skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a few points:

* Your customers/clients don't care how much you work. The only thing they care about is whether you can help them solve their problems. If you do that consistently, you'll be fine.

* More work =/= more quality output; in fact I'd argue that after a certain amount of work, it is an inverse relationship.

* Find ways to solve more with less: write less code and still have features. Have fewer servers and still handle the traffic. Work less and still get things done. It's incredibly empowering.

* Knowledge, experience and honed intuition more than compensates for fewer hours of work. My suspicion is that a lot the extra work performed at startups is needed because of inexperience. I worked at a very early stage startup and it seems that a lot effort was spent on getting systems to work as they were supposed to (usually bleeding edge systems). We also spent a ton of time learning to deal with the data volumes we handled; in hindsight most solutions we arrived at were known and publicly available at the time, we just didn't know (enough) about them.

Background: I'm currently moonlighting on a startup idea while having a family and working 9-5. It can be done but you need to leverage other people's work as much as possible and need to be very disciplined. I use the best systems/libraries/services I know to basically outsource everything that's not core to my startup idea. I also consciously set aside time to be with my loved ones: dinner, bedtime stories, weekend hikes and trips etc. Being successful is only meaningful to me if my kids know me in person, not just as a distant figure.
Ask HN: How can I get people at school to check out my 'game'?
I'm a student at college and I've made a 'game' that I think is well targeted for the demographics here. I've tried putting fliers on the walls, but the turn around hasn't been so great. Anyone have any other suggestions? I've only got a week left at school so I want to make it worth while (I'd also be willing to do something extreme given that I'm done soon).
How about the standard of putting the name of the product on the outside of the packaging?

How about the gold standard?

Also- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#Examples_of_open_...

http://media.mises.org/mp3/interviews/murphy1.mp3
Support or bugs go to support@schedulingapp.com. There's a support link in the bottom right of the app as well.
I can't comment on how Phusion Passenger Standalone differs from Pow because I've never used Pow. However I can tell you what Phusion Passenger Standalone's benefits are:

1. Phusion Passenger is currently the most popular production server for Ruby web apps (see ruby-toolbox.com and the last NewRelic survey). Phusion Passenger Standalone is practically the same as Phusion Passenger for Nginx. It's a good thing to have the development environment match the production environment as much as possible. Phusion Passenger actually comes in 3 editions: Phusion Passenger for Apache (integrates into Apache), Phusion Passenger for Nginx (integrates into Nginx) and Phusion Passenger Standalone (can run by itself, does not require an external web server).

2. Because Standalone is based on an Nginx core it's even fit for production. According to the Pow website it uses Nack, which according to its website is not ready for production. If 'passenger start' works for you locally then you can run the same thing in production. No need to learn how Apache and Nginx works.

There are other things as well, but I have to go in a few minutes. Feel free to ask me more questions if you like.
The market inhibitor for scheduling software/app is usually the mixed needs factor.

Offices have very little requirements for scheduling and the product would have to so much "better" than stubby pencil or excel that it is hard to drive usage.

On the other hand service industries with volume concerns are so in depth with regards to scheduling that the product must integrate projections and production demands. The problem being that what those two words mean to each company is different. How each company employs the basics of volume projections are not standard.

I have spent a decade vetting software and products to make scheduling easier but in the end the main inhibitor to adoption is ease of use. If it isn’t substantially easier to use and just as accurate and communicative as the original practice then adoption is a negative.

Sorry for any typos.
One confounding variable might be that strange, arbitrary rules cause too much cognitive dissonance (distracting, tangential thoughts) for the test subjects to apply their reasoning skills effectively. When the the rule is more like something one would find in the real world, people would be free to concentrate on the reasoning.

We therefore need to think of a 'real life' rules that's equivalent but does not involve cheating... like

If you became a lawyer, you went to law school.

If you didn't go to law school, you're not a lawyer.

Test:

[Is a lawyer] [Is a doctor] [Went to medical school] [Went to law school]

Actually, looking at it, there seems to be something counter-intuitive about the phrasing anyway. We usually would clarify by saying something like 'all lawyers started in law school, but not all law students managed to become practicing lawyers.' All calls to the subclass were dispatched from the parent, but the parent could have dispatched the call to a different subclass as it is polymorphic.
Anonymous goes after Sony, makes it personal... very personal
You mean MS isn't applying the "Business X-Ray" and start cutting products? :)

Right now, the only MS product I rely on is...

...

...
...

Yeah. Everything MS that I use is in a support role (Windows). I don't use any MS products directly.
Yeah, I realized this too while using it. But then how would you delete a pixel? I would need to add an eraser tool, which means I need to rethink some of the UI, etc. So I decided to keep things simple for the MVP.
I don't know. Probably not, but it's sometimes convenient to do so.

Well, I've did so when I had to debug some redirect caching problem with "walled garden" setup. This could also be done with a more specialized software, though, I just happened to use telnet as it was readily available.

I also sometimes check server's availability (and overall response correctnes) by telnetting to it. Although, I was just too lazy to set up a tunnel to the LAN they're residing at.
The difference between "based-on" and "Windows everywhere" is subtle, but makes for a huge difference. Apple is willing to fit the right parts in place where Microsoft has made some truly bad and confusing technology selections (e.g. full Windows on tablets instead of a grown-up phone OS).
So good to see all those website. Job searching and recruiting is ready to be disrupted and I'm glad to see those guys sticking it to "the man"!
> I'd really like to see him follow the "New Detroit" idea and announce a major re-thinking of the company.

How about we wait until "new Detroit" actually succeeds before using it as a model?

Folks are constantly doing "major re-thinking" of various things and most of the ones that get implemented turn out to be disasters, especially the urban ones. ("The projects" were one such "re-think".)
Ask HN: How much energy should a software startup spend securing IP patents?
Any examples of software startups who's success or failure was visibly influenced by software patents is welcome along with founders general views into the value of software patents for early stage companies.<p>Please leave the debate of the morality of software patents, patent reform, etc for another thread.
Totally agree with this. We were using WebSockets initially and it worked great in Chrome and not too well everywhere else. We got the exact same user experience/effect by switching over to XHR with a fairly frequent polling interval. It's much more reliable and we found it easier to program, test, and debug.
App Alerts Drivers to DUI Checkpoints - Angers Senators
The best example I could find is about non-profits: http://nvs.sagepub.com/content/39/6/1057.abstract

But I think the same principles would apply to for-profits.
The only other examples I have are anecdotal.
eBay has extraordinarily strong network effects. To beat them, make something designed very well for a particular vertical and build a strong following there. Like StubHub did in event tickets.
Macabacus - Everything about Mergers and Acquisitions
I think you'd benefit from replacing the screenshot of the "my office scheduling" page on the homepage, with an explanatory graphic. The text there is too small to read, but I found myself squinting to make it out to try to glean the features I could expect from the product. As an example, I cite Highrise's homepage: http://highrisehq.com/, where icons and descriptive text are used to better present what I can do with the application.

I think that having two metrics of plan/pricing levels is confusing. I'd like to purchase by users in my office, but I don't care how many gigabytes of storage space it costs you. It's also not clear exactly what counts towards that storage quota. Will you be tallying the space used by my calendar events in your database? Will there be a feature where I can upload large files to share with appointments? I couldn't find an explanation of why I'd want to pay for storage space anywhere. Once this is defined, maybe an add-on of 'n' gigabytes of addon storage can be purchased for those requiring the additional space- but right now it just appears to be one more thing to confuse someone about to make a purchase.
As for "the stuff that got downloaded and compiled on my machine", that's Nginx being downloaded and compiled there. Nginx is a high-performance, lightweight, extremely stable, battle-tested and proven web server.

Hypothetically speaking, it's possible to modify Phusion Passenger to not download and install Nginx. We can run on a pure-Ruby web server like WEBrick. However I guarantee you, WEBrick sucks; it's slow, buggy and leaks memory.
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful response. I do have some questions for you.

- How did you market it?

- You said you talked to local businesses and chains. What did you do to get to them? What was most effective?

- Are there any marketing avenues you think should be avoided?

- Are there any features which you found to be not worth it? I'm keeping it simple for now but would appreciate knowing where not to take it.

- What finally made you decide to abandon it? What did you do with your customers?
> I don't understand how this is any different from running the application after you install it

I'll tell you one difference. It takes me 10 minutes to review the shell based installer. It takes a whole lot longer to inspect an installation package or application source code.
Check out this previous thread: 32 years on, K&R's "The C Programming Language" still stands alone

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1245255
Finally some opinion I can agree with. I have a suspicion it's some perception thing, like the opinion leaders proclaimed that "Microsoft isn't innovative" and every media repeat that.

Actually, Microsoft is an innovative company, and after reading the blog of the Win7 developers, their software development methodology is far ahead of most other software companies. Maybe, just maybe, they are around for a long time a became very big, so people expect more of them...or, I don't know.
There are a lot more devices on the route between the browser and the server -- they all currently expect TCP.

Few examples: firewalls, load balancers, etc.
Your comment didn't indicate to me that you needed help. I'll try to be helpful, but i can't do anything about the pompousness, sorry. :D

So, how can I help you?
Bold and/or bigger and a slightly darker gray could make it work. it's the only real color on the page.
It's not about the fact that open sourcing this info affects their bottom line as much as it is about responsibly contributing to the progress and advancement of computing... however it should be noted that for years, google has been very secretive about all aspects of its internal DC designs.

The fact they were making their own equipment, incorporating UPS functions in the power supplies of their servers, how they were cooling - the fact they get the cheapest cabling possible etc etc all played to their competitive advantage.

Highly efficient low cost commodity gear results directly in lower TCO / OPEX thus allowing you to do more where it counts.

With the mass defection of high level folks from google to facebook, and with the very agile innovative team that facebook has, it is just expected that strides in these areas would occur there as well.

This is one area where I have a lot of respect for what facebook is doing.

The impact may not be direct to tiny web companies - but organizations that have massive energy costs, specifically hospitals, can greatly benefit from this information.

The problem is though that hospitals are not IT companies, and thus they dont focus on the physical characteristics of their equipment or directly look at the designs of their datacenters as they buy gear from the big names we all know.

If companies like google and facebook work to get the suppliers to incorporate these design elements - it will result in organizations like hospitals benefiting in the long term. This is a good thing.

El Camino Hospital in Mountain View pays over $500K PER MONTH in power. Imagine if they can reduce that by say 20%

The biggest take away I have in looking at this information is the POE LED Lighting. I am really interested in this because of the impact it has on the overall electrical infrastructure in a large building.

Currently, you design your infrastructure so that you have emergency power backing your MPOE, DC and IDFs. This means that the more POE devices you have off the IDF, when utility power goes out, your supporting those devices via the UPS/generator infrastructure.

If you add lighting to this, its going to redistribute costs from the electrical/infrastructure expense to install and power the lighting, to adding a port on the switch and the requisite load on the IT side. I assume that the wattage per lumins could be less - and the overall cost of emergency lighting could be reduced in a very large facility.

This is right in line with the idea of "Technology is a utility" -- the number of devices and range of services we now hang off the network is amazing - lighting is just another example, and this will ultimately simplify and reduce the wiring infrastructure in your building.
I was planning on doing a bit of online marketing but mostly in person -- brochures, business cards with the app info, phone calls, etc.
I wonder if Microsoft needs to define themselves, as Apple and Google have. Apple: "Make it Shiny", Google: "Don't be Evil", Microsoft "Not afraid to fail". Maybe they could increase the velocity of bringing their research infrastructure in-line with their broader interests.
AD for Skype Video calls
Spring onions for scallions - the list goes on...
This was a wonderful comment and gave me a lot of ideas for targets to implement. Thanks!
here is a link to the book tzs is talking about, for those who are interested

http://ifile.it/vo6ezb
The lead quote from Mans Adler is interesting. I'm still trying to grok it ->

"You don't start a rock band today, you start a company."

Is he trying to say that it is fashionable or trendy to be in a startup these days?
Maybe not entirely true: http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/03/18/revocation.html
No they haven't. The closest you would come would be a tegra2 which is dual core and I believe the omap4 is dual core as well. Though iirc, you can't currently use both cores in Linux. Freescale have announced the imx6 which should have quad, dual and single cores but availability won't be until q4 (though they are pushing hard to get it before then I think.) You still are currently limited with ram on an ARM machine which I think is the biggest hinderance to going in to servers. Presently almost all server software works on an ARM machine with a few exceptions like spidermonkey (so no running Launchpad) but plenty of people use them as personal servers.
tbh I didn't remember when exactly it launched. I agree that Germany might not be an obvious market because public transportation tends to be pretty good. Except after midnight on weekdays, or sometimes on the weekend, or when you want to go somewhere quickly, or with a group of people :)

Also, people obviously do use taxis even in Germany, and myTaxi replaces the middleman (taxi dispatchers) and replaces them with tech, so they can take a smaller cut, and claim to be impartial. Taxi drivers seem particularly disgruntled with dispatchers in Hamburg and Berlin and are happy about myTaxi giving them back some control – and more of the profit.
I was considering building a scheduling program too, after seeing the paper-posted-on-the-breakroom-wall school of scheduling in action, but I gave up after talking to potential users and buyers who basically said they wouldn't buy it, and they wouldn't use it if it was free.

But I still believe that someday they will switch to something better, so good luck.
HP, Dell and other vendors are already showing off hardware built to the new specifications: http://instagr.am/p/C66FU/
It's mine, and everybody's.
Yep, Messina, Sicily, and the tsunami caused a lot of deaths in that case if I remember correctly. Btw full details here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_Messina_earthquake
I disagree. It's much, much easier to support SCTP (since it's already provided by the operating system) than it is to support SPDY with all the server pushes, etc.

But to be honest, I don't know what was the source of such comparison... It's apples to oranges.
everybody/everything is subject to natural lifecycle. At 35 one is completely different from the one at 15. The complex living system like a large company is subject to it as well. You go through life, you change, you age [the undead of course are exception from the rule, like vampires or IBM]
Google app engine to resize images
The reason I went for the selector is because it makes the macro into essentially a function-typedef. I don't know any languages which allow typedefs to specify things like `Class.short = Class.super_long_name_here`, even though it's essentially the same concept, especially if looked at from a C standpoint. It's a minimally-intelligent text replacement.

IMO, something like `[NSDictionary with:key,val,key,val,nil]` is far less brain-taxing than `DICT(key,val,key,val)`. It fits without modifying the language or the syntax, it merely makes something long shorter, and the usage implies it does nothing "shiny" - you even keep the class name you're calling, making it clearer what you should be expecting, and it still allows access to all other parameters without modification or even thinking differently. DICT(...) is ambiguous about what kind of dictionary it's returning.
I mean yes, it does take a whole minute to verify that the pow code repo is on 37signals' GitHub organization account and that the repo references http://pow.cx.

Although I suppose it is possible that 37signals' GitHub account was hacked and someone maliciously designed a convenient Rack server and website with the intent of targeting the lucrative Rails developer demographic, or that the package the installer downloads is an insidious 37signals trojan not built from the code at the public repo.

Point taken.
Famous Scientists Who Believed in God
In fact it's much more transparent. With a compiled binary you don't see the steps involved, with a bash script you can step line by line and see exactly what the script is doing.

Those that don't care won't look at the script any more than they'll check the md5 hash of a binary to see that it's a legit binary. For those that care, they can look at the bash source.
Yep. DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE):
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dane-protocol-06

I'm glad DNS has been getting a lot of love lately. I just wish people would realise what other cool stuff it's useful for. :)
Definitely! Probably be one of the first places I debut it :)
the sms short code "twttr" was already taken by Teen People or something like that.
Summer 11 Incubator Announced in Columbus, OH: 10xelerator
Nice! I would have it default to a nice looking pattern first to show it in use. Then a clear button would be useful. And finally I agree the drawing is annoying - just have them draw over things with white that they don't want! (have that as a clickable color beside the color selection, maybe with a few others too).
That's why there were experiments with different wording of the problems. All of the logical setups and solutions are identical (when expressed in abstract P/Q, true/false), but some problem domains (took a plane) is a lot more difficult for average people to comprehend than others (ate the vegetables).

This is not in the article (I'm just familiar with the exercise), but people are also much better at dealing with logic when the questions are about legal drinking age.
I very frequently use netcat (or openssl s_client for HTTPS servers) to connect directly to a server I am debugging.

It could be argued that there is no "need" for this, but I find myself doing it quite frequently all the same. That may have something to do with the fact that I am developing a relatively low-level reverse HTTP proxy tool (PageKite), but I also did it quite a bit when working on more traditional webapps.

Once you speak the protocol it's nice to be able to just connect and chat with the server directly. :-) Humans are really bad at speaking binary.
So, this brings the number of >6.5 mag earthquakes off the cost of japan in the past month up to like 12 I believe?*

Surely there is a geologist in the midst who can explain whether this is normal/expected?

*http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/qed/
Larry Page ties all bonuses to success of Google social strategy
Let me just say I love your program and use it daily, but...

I recently just let the trial period on the mobile version (ios jb) lapse without buying a subscription. While I love the idea, and I love the app itself, the music quality simply isn't there. Now, I know the bandwidth limitations that come with 3g, and I know the quality is as high as you can get it, but it's just not good enough. Which makes me think that you guys might be peaking too soon. I can't see you making money off free web users with your (thankfully) unobtrusive ads, I don't see any real reason to pay to use the web version, and I don't see mobile infrastructure being fast enough to support you there, where it seems your real prime usage case is.

Even if Google and Apple weren't booting you off their platform, how would you survive long enough that you could deliver the same quality music through my phone that I already have on my phone?
I'd love to see a blog about your experience with using Go as your web server. Did you use the standard library, Web.go, or something else? There have only been a few deploy production web apps with Go so far, so the knowledge needs to spread.
Magnitude 7.1 Aftershock Disrupts Japanese Efforts
Commodore 64 Is Back, Running Ubuntu
Thanks everyone for the replies. Michaelpinto - you raise some very interesting points.

This really hit me when reading it:

c. Don't be afraid of making a mistake!

For some reason, and I'm sure some people here are the same, I'm petrified that I will make a huge mistake.

Beside that, I have one other fear - I'm not good enough.

Since I've never worked in a company, I've never had the opportunity to compare my methods with other members of a team.
I know I'm not the fastest developer out there, but am I the slowest? I don't know!

I suppose I could look at this from the employers point of view too - nothing is final. If I'M the mistake, they can always let me go.

Thanks again everyone. I appreciate your input.
Thanks, I'll invest in the books instead :)