skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well I've got the viewpoint from the other side here. I work for a large company in the US that has set up an office abroad for outsourcing some of the engineering. (I'm actually planning to leave to start my own thing soon, but that's a different story.)

I think points 1 through 7 you made are typical in any large company. I've found that I've had to just pick a few things, and learn to ignore the rest. It helps to have at least one higher-up who agrees with you...find that person and get them to like you. It's probably better for your career not to be the one who always complains and upsets people. This is pretty difficult when you get attached to a project and think that the contributions of others are making it worse, but you have to be diplomatic about it.

Your last two points are intriguing thought. I recently had to sit through a training session on "How to work with India". It was chock full of ridiculous generalizations, mixed in with a few useful comments on the cultural differences. They have an equivalent "How to work with the US" class over there and I'd love to sit through that one too.

However, the two things you mentioned echo a lot of my experience with our foreign counterparts. I rarely get a "no" or any pushback, and I really wish I did. Our management here relies on the low-level engineers to make the implementation decisions. They, after all, are closest to the problem and have the most information to base their decision upon. For some reason our management here however treats our Indian counterparts as a black box project factory - requirements go in, solution comes out, and there's little to no feedback in between. The class we sat through made this out to be a cultural difference, where it's disrespectful to disagree with a superior, and the manager is always supposed to have all the answers. Maybe that is a cultural difference, but it's not benefiting either party in the long-term. I tend to think it's really because we've treated them as cut-rate engineers for so long that it's now an ingrained behavior. Of course, if we didn't and instead genuinely expected their productivity to match ours, then we'd have to pay them a full engineer's salary and that sort of defeats the purpose. I'd love to hear some comments on how this plays out at other companies...

In any case, it sounds like you're unhappy. In that sort of situation, your output will eventually decline to average, at which point you're doing neither them nor yourself a favor by staying. At a minimum you now know what to look for when finding a new job. But if you take a job at another big company, know that some of these issues will follow you there and you'll have to learn to pick your battles. But if you can at least find a boss you respect (and get him to respect you), it'll really help to mitigate the issues.
V8 and webkit can surely be compiled under varies os. CodeWeaver just wanna promote its commercial wine....
In high school and college you are required to take quizzes and tests. You are not allowed to use a computer, and therefore must handwrite them. Legibly.
Ha Napster doesn't support OSX yet? I knew what I was getting into when I went to the site but... wow.
I like my X40 and since the built-in optical disk and touch pad aren't important to me, I'm waiting to see the X201.
I would get it. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of effort to run Leopard on it, so it is no option for me. Linux costs too much time, and I simply don't like Windows. I would love Apple releasing their OS on other platforms.
Making Lisp run faster would almost certainly involve making it closer to SML / OCaml.

Indeed.

I like Haskell as a compromise between OCaml and Lisp. OCaml's syntax is a bit too weird for me, and its type system is needlessly irritating (a different operator for integer and floating point addition?).

You have given me a good idea, though -- compiling a Lisp into Haskell or OCaml. All the syntactic goodness of Lisp, all the strictness of the "host" language.
Works great in Parallel's Coherence mode too:

http://tlrobinson.net/skitches/Skitch-20080915-154041.png
There is no digital version of my math textbook on Amazon Kindle...
what channel?
PHP is very fast..

If by very fast you mean the second-slowest:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

I agree that it doesn't matter much. But why use a slow language with poor syntax when you could be using a fast language with beautiful syntax? (I won't go in to detail about how horrible PHP's object model is, or how it doesn't have lexically-scoped variables, or how it doesn't have closures or even anonymous functions, ... or a host of other features that most programmers have been enjoying for the last 30 years.)
I've seen several Macbook air's on the train into London. In all cases I have to say it appears to offer nothing over a regular macbook on a train. Whenever I got it there were a couple of looks (although nothing compared to the people going up to those with EEE PCs last year and asking them about them, then watching their jaws drop when they find out the price) but nothing major.

I noticed that the number of air's peaked around earlier this year, but that might pick up later as more commuters join in the post-summer morning/evening fun.
the phrase everything old is new again makes me wonder how many times great inventions had to be invented before they gained traction. Everyone knows that iPod wasn't the first portable HDD music player, but will people know that in 200 years? What inventions from 200 years ago do we attribute to the wrong people? (tesla/edison is one obvious example, but I'm sure there are some that no one knows about.)
PA Semi made PowerPCs, not ARMs. The fact that the former PA team is workin on ARM is "news" (although obvious to everyone in the business).
Control Parental - Seguridad en Internet para nuestros hijos
Ask HN: Feedback on my new web app please
Control Parental - Seguridad en Internet para nuestros hijos
¿Sabe con quién chatea su hijo en Internet? ¿Está seguro de quién está al otro lado del computador? ¿Puede una inocente conversación a través de la red transformarse en una pesadilla?
Reaction times might be 180-200 milliseconds, but a delay in rendering (as in a pipeline delay, so 60fps rendering but 180ms delay) will add to the reaction time latency, it won't be masked by it. If you delay rendering by 180ms, then the screen will change 180ms after you hit a key, and you'll only notice the result after your reaction time for a total of 360ms.

I'd bet even 50ms will feel a bit sluggish subconsciously (people won't like your controls but they won't know why), but delaying by 180-200ms will make your character noticably lag input.

I could easily whip something up to simulate it if you'd like.
Your conclusion assumes that startups are an intrinsic aspect of hacking, hackers, and the hacker condition.

I disagree.

Even if it were so, outside funding (credit and financing) is most definitely not an indispensable requisite to starting a startup.
Nice, but I'm not sure how much "legs" it has in terms of being a business.
Technology Can Be 'Berry, 'Berry Addictive
the incentive to buying an electric car is reaching a tipping point. once that tipping point is reached economies of scale will kick in and we'll have faster adoption than people expect. however, personal transportation isn't the big problem with oil consumption. personal transportation uses up less than 10% of global oil supply yearly.

an aside: can we blacklist treehugger urls? their submissions are ALWAYS sensationalist.
Using different operators for ints and floats in OCaml is like making people use prefix notation for arithmetic in Lisp - you get used to it, but it can really annoy people new to the language, and some people never get over it (or forgive the language designer).

(Messing with the syntax for basic arithmetic is all but trying to give a bad first impression, even though it may fit the overall language better. Smalltalk seems to have found a good middle path here.)

I'm in the early stages of working on a synthesis between them, as well. Among many other things.

I understand the appreciation for Haskell, but it's just not my thing. I really strongly prefer multi-paradigm languages. Instead of forcing me to do everything in pure functional code, I'd rather it just be able to tell if it's pure, and if so, optimize accordingly. Sometimes bending the language's rules a bit is a better idea than the language realizes, and what constitutes "good" code can change over time. No one programming paradigm or technique is the best match for every problem domain. OCaml is far from ideal, but it suits that style of coding pretty well. (Also, I prefer OCaml's syntax to Haskell's, though I might be the only one.)

A language with OCaml's type and module sytems, Haskell's typeclasses (which could be built with macros on the existing type system, I think), Lisp's s-exps and clear specification of whether code at executed at read, compile, or run time, and Scheme's first-class continuations could be a great thing. (While we're dreaming, let's give it a standard library like Python's, a conceptual core as clean as Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, or Lua's, and a runtime as small as Brainfuck's.)
Stock Market Meltdowns - Why they will happen again and again and again
A Sketch of a Theory of The Early Modern Witch Hunts
Thanks!

I have ideas about how to monetize it like adding premium features and adding up-sell add-on services.

I subscribe to the launch early and launch fast mentality :)
I normally avoid posting economics articles as they often boil down to philosophical differences between various factions, but this just seemed interesting.

Hopefully there won't be any "flaming" ;-)
Do those other ones like tinyurl actually bring in money? I'm not very knowledgeable about that 'market'. In any case, getting it out there is a good idea, it looks like it's pretty nice 'as is'.
This guy was a Persian. They are a different ethnic group with a different language and history.
#4: treating legacy like a dirty word.

this one resonates, I think hackers should see crappy legacy code bases as an opportunity for improvement.
I've found that the better a job suits me, the more they are willing to pay me. (I have never looked for a Lisp job, though.)
Ask YC: What are some the best business books?
I am looking to read some good business books. I would really appreciate any recommendations. Thanks!
Persian and Arabs share a whole lot of similarities. I lived with a Persian family for nearly 6 months so I have experienced it. On the other hand I lived 12 years across the street from a Arab family and I went to school with a few Arabs as well. I know Arabs, Persian, Assyrian..
WordPress Developer’s Toolbox
Slippery Slope!
http://searchyc.com/business+book
Let me start off with this: That is pretty sad and pathetic that people become obsessive over virtual cards to the point of effectively scamming their 'friends'. But who remembers the days of Poke'mon cards? It's almost no different.

Now, that said, let me say this:

This type of article is exactly why I'm beginning to loathe Michael Arrington. I honestly hope there is a part of him that's laughing at this article, because saying "Facebook Isn't a Social Network" based on what happens with one Application is nothing short of completely and unforgivably stupid, and is about as bad (if not worse) as the argument involving Video Games and violence in American culture.
Good idea (especially if you can persuade somebody to pay you).

Design suggestion: wording on the left hand side is too verbose. You should think about how to get the idea across more quickly, maybe as a three-step pseudo-cartoon.

On the downside, the stuff about SEO makes it sound like your site's primary purpose is evil, and that's sad.
Why don't all the hackers get together and stop spam?

Why don't all the hackers get together and elect Obama?

Why don't all the hackers get together and stop terrorism?

This is fun!
Interesting concept ... I like it. URL shortening is definitely something early tech adopters use a lot (I'm not sure about the average Internet user).

You've definitely spelled out the benefits on the home page–but I'll be totally honest: the website design is pretty bad. Simplify, get rid of that laser beam and handwriting font, and clean up the page.

I think you could do some creative things to get traction ... for example, create a FireFox plugin that cligs the current user's URL and posts it to Twitter, Digg, or WordPress. Anything like that which makes it as easy as possible for people to use the service will help adoption.

As for a business model, be creative as well.
The idea behind it is one that has an obvious demand, so good for you if you find a way to make money off it.

However, there are a couple of things I don't like about the site design itself:

- The "skip to navigation menu and content" link at the top seems extraneous to me -- I'm not sure of how it looks on lower resolutions, but I can already see those parts of the page.

- Using images for your titles. It's not just an accessibility problem, it's lame. If you browse with a little zoom, compression artifacts are clearly visible, and your "Register FREE" becomes "Register FR."

- The gradient bars are -- to be blunt -- ugly.

Best of luck!
"You could say that he was a hacker ;)"

You could, but that would sound really narcissistic.
Agreed. Tip for experts exchange: just scroll to the very bottom of the page. The answers appear in plain text.

(The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler... they need to display the text to somebody ).
There are a few points missing from this analysis:

1. Oil prices are subject to price elasticity, that is, the relationship is not a linear one. For example, 10% more oil on the market than is being bought, would not reduce prices by 10%, it would reduce prices by perhaps 25%.

2. Drilling is not solely about oil price. The reason that drilling will occur is that domestic oil production means more total dollars going into the US Treasury. There are royalties and other taxes, not to mention taxes on employment (humans, not robots, build the rigs and operate the machinery).

Right now, when the USA sends $500Billion per month, or whatever the number is, overseas to pay for foreign oil, the US gov't gets virtually none of that in taxes or royalties, and even the follow-on effects of Saudis buying our goods are weak. Domestically produced oil has much more positive effects on the US economy, per-barrel.
I couldn't past the design and immediately closed it. The color scheme is truly awful.
"How Do You Feel" off of Atom Heart Mother was a Wright song. It was always one of my favorite Floyd tracks. RIP...
I think democracy is a disaster. Votes based on income would be silly -- what about people who own lots of non income-producing assets, like timber, minerals, early-stage companies, etc? Surely a system of votes based on wealth would be smarter.

The governing business should operate like the cereal business, or the software business, or the anything-but-government business: people pay a reasonable price for a particular service, and get what they pay for. You'll notice that a company like Google is somehow able to make its users happy, even though it doesn't have monopoly power on multiple industries or the ability to print arbitrary amounts of dollars, and yet the government is unprofitable even with these advantages.

Just tell me how you'd convince Larry and Sergei (and their shareholders) to turn Google into a democracy, and I'll concede that perhaps democracy is a sensible system after all.
you mean impatient - not lazy?
Stasis: Flexible Transactional Storage
I like it. How about allowing people to use the service before signing up? Obviously the data collected could be public.
Please don't take this the wrong way -- but you need a designer to go over your site. There are font inconsistencies, weird graphics, and the color scheme doesnt work well in its current implementation. I've been guilty of this as well, but your site would be better without any graphics (just text/css) than with poor graphics.

Some other notes:

- Less Is More. You dont need that much text on the homepage. It would be much better to make it a simple 1. "X", 2. "Y", 3. "Z". Put all the answers to the weird questions in a FAQ.

- Easy to read means Easier to use. You have no need for a 100% width layout, in fact it kind of makes it weird. This is just design opinion, see comment about designer above. 100% can work if it is laid out correctly.

- Thought of using email address as username? Makes logging in and signing up a little easier.

- Passwords. "Your password is valid and has been accepted but a bit weak. You can make it stronger by adding characters like &, *, ! and others." Thats fucking weird man. This isnt a site with secure information, in my opinion, so the password is pretty trivial here. If you want stronger passwords, enforce them, dont remind someone they are being stupid but do nothing about it.

- AJAX / Javascript. Its not just to make things prettier (although that would also be a benefit here). You can do live validation of fields and you dont have to update the whole page if something goes wrong.

- What the hell is the "Skip to navigation menu and content" Link at the very top. Weird. Bad.

- Dont you want to validate their email address before you let them post?

- Make your home page after logging in a list of existing "cligs" with links to create a new one. No need to make me click an extra time to view my existing cligs. Think craigslist style if you need mental picture.

- Your site doesnt validate. Thats bad. see http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fcli.gs%2F

- You have a lot of CSS tags that read like "delicious-blogbadge-tall". Is that yours? or stolen? Not accusing, but the naming conventions seems weird for your site.

- How do I close my account? These things need to be obvious, not explained.
- How do I delete a 'clig'? These things need to be obvious, not explained.
- How do I edit a 'clig'? These things need to be obvious, not explained.

The app itself seems to work pretty well, but the current state of the design is totally nuts and will drive a lot of people away/. As such, most of my comments are UI/Design related.

From a business/strategy standpoint, do not spend time re-creating the wheel. Your competitors (including but not limited to is.gd or tinyurl) make using their sites a lot easier. How can you expand upon their model making it better/faster/easier/different? Different is best, as replication + improvement only gets you so far. Right now your solution is not only replicating them on some level, but it does so in an inferior way. You need an API. You need something that differentiates you.

Keep going! and hire a designer! Good luck.

:)
The concept that any one individual could be representative of hackers is fallacious, and neither does ESR purport to be representative of hackers, even though many of his views and his style of reasoning are indeed common amongst hackers.
Well-Traveled Angels Back Dopplr Again
> Using different operators for ints and floats in OCaml is like making people use prefix notation for arithmetic in Lisp - you get used to it

Until the day when you have a large code base and you decide that something that you originally decided to make an an int really ought to be a float instead. Then you'll get unused to it again.
I think we need to distinguish between two aspects of good storytelling: having a good story, and telling it well. In a game, I think the latter matters a lot more than the former.

People don't play games just because they want to see a story -- if they wanted that they'd just watch a movie and get a lot more story in a lot less time. In a game the main function of the story is to provide a reward for beating the last part of the game, and a motivation to beat the next part. Games can have quite simple, even cliched storylines (e.g. Prince of Persia Sands of Time, or the original Half Life) and still seem compelling.

On the other hand, a lot of games fall down in the quality of the storytelling. Bad dialogue, bargain-basement voice-acting, or just plain dull scenes can spoil a game pretty quickly. ("I fought a seven-headed monster for this?")

Bioshock may have a well-developed story for an interesting novel, but I'm not sure about the quality of the storytelling. I've only played the first couple of levels before getting bored, but so far most of the story has been pumped directly into my ear by some guy with a sepia-toned icon and a largely-incomprehensible monotonic brogue. Combine that with the fact that the levels and enemies so far have all looked pretty much the same, and I couldn't summon up the motivation to keep playing.
Rumors aren't news. This is news because it confirms our analysis, and its the first time we've know this information for sure.
Good religion needs good science
New programming languages are only bad if you're afraid of learning.
It can take work to get complex applications to run in Wine. These may also be winelib native ports.
I've found the best ones are books about the history of business and biographies of individual founders.
So 1000 poor quality users are 'better' and more valuable to a customer than 10 potentially great matches? You are right that a site must have a certain critical mass to attract other users. The exact number is unclear though; is 50 enough? 100? 200? At what point do people just start flipping through profiles to guage the quality of the potential matches as opposed to worrying about whether there's enough people on the site to justify their registration?

I think viral ideas are the way to in terms of low-cost and high impact ways to attract users. The smart entrepreneur will always experiment with different ideas and use metrics to guage their effectiveness. The name of the game is new users for $0 if possible. It has been said that creativity is what happens when one removes a zero from the budget, so let the brainstorming begin!

I am working on a few niche dating sites right now, and I plan to put a fresh spin on dating using the internet.

Thanks for posting on this topic.
The 2nd option would be to prevent certain types of companies from being or going public. Law Firms can;t go public. Investment firms like Goldman Sachs used to not be able to go public. They were partnerships. Partners were paid for the most part in cash. If the partnership had money to pay, it got paid. If not, not. I promise you, their tolerance for risk was far lower than it is today for Goldman because there was a direct link between the risk and reward for partners.

we need a rollback to direct incentives.
Sure - that's what I meant by "more government". Problem is, I don't think you can simply look at their budgets - they do other things besides research - and their research efforts are likely much smaller. It would be interesting to see the research grant lines in their budgets if anyone knows or finds them.
Personally I have a different theory. The supply/demand curve for investments is shifting as the baby boomers retire - instead of investing money they're drawing down their investments. And that means 20 years of boom for Wall St, largely driven by a huge demand for investment products, is turning into 20 years of bust as that demand turns into essentially, negative demand, because behind the comparatively wealthy cohort of baby boomers, comes a smaller, and poorer cohort (Gen-X). Yet there's still pressure to produce reasonable returns for those same baby boomers and the people following behind them. This results in increasingly risky investments being sold to people nearing retirement who are depending on the kinds of returns their parents saw.
This is an area that needs to be hit big. & Not just prescribed textbooks, educational materials as a whole. The potential is enormous.

There is potential for $0 degrees. Maybe even free degrees. It's possible to acquire all the knowledge contained within a University degree on the 'outside'. That's not new but it's getting easier. But a framework for delivering the piece of paper, that would be something.