skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Besides being small, 37signals has always been a flat organization."

..

"We've experimented with promoting a few people to manager-level roles."

So they are flat, with no chief anything, but they have 'manager-level roles'? Am I missing something or is there a contradiction in his description?

Edit: Got it, 'experimented' meaning that they tried, didn't work, and they went back to flat. Thanks for the responses.

Besides that I find that even with no job titles or formal roles, people within a company tend to self-organize and take on de facto roles. The only difference is that it isn't formalized, and people who end up managing aren't being paid manager salaries or getting manager options.
Pricing is an important factor in a purchase decision, so shouldn't it be a valid factor in a review?

A 1-star review saying it's completely overpriced, while not perfect, is still better than reviews I see in the app store like "Amazing app, love it! 1/5" or "Pretty cool app, but it crashes on load and I can't use it, 4/5" (and those are the intelligible ones).
5 years ago when I was applying to lots of agencies I sent out custom links to each one. So when they landed on the site, their company name was used in big letters at the top of the page ("Hi company X"). It also allows for tracking whether they actually look at your site. It's easy to do, shows that you're not just spamming people, and is not as involved as some of those more intense examples that target one specific company.
FWIW the author claims this in the FAQ:

This is cool and all, but you aren’t the owner of any of these logos. Aren’t you going to be in deep trouble?

Trademarks need to be renewed fairly often. Even old logos from companies still in business get abandoned and die. Everything on this site is legally kosher as far as public records are concerned.
these are not revolutionary:
would like a much better way to give fine grained access to my network based on who I want to see what. Today it is clumsy and very error prone it might as well not be there. From management of my friends (terrible) to publishing and the types of things I publish

would like the ability to create a family tree with special propagation of family members and include dead people. Would like one person to be able to manage the accounts for their family since not all family members will participate, but they are still in the tree. Would like a visual interface to manage family connections that way. As people marry into the family I would like to see the extended tree
This is why you should aspire to make it big. Not so you can buy a jet and fancy cars, but to go on awesome adventures and push the definition of "what's possible."

Or maybe I just admire Richard Branson a little too much.
From LinkedIn Blog: http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/04/06/linkedin-developer-platf...

Also covered on RWW: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedins_answer_to_fac...

And, TNW: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/04/06/linkedin-launch...

And, VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/06/linkedin-platform-plugins/

Finally, TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/linkedin-unveils-a-more-ope...
The traveling German carpenters
> As soon as you get database transactions involved you're screwed

This isn't true. If your DB has an async API, just wrap that up, otherwise you're limited to pushing queries to a query-thread-pool to keep the rest of your app async or implement your DB's protocol in whatever framework you're using. Twisted has native DB drivers + the ability to push to a thread pool if you're dealing with a legacy API.
You are bitching about gif not being open while advocating flash... And telling him that he looks foolish?
Who is your customer
US atom smasher may have found new force of nature: report
The Mondragon worker cooperative federation has 85,000 employees. If you look at how it's structured, it's not hard to imagine how Google could operate similarly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Interesting that Austin is left out. I would put Austin before Boulder and after NY... but I am bias I guess.
Its not. Start on your own, keep the equity, and in 6 months you can hire the same person for just a salary and only 1 or 2%
SPJ's take on Microsoft STM attempt: http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell-cafe@haskell.org/msg7973...
To clarify, we think everything we do is marketing.

From how the error messages are written, to customer service, to copywriting in our emails, to the cancellation process, to clarity of message, to how every single thing in each product works, it's all marketing. Marketing is everyone's responsibility. It's the sum total of everything we do.
Perhaps they should be more honest that this is temporary, "early access" pricing. Perhaps they should say "The Fifth Witness: Electronic Early Access Edition, $15", and promise "The Fifth Witness: Electronic Mass Market Edition, $7". After all, early access is a reasonable thing to charge money for.

I also seem to recall reading elsewhere that authors get a much bigger cut of hardback sales than they do of mass market paperback sales. Perhaps this should be advertised more prominently?
Jason is a designer by trade, and is routinely involved with the design of 37signals' products. In the same vein, DHH is a partner in the company, but still writes code (as I understand it).
It looks like you stole your design from gmail, any reason for that?
These "datavis" resumes exemplify everything that's wrong with data visualization today:

(1) cluttered and distracting

(2) vapid (a Frank Zappa quote and a timeline with tank top reference? a quarter page for a pie chart of one's intangibles?)

(3) terrible at actually visualizing data or information (okay...what, exactly, can these people do relative to others?)

They're beautiful resumes, for sure. But their ideas for communicating information are too clever, and if I'm hiring a datavis guy I would wonder how effectively they could visualize real information.
>The typical path that many people (myself included) have experienced is: total obsession for 1-2 weeks, followed by rapidly waning interest.

This what I experienced. Mutliplayer is fun though, but I can't play the game properly due to bugs (framerate issues, random disconnects / crashes to desktop). I'm not sure if my local JRE has a problem but I have been doing Java development work recently and I've not had any issues.

I think once the bugs have been ironed out and the development process has been refined (to prevent re-occuring bugs) the game can really grow. Recent updates has shown that new features are being added to the game (including reaching out to the mod community) and by the time of proper release the game will have much more to offer.
He's enjoying the title of "President" which, to me, is a purely managerial position.

I doubt that what he does in that position is purely managerial. I think you may have a hard time seeing why they value what they do if you impose your own viewpoints on them.
Actually, it does glide. Check out from 0:16.
Eddie Bauer warns customers of email address theft
2 options:

1.) Google
2.) Read the two threads that were posted here 20 minutes prior to your comment. (Hint: search for "codemap" in page).
It's currently taking in > $200,000 per day.

http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp
Preview couldn't handle it either.
Suggested improvements to JSON
Try this one:
http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/culture/index.html
I had second thoughts about saying that as soon as I hit reply. You're completely right. I should have said things get harder, and if you don't understand what you're doing to start then you're screwed and you don't even know it.
Key word: Experimented?

Past tense, too.
Clickable http://gethirely.com
Unfortunately, being firm in your convictions or even being right is not always enough to win in court.
We've experimented. That's how we've become more confident in our decision to be as flat as possible. We believe it continues to be the right direction for us.

Re: manager's options... We don't offer options so that's not an issue.
There is some lovely muck over here.
although not submitted separately, this was discussed a bit yesterday on HN, when plux posted it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411141

it looks like the attribution is different for each presentation, though the content is identical
Got a Jailbroken PS3? This is the place for YOU Check it
I hope it's something big. It would be a fitting way for the Tevatron to go out before passing the baton to CERN. Still, it's a bit sad that this country lacks the will to investigate fundamental mysteries, leaving us to pass onto others the responsibility to do cutting-edge particle physics.
If you're trying to build something quickly, it's not a bad idea to use an existing style and layout to just get it done. Thinking about design too early can be an unneeded burden. I wouldn't propose they go live with it, but it's fine for early development.
It doesn't show it alternating flapping and gliding, though, the gliding footage is just of it gliding. Look at the rest of the footage, it keeps flapping its wings until it stalls. It doesn't seem to be able to control its flight path.
perhaps its integrated into gmail? that would be pretty neat, I'm hoping it's a google marketplace app.
Handling a low traffic website with extremely high traffic peaks?
Hi, I'm an experienced web developer that has found a new hurdle.

I'm developing a web site providing a service for a big company which will have a relatively low traffic (in the order of 1000s per day) and a few moments during the weeks where one could expect 100,000 visits in an hour. Each visit implies a somewhat server-intensive transaction, so server load is an issue.

What considerations can I make hardware and software-wise in order to minimize the impact caused by these peaks?

Amazon EC2's elastic structure seems fit to this specific kind of problem, but I have no experience with the platform, so any recommendations on whether this is convenient or better than a server array with load balancing.

Also on the software front, I normally run a django-nginx-apache-memcached stack, which works wonders for websites with constant demand, but is there any other framework that can help with load handling? Or in the case of a server array, some load balancing framework.

EDIT: Clarity/format.
Any help will be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!
"But what works there, or at FC, is not a one size fits all answer."

Absolutely. I'm simply sharing our experiences with how we run things - that's what my Inc. articles are about. I wouldn't expect anyone else to do what we do because we do it. Find your own comfort zone. There are plenty of ways to do plenty of things.
Isn't that basically the Peter Principle?
The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: How Failure Leads to Success
Are Wooden Skyscrapers in Our Future?
Apparently, this seem like a no-brainer pieces of advice for everyone and anyone to take, but only those who have walked in these "shoes" can really know how difficult is to keep on smiling, loving everybody, how to be optimist and enthusiastic every single moment around the clock, specially when you see that you are doing everything right, everything by the book, you are following every single one of the 13 steps (even the one with the exercises) and you still have no ROI.

The truth is that a start up has to find it's own way, it has to pivot, to adjust, to ask for feedback and so on, until it has gotten some things right. There is no perfect receipt to having a successful start up - you just have to find your way.
10 things I love about GNOME 3
No you're not alone on that. Branson has always pushed to be at the "edge", see Virgin Galactic as the prime example of that :)
Agreed, the answer summary is very weak on this question and I've seen that on a lot of others too. Anybody can edit an answer summary to improve it, but I very rarely do: it's too hard to do justice to individual answers without imposing my own viewpoint. Also, they've set it up so there's a lot more incentive to put work into an individual answer than work on the summary.
Yeah, but I'm a bit fortunate in that there's a B&N conveniently located on my route home from the dayjob; and I do live - literally - across the street from a theater. If I had to drive 15 minutes to go see a movie, I'd probably allow myself even fewer of the "night off to go take in a movie." But then it would probably just turn into "read fiction for a couple of hours" instead. :-)
What Jason Fried is expressing is something I've been pondering for a while. And I think we'll (hopefully) see more of it (sorry, manager-types).

In my experience, managers in most departments have essentially taken the role of sheep-herders. So, I started to ask myself: why do I need a manager when I work well on my own, making smart, educated decisions that are based upon the ideals and successes of other smart, educated and passionate people?

After all, I'm being hired for my prowess, no? If I am, do I need a manager? And shouldn't you always hire people who have these sensibilities?

I think the message I find within this rubble of contemporary and progressive ideologies is: Hire smart. If you have a good team who understand their roles and how it pertains to the goals of the company, you don't need managers - not for a small or mid-sized company, anyway. Basecamp has been the best PM I've ever worked with - alive or binary. Software has already begun to facilitate the role perfectly for me.
Aprigo Pivots to the Cloud - Changes Name to CloudLock & Shares Insights
I haven't gotten any direct numbers from them, but the authors of technical books that I've talked to have told me that your Amazon sales are proportional to the number of reviews, not the rating associated with the product. They claim that just getting more reviews is important and always worth comping review copies to people you know will write a review, even if they are not all 4/5-star reviews.

If I had to guess, most people only click on items with high numbers of reviews, read the "top 3 most useful," and then make their purchase decision from those, rather than the long tail of rants from either the easily-bribed or disillusioned masses. These voters may inadvertently be steering people to the Kindle version by inflating the number of reviews associated with it over the hardcover.
What blogs drive the most iOS downloads?
Downloads on iOS devices either come from the Apple ecosystem (being at the top or featured), or from blogs.

Which of blogs are significant download drivers?
US: freeappaday.com
France: appgratuites.com and iPhon.fr
Any others?
That being said, open source libraries aren't always free when it comes to support and technical costs..

While it's true that you can't always compare open source support with vendor support, I definitely feel the tide turning on this one. In the past 2 years or so (and this is just my experience, YMMV) I've found it much easier to get changes made from a project maintainer, than from most software vendors.

Github has changed this drastically. I can fork projects, fix things myself, send pull request back to the project maintainer all in less time than it usually takes for a traditional software vendor to even put my support request in the queue and acknowledge the problem.

I'm just saying, things are changing. Your business will have to change too if you want to sell to developers. You can't keep repeating the same aphorisms about support and technical costs.
Richard Branson reminds me of a robber-baron hero from a Robert A. Heinlein novel.
Not for me

http://i.min.us/imFTSK.png
I wouldn't call biology students the most miserable... But as someone with a biochemistry degree (BS), I totally agree with the main point of the article: A PhD in Biology does not guarantee a job. You spend all this time and money on what seems, to a layperson, to be an amazing degree with amazing job opportunities working on the cutting edge of technology cloning dinosaurs yada yada yada.

Unfortunately, you graduate only to find out that you're only qualified to work in a lab at a research university! All your computer science buddies are now millionaires and they paid a quarter of the tuition you did. You're over qualified for most jobs in the private sector and you most likely lack the experience for private sector jobs that do require PhDs! You learn all these advanced specialised skills that end up being worthless--they're either being performed by machines or students/interns. The same can be said about other "purely academic" majors such as economics, international studies, political science, physics, mathematics, etc.

That's my biggest problem with academia and university culture. They only exist to train a new generation of professors and other academics. They don't seem to care about teaching their students more vocational skills relevant to their major or highlight possible private sector career paths after they graduate.

For example, Arabic and Chinese are hot topics right now, so as a student, you figure you should get an international studies degree in one of these cultures. You hear it all the time in the news how the defense industry is starving for these people. You graduate and find out that no one wants someone who can speak Arabic or Mandarin fluently unless they have a business, statistics or computer science degree... You might as well have gone to a vocational/technical college and learned Arabic on the side.
PyPy Tutorial Part 2: Adding a JIT
Let's not drag this discussion into an Android bash-fest please.
big dog uses RL while this bird robot do not have any learning abilities (at least nothing is said about it) and is just a remote controlled unit.
Why is $10 too much for an ebook ? - surely it depends on the value of the content inside it.

Valuing a book by it's physical properties is a practice that's gone on for far too long. Lots of technical books are full of "padding" and duplication because no-one will buy a 50 page book which concisely provides the useful information for $10-$20. It waste a huge amount of time both of the author and the readers.
Google Maps v5.3 can now track your whereabouts
Actually I'm advocating mp4, but I'll take flash over gif. Heck, since Flash9, it can play mp4 files.

I'll even take wmv over gif. Gif is not an appropriate container for video. People use it for easy hosting not because its a "standard" or because its good at video. 4 megabytes of this? Please.
This is why you should just use Erlang :)
UrbanDictionary is usually my first stop for decoding this kind of slang:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=AMA
I don't claim that they don't admit low-income workers, but that their laws discriminate in preference of high-income workers (that is, highly educated professionals). See their points system [1]. (It also discriminates on the basis of age, which would be a Human Rights violation if it was a private employer doing it. [2])

[1] http://www.workpermit.com/canada/points_calculator.htm

[2] http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/lp/spila/wlb/caowc/10chapter_5.sh...
Yes, I like it and it works well.
The article mentioned rotating managerial duties, and alternative methods of adding structure. Was your comment taking that into account?
To clarify... "President" isn't a title I use, it's a title often ascribed to me as the founder of the company. Whenever anyone asks for my title I tell them we don't have titles. If they require one for whatever they are writing, I say you can say president or founder if that works, but I'd prefer if they didn't say anything other than founder since founder isn't a title as much as it is a fact.

Re: design. Yes, I design. It's the primary thing I do. Design, sketch, work on product simplification, design/think about user experience, etc. DHH still codes as well (he's working on some nice enhancements to Highrise right now, in fact). Both David and I would prefer to design and code all day, but it's not always possible. Lately it's been more possible so we've bee doing it more often.
Not yet but I've considered making it one.
What happens when the price changes then? Suppose it's on sale in a month for $1.99 and still is loaded up with 1-star reviews that say "SO OVERPRICED!" -- not very useful then is it? Ideally, I'd love to see a completely independent review source that has common 'tags' that are easily understood. Rather than complain about the price, just check a box that says you don't believe it was a good value at the price, so when someone looks for reviews, they see "Customers don't think this product is a good value at $14.99" (Which is relevant, and useful even if the price changes).
This could potentially have a bad impact on the usage of Firefox. A heck of a lot of developers use it specifically for its addons like Firebug..

Will more people now leave Firefox on the bench and pick other inspectors like Google Chromes?

Maybe Mozilla should have thought about the impact that such an article could potentially have before releasing it to the big bad world..
Good reference, thank you. But...

Tell that to any software development manager, and you'll get a long lasting blank look. Too many people and corporations have lied to the managerial class for too long. I've had managers tell me that I can estimate development time exactly, while giving me a short, finite time span in which to generate the estimate.
> but there are use cases where displaying cleartext passwords is acceptable.

The only use case where sending and displaying cleartext passwords is acceptable is when the password is auto-generated and very long.

In all other cases, especially if the password has been entered by the user, this behavior is not only unacceptable, but also unexpected and thus the exact opposite of user-friendliness.
Yeah I experienced this growing up as a kid in Germany. I remember these people from other towns in their "strange" outfits. Over the years they got less and less but you can still find a few.

Now living here in the U.S. I wonder how something like this would maybe translate over to coders and designers in startups. Seeing that we have these startup heavy areas across the country. Why not have people work a year in the Valley, then move a year to NYC, followed by another year in Boston or Austin. Would be a fun and rewarding program for young talent.
Simple products mean less support requirements. Although, we're going to be growing the support team so we can reduce the ticket load per person and create more time for other support-related writing/design projects.
There seems to be a rift here between what people are good at/what they want to do now and what they want to do later. I consider myself a good programmer, but it's not where I want to be forever. I have always wanted to branch out and learn multiple facets (management, service, sales, etc.) and this seems like it would be limiting in that regard. I guess I just wouldn't be the target of 37signals?

Without wanting to sound snide, do you look for people who want to stay in the same role forever? It surprises me that people's ambitions to branch out and take on more responsibility haven't caused this to come up before. A salary bump, more benefits, and more vacation time wouldn't help me placate my desire to learn about other skill sets.
Ever since Garry joined YC, I assumed (and suggested) this as one of the top things they get on making...just a simple UA detection for mobiles and more usable interface in CSS as you mention.
Make the image width a multiple of four? (thanks to this comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2415202)
I made a comment below about price changes and how it hurts the usefulness of such reviews, but I also wanted to add that what you mentioned is another example of where the system fails. A 1/5 or 4/5 review that contradicts itself with a single sentence 'this rocked/sucked' isn't useful. We should be forcing people to provide a real review, or not allowing them to do so at all.