skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question is, do you want to move up?

If someone wants to move up within the organization, this is a quick reading list.

Getting to Yes -- If you only have a chance to read one, read this. It is about how to effectively collaborate toward a solution, and it works in functional work environments. It will be around in a big enough used bookstore.

How to Win Friends and Influence People -- Another oldie but goodie. It's a quick skim, and it's in every used bookstore. It has influenced interpersonal communication in the corporate world for nearly a century, and most people are taking their cues from this book.

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business -- It's a condensation of many of the terms in business, and a reflection of the current corporate zeitgeist.

Then, read two top selling business books a year. They're usually quick reads, and you want to speak the same language as the people reading these books.

How does this help? By speaking the same language as the people making decisions, you are perceived as "one of them." This gives a common bond, and they perceive you as more likely to "understand business." By participating in collaborative conflict management, you are perceived to be a "team player." You can make the same good decisions without a confrontational work environment if all parties are speaking the same language.

And all of these will help you run your own company, because you will be talking to other businessmen who are reading these books. They will trust you more if they perceive you as "one of them," and you will be able to describe how your product produces a return on investment in their language.
In my upcoming book on technical blogging for hackers and founders (http://technicalblogging.com), for companies I recommend using either a self-hosted WordPress or Blogger. The latter has less features and is less extensible, but it has the advantage of being a hosted solution, much like Posterous.

If you're having questions or doubts regarding your switch, feel free to shoot me a line by email.
I'm curious--if the ball rolling down an incline were instead a photon falling through an event horizon, would the time-reversal involve breaking various physical laws? (Does it fall into the "physics doesn't apply inside of a black hole" disclaimer?)
I'm in this position but I'm not going to let it stop me. The best lesson I've learned from HN is that I don't have to do it all myself (even as a solo founder). I need to learn how to outsource intelligently. Not there yet, but the wheels are slowly turning....
This reminds me of an example used by Stephen Covey to illustrate the principle of "begin with the end in mind"[1]:

Many people climb the ladder of success only to find
the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

Like you say, it's not an either/or question, you need both. That said, I believe that execution is the more difficult of the two in most circumstances.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effe...
It's a small point to make but there are no cat videos on my small corner of facebook :)
What does it matter what it looks like if it is effective? The stats you get from this should matter more than our opinions.
Why would someone hate citing reddit?
That's a straw man. Let's say after high school / age 18.
i'veused the SuperCache plugin, which I think is one of the more visible recommended plugins and was braindead easy to install. Don't have much experience with hige traffic dumps, besides an appearance on Reddit's front once.
I definitely concur with the statement on organizing by release cycle (or perhaps using the PHP convention of showing deprecation and support version information for different calls).

I recently ran into issues with replicaSet myself; finding it hard to locate documentation on using user-based authentication. It boiled down to me eventually locating the necessary info on the Master-Slave page for ensuring I did a db.addUser() on the slave's local db. All in all, I'm much looking forward to a rewrite of the documentation.
Terrible formatting.

A better language would facilitate more reuse. A better language would have a real type system. A better language wouldn't explicitly discourage unintentional extension points.

In Java, there is no way to reuse code other than by subclassing something. This is the second-worst possible way to reuse code, because you often don't want to reuse code in the form "make me a thing that's oh kind of like that other thing". The best way to reuse code is through composition; either something like interfaces with some implementation in them ("roles"), or by automatic delegation. If I "has a" foo, then I should be able to delegate some subset of foo's methods to myself. This allows me to use some of foo's implementation without requiring foo's API to become my own API. (If foo does some role fooable, then if I delegate the right methods, I also become fooable. Then anything that takes a fooable can now accept me.)

The type system should make this standard. You should never be able to type a variable with a concrete type; only abstract interfaces. This way, extensibility is mandatory rather than a "best practice".

As for type systems, it should be something deeper than "there are some random primitive types, and everything else is a subclass of Object". That's worthless, because null is a subtype of every type, but violates Liskov. This means that I can't ever be sure my code will actually work at runtime. Haskell fixes this with the Maybe type. By making nullability explict, the compiler can check that you handle it where it needs to be handled.

Finally, a better language wouldn't be so uptight about privacy. If you don't want to support some API, don't add it to an interface that you implement. Document that you don't want someone to call it. Most of Java's syntax focuses on access levels: private, default, protected, public, final. Who cares? If I want to reimplement a private method, it's probably because I know what I'm doing. It's the langauge's job to make the programmer's intent clear, not to stop me from violating that programmers's wishes. Larry Wall said it best: "Perl doesn't have an infatuation with enforced privacy. It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun."

Anyway, Java makes writing flexible and reusable software very difficult. This is why you see so much brittle and outdated software written in Java. Compare this to Emacs Lisp, which doesn't enforce any privacy ever. Much of Emacs is over 30 years old, and it's still "state of the art". Food for thought.
It is unfair to expect VC11 to have super C++11 support, it has just been a standard for a few months. Building compilers take time, maybe a more positive headline next time?
I struggle choosing. I started both at the same time and keep going back and forth.

Riak

-> I love the fault tolerance
-> easier to scale with a dreamworld of hash-rings I wish I could have.
-> no indexes
-> no Geo-spatial indexes
-> I don't like link walking... it's not intuitive.
-> I want to use Riak (Lucerne/Solr like) full text search, but the docs are poor and have to read dozens of useless documents to get nowhere very quickly. It's a separate install that requires pre-commits?(which are never explained well enough to start using it).
-> installing on Mac OSX is painful (homebrew works/doesn't work depending on version, 32 bit or 64? how come I don't have include 32bit flags with older repo's, yet newer ones are only 64bit yet don't compile.... errors errors errors...ERLANG which? such a pain in the ass installing Riak unless you do it using specific build tools.
-> Only Joyent provides a hosted solution which is too expensive relative to its offering.
-> accepts any docs just set the content type.. handles original documents without conversions
-> easy to load balance behind NGINX
-> can choose between conflicting writes

MongoDB

-> straight forward install.. up and running in no time
-> SQL like queries
-> intuitive indexes
-> Geo-spatial indexes
-> Affordable hosted services with more than one provider.
-> no full text searching over documents
-> have to fiddle with doc handling GRIDFS etc..
-> can't choose between conflicting writes (last one wins)

I wish I could have "RiaMong"

-> straight forward install.. up and running in no time
-> fault tolerance
-> easier to scale with a dreamworld of hash-rings.
-> indexes
-> Geo-spatial indexes
-> Affordable hosted services at with more than one provider.
-> full text searching for documents
-> handle original documents without conversions
-> can choose between conflicting writes

Oh well maybe someday :)
I've learned from experience to run away from these kinds of UI kits. I always end up hacking around their shortcomings (e.g., tokenized inputs with autocomplete, etc.)

This one does seem to have a nice, compact, intelligible stylesheet, though – big improvement over jQuery UI there.
The group of people that have a relevant reason for discussing her departure from Hunch (which could potentially include future investors, future co-founders, future business partners, and future employees) can ask her and/or Hunch about it directly. That subset of people is considerably smaller than TechCrunch's (or Hacker News') readership.

It is natural for people to be curious, which is why gossip exists, and why there's a market for publishing it. However, our tendency to gossip is something we should resist and overcome.

There's a large distinction between Fake and Jobs (or Schmidt, or Bartz). The former was an executive of a small private company. The latter was the CEO of one of the largest public companies on earth, owned in part by many thousands of investors, all of whom have a financial interest in his health. Executives do have to explain things to their investors, and in a public company, the investors and the public are the same.

TechCrunch and similar publications have long tried to treat Silicon Valley and high-tech entrepreneurship in general as 'Hollywood for geeks', and the founders of startups as the equivalent to entertainment figures. But entrepreneurs aren't politicians or movie stars, no matter how much the tech press (and certain entrepreneurs!) might like it to be so, and subjecting their private lives to the same amount of scrutiny is repugnant.
Ableson and Sussman might beg to differ. From SICP:

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a
computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing
ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only
incidentally for machines to execute.
I read those statements as demographic, not judgemental. A median 40-something does indeed tend to have a family, more financial obligations, a more expensive lifestyle, etc... Those are just presented as facts, and while I don't have the statistics handy they jive pretty well with my 39-year-old intuition.

Nothing is saying entrepreneurship is impossible for the middle-aged, just that it's harder.
things like Amazon RDS are compelling from a deployment perspective

Check out http://postgres.heroku.com for an analogous deployment option for Postgres.
Regretsy is a startup? I thought it was just a blog that linked to stupid Etsy art.
That's what I'm doing whether we get into YC or not we're planning on moving to Cali just bc there's better opportunities for programmers. We're selling most of our stuff and saving money like crazy. Also I have an online job that allows me to work from home. If you find something like you could move and still work while in Cali.
While related and interesting, that article really doesn't deal with the central point of Joel's article: that pointers and recursion weed out mediocre programmers. A degree from a Javaschool does not weed out as many bad programmers.

One could set the same bar during an interview by asking questions requiring the skilled use of pointers and recursion, and most Javaschool graduates without other programming experience will fail. This, of course has a high rate of false positives since such people have never attempted to learn pointers and recursion and therefore won't likely get it fast enough to answer an interview question.
Boom - text snippets on the command line
What does everyone think of the map as the background portion of the UI? I found it to be a little cluttered.

I recently wrote similar app for cougar sightings (the cat) http://cougarreport.com . I moved the map into a separate spot.

Any opinions on which layout is the preferred way?
Well, it depends wether you care about the market share you are leaving out.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

http://caniuse.com/

I think that for most applications, it's not worth the trouble...
The description is too abstract for my taste. Of the three main points, all I really get is that you somehow organize my "Events", whatever that is. The logos above the first point give me a clue as to what "Events" are, from a technical point of view - but still doesn't give me a good idea of how that applies to my life. What events am I expected to think about and get excited? Meetings? Facebook events like parties? What do you actually DO - is it a glorified calendar with notifications?

I don't get any mental image that connects your service to my life and why it could make it awesome. It's missing an "aha - this would've been great last week when X happened" or "I could use this in two weeks when Y".

Too much explanation, not enough examples. Better yet, some images or screenshots.

Also, not a big fan of the custom "social bookmarking" icons in the top right - I think most people will completely miss them.
The fact that this site lists oolong engine* makes me suspect that it's not at all a carefully selected lists of framework.

(oolong is basically a poorly put together collection of sample code with an 'engine' label slapped on it. For example the engine doesn't actually have any concept of 'lights', instead the 'lighting sample' is a rip-off of an Apple sample with all light properties hard-coded calls to OpenGL).
From my grumpy old man perspective, Foursquare and Farmville are the top-most "noise generators" in the social stream.
> The other day, someone asked Kyle if the hat he was wearing was new. He replied by asking what the person meant by "new".

Tip: don't do this. Just by refraining to ask such obnoxious questions, you'll become a better conversationalist.

(of course there are situations when such questions can spark interesting discussion, but most of the time it just annoys the other person)

> From an intuitive perspective — the perspective of the person asking the question — Kyle should have answered simply "yes" or "no".
After reading this and thinking about the blog post a bit more, there is another difference. Only essays that are very technical in nature are purely explanatory. Usually an essay must persuade the reader as well. When was the last time you had to persuade a computer?
Reading the three main boxes, I had no idea what you were talking about.

1. "We manage your events...": Ok, so it helps me plan parties and meet-ups and stuff? Facebook, Twitter, Gmail icons: Right, these must be how I can manage invitations and attendance.

2. "Get smart and precise[d] recommendations...": Recommendations for what? Similar meet-ups I can attend? But I thought it's for planning the event, so maybe venues and catering?

3. "We can help you complete our recommendations...": That doesn't tell me anything. I still think it's like Anyvite.

Then I read the lower blurb (which is better):

"Diglig is a context-aware, virtual personal assistant and do engine."

Does "do engine" mean anything to anyone else? I have no idea.

"Diglig manages your events at one centralized location and anticipates which tasks you’ll need to complete before your next event."

My idea from before was reinforced: I have tasks like "book venue", "order catering", "create seating chart", and you'll help me with those.

"Diglig then assists you in doing our recommendations, whether it is booking a flight & hotel for your next meeting, making a dinner reservations or getting a gift for that special someone."

Hmm. This is the first time I feel like it's not about planning a single event. So maybe it's attaching tasks to the events in my calendar. Can I suggest you use a word like "appointment", because "event" sounds large and once-off.

"At Diglig we believe that everyone should have a virtual assistant to which they can delegate their tasks."

Oh, I can delegate my tasks. So now it sounds like not just an app, but a service with real people as assistants (where "virtual" means "not in person", NOT "digital"). But I have no idea if this interpretation is correct, as it's hard to get a consistent description of what you're trying to do.

So what DO you do? Then I can help with some wording, if you like.
This raises the question: Are the merchants giving poorer customer service to Groupon customers, because Grouponers are cheapskates, or are Groupon customers just jerks?
Top 30 Powerful Google Products You Need To Know
The ironic thing about this scenario of ActiveX being required by Gmail is that XHR sort of has its roots in ActiveX -- that is, before Mozilla and others had to replicate it to remain competitive.
I completely agree and I am very sad that a lot of people can't be rational about this. The vision of HTML5 may be towards that direction, but when I do a simple test with SVG and found ugly issues on Google Chrome (I move a specific object but it left a trail behind) then I understand that we are far from there, may be 2 years in development and business terms?

Also the development side, something like the criticized old Visual Basic, an IDE where you can quickly design a rich UI with a lot of controls. It will be an irony if the best IDE for HTML5 came from Microsoft on Visual Studio >= 2012? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zNKE5vp... Macromedia, Google et al have opportunities but they move slowly in this direction.

It's also strange to be developing and debugging CPython using Visual Studio http://pytools.codeplex.com/
Seedcamp was great once again this year. Vox.io was by far the most impressive company I've ever talked to out of an accelerator or competition. Congrats on all fronts.
How individuals can survive in the new world of work
I'm guessing this excerpt comes from an early section of the book that sets out how Lean principles matter for startups.

The point is that your goal is to maximise delivered value and minimise waste. You just have to re-think what value and waste mean for you.
I have an unusual reason, but a strong one: I primarily use relational DBs for large-scale analysis of frozen snapshots of data, rather than transactional loads. PostgreSQL has MVCC features built into it at the most fundamental levels where they cannot be disabled, and as such it's not suitable for the types of queries that I frequently run against MySQL. In the most extreme (and trivial) case, you can't run a "SELECT COUNT(*)" on a table in PostgreSQL without a full sequential scan of your data, which can be a huge expense when your row counts are in the tens or hundreds of millions. MySQL, in contrast, can return a cached answer instantly, which isn't possible under PostgreSQL. Less trivially, MySQL is still drastically faster for aggregates on low-cardinality fields.

Yes, I know you could set something up with triggers, but the point is that it needs to be simple enough for frequent, ad-hoc usage. Usually the time I need to know how big a table is when I just made it, and I might well drop it five minutes later. I'm not going to set up an elaborate network of meta-data tables when MySQL will just do it for me for free.

Not trying to hate on Postgres, by the way. I fully get that it's superior in most regards, and I use it frequently just for the much stronger support of user-defined functions. But MySQL does still have a few tricks left in it.
Is anything coming after the colon in a subsequent edit? The problem is not in my device, I guess.

(I don't try to sound funny, I really am curious what you have to say about these two services.)
Software Outsourcing
or because if you've already started a family you are generally expected to spend a certain amount of time looking after them/enjoying their company. People get socially ostracised/divorces/estranged children for working too hard at the office too.
I can imagine how nervous you must have been in front of PG and especially in front of an audience.

I applaud you for even getting up there to take criticism so publicly.
Murder Incorporated
How Tumblr Recovered from a Business Crisis
Potentially, yes. In the case law I remember, exceptions were explicitly carved out for "hobbies", so if you can show that it's something you usually do as a hobby and that it's not interfering with your job search, you can probably avoid penalties, but I could see it being a major pain in the ass.

In reality, enforcement of UI regulations is somewhat spotty, and at least in California, a tech worker who's only on it for 2-3 months is unlikely to have any trouble. The risk isn't nonexistent, though.
Ok, I'm getting the same error someone mentioned earlier.

Also, the front page design is, well how can I put this, bad. Would I pay for a service like this? Maybe, but then I question the integrity of the company. If someone puts out a half-ass design, what does that say about the company? Why should I trust you (the company). Also, I'd rather you include a link to a contact us page or something, putting your name on the page makes it feel like this is a one-man show (which I'm sure it is).

Instill some confidence in me and don't make this seem like you're an overnight sensation who might not be around months from now. I dont want to give up my credit card to someone working out of their bedroom. You use the word "We" alot, but at the bottom you said this app was developed by "Adam Griffiths." So, which is it? Did you make it or do you really have support people behind this? If I'm sending crucial log files to you, I need you to be able to support this when I need you to.

I'm not hating or trying to put you down but these are some of the things I've noticed. A well-design site wouldn't be the only reason why I would select a particular company, but it goes a long way to tell me a company is legit. I refuse to sign up for sites that don't show a support link or contact info. Who can I reach if I need help?
If you focus on the UK check out openstreetmap. The map data coverage might be better. cloudmade has some beautiful styles.
With Windows Phone 7, you don't look for Apps anymore
The essay seems to miss the point.

While programs have little in common with the written word the act of programming is similar to the act of writing in that someone will read your code. It's not that hard to write something that people can decode, but it usually takes a fair amount of revision to remove the craft and add clarity. That’s not to say everything must be a masterpiece, but just as a great speech can inspire a nation some code just plain runs things.

PS: The most interesting program I ever read fit into 4kilobytes of ram. At the low level it employed plenty of twisted logic to fit into a limited environment, but the overall structure was plenty elegant to call it poetic. Just think cooperative multithreading, networking, and the ability to deal with quite a bit of memory errors in 16kbyte of source code and yet you could still understand what's going on.
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