skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blog post links to a RapidShare URL. Looks like the application comes from here:

http://linux.techass.com/projects/etr/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/etextreader/

It looks to be pretty old; the previous to current version is listed with a date in 2002. But if it works (haven't tried it, yet), so what?

Project Gutenburg hosts a file that appears to be one version back:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/255

Now, for my "value added. For extended reading off the screen, I wanted to dim all but the foreground window. Whether reading a text book in an editor, or a text-ful web page, or what have you. After a fair bit of googling, I settled upon this (Windows only -- sorry) utility, Ghoster:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Skrommel/#Ghoster

It can get a bit finicky with focus, and sometimes I have to hit the Windows key on the keyboard to get the taskbar to show, but I've never had a serious problem with it.

I shrink whatever window until the contents have a comfortable width, flip on Ghoster, and have a less eye straining, distraction free read. And since the background is dimmed rather than completely blanked, I can still notice if e.g. an IM pops up.
Army Wives: Departures, Arrivals
Click here for more information
awesome site, brings blogging to a lot more people

daren.posterous.com
I thought Calacanis renounced blogging and began an opt-in mailing list..?!

The things some people will do to get attention...
It's a very short book.
yes. i believe the reality is there's a lot of mediocre people waiting to happen in hungry nations as well. while striving to help is awesome, and people should be commended for their efforts, the individuals that arrive to change the world will still be few and far between no matter how much assistance is lent.

it's truly a hard matter to gauge accurately
archiving the rank of ___ and then going down in infamy for being the worst of the ___ is probably not an achievement.
You know what, sometimes you ARE a subordinate. So suck it up.
Also Scala:

val m = Map('name -> "Bob", 'age -> 30, 'color -> Colors.Red)
no, it's a mistake because it's semantically incorrect.
You are right - he wasn't being reactive, he was being proactive, trying to steer his ship ahead of the oncoming storm.
I don't know - being a leader means making the best possible decision, even if it isn't popular. If a 10% cut saves the other 90%, that's a trade I would gladly take.
Android Market: Now available for users
It's becoming hard to distinguish open source from SaaS
Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping
seems like gates is gearing up to take advantage of some of those Obama tax credits.
Agreed. I think it's hilarious watching so many companies use the current situation as an excuse to fire people. I have no problem with CEOs firing people for whatever reason but it is pretty pathetic when they use such transparent and bullshit excuses.
Welcome to the club. I released a program back in the 80s called "calender"... at 1.2 I changed it from a pair of smooth rollers used to press paper and cloth to create a shiny surface in to "calendar" which described its function much better.

English is a silly language.
That's what they said last time around, too.
> In the typical American fashion, Yahoo bought a bunch of shit it didn't need with money it didn't have.

This is priceless ... even if it's not exactly accurate :)
oh but the young'ns CAN HAVE...most of it

they want to be CEOs, so they just end-run around having a real business...they start some dipshit website, call it a startup, call themselves Founder & (CTO | CEO | President)...and sit back and start counting the benjamins....errr...coupons. who needs money? doesn't everyone want to be fifty and still live with the 'rents??
My favorite part was about how "millennials" will move into entrepreneurship instead of working for people who don't respect them. Hope so!
I'm hoping for a giant crime-fighting metal rocket suit.

/cue Black Sabbath
plus ca change...
writing's on the wall wantrapeneurs...invest the last $100 in crisco. you can survive two weeks on a tub, and it doubles as a lubricant
Being a subordinate doesn't mean you shouldn't be treated with respect.
"[Employers] are concerned about this generation's desire to shape their jobs to fit their lives rather than adapt their lives to the workplace."

God forbid.
I understand your point, but it doesn't necessarily follow that law->fail. If those people burned alive in a horrible fire, like the patrons of a certain RI nightclub, then we would be calling for the law. Because the homeless have had to find another place to go we won't know.

The problem that I see with regulation is that it's hard to apply it intelligently to each case, so broad, sweeping regulations are made when other, more practical solutions may solve the problem. My pet peeve is the banning of smoking in Boston (I don't smoke and have never been a smoker). Make the law something like "smoke will be undetectable in non-smoking areas to with x parts-per-billion" or something, and let somebody figure out how to build a cheap negative-pressure room for smoking areas in restaurants. Instead, we get "no smoking allowed."

I actually suspect that in a lot of cases (good) regulations help businesses by establishing some trust in the customers' minds.
Thank God. I think CSS wastes a lot of good behavioral design time with the way it's implemented right now. Hopefully these upgrades will change that.
Fred Wilson: Cash Is Only King If You Use It
Rackspace Buys Two Startups to Beat Amazon’s Cloud
In short, companies are giving less, are less loyal, and are asking for more.

This.

I'm a millenial I suppose. Born in 1982, and now solidly in the workforce. I watched my parents get screwed over time and time again by companies that demanded loyalty without reciprocation. I learned things like the fact that the best way to get a raise or promotion is to leave for another company, and received the admonition to remember that a company is not your friend. It does not have personal consideration.

I was taught that I have to take care of myself, and that nobody else will do that for me.

Loyalty, like trust, is a two-way street. It is hard to earn and easily lost.
In other news, Internet Winter has also hit the internet, which regrets that it must shut down on June 30, 2009. It regrets any inconvenience this may cause.
I'm hoping that we see a big shift in the high-tech field away from big companies toward a network of small entrepreneur-driven companies that do one thing, and do it really well. Working with a network of people I trust, who are proactive and motivated to do a great job because they have skin in the game, is a real pleasure.
Praise of my site makes my day, and any random troll's "you are teh sux" crushes me. I'm working on getting a thicker skin, but it's hard.

The advice in the article is pretty good, though, and it highlights the main issue that negative criticism usually contains the most helpful information.

Praise keeps you going, while criticism keeps you on the right track.
http://meetup.com ?
Ever have one of those moments where you thought "wouldn't it be cool if someone made/built/offered X?" bgC3 is where Bill Gates can do a brain dump of all his ideas and have some smart people try and make them.
Kids in the US and GBR are generally treated like shit, so they damn well should feel entitled. Children here have lots of material goods, but on every other quality-of-life measure they are basically neglected if not actively abused-- by parents, the school system, corporations, religion, the government, etc.
Really? From urbandictionary:

"Duder is a word of many possibilites. It can be used as a replacement for dude. It can also be used to mean someone is more dude-like than someone else (as in dude, duder, dudest.) It has also been known to be used to describe objects for which the name has been temporarily forgotten, or otherwise unknown to the user of the word. Still yet another usage is a verb which means the act of being a dude or doing dudely things."
Absolutely. I often have friends who are working for, or contractors for some company, and get a great opportunity presented to them, and say "but I can't leave MegaCorp, I've only been there for a year, and I don't want to let people down".

I have to remind them that if their project gets cancelled or postponed, they won't even get two weeks notice from MegaCorp. That they won't let anyone down, MegaCorp has 200 people with your job title.

Some companies show real loyalty to their employees, but most will let you go or lay you off without a second thought and without any sleep lost. So why should you lose sleep over turning in your resignation to them.
Edison counted deafness among his talents because it enabled him to focus better.
I've been using Linode.com for about 6 months. I find their offerings far more compelling than slicehost.
Mahalo Layoffs
How Much of Apple's Value Is Steve Jobs? 20%+
Well said kirse.
Nice, looks like you have interest shown..did you receive a question via email or was there a separate page you're suppose to check on yc reponse?
Rumor: Imeem Laying Off Staff and Looking for an Exit (Updated)
Um, lowering your threshold for what you'll let yourself think, is one thing. If anything, I would suggest raising your threshold for what you consider good enough to implement.

My advice would be to find a creative cofounder instead of relying on yourself to come up with the idea. Straining your mind too hard will probably just produce something me-too that won't really work.
I don't understand your reasoning at all. He specifically states that reducing the workforce will give Mahalo an extra year of runway. That could definitely be the difference between life and death.
I guess they read Warren Buffet's Times Op-Ed, I hope buying when others are fearful doesn't just apply to stocks.
Post-Update Restart
Mahalo isn't close to profitible despite a record 4.6 million uniques in August -- because he wants the site's traffic to hit 10 million to 15 million uniques before injecting ads.

I'm sorry but, WTF? Why? You've got a crowd of 4.6 million potential ad clickers (even 1/2% is 23,000 clicks a month) and you're choosing not to bring in cash?

I'm completely missing the logic here. Can somebody give a good reason why you would use this approach?
I know that Whole Foods does this though in a more evil way. If some small local gourmet place's stuff sells well within Whole Foods then Whole Foods will clone the product (don't know if the make it themselves or outsource it elsewhere) and then cut the small local place out.
In what ways? Could you elaborate some?
I don't use one but here's my buddy's company http://24im.com/features/livechat
> At some point a design reaches a limit as to how much better it can be.

I assume this is true as well but there's no reason to suspect Gmail is anywhere near as good as it could potentially be.
> full of either Brahmins or SC/ST

thank you for bringing your prejudices here.
do you have any numbers to back that up?

> people who are recruited through references

this need not be a bad thing ,which is why most companies have a internal referral program.
I'd rather dream of being "CEO tomorrow" than be content working as a subordinate the rest of my life.
I'd imagine Campfire is popular.
Sounds like your professor was the inventor of the dot com bubble ;-)
Girls geek out over dinner
It's no more meaningful to talk about the semantics of html generated by programs than it is to talk about the semantics of machine code output by a compiler. Complaining about using tables for layout on semantic grounds is like complaining about using shift instructions for multiplication.

Semantics applies at the level of abstraction where humans look at something. That's the fundamental mistake of CSS zealots. Without consciously realizing it, they have a model of the world in which one is editing web pages by hand, or at least editing templates that are only a thin layer of abstraction above web pages. Which is actually quite backward.
The Queen uploads a YouTube video
Maybe they read the Maverick by Ricardo Semler and realised that working in a company doesn't have to be shit.
I think it's already happening and will increase even more as very talented people continue to get laid off for reasons outside of their direct control.
That could also be karat, and it's for all gems AKAIK, not just gold.

(Talk about picking the worst example ever!) :-)
You are VERY unlikely to work at the same job in the same company until you retire. Companies aren't supplying reliable pension plans. Many hot fields aren't unionized...

I think this is a key thing to notice. Without these benefits (and especially in an at-will employment arrangement) a job becomes more like contract work: a simple trade of time/knowledge for money that can be abandoned by either party at any time.

To the extent that this is true, it might make sense to compare this to other types of work-for-hire. It would be absurd, for example, to require that your auto-mechanic wear certain clothes or demand that they not listen to headphones while working.

I'm not sure how far this analogy extends, but it strikes me that many of the things large companies demand of their employees would be considered onerous in similar contexts.

Why is that so?
CSSZenGarden cheats by using images for text...
Japanese plant writes blog
Which sizable codebase have you migrated using 2to3?
Because that's how they've always done business.
Symbian Boosts Developer Options with Ruby
Yeah, sit and watch the world go by. Let something - anything - spark an interest and just follow the vibe. You'll soon discover something you hadn't known before and find yourself in a preferred position to that in which you are now.
I'm surprised that Jason made over $10 M in revenue from just advertising, that's really impressive.
What's the point of Mahalo anyway? Does anyone actually use it? I took a quick look and it seems like a weird mix of Dogpile, About.com, and Wikipedia without any unique value added. The searches I tried for a few consumer products and technical terms turned up mostly irrelevant results.
Helping people communicate? I care.
Also of note (and from the same source): Income Per Employee

Yahoo: $72,055

Microsoft: $194,297

IBM: $30,681

Amazon: $34,588

Google: $303,903

It's usually good to look at revenue & net income together. Currently, I'd invest in these companies roughly in order of net income per employee.
to include in a website, jsjac is pretty nice. (http://blog.jwchat.org/jsjac/) it can be used to replace nearly all of your messaging functionality -- short messages, group messages, and live chat. it's reasonably easy to configure and install, and requires a jabber server running somewhere.
all of my ideas have been bourne out of experience. is there an industry that you like outside of web? my passion has been in real estate and it's led me to create a web app for real estate investors that solves many of their needs.
They're interested in allowing you to choose your back-end cloud provider (S3 vs Cloud Files)

http://www.jungledisk.com/RackspaceFAQ.aspx
FTA:

"JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it will now also support Rackspace's new cloud storage solution."

It's right at the beginning...
If you care about people at all it's much better to "lay them off" than to "fire them".
Wait, did they buy pressflip?
If you make decisions based on what will probably happen, the proactive thing is to shut down the operation entirely, because most companies fail. But you don't know whether that's going to happen.

Firing people is not free. All the time and energy spent investing in them is essentially gone. You shouldn't do it unless you have a solid reason to.
Stock market tanks again on further fears about global economy
they're buying up hosting to compete with amazon, likely.

we use slicehost and really dig it. will this adversely affect our service and pricing? time will tell.
Ask HN: What are your Favorite Feeds?
I'm building an index of interesting feeds, and I'd like to invite HN readers to post their favorites to: http://www.seeksift.com/asp/suggest
This is the most outragous story I've ever read. It's insulting and definitely says something about corporate structure today. I wonder if any of these companies are on the "Best Places to Work" list...

I'm technically a millennial and I don't feel entitled to anything. The points this story brings up are actually things that have been shown to improve productivity if done correctly. Look at Google and numerous other successful high tech companies. People work better when they aren't forced into a suit, get to do non-distracting personal enjoyments at work, have time to sit back and just flat out think and relax during their work day.

What this article shows is that some companies really are full of stiffs who have a superiority complex and are forcibly conformists to their employees. It should be investigated why these companies are tetering on personal rights violations rather than why their employee's don't bow down to their boss's power.
Shouldn't apply just to stocks (Buffet likes to buy companies). But you think startups can be bought at bargain prices right now?
That link is: http://www.seeksift.com/asp/suggest

(not sure why urls don't appear in the discussion text)
Idea Vista
Exactly.

On our project we deleted the master branch in favor of having two branches we work off of: production and development.

The production branch reflects what is in production while development contains new completed features that each developer builds in all of their own branches.
Link to the post he refers to:
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2008/10/when-your-compa.html
I for one was surprised to learn the author of this post was 23. Based on the writing style, I would have figured 13.
How Craigslist Scammer got caught.
I want to see details on the API. I'm really hoping they let you provision new profiles with it.
I don't know if this is the right place to post it, but i actually liked the way they found him and nailed him. I thought Hackers would be interested in finding better ways to one-up scammers who seem to be pretty smart.
http://discountasp.net/sp_dotnetnuke.aspx .Net hosting tends to more expensive but discount has been good to me in the past.
Has this ever worked? I'm not being facetious - I just can't think of any good examples where one "idea person" has dumped ideas on a bunch of smart people and good things have come out of it.
The Flaw at the Heart of the Internet
Not happy. Mosso is crap. I would never use Mosso and now Slicehost is turning into the "Mosso cloud server." Hopefully this is simply a case of Slicehost adding in that missing piece required for Mosso to be a good service. To be fair though, Mosso "cloud server" is different from the "cloud sites" service. Skeptical.
does it still make money?
Yahoo Wait For Layoffs
A few of their sites are about the only value there, delicious, flickr, finance is about all I use there. They lost my on tv long long ago and I can't remember the last time I searched with Yahoo.
People who treat their subordinates like crap are sabotaging themselves, because their subordinates are drastically less likely to give them reliable information or enthusiastic effort.

Good managing isn't about indulging in power trips, it's about being able to ensure that a group of people are working in a way that makes sense in the big picture.
OpenID Day Coming Soon for MySpace
Kind of ironic that the people being scammed were just rewriting other people's content.
Design Fail Patterns:  Ways That Bad Designs Get Chosen
And I'm completely anal retentive about my files. Pleasure to meet you, wmf.
6 offices?
Yahoo Stores does.
Writing a simple expert system in Prolog
Sticky tape generates X-rays
Major spam bust fails to result in sustained drop in spam
Bill Gates’ mysterious new “think tank”: bgC3
Yup, congrats. I just subscribed (3 days ago) and I have big hopes from you guys. Keep it up :)

LE: Also, if I may... the tone of the FAQ is a bit corporate. I don't think it's the right approach with your target. Ex:

How does this acquisition affect Slicehost customers

Our number one goal is to continue delivering the Slicehost experience. In fact, we hope to make it even better.

It's a very nice answer, and contains zero information. Just saying :)
His blog article (I thought he retired from blogging...) mentions it gets 4M uniques a month, so people are obviously using it.
See also video:

http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/x-rays/
Y Combinator for Africa?
The impression I got from reading his article is that with the lay-off, Mahalo can survive with no external funding (or revenue) until 2012.
"...The researchers suggest that the high charge density generated by peeling the tape could be great enough to trigger nuclear fusion..."

That quote gets my WTF vote for today.
The corporate structure is inherited directly from that of an army. CEOs are generals, VPs are lieutenants, line managers are sergeants, and line workers are privates.

The problem is that people in companies have entirely different motivations from those in armies. In volunteer armies, many people have a strong sense of patriotism or religious devotion and already consider themselves subordinate to their country or ideals, and they are therefore usually willing to respect rank and order. Conscripts and mercenaries, on the other hand, do not have such motivations and are quite often useless, as it is difficult to make them follow orders enthusiastically.

A large corporation doesn't stand for anything, aside from making money for its shareholders (and, in practice, officers). Therefore, it inspires little or no loyalty, much less devotion, and it shouldn't. It's employees are effectively mercenaries, not volunteers. Therefore, people aren't willing to clean the toilets with toothbrushes, and understandably so.
Nvidia big driver update
New Nvidia driver released.
I'm not sure about this article, I think we're getting trolled here.

Some of the quotes are questionable, but some of them seemed to sound like they came from larger "employees are people too" interviews. I don't think all of the people interviewed share the opinion of the author.

The "We keep treating them like crap but they keep LEAVING! What is going ON HERE?!?" temper tantrum is pretty bizarre. If you can legitimately hold that opinion and be an HR executive, it certainly implies to me that the problem has existed at least as long as that person has been in the business. Your feeling of entitlement isn't all that different from mine if you stand back a step.

If we're so dispensable give us another week off, what's it going to hurt? This is a pretty green field for any big company that would like to improve retention.

A fun business hack would be structuring a company so you could dial-a-salary: your salary assumes you work 95% of the year (2w PTO + 5 holidays), and you tell HR how much you actually want to work (down to say 80% of the year -- 9wk + 5 holidays, as a lower bound for benefits). I bet your retention would be invincible. Screw the money, I'd probably be at 85%.
Gah! The BBC writes an article and doesn't bother to actually include a link to the blog?

Besides, is this much more advanced than the old Trojan Room coffee pot?
OSX Uninstallers the Easy Way
Ok, a strange ideea: if you want to do a startup but don't have an ideea you like, you can try something ourside IT. I did it for about a year (a local courier company). It failed, of course, but I learned _a lot_, about startups, about people, some about myself. And more importantly, one year later I have my passion about programming back.
Important stuff: don't sink too much money into it, and try to use it to make connections, not brake them.
The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki)
Price discrimination.