomes harder to read.
A Tale of Customer Service : Apple vs Nokia
Apple is in the business of making Customers Happy, while the rest of the industry is in the business of making money. The past few years, have been anything but indicative as to who is winning. If you are building a product today, what you are really selling is the Customer Service, not the product in itself.

Nokia, and the rest of the industry, please get in the business of keeping of your users Happy, and not treat like them piece of shit. Apple needs some serious competition.
There's no forcing done here actually. I worked on a Windows stack for many years (including loving the Visual Studio IDE). Eclipse or other IDEs would not be counter-cultural at all, it's just there isn't a need for that given the languages we work in. I also have 2 Windows machines at home, 1 Ubuntu VM, 2 Ubuntu machines (although one died), access to CentOS, and recently got an MacBook Air for home too. I thought I would be best at my work with a MBP and chose that among my options between a Mac/PC.

It's true that we don't have that many requirements at that low-level right now, but we certainly do have some work done lower than the web-stack -- we even got an ex-Ksplice engineer joining us to help with that.

But maybe I could also have included some of the deficiencies too, to make it a little more balanced--I agree with you it does seem too rosy with what I had mentioned, but overall the experience has been really positive. I've tried to keep things as real as possible, no-holds barred, instead of being filled with corporate imagery. So you can see the messy desks, cardboard boxes, boring food, lack of 6-core Xeons with 12GB RAMs :)
While the legal system is different and courts cannot define new legislation, they can decide how to interprete existing legislation - if they do so it's possible that other courts will follow (however, they do not need to follow).
The thing I found by far the most interesting is about the sales process / incentives.

On the one hand, Apple is not encouraging dysfunctional competition within the team:

> We aren't paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you're not selling enough.

And yet on the other, they are:

> We have a posted list of our metrics, and you can see everybody else's. It shows you how much money each person is pulling in for the company. If you aren't doing very well, you start getting manager meetings, and they sit you down and try to figure out why you aren't selling more.

The best explanation of this I've seen is in the work of W. Edwards Deming. His Red Bead experiment demonstrates that in any system, there will be variation that is due to the system itself, and not due to the individual efforts of the staff themselves. Because of this, league tables and metrics randomly and arbitrarily punish people for performance variation that is out of their control.

http://www.redbead.com/what/

Deming even listed "evaluation by performance" as one of the seven deadly diseases afflicting the western economy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly_...

On that basis, I find it strangely contradictory that a company with such ongoing quality efforts as Apple has produced a sales process absent of the disease of sales commission, yet still suffering the disease of Evaluation by Performance.

It's possible, however, that Apple is being more sophisticated than the post author realises. If they have statistical control charts, for example, there may well be no contradiction here at all (they would only be reviewing exceptional outliers). But with Apple's tight-lipped nature, I don't know if the evidence to decide that is out there yet.
I don't think Click to Flash is the optimal solution. On the PC side it still loads Flash objects, they just aren't displayed. It also skews feedback. If developers think that flash is being represented in mobile devices when its not that only causes them to divert resources from creating mobile HTML versions of sites.
Kind of like a huge ycombinator.
I like the concept. It's sort of like watching TV with a bunch of friends. Interactive voting on the next video is very cool.

But, here's your biggest challenge: This concept doesn't work without a bunch of users showing up at the same time.

Tomorrow, when this is off the front page of HN, how do you plan to get people to come back? If you can solve that, you've got something.
Interesting reasoning behind the distinction the judge made. A router doesn't meet the legal definition of a computer. Here's a judge with some understanding of technology. I'm not a lawyer, but I assume in the U.S. this would still qualify as some sort of wire fraud or trespass. No law against illegal use of a telecom network in the Netherlands?
Nostalgia so strong I got vertigo. Aldus Pagemaker, System 7 on the MacintoshLC's in the computer lab.

The were color dammit. In 1992 when the school got these, it seemed like a time machine had dropped them off. They had hard disks! Even my Amiga was jealous.
There seems to be an unsatisfactory gray area between slack technology and misguided editorial practice (assuming better guidelines help create more substantial/enjoyable journalism).

With adequate tools for making the sourcing process as effortless as possible (see Jeremy Ashkenas' and Scott Klein's comments) it ought to remain an optional value-add for publishers: those who don't mind having their sourcing restricted to press releases, effort-obscuring generalizations or PR-driven 3rd party referencing won't encourage technologies that would enable their newsrooms leverage their in-house professionalism, regardless of its potential.

Linking/referencing is fundamental to good, original content, whatever the medium (see randlet's comment). If publishing software won't support easy source accreditation (particularly in a web-focused, hyper-linking context), journalists and editors are going to lose out - either by facing a 'keep my job vs. best practices' drama or by becoming disillusioned with the chance of success their organization has in maximizing the credibility of the staff input going into evolving their brand itself.

Taking their access to low cost, more modern publishing tools as a given, perhaps in more dynamic/educational reporting environments they should exploit software with prompts - asking authors to confirm that their content is 100% lacking of any derivative work, sources, or any mere cursory reference to any other material/commentary out there. This might even help less experienced journalists off-set some of the responsibility they have in bringing new ideas to the attention of their demanding readers ('this is my article, but here's some source curation for you, while I get my story straight'). Of course software that assumes any kind of pedagogical role is just as likely to become demonized by journalists who resent tools for their antiquated inefficiency. There's a fine line.

Services like DocumentCloud are vital in all this. As ilamont points out, there are also practical hurdles to overcome: even if you have the technology and inclination towards sourcing best practices, if you're running an online publication there's still the knee-jerk reaction to want to obscure your primary source, in case it out-performs your own content and thereby undermines your credibility. That's a question of quality and self awareness, though. The credibility loop will eventually hit your property, one way or the other.
Not true. Granted, court rulings are more important in the US, but Dutch judges will definitely take old cases into consideration. Take a look here for a short explanation: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudentie (Dutch link, I'm sorry.)
Perhaps a diesel engine is even more prone to the cooling effect, since (it is my understanding) diesels don't have throttles to limit the amount of air pumped through the engine on each rotation.
Places I rented over the years either had music blaring next door or loud parties periodically or I could hear other couples having sex, cockroaches from neighbors, etc. (this was in the nicer areas).

I've had my fill of all that. Owning a home is just as cheap as renting one in my area. The peace and quiet I have is priceless.
Just wanted to clarify a harmless misquote - the corrected is: "and I don't wanna talk to a scientist, y'all motherfuckers lyin', and gettin' me pissed"

The correction draws you into the mindset of a killa fuckin' clown writing lyrics in criticism of an alleged killa fuckin' scientist abusing his/her socially granted authority.

Sure, Scientists can "give him shit", that's fine as it is, but in my opinion, in the corrected form, Shaggy expresses a bit of anger and resentment: "gettin' me pissed".

The corrected, to me, conveys an active and growing defiance. whereas the misquote suggests a passive complacency.

Rather than accepting allegedly fraudulent claims (in this case, the infamous inner workings of magnets), I believe he is offering an allusion of menace to the scientific community members that would mindfully work to subdue his demonstrated and consciously limited, yet poignant, understanding of the nature of reality.

Although some might consider that in poor taste and perhaps ignorant, I believe he is expressing the autonomous freedom of thought awarded to us all by virtue of birth.

Science is a bliss I truly appreciate and I long for keen minds to show me new and exciting discoveries where I can offer in kind in my own studies.

Indeed an interesting conversation. Hope more of y'all chime in on this.

Bustin' out semantics in this bitch.
Sure, I checked out jquery mobile before starting with this and would suggest everyone else does the same, actually a bit silly to leave that out of the article.

I decided against using jquerymobile for 2 reasons,

1. the page loading / transitions are extremely buggy for me, clicking a link can cause 3/4 page flashes for me on the current online demo.

2. having previously been burned by jquery ui, I love jquery because its a tiny library I add that enforces nothing on me, jquery ui is large and its quite hard to take a little bit out of it that you like, a lot of that is due to its themeing library, jquery mobile felt more like jquery ui to me more than jquery plain.

extracting the click / tap support into a plugin I could use with plain jquery would be a massive win for me.
If there are answers to questions that result in your information not being passed on to someone who you'll actually be working with then it's a phone screen.
That's Kevin Rose. You can't tell because he's backing the camera.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/167663907/
That's Kevin Rose. You can't tell because he's backing the camera.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/167663907/
You've posted 600 stories in 80 days. I got curious when I saw two back to back posts from you about the US air strikes.

Is this a HN story? We need fewer submissions here, not more. HN is supposed to be more focused.
I was actually looking for exactly what you describe yesterday. Does anyone know if such a thing exists for bare metal servers?
> HN is not a business, and generates no revenue.

Off topic, but still: While HN is not a business on it's own, I would be very surprised to learn that the mind-share for, and applications to, YCombinator generated by HN doesn't comfortably out-weight PGs investment in it.
You can always combine a fluid layout with a max-width for your text. Besides its not the width of the monitor that matters, its the width of the windows and I like my windows narrow, thank you very much. I used to be able to do this, but then they went and broke Readability :-(.
Oh man, Macintosh LC! We had 575s in my school's computer lab and I know exactly what you mean. Almost alien technology or something. They were so damned cool.
Show HN : we built FreeFreeBeer.com to help you close SXSW in style
In the last 48 hours we built a mobile app to help people find free beer at SXSW: http://www.freefreebeer.com We have an html version online now & an iPhone native version will be in the AppStore soon. Tell me what you think!

If you feel like discussing the actual website/app, do so here. If you feel like discussing the general sentiment that prompted us to build this, maybe the other thread is a better place?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2344324
Wave itself was ahead of it's time. i was using it very much.
I think unifying the assembly language would be quite difficult given the large churn in the underlying hardware architectures as the GPUs evolve. DirectX is mostly fine, and it has served well to allow games to continue to operate even when they were developed against much older versions of the API.

Perhaps more work can be done driver side. For example, allow developers to hint at the formats of data used so the driver doesn't always have to check degenerate conditions, like textures of a certain size or mismatches in vertex shader outputs and pixel shader inputs. Maybe the old capabilities model of DX9 would allow the option of a faster path.
Unusual Ways in Which I Attracted Wealth into my Life