skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I quit my job in the middle of June, I have to agree being "unemployed" definitely beats having a lousy job. In fact I haven't been this happy since the last time I was unemployed. I learned so much, worked on so many projects... The most amazing thing is that time slows down again, the weeks and months don't race by in a blur.

I am currently learning Objective-C, openGL and how to develop iPhone applications. Sure I figured, why not write a game and see how it goes; writing the code will be the easy part. I look forward to learning about the apple release process, marketing, doing user studies, reviewing the feedback...

I give myself til the end of 2012, if the game or game(s) are successful I will continue. Otherwise maybe I will consider moving from software engineering into product management. The thrill and challenge of writing code is gone, the isolation one feels developing code has become too much; while I can understand other developers I've learned that I am not really like them. I enjoy working with various team players, executives, customers. I like going to meetings where I am an active participant, I like being thrown into the deep end of the pool where I have to figure things out on the fly. I love making decisions and taking full responsibility for them.

Unemployed? Yeah, it's the happiest time of my life. Stress completely vanished. Not even looking for a job, haven't even updated LinkedIn so very few people even know I'm not "working".
Trend Watch Startups Run By Bros
I was going to say the same thing kwantam did about piloting: airplanes generally fly themselves. In the vast majority of situations, all the pilot (ideally) does is add slow and small perturbations. Airplanes without inherent stability, like some fighter jets, are without exception flown by computers, with the pilot providing control inputs to the loop.
Why Corporations Will Die (Including Google)
Happy to help! Have been looking to do this for awhile and just recently got some direction by @paul_irish on where to look. Look forward to seeing what others push out.
Can someone from the UK comment on if 4-year sentences are typically served to full term. I believe in America, you can be sentenced to 4 years and only end up doing a few months of the actual sentence.
I wouldn't feel for those having justice dealt to them, not one bit. They not only participated in the riots - but made an effort to promote them.

As for the woman who accepted stolen goods from her flatmate - she deserved it. The right course of action would've been to advise her flatmate to turn herself in and return the goods, or actually call the police herself. She decides to go through the stolen goods, picking what she wants and wearing it.

As far as community work / fines - there's been a few articles on various newspapers by community workers and enforcers who plainly state that it has little to no impact. Dig a little deeper, and you'll find prisons in the UK happen to be quite nice; offering lot better facilities than many hostels. Plus, having spoken to a lot of officers, many state that if you don't clamp down on people when they break minor laws / rules - soon the boundaries shift and before they know it; they've become criminals.

Having witnessed first hand the devastation and destruction in Hackney - most small business owners who lost pretty much their whole lively hoods would state that the sentences being handed out aren't enough - and I whole heartedly agree. What still irks me is that nearly two-thirds of my hard earned money is being taken by the government in taxes, and is feeding these people in a prison cell; likely where they have access to a TV with Sky, a PlayStation, 3 good meals a day, clean bedsheets and clothes etc etc.
Hughes has already denied this on Twitter, but really, who knows.
The Dangers of += in JavaScript
The Federal Government Wants You (And Your App Ideas)
http://www.analytictech.com/mb119/crosscultural_communicatio... quotes some of Dave Barry's best on this. "Perhaps you would prefer to take a train."
Those who are saying that this article parrots what HN has been saying must not be reading very carefully.

The author states that entrepreneurs should be patient for growth and impatient for profits. This flies exactly in the face of much of the teachings of PG and other lean start-up advocates. Instead, they advocate that start-ups should grow like hell to gain market share and mindshare, and focus on creating value ("something people want"), not profits. Profits, according to the lean start-up playbook, will come later, when the founders decide on the best way to monetize the value they've created.

The HBS piece aligns with PG's statements in one way -- the focus on keeping overhead low. I'd argue that Groupon is actually doing this -- their investments are going into buying deals, not paying for corporate jets.
Legal folks, can a non-profit be acquired for more than $0?

It's a great deal for Good as they get the fruits of $3.5 Million in charity for free, but I'm not sure how they would pay unless the IP was locked up in a for-profit licensing-centric holding company.
If You’re Not Getting Job Offers Right Now, You Just Ain’t Tryin'
The 'Haves' show less empathy than 'Have-nots'
I wonder if an App for something like voting would be good or bad. But an app that would make it more convenient to submit feedback to my local representative would be interesting. How about an app where my local representatives could poll me?
Also, this is my main inspiration for the fable: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/01/31/therovingcaval...
Hey, look, requests/s on a synthetic benchmark.

Let's not look at things like thread safety, resource consumption, average/best case/worst case latency, quality of available libraries and their support for concurrency, or code quality/maintainability issues.

Meh.

At least he provided the source code and plenty of data. That's cool.
Probably sounded like I was trivializing it, and I 100% agree, the Apple ecosystem (stores, accessories, etc) all help support new products (ipad, etc).

That said, there's been some staggeringly dumb things the webOS team has done with respect to getting stuff out to developers (like, you know, functioning handsets, SDKs, updates, information). Apple can afford to be tightlipped about this sort of stuff, but others can't. Developers will be the earlyvangelists for new products if companies will let them be. That means supporting them, and Palm and then HP both dillydallyed around way too long in both cases. I say this as someone who'd signed up for the SDK for the original webOS launch, and waited, and waited, and waited, then was rather disappointed with what was eventually released.

Yes, Apple does have a lot of stuff in place, but what is stopping other companies from doing this? It won't be overnight, sure. It takes a long term vision, and perhaps Apple really is the only large company that can execute on this. I don't see HP, Dell, Lenovo or any other PC/electronics company having even a medium term vision, let alone a long term one, when it comes to consumer electronics and computing.

MAYBE Google could fill this? Maybe. But really only if they get in to the hardware and retail game. Apple controls the hardware and software and sales channel, and can create a strong, consistent and cohesive experience. No one else can do this - the hardware guys point the fingers at licensed software, retail chains push whatever they get a big check for, etc.

So, yes, Apple makes it look easy, and it's not, but it's certainly possible. Year after year we see lackluster 'me too' stuff from companies that are only addressing one portion of the end-user experience. Can MS ever get in to this game? Not without some serious long term vision from the top, a restructuring of their business, and a willingness to piss off some long-term partners. I don't see it happening...
I like the first comment:

There’s no shame in having a failed startup. There is shame in attempting to maintain the facade of success.
This is missing an important point - if you buy, you are stuck there until you can sell it again. That loss of flexibility represents a significant cost of its own.
I am aware of the quote. I'm just offering a more constructive solution.
QEDServer
The "away" rule seems counter productive. The value of async is that I can ask you a question when convenient for me, and you can answer when convenient for you. If I have to wait for your status to become available, I'm wasting my attention.
DDG is very clean and spam free, but I am being pulled back to Google for the tighter integration across products (Videos, Maps, Images)

I search for "San Francisco to Los Angeles" in the url and then I click on the map tab at top left. DDG proxy is good, but it demands me to memorize the shortcuts (the shortcuts list is impressive).

Adding a contextual proxy in the results page would help i.e "Did you mean !m San Francisco to Los Angeles"
Groupon's modus operandi is that the business is (usually) making a loss or zero/negligible profit from the deal for the opportunity to generate future (post-groupon) business from those customers (or their friends).

Spending no money at all might either be worse (they've lost more than they earned) or no better (zero sum) than buying the coupon depending on your future intentions.

Or do you mean that you've returned and purchased again from those places?
In some ways I feel like a lot of Android fans want coverage of tech to be fair in the same way that Fox News wants coverage to be fair and balanced.

Just because many sources these days are very positive on Apple and its products, I don't think you can necessarily say that they are Apple-biased. The fact is that Apple is killing all of their competitors right now on almost every measure - product design, profit, etc. Insisting on more "even" coverage of their competitors just isn't warranted because in most cases the competing products don't deserve that much attention or consideration.

Gruber, Asymco, and Marco tend to be very positive on Apple, but when the company screws up, they'll be as harsh as anyone else. For a recent example, look at their coverage of the App Store's change in-app purchase and subscription policies .

To paraphrase Steven Colbert, sometimes reality has an Apple bias.
I have a mouse (actually a trackball), and run X. But why do you need overlapping windows? Tiling requires less mental overhead.
This also affects Live@edu.
You are completely wrong. The publishers saw this coming a long time ago (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_...) and attacked first (http://blog.laptopmag.com/ebook-price-war). This is just Amazon slowly following through on its threat of personally entering publishing, which so spooked the publishers years ago.
Google Best Guess
Create quality hardware, fix the web site.
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been refuted by further research:

[D-K] describes everyone’s favorite theory of those they disagree with, that they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots...

However, many psychologists have noted Kruger and Dunning’s main data is better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our ability and of task difficulty. For example...

So why does Google blog search finds zero mentions of this refutation? My guess: because under [the new] theory you should listen to those you disagree with instead of writing them off as idiots.

citations here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/all-are-unaware.html
They haven't really eliminated meetings, they have changed the way meetings are conducted. Thanks to the technology, you can step out of a meeting at any time to have lunch or, you know, work without missing out on anything. As a result, meetings never need to end.

I have worked under a similar model for almost a decade now. It comes with so many benefits over a traditional meeting that I am uncertain why any software development company would do it any other way.
Both IM and email is private. Chatrooms are public.
> Having witnessed first hand the devastation and destruction in Hackney - most small business owners who lost pretty much their whole lively hoods would state that the sentences being handed out aren't enough - and I whole heartedly agree

That's why a neutral judge does the judging in a trial and not the biased victims.
As Betabeat wrote on Twitter in response"

"@chrishughes @techmeme @GOOD as we said to you before we published, confirm or deny on the record, and we're happy to report it. You can't decline to comment beforehand, then refuse to go on record after, then point fingers. And we included the statement from your GM in the piece."

If Jumo had a $$$ figure they were proud of, they would share it. But the first comment captures it best. If Hughes understand that failure is a badge of honor in the tech world, and came clean before this news broke, it would be a non-story, and people would respect him for trying to build such a noble start-up.
That's a communist view ;)
What I like about Campfire is looking back through the transcript is easy - even for the times when you have left the room. Plus it has the ability to star parts of the conversation so you can see the important points as you scroll through.

So you can use it as a synchronous "have a chat now" tool - or as an asynchronous "leave a message and I'll deal with it when I return" tool at the same time.
Ok - I can see that those articles make some good points about the US housing market. However, I am not in the US, and the housing market in the UK suffered from very similar problems and, as far as I am aware, we never had any overt government support for mortgages so our mortage market looked rather more "free market" than the US one and we still ended up with similar problems. Northern Rock being the most obvious example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Rock
There is no software that we cannot put into hardware - literally!

Indeed, as I have often argued too. And even "virtual" software can readily be implemented in human scale electromechanical devices, as with the relay-based computers where you can watch the memory bits change and even reach in and flip them with your fingers.

"If a method can be performed by the human mind alone, or with paper and pencil..."

However the issue with this patent is that it was too broadly written. The claims apply to all possible implementations, including pencil and paper methods, not just implementation with a logic machine. That is unpatentable.
I had horrible grades in college. I retook more classes than I would have liked, some for really stupid reasons. I felt like I was a complete phony doing physics because, for some fucked up reason, it was what smart, cool people did, and that I didn't belong there at all, I was just a poseur who had some bright flukes along the way. More importantly, I almost worked entirely alone along the way.

In my last year, I was taking Analytical Mechanics, Q&M, Advanced Electrodynamics, and Nuclear and Particle physics. I had the second highest score in the class on the first test, which included 10 grad students. I still wrote it off as a fluke, and I didn't do so good on the next test. Then I did it again, the next semester, and I still couldn't believe it. Everyone had better homework scores than I did... how could I beat them on the test? Then the same thing happened in Nuclear and Particle physics with an oral examination because my grades were low. I sat through 5 other students who had much better grades and were doing the oral examination for the A instead of an A- (I was fighting for a B-) They weren't doing so well for the most part. At the end, the professor, who knew I could do it, started going above and beyond what we hard learned into Solid State physics, just to see what I knew. I screwed up a bit on the paper final, getting stuck on weird problem that involved some hand waving for some radiative losses for an electron near relativistic energies. I knew I was below the curve. I went in to say bye to the professor on the last day, and he asked what grade I thought I deserved, and I told him a B- (I was in C territory before the oral exam and final exam). He ended up giving me an B+.

The last year was weird. It was really the first time I thought I could really, truly do physics. I worked with other students, and I realized that a large portion of the students who I thought were better students were better focused and better working in groups. These same students even thought of me as really smart (and still tell me that). Overall, I don't think I'm smarter than they are, but I do think we have different strengths. To this day, I still feel like I got lucky, and that my bosses didn't bother to check my GPA because of my enthusiasm for the position (and writing skills)

I do have ADHD, and I know for a fact that's a driving force in this because I have a hard time focusing on many tasks. I've gotten much better at it, especially after having a regular job with a regular schedule, but I still have a hard time believing where I'm at.
Except for the servers at Disqus which are running the comment system. And the servers serving up the static HTML pages.
This is great work but...please redo the charts to start at Zero and end at 50,000 to keep things consistent and prevent Edward Tufte from killing a kitten if he ever sees your charts.
While we're at it, let me throw in my bid for YC Canada. :]
Having read Snowball (the biography of Warren Buffet), I would not be so sure he isn't disagreeable. Clearly, this is a guy who is so focused on his goals that everything else and everyone else in his life took a back seat. He does not come across as a malicious person but clearly not a "nice" person.

The terminology used in the article ("disagreeable", "mean", etc) is imho too emotionally loaded for proper understanding of the phenomenon. Most people reading this article see the takeaway as "assholes finish first" and are (rightly so) conflicted about trading their souls for a couple gold coins. The real lesson, I think, is to realize that to get anything significant done, you will eventually have to piss off some people you care about at some point. They could be your employees, partners, customers or even family. But this is alright, we piss each off all the time. It's ok, it's a part of life. Just don't be a jerk about it.
You made a benign claim about the article that was incorrect, and in the interest of not confusing other HNers your comment was downvoted, why are you taking this personally?
Well, we certainly won't have to worry about it for now. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about it, of course.

It's a ways off in terms of orders of magnitude for how fast our computers now, and I don't think computers will be growing at that rate in terms of power unless new breakthroughs are found.
I agree with you, requiring everyone at your company to have strong people skills would be, at the very least, wasteful.

So, it seems that it should be the company’s responsibility to make sure that they don’t talk to frustrated customers — or terminate their accounts — just like the employees without strong computer skills shouldn’t touch the servers.
We do it for cars?
Microsoft: The Future of the Living Room
...meetings pull you from doing actual work in order to talk about doing work. It’s easier to push a branch up, check out the diff, and then iterate on that diff rather than assuming you’re going to perfectly whiteboard system design ahead of time.

This seems over-broad to me, and seems to violate the accepted wisdom "Good programmers spend 10% of their time coding, and 90% of their time thinking." A good system/design meeting can go a long way to producing better code.
Aha! That's how he did it. I couldn't figure out how commenting worked. He does have a comment count link at the top of the page. Is that fragment from Disqus also?
Researchers grow crops on super thin film, do away with that pesky soil stuff
> It's almost as if people derive personal satisfaction from poking holes in

Yes, many hackers/engineers like fixing things. The first step is to identify the problems.

It's almost as if people derive personal satisfaction from playing apologist for anything, no matter how crazy or unadvised.

> I really don't understand this part of human psychology. We cheer entrepreneurs on, until they see a massive success

What's a massive success though, a bubble supported entirely through hype and start-up capital?

Where is the real success, as in, the expected belief to be able to continue to turn some money into more money in the future, as a result of providing value to customers? Maybe if you thought about what a sustainable business model was you'd understand why the apparent lack of one is such an issue with other professionals in field.

If they weren't soliciting investment I doubt anyone would care but as long as they are we should be thankful for the wisely cynical.
Coming from the CTO of Amazon...
Nope, but the light bulb plant can choose which states it wants to sell in and manufacture bulbs that meet those requirements. In fact they may just make one that meets the strictest requirements, and people other states may choose to purchase STATE X efficient bulbs.
Four hour body had some pretty ridiculous stuff in it, but the diet and bodybuilding advice was pretty solid.
It's impressive but it seems the marketing people are driving the bus. For what other reason than marketing would you be required to say "bing" before the software realizes a search was required?
A simple inspection of the source reveals that it is also an embeded javascript file from Disqus.
This has nothing to do with 'dangers of +='.... Or am I misinterpreting this?
That's not a "danger" of +=; it's an explanation of why using jQuery to generate HTML is more readable than using +=.

The real reason you should not be generating HTML with string concatenation is that using jQuery (or an equivalent) gives you built-in escaping for field attributes and content.

Consider this:

wrappedInput += '<input type="text" value="' + defaultValue + '"/>';

If somehow defaultValue got passed in as

" /><script>foo()</script><br x="

, then you've just been XSS'd. If you use jQuery to set input.val(defaultValue), you're safe.
I guess it's now Office 364?
Groupon is exploiting small businesses. This has nothing to do with jealousy and has everything to do with what's right and what's wrong.
This guy is mistaking "poor people skills" with "being an asshole". I'm not sure whether the two are so clearly related : there are a few different manifestations of lack of social skills, and there are jerks who don't have much social skills issues.

"All it takes for someone to be good at customer service is: [...]".

This sounds so simple. And it misses quite the point. Lacking "social skills", is precisely this : not knowing how to behave completely "normally" (whatever that means) with other people. Like, not grasping the effect of your words, or not being able to think them through fast enough before saying them. Of course, I want to be helpful, and to answer the person in front of me (or on the phone). That doesn't mean that it is what the person will see or hear.
"While string concatenation for building elements will do fine for small things, for larger JS projects you should use jQuery as much as possible."

Or you could do the sane thing and use JS templates (handlebars, mustache, jquery tmpl, etc).
> Often, that abrasiveness is a side effect of their talent

I think this is the crux of the argument. That there are people who are highly technical and good at soft skills proves that it is not a necessary side-effect.

Why would it be? What evidence is there that there is a meaningful correlation beyond pure anecdotes?

I agree with the author. Here's my take: extraordinarily talented engineers have been given carte blanche in this regard because there is an well accepted stereotype. If we stopped accepting this behavior, I believe engineers will adapt, or be replaced by those who can.

I don't expect everybody to be a social butterfly, but I do expect people not to be an outright ass (i.e. 'abrasive personalities')