skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plus they could book any such stock purchases as revenue. Profit problem solved! I love creative accounting.
DevDays 2.0 really seemed to be out of touch with the original DevDays concept.

As Joel says in the post, $99 was a good amount for someone to be able to just take a day off work and pay for the conference themselves. Had I not lost my job in mid-2009, I was seriously considering attending the one in Toronto. I could have planned a trip home at the same time, and just stopped over in Toronto rather than immediately grabbing a second - considerably smaller - plane the rest of the way.

Even had there been a DevDays Toronto again this time, it would have been out of my price range to attend, and it would have meant finding accommodations for a night and all that goes with that. I couldn't have justified it to myself at all.

Good on Joel, though, for straight-up admitting to the problems with the new conferences, rather than manufacturing excuses.
blr doesn't mean I'm settled in blr just that I'm working here :) so wrong states...

Although that means if I count my move to blr, that's 0 on this poll.
Limits of Network Load Testing -- Ephemeral Ports
Invitaitons From the Captain Can Not Be Declined
The Maybe and Either type classes are typically used to model exceptions in Haskell.
Reddit could become an email replacement. My college campus has all-campus email that anyone can send to. Discussions in email simply don't turn out well, there's no good way to respond to just one person while letting everyone view it, there's no good way to voice agreement or disagreement, and it's mixed in with much more important information.

Reddit would be perfect for it, and for campuses with less generous email policies. It doesn't interfere with work communication and its better suited for the sort of discussions and arguments that email often plays host to.

As a student, I can't speak much for companies. And I'm aware of Reddit's recent College promotion and how easy it is to make, moderate, etc a new Reddit. But a dedicated Reddit integrated with college websites or email could be a profit stream.
Crowdsourced vision seems like a PR-approved term for design by committee. I don't see that being an improvement.
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Well, is he wrong? I know I make an active effort to avoid children...
Option is implemented only by the two case classes Some and None. All case classes implement Product automatically. Having Option extend Product allows access to these methods from variables with the static type Option.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a use for the Product interface to Option, but I suppose it might as well be allowed since it is implemented anyway.
> don't just point them at Google. Tell them YOUR story ... and .. what YOU would do differently ...

> Use your friends

These are good bits of advice. I would also encourage folks here to realize just how far programming is from what most people do all day.

It's interesting for me to read this thread because you could find/replace programming insert any number of other activities, like writing (the one I'm closest too), but music, photography, cooking, and many others probably apply too.

Theoretically, you could be a steppenwolfe and teach yourself how to write without any direct interaction from others, or others from the Internet hordes. But it would be so damn difficult and time consuming that you'd be better off finding a friend—any friend—who is already at least moderately proficient and getting her to read your stuff.

I'm a grad student in English lit, so when I tell people I spend a lot of time writing and they reply by saying, "I write" or "I want to write better" and are curious about what's going on, I'll talk about my experience and what I've done and so on. If they want me to read their stuff I will, provided they pass the (very low) barriers described here: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-professors%E2... .

The mentor / mentee or teacher / student paradigm exists for a reason. Yeah, a lot of its official manifestations in the school system don't work real well, but there's a reason it's there.
Interesting - how are you doing the sentiment analysis?
In danh thiep http://www.quocthanh.com/in-danh-thiep_p6.html
Yeah, that's one thing that bothered me somewhat about the article: the implied assumption that any sort of consensual arrangement where the man is getting sex is by definition exploitative. If it were a young man getting paid by an older woman for sex, is that still exploitation?
Various nations through history have used all female fighting units for psychological power. It isn't a sound military strategy, it is cultural belief. Many cultures consider men to be more expendable and that makes killing them easier. For a modern counter example, can you imagine the effectiveness of an all gay special forces regiment against the Taliban? Can you imagine morale within Taliban forces after getting repeatedly defeated by an all gay unit? Read some history, the same thing has been done several times with all female forces. Militaries are predominantly men only for cultural reasons.
I must be out of touch. A price increase of $99 to $499 is not a "modest increase". Come on.
The Frankenstein problem is huge. Look at the clutter on Yahoo versus Google. Absolutely captures the difference in focus and culture.

Frankenproducts are a sign of a bloated middle management that isn't willing to make a stand on win-lose tradeoffs.
I wonder if there's a version of this article that uses paragraphs.
Unsure if it's just me, but it's amazing how much his questions remind me of thesis/dissertation defenses as well as grant writing in chemistry.

What problem are you solving? If you're successful who will benefit the most? What experiments will need to done? Is your lab capable of doing them? How much will it cost and how long until you get preliminary results?

My guess this applies to other hard sciences as well.
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It's not about meetings, incompetence, or lax work hours. It's the reality of software maintenance.

Lines of code is an awful metric of productivity but, yes, that figure of 3250 is accurate. Between 1,000 and 10,000 LoC per year is normal for a software engineer in the industry, and the rate is often closer to the lower number.

Note also that code of average architectural quality will require about 1 maintenance day per year per 80 LoC just by virtue (vice?) of existing. (Paul Graham: a full-time maintenance engineer can own 20,000 lines of code.) LoC are a cost: if we rate a developer's time (including benefits, office space, etc.) at $80/hour and charge each LoC for 4 years, we pay $32 per line of code in maintenance. (We spend $2-3 per line to write it.) That is, IMO, a pretty accurate estimate of what we pay for software.

If you write at 500 LoC/day under ideal circumstances but you're writing code that's merely average in architectural integrity, the maintenance problem will catch up with you very quickly.

It's a lot better to write 150 lines per day of great code (200-300 including unit tests and debugging utilities) and maintain that pace than to start out at 500+ but stall out late in the project. Great programmers don't write code at college-project speeds; they write in such a way that they can sustain triple-digits in perpetuity.

A single developer solves this problem by refactoring the code when necessary and incrementally improving the architecture so as to reduce the maintenance cost. It's only by doing this that projects beyond about 15,000 lines of code per person (75% maintenance burden if code is of average quality) are even feasible.

It's not just a problem of incompetent developers. Maintenance imposes a 70 to 90% overhead on most important projects in large companies, just because these projects become difficult or impossible to refactor and fix and their "broken windows" patterns of decline take on a life of their own. Individual developers can refactor aggressively when their maintenance burden breaks 50% (70% being a crisis) but this is not usually feasible for multi-developer enterprise projects that have changed hands several times.

The more progressive large companies now actively discourage any mention of LoC in performance reviews. First, deleting unnecessary code is one of the best things a person can do for a code base. Second, if someone in a big company generates 250 LoC/day reliably over years, it doesn't always mean that person is a great programmer; it could mean that, or it could mean that he's always taking the fun, "green field" projects and passing the legacy maintenance (on which 10 LoC/day is a typical clip) to others.
> I think this is a distinct C-level problem. And if managers aren't being held accountable, that a C-level problem, too.

The C-levels are content with directors who "manage up" instead of looking past them to see what's really happening on the ground.
Someone should probably do a startup that solves the problem of "overpriced" conferences. This has always been a problem for me when wanting to attend a conferences, first comes the plane ticket, then hotel, and then the conference ticket itself (which sometimes is ridiculously high).
Thanks regEx. Hopefully we can make it even better.
Agree on taking responsibility. There are a lot of excuses he could have made: economy, bad PR firm, etc. By taking blame he can now move on to fix things.
I think they made this list before auto-suggest existed.
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Consider the following:

In order to look how fashion advertisers tell them they should look, women have to have extraordinarily low body fat.

In order to look how fashion advertisers tell them they should look, men have to have extraordinarily low body fat... and high muscle mass.

If you know anything about body building you'll know that the second is extremely hard to do. Building muscle mass while at the same time keeping body fat to extremely low levels is a rather unnatural thing to do, far more unnatural than just being skinny. Not only that, but it's not strictly dietary, it takes time and money to build that muscle mass.

So why do women have more eating disorders than men, who actually have a harder time achieving their "greek god" form?

My guess is women take what they see in advertising too seriously. The majority of guys in this world don't actually expect their women to look like that, and the standard reaction to women who demand that from their men is "fuck it".
> worst kind of cheapskate

Exactly (the OP was being sarcastic :)
Second Degree Homoiconicity
So many disconnecs. :(
Sure, but there's an order of magnitude difference in average difficulty (at least) per LoC in legacy maintenance vs. green-field development, and most software jobs are in the former camp. It's true that 20-40 LoC/day is a fast clip in most of the software industry; it's not true that this results from laziness or too many meetings.

Hacker News gives us a rose-colored view of the software industry-- one in which knowing about functional programming and agile methodologies (regardless of whether one intends to use them) is a prerequisite for being considered literate, and in which 200 line-per-day development on new invention is something people can actually get paid for. That's now how the average developer experiences software.
Ermm.. I'm assuming that comment is the beef jerky of humour: Very dry! In that case, haha! If not, then I suggest you check out the latest developments with AOL/TC.
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Most software doesn't need to be performant or defect free. It just needs to be barely good enough to accomplish some task. An average developer with an average tool like Java can meet that criterion.
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The only thing I don't quite grok is that, as the complexity of a given bash script increases, it moves ever-closer to looking exactly like the well-written-by-90s-standards Perl I remember from when I was just learning Unix.

Given that Perl's about as ubiquitous as bash (and arguably more so, since I literally don't know any mainstream *nix that ships without Perl in the core, and I know several that ship without bash), why not just use Perl in the first place? This is exactly what it was designed to do well, back in the beginning.
You are right. The FCC does also approve some mergers, but those are mostly for telecoms. I think Google-Yahoo would fall under FTC jurisdiction (as well as the department of justice).
OK Now I'm at home and can write you a substantive answer. It starts here:

- Marketing is Highly Situational

- Different Markets Should Be Approached Differently

- Tactics are constantly changing and evolving, so mix, match, and measure until you find something that works.

It sounds like you're looking for the essence of web marketing strategies for early stage startups. The best person blogging about this topic right now is a guy named Sean Ellis (http://www.startup-marketing.com) who's the CEO of Catchfree and ran marketing at some really amazing companies (Dropbox, Eventbrite, Xobni, etc.).

His framework, as detailed in these interviews here - http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview - the Sean Ellis framework seems to be the following:

- Value Proposition Clarification based on user interviews/analytics/qualitative customer data.

- Conversion Optimization - not only conventional LPO or form optimization, but actually optimizing for high quality users, attracted by the value proposition found in part 1.

- Channel experimentation/optimization - At some level, web companies are not highly scalable until they can "buy" customers profitably - until there's a known, strong relationship between CPA (cost per acquisition) and CLTV (customer lifetime value), and of course, you can get CPA below CLTV at scale. So this step is where experimenting with different channels and different tactics fits in.
Here's where you'd try different channels like paid and nonpaid social media and search engine activities, other advertising channels, affiliates, etc.

So that's what I'd do - clarify the value, optimize the conversion flow, and then relentlessly test channels until I could find something where I could acquire customers at a profit.

(In an slightly related side note, I'd suggest you read Noah Kagan's blog OKdork.com, where he writes on cool startup marketing topics.)

(Note: this assumes your product is not a social network.)
sweeet. too bad it's taken
When the programmers in these places take over the hiring process, they actively keep out anyone who can code better than average to protect their jobs. Many banks and insurance companies IT shops fall into this category.
sorry dannytatom, we put a rate limiter at the last second to keep our server from getting overloaded and it needs a little adjusting. if you try not to click around too fast it shouldn't be too big of a problem.
How’s That Again, Mr. Arrington?
I think tickets are like $3k or is that just for startup alley?
"Keeping the lights on" doesn't sound too nice, although it's likely exactly what he's going to do..
Says the guy who was promoted to CEO last week :-)
Anybody know what presentation software the guy in the PyCon talk was using? That looked pretty slick.
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The C-levels just need to look at stock performance and profit to see there's a problem. There is nothing that a director level person should be able to say to a C-level to make them feel comfortable.
Agreed. There is more to the story we don't know yet.
I'm confused. Didn't he put the blame on poor attendance?
All good, was just confused as to why it was happening. It's worse because what I was doing would start sounding awesome, then I'd realize nobody had been doing anything in a while, only to find out it was because I had been disconnected minutes earlier and was playing alone. :p
Yeah everybody knows there's no way a C API from Microsoft could ever be a leaky abstraction. Lol.
Yes, tickets are approximately $3,000. We would love to go, and apply for PG office hours, but can't swing that expense right now.
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Ktouch is awesome, Free, and in the Deb repo's, maybe others. Simple, effective, nice UI, and you can learn any layout from Qwerty to Colemak.
Also posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2968132
I'm also late here but I wish there were more "older" people on the internet that had advice. Sometimes it seems that everyone on the Internet is 25. One investment forum I used to visit had many people in their 50s and 60s and there were some posters who I would always search for their comments because you could tell they had seen it all and their advice contained wisdom from experience.
I'm confused. Did you read just the first sentence?

The second: It’s my fault, actually. Followed by an entire post re: errors made in planning DevDays '11.
Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team was trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.
Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team waas trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.
There's actually some discussion about how to handle errors in Haskell. See: http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/08/8-ways-to-report-errors-in-ha...
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Show HN: Hacker News Mobile - Twitter Bootstrap
Weekend project. Got tired of the rough layout and styling of others, so I built a Twitter Bootstrap-powered, mobile optimized reader for Hacker News.

Uses the ruby-hackernews gem:
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I honestly think the nature vs nurture thing is a red herring. The difference between individuals in either population are far greater than the differences between the two populations. Sure, maybe statistically women are a few ticks higher or lower on certain measures than men, but when you look at women and men at the individual level, there is going to be a very broad spectrum, and yet women will still be treated differently.
I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate.

Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor.

Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers like everywhere. There a lot of very good talented and hardworking folks here, sure they don't come cheap. But they come cheaper than what a similar guy in the US would cost. I have myself seen a lot of quality work getting delivered at almost 1/10th the cost it would have taken in the US.

The US taught us ideals of capitalism, didn't you guys want the world to follow your way of life. Now when we actually do, you guys frown.. withdraw turn your back on the same principles you have taught us for nearly half a century now.

You have nothing to fear from the bad engineers here, trust me they are loosing out very quickly. What you must fear is good hardworking folks coming at cheap prices. That will be a big problem, because when some one sees quality coming for cheap they will go for it.

Also, Indian is a huge buyer of military equipment from the US. We spend billions buying stuff from you. But we never complain that those jobs are being outsourced to America. In fact we love America for the help they offer us.

We live in a globalized world, this is how its going to be in the future.
I worked for Sun in the Bayarea and for Yahoo from their Bangalore office. I found lot of similarities between Sun and Yahoo. Similar to Sun, the engineers at Yahoo were really really good. It was really disappointing to see engineers of so much quality not being used to their full potential.

If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it would be, if those awesome engineers were freed up to help create real value to our economies. I would hire an ex-yahoo engineer in a heartbeat.
I still have my copy of UNIX for the Impatient I bought in 1997 and I still find myself referring to it occasionally (less so these days, with Internet references being more accessible generally). Quite a thing for that book to stand the test of time so well to still find it recommended -- 1995 edition and all. The C equivalent would probably be Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment.
Given the sheer volume of conferences these days - a problem that's only getting worse - I don't know how I'd plan my schedule without Lanyrd.

So this is excellent news.