skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Toxic Mac Pros emitting benzene?
I approach criticism critically. Then I usually decide the person criticizing me is an idiot, the wrong person to talk to, or that they had something useful to say. When people criticize me, it doesn't make me feel down. It makes me feel smarter or at least ahead of the curve around my ideas, some of the time, and lets me learn something useful the rest of the time.

You sound like you are running a neuro-semantic loser script about your project. That's not the way to change the world. You can't play this game if you care that much about what eight douchebags who happen to know you think. Instead of "criticism is a downer" try substituting "criticism is a valuable chance to play a mental game with my ideas"

You should lose the depressed downer reaction right away. Then, you should think about the criticism, and if it's useful, don't be so arrogant that you don't take it. If it's not useful, either they are stupid or just not relevant. Either way, nothing to be depressed about. Or, maybe you actually are a loser and just are in a state of cognitive denial about what a loser situation you are in, I don't know.

(You could give your framework to communities all over the country who do similar community reporting.)
Not to mention that you're risking your own money instead of the VC's. And since most startups, even yours, are likely to fail, you'll probably have better odds going to Vegas and putting it all on red.
These videos made me a better python programmer. I wrote a small game in python in a lisp inspired style, and thought it was too lispy and so i tried to rewrite it in scheme, just for comparison. I don't know scheme that much, and because of that, i failed.
Accedi
The lukewarm reaction is the least useful. Bona fide criticism or praise is always useful. The first thing you should seek to understand is whether the person has the problem/need that you hope to address. Talk to them about the problem before you get their feedback on your current solution iteration.
flow charts for the win!
it should be listed on their site, front page actually. if not try to reach out to Eric, he will probably let you know.
I wonder if it is just some regional thing they accept there. I dunno...
Not when I'm at home. :)

I'm not some piece of machinery that can work 24/7 so there are certain externalities that don't quite match up to accounting. Goodwill perhaps?

I get paid a certain salary whether I show up for 30 or 60 hours. It doesn't matter so long as the work gets done. If you're a contractor, do you take your time while your asleep and deduct it as a business cost?
First you have to see if the criticism is constructive or destructive. If it is destructive eg. "Your idea sucks!". Well then just ignore it. You have to develop a bit of a thick skin and ignore the naysayers and the ones who want to put you done. If the criticism is constructive then make sure you understand what needs to be done or how you can use it to your advantage.

In my experience being a solo founder is very tough because you have to keep yourself motivated. Having a partner helps so that you can take turns at picking each other up when times get tough.
If we could make money by reading on HN I would be rich :-)
Leadership & The Economy - (in)decisionmaking
Isn't flagging meant for spam-submissions? That has been my sole use of it until now, at least.
Are new web start-ups more Me 2.0 than Web 2.0, and is this deterring investors?
add http://spicypage.com to this list
I actually signed up for timesvr earlier tonight after reading this. They claim $59 a month buys you unlimited tasks, which I cannot believe is profitable, but if they can make money off of my business, I wish them health and happiness.
I'm pretty surprised by it as well. The 1 week free trial is awesome too - worst case, you have a team of assistants to do free work for you and you leave after 7 days. Although at their prices, that's really only a $15 free trial so it's not really going to hurt them any
God prefers atheists
I think it depends a lot on the school or the department.

When I was in grad school for physics, C+ was considered failing. Beyond that, we were specifically told, as long as we passed, grades didn't matter. It was of course quality of research that mattered.

I don't know how differently people faired with different GPA's coming out. I think employers mostly looked at publications and references. And I'm not far enough out to say who was "successful" yet.
"There are many different reasons why customers have requested Windows Server; for example many customers want to run ASP.NET websites using Internet Information Server and use Microsoft SQL Server as their database. "

I guess they're moving beyond startups then. What are the licensing implications for suddenly requesting 400 instances of your Win2K8 box?

Afterthought: are the kinds of places that use Windows server (older larger corporates) likely to want cloud computing?
Hahahaha! It's surprisingly exhilarating when someone else does your work for you.
Well, Apple can do what they want. It's the others that need to adhere to these rules.
Licensing will end up killing proprietary operating systems chances of running the cloud. Dealing with licensing is like dealing with long distance -- people still put up with that?
Very professional work, awesome minds. Congratulations TimeSvr Team!
The easy way around that is by "grandfathering" people who are already paying what you thought they should pay for your service/product; then charging people who have never seen your service before the new price.
Key point of the article is insightful and generally applicable. The stronger Android is, the more likely features which everyone want but Apple resists show up on the iPhone.

I'm also patiently waiting for Linux to catch up to OSX in usability/UI.
What does a startup CTO actually do?
Sure, but it would be different from the one we have now. Things might be moving slower, but crashes should be less frequent.

The main difference is that that system isn't built on the assumption that the economy will always expand, which the current system is. I'll leave it to someone who actually knows something about the pros and cons of each to tell you if that's good or bad.. But basic reasoning tells me that it's not likely that something that takes place in a fixed environment (Earth) can expand for ever.
I like the writeup, but I wonder what size your startup has to be before this kicks in. Under N engineers, isn't the CTO just the founder with the most technical experience?
The interest rate is not tied to the amount of money available for lending but the amount of lenders out the there. So if there a huge demand for loans the interest rate goes up to counter balance the demand.

With the economy tanking and the money tightening if they raised the interest rates, nobody would borrow and the situation would get even worse.
This is only from MY personal experience: I have found that I take criticism more negatively for projects I am myself not fully convinced about.

My advice: fully be sold on your idea before inviting outside opinions. Otherwise outside opinion, especially negative, is just an EXCUSE to drop an idea you were never convinced about yourself.

Talk is cheap. Don't seek validation of your idea from others. Except of course when they are people that matter(and there are limits to that too). ie. VCs, potential cofounders.
Yes, absolutely. We didn't even formalize titles until we were in the 10-20 people range. I served as both CTO and VP Eng until the company was about 65 people, and it was starting to strain but was not a total disaster.
"I'm also patiently waiting for Linux to catch up to OSX in usability/UI."

That gave me a chuckle. The first thing that the Linux world should do is decide on one UI to use but that will never happen. It is philosophically impossible.
Outsourcing code reviews?
I'm writing a lot of code, and I want it to be good. Good code reviews can help that, especially with code written solo.

I don't especially like the idea of outsourcing coding, but having someone else tear apart my design, style, and logic seems like it could be a good idea. The across-the-world aspect of some outsourcing seems like it could be a benefit.

Code reviews can bottleneck development, so I was thinking it'd be nice if I could just commit at end of day... Then in the morning, I'd come in to an email box magically full of corrections, criticisms, etc.

When I think of the big worries I have about outsourced development, schedule risk, quality risk, and the miscommunication burdens. They all seem to be mitigated by just doing reviews. If they can't review well in a reasonably timely manner (strong preference for a day), just quit using them. No major loss. If the code isn't understandable, there's a real benefit to improving it... it's not just a burden imposed by the process.

Has anyone tried this? What issues did you / might you run into?

Are there companies I could approach about hiring them to do it? I'm happy to pay up for such a service because if it works well it could make me dramatically more productive.

Am I missing something that makes this obviously a stupid idea?
From the guidelines:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)
Has anybody thought about talking to the people who post this stuff?
Try call/cc when you want a challenge with Lisp (i.e. Scheme).
"The CTO's primary job is to make sure the company's technology strategy serves its business strategy"

Best description I've seen. Startups that follow the opposite scenario often die because they're little more than academic labs, and no one will pay for what they're doing.
The Playboys of Tech (iminlikewithyou YC Summer 06)
Is all of the code you are writing open source? If not, then you may not want to release it to third parties, and they may not want to read it.

Also, getting a reasonable code review on a large project pretty much requires the reviewer to be versed in your codebase. Depending on what you're doing, it may be more costly (in time/money) to bring someone up to speed.
Thanks for the article Sid. Appreciate your balanced review :)

Zaki Mahomed
CEO, TimeSvr.
What's with the rash of people posting links to wikipedia without context? Is this some research experiment (if so, please tell your human subject oversight board that you're pissing people off)?
Thanks. I worked really hard on those. It was a long, 2500 word block of text before I put them in.
For anyone who has to explain why concurrency is serious business (prof, TA, etc), this is an awesome example.

Hardcore debugging, too. Can't ever be too good at debugging.
Microsoft still paying people to search
Exactly what I thought on reading article title. Especially since if you invert the m and the u...
There's pretty cool pop-up effect when you click on "screenshot" link.
Amazon Kindle Product Analysis
Code reviews can bottleneck development, so I was thinking it'd be nice if I could just commit at end of day... Then in the morning, I'd come in to an email box magically full of corrections, criticisms, etc.

This sounds like open source development. There's a reason why people joke that the fastest way to get a patch reviewed is to commit it. :-)

But more seriously: Finding people who are good at reviewing your code is very difficult. The more obscure the code you're writing -- that is, the more you actually need your code to be reviewed -- the fewer the number of people who would be competent to review it; so any attempt to put together a generic "group of reviewers" isn't likely to get the most important code reviewed.

If I were you, I'd think about what specific things you're doing in which you're likely to make mistakes -- generally speaking, this means sorts of code which you don't have much experience writing -- and then go out and look for experts to review for those specific bits of code.

I'm available for contract work reviewing cryptographic code. :-)
This article is as alien to me as a newspaper written in Greenlandic. Perhaps it's something to do with spending too much of my life in Stoke-on-Trent, one of the less salubrious corners of England. It just seems to be taking the bland consumerism that has taken over life in most cities to a new extreme.
I must disagree with the comment of pmjordan. My impression is that the math argument didn't made through.

If the issue is raised over and over their might be a possibility that it has not been optimally addressed yet.

I also understand the initial question as an invitation for suggesting for a better solution. Why smashing this with a "don't ask" comment ? This is a hacker topic and it has many potential applications if a better solution is found.

Back to the initial topic. It looks like the problem comes from using a simple scalar parameter for the ranking. There are other parameters in play that could be combined to yield a more pertinent ranking: number of leads, number of votes, kind of votes (good, bad, off topic, spam, ... ), number of comments.

The ranking could also be multidimensional instead of a simple scalar value. For instance, identify hot topics, popular topics and pertinence, etc.

10 up votes may mean 90% readers up voted the subject or only 1% up voted the subject which is a very different information value.

The google story, as well as the reddit story, should remind us how important the ranking can be. The more pertinent your information channel becomes the more valuable it is.
Thanks, I feel better now

:-)
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A mortgage is essentially (depending on the rate of amortisation) renting your home form the bank.
Dear Henry: Frame or Be Framed
The point that I was trying to get at without breaking any sort of NDA that I may or may not be under was that perhaps there's a way to embed some sort of Apple-sanctioned interpreter in an application...

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Web...
Some interests are going up: Google "TED Spread". Also, note that 3 month Treasury securities, the safest investments in the world, have been selling to yield less than 1%. LIBOR - the "prime" rate for loans between banks, hit over 5% - for 1 day loans! Banks are very scared of lending to other banks, because they don't have any idea whether the other guy is broke.
Where Are All The RDF-based Semantic Web Apps?
Been interested in the whole VA/personal outsourcing thing since reading 4HWW - I know, how original - but was put off by the pricing.

Definitely going to be giving this a shot in the near future.
I think many HN readers dream of getting rich and dining at the best NY restaurants.
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This kicks in right from the beginning.

The "five essential skills" are critical on day -1 of the start-up. If you select the wrong platform, aren't aware of what it can do, can't come up with many options to do each of the things that need to be done, don't find the right 80/20 compromise, and can't recruit more technical talent, your technology start-up is screwed from the get-go. It might burn on for a while, but it'll all turn to ashes if you don't have a good start-up CTO.
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I read this article before it was posted and passed it up. Maybe I'm wrong. The flavour of the article smacked of "Boy-band" web company. I didn't realise it was a YC Co. Maybe it's the style of the site it comes from but I would have pegged some of the insights I read as a good example of a bubble in action.
"we'll have a lot more talented people going into things like real engineering, as opposed to financial engineering."

o snap
I fraking LOVE gnip. This is the first solid new biz that I've seen really enter the market in a while. A core, solid kind of business that just fundamentally makes sense. They have made the process of getting data for web apps SO easy its just crazy. Love it, love it.
Here ya go. Its under the API link on the top of the homepage.

http://groups.google.com/group/gnip-community/web/publishers
Excellent article. Quite comforting to see how the role evolves past the "tiny start-up" stage (which is where I'm at at the moment.

It's worth pointing out that many of these responsibilities don't just appear out of nowhere. They're there from day one - from day -1, in fact. They might become more formalised as the start-up grows, but I'd be seriously worried about any start-up whose CTO (or technical cofounder) doesn't take up responsibilities 1-4 at least right away.
I think I would still prefer a live, personal, one-on-one assistant. Sure there are a lot of downsides, but if you get a good person and you learn each other's personalities? I think the upside is a lot bigger than the downside.
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The problem with that part of the NDA is that Frotz is available on the app store and has been for a month or two. Frotz is an interactive fiction application (arguably interpreted) and also open source (gplv2, http://code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/), two things technically incompatible with the NDA.

I don't really think Apple meant to include the likes of Frotz. Seems like the biggest issue is arbitrary rejection (as you mention), and not so much whether or not the NDA is strictly followed..exceptions made for applications that Apple sees nothing bad in. Of course, Flash would be a more direct threat to the App Store than IF, sooo...I have a feeling that even if there were some sort of loophole, Apple would reject it anyway. Shame, cause I'm not really interested in games, I just want to view some websites that don't have non-Flash fallback (sometimes for a legitimate reason) on my phone.

This also sucks from a developer perspective, but that particular issue has been discussed to excess everywhere without Apple yet doing something positive..
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Very interesting comparison. Thanks for sharing!
He didn't have to tell me he was ADHD. I could see it in 3 paragraphs.
The problem being nobody knows what these rules are. Applications have been accepted that are incompatible with the NDA, and conversely, applications with no NDA incompatibilities have been rejected or pulled for frivolous/unknown/bizarre reasons.

When I look at all these complaints from iPhone developers about the NDA right now, it's not as much about how irrational some parts of it are (really, not letting pragprog publish an iPhone dev book?) but more about how other parts that exist to someone at Apple are not made public to developers and their clients/customers so they know what the actual limitations are. Effectively a black box. Fantastic way to get people to not spend money and time on an application they don't know will be approved or rejected until they're close to finishing up on an initial release.
As it was "impossible" for Apple to decide when all they had was the old Macintosh toolbox and NextStep UIs, but they did it. They made Carbon/Cocoa to look reasonably consistent despite huge internal differences.

Linux can do the same with Qt/GTK+/etc. It certainly possible to have high-level UI consistency between multiple toolkits, especially when they all share the same lower-level stuff (X11/Cairo).
Maybe I'm not cool enough for the tech scene but I'd rather be in the office working on my product than be at the nightclubs partying.
Yes this is the root problem with the credit markets; bad mortgages.

However, this doesn't account for the root financial problem of our country that has plagued us since 1913; the federal reserve. These crooks sway the entire economy and have exponentially inflated our currency. The dollar is worthless today. It is worth $0.02 to the dollar of the beginning of the 20th century.

We went off the gold standard, we decided fractional reserve banking was a good thing, and we put in charge idiots and crooks to create a lesse faire market that only benefits them.

Don't believe me?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:USACPI1800.svg

Usury, fraction reserve banking, and crooks.
You know, riffing off this Matt - would it be possible for you to set up a page with HN and NHN side by side in iframes?
Programming languages (comic)
Ireland’s talent meltdown
I don't consider this a big problem yet, the quality of frontpage submissions is still pretty good. Yes, there were a few political/financial entries recently, but still they weren't completely off-topic IMHO, given the current state of the world.

Sometimes, I like to read other HN readers opinions about the so-called "nonhackers news". Overall, I consider current voting system functional.
Virtual Server Sprawl: FUD or FACT?
Know your advisers and use them. The main problem to solve is knowing when to listen --- and when not to. Look for commonalities in what they're saying. If you average their feedback together, which concerns float to the the top of the stack?

If it's a social news site, why not have them enter each concern as a separate item? To the extent that others agree, that concern will get up-voted. Then there's transparency for all involved when you listen and when you don't. And they end up using your product more.
In the UK you are insured up to £35k (soon £50k) per person per FSA registation.

As multiple trading names operate under one registration (E.g. Lloyds & Scottish Widows) you have to be careful.
That adds up to 125%. Maybe you meant that IE7 is 49%.
Completely agree. However, most people can not justify or afford a full time, or even part time, assistant. They're just looking for 30 - 45 minutes of help a day. That's where we step in :)