skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish I remembered the details. Seriously, it was subtle enough that I've forgotten.

The Dashboard widget for recording your time was one -- Harvest's is nice, especially because you can easily switch from client project to client project with the UI. But the thing which ultimately switched me over was the ability to fully customize the line items on invoices -- I was able to get the style I wanted with a few clicks, and I can easily edit and merge line items if I want to. For me, it hits the sweet spot between doing things automatically and allowing you to edit things.

Of course, once I switched over to Harvest I gradually became subliminally aware of other reasons to like it. I haven't found myself wanting to try out anything else.
Thats what I'm starting to figure out. I was just confused because I saw a lot of startups say they use Google to manage their mailings to users.

Back to iContact or Constant Contact or one of those I guess...
Blog Tool That Builds Traffic: Just Announced
Lack of what I perceive to be a solid idea that I can maintain interest and passion in. ADHD is a bitch.

I tend to be a jack of all trades (master of all, too) flitting from one thing to the next.

Other than that, little fear about the rest of the stuff you mention. I'm hungry for an idea I can be devoted to.
What's amazing about this update is that Apple has included a what's new.

FINALLY!
umm..it is still showing 2.02
Definitely better than the pc-vs-mac ad, which makes me want to kick the smug dude in the crotch.
Or, like, it's reintroducing the company to the world. "Now with less evil!"
Savings is the most important thing...once you have enough savings you can walk out.

If you really want to keep the guy around, make it easy for him to do his startup while he still works for you. i.e. have him spend 60% of the time working on your stuff, and 40% of the time are free for him to work on his startup. If he gets that security he'll probably stick around.

And chances are he'll be able to provide the same amount of productivity during that time.
Many apps have a "safe mode." The Firefox safe mode has saved my butt many times when I installed a misbehaving plugin....
tell that to the mobwars guy who is getting sued by his old company because they are claiming he created it while he was supposed to be working on their stuff
Sounds like something from Futurama.
Oh yeah, and one more thing...

all your standard developer care and feeding: snacks, beverages, free lunches.

Really? At your company, can I stay in bed or spend the day doing something else when I hit one of those days when I don't feel like working? Can I work in my dressing gown? Can I prepare my own food in my own kitchen? Can I have a 10-second commute from my bedroom to my office? Can I have a nap whenever I want to? A 2-hour nap?

Perks-wise, working in most corporations doesn't hold a candle to working for yourself.
Sometimes it not as much about money as it is control of your destiny and the ability to do interesting work
I have been waiting for this for a long time. 2.0.2 drops calls like that was its intent.
To join the several comments here: let him work on his startup part-time (20-40%) during work hours, as long as he gets his responsibilities done. I've quantified this idea a bit in a blog post: http://blog.ezlearnz.com/post/40316576/the-6-hour-workday
Ask Yc: What is a Good Book to Read Before Learning a Programming Language?
I have dabbled in server side Programming Languages here and there, but I would now like to thoroughly learn a new language. Before I do that,what would be a good book to read?
This may sound glib, but have you asked him?

Have you explored with him, with you in a Coaching/Mentoring role, where he sees himself heading; who he sees himself being; what effects he sees himself making over the next year / 2 years / 5 years / at retirement?

Once you have the answers to those (and he may not have fully considered these things himself, to that degree of clarity and detail), you can then work together to see if any options exist where you both get what you want.
Knowledge. I believe it is very important to know the code behind the startup.
why can't you get a student loan? i have friends that didn't have credit and didn't need a cosigner.

how about try and emancipate yourself and apply for governmental money.

with respect to life in general being unfair, there's not much that you can do except try and learn from your situation and move on.
Intel launches less-toxic halogen free Xeon CPUs
50 Years of Integrated Circuits
KeePass proper only works on windows, there is a port called KeePassX that works on Linux and Mac. I'm not sure about mobile devices. They all read the same database file, so this setup will work. I have achieved what Joel is talking about with a flash drive on my keychain that has the database file, keepass, and keepassX. Too bad my flash drive broke yesterday...

KeePass on windows is the best password manager I have ever seen, featuring programmable auto-typing.
Best line from the article:

"a non-detail-oriented securities analyst summarized the article (apparently without reading it first) and uploaded the summary to Bloomberg."

Should read: "a lazy and now-unemployed securities analyst..."
Please, please tell me that is true. As it is, it's embarrassing..."let me just add you to my address book... just a second. ok hang on... erm. got a pen?"
This could also be one of those "if you were on the other side" arguments. As much as I am annoyed by the Boston investors' skittshness (not to excuse other investors from being skittish), I wonder if I too would be a pansy when it came down to investing in 21 year olds with startups who have practically no business model or revenue stream. I guess I hope not to be that way one day but maybe I understand why these guys are like that. It's clear, though, they do miss out on huge portfolio gains by passing on a lot of these startups that end up just remaining on the west coast.
A start up is desirable because:

1) Chance for a life changing payday, that could free you from the burden of working (if that were desirable - I have a theory that working is more fun when it isn't required).

2) Ability to control how the game is played. You don't want to lose because you were forced to follow someone else's direction - if you lose it should be your own damn fault.

If you can create these two things in a big company, let me know :)
Haha, well stated.

Frankly, that comment was slightly offensive. Flickr is seriously one of the best put-together sites out there. I would rank it with Vimeo in terms of aesthetic beauty and pure functionality. Probably higher, even.
For me, it's freedom. And only he can give that to himself. I would say your best option is to support his decision, but give him a big welcoming door to walk back in if his startup doesn't work out. Sometimes people with the drive to do things on their own need to try it first, and maybe it won't work out for him. Then he will come back to your company with that much more experience, plus he will be more invested in your company emotionally as you supported him along the way.

It's hard to lose good people, but even harder to see somebody leave their dreams on the table.
(Suit() )yourself)))))))))))))()((()

Just joshin'.
Previously they probably didn't want to promise something that might not work. With all the recent high-profile problems they probably feel they finally have to.

I agree, about time!
There has been no report of the analyst in question being fired.
(Looking at you, Cuil)
Have I missed anything?

Yeah, you've missed everything. It's a nice idea to try and give an employee what he's looking for from a startup within your corporate environment, but it's just not possible. Corporate employees exist to build wealth for someone else. That's just the reality of the situation. There are a lot of benefits that come with corporate life, primarily stability, but if he wants freedom, he won't get it working for someone else. When I was an employee, I had to remind myself that every benefit and incentive was an addicting trap, designed to keep me from leaving. A steady paycheck will erode an entrepreneur's soul over time, because you come to rely on it and striking out on your own is that much harder.

To be clear, I think it's commendable that you're trying to provide a great environment for your employees, but I think the best case scenario here is that you'll work hard to keep him, and you might succeed, but something inside him will die a little and he'll always wonder if he made the right choice. Why not just let him go give it a shot? I think it'll cost you more in the long run to fight it than it would to just get a new employee.

And I know we don't want to get sidetracked on this, but entrepreneurs do not "quit their boss". They absolutely do quit their jobs because they long for the freedom and rush of creating something on their own, no matter how awesome their boss is. If you disagree, perhaps that indicates more about the difference between a corporate and entrepreneurial mindset than anything else.
Hey, you know what's a radical new idea? Shipping production-quality software when you make a new release! Just imagine for a sec... company releases a new product and instead of a POS beta-quality software, you get a decently-working software.

I have OS 2.0 right now and yes, despite what Apple may say it IS beta software and it is embarrassingly slow and laggy.
On that subject (more or less): Can anyone recommend a good, reputable online stock brokerage?
I would agree that most people quit their boss and not their job, there's empirical evidence to support this. However it isn't true all the time. I'm wondering if what he wants to do more interesting to him than what he is doing at the moment? Does it scratch his itch?
Not like there's not mobile wireless, and there's even buses with wifi.
"I have the opinion that the 'misunderstandings' largely consist of either preconceived notions of what the ad campaign would be like or, more commonly, anti-Microsoft sentiment repeatedly raising its ugly head and any Microsoft advertising campaign would not please those people."

They're trying to change anti-Microsoft sentiment with these ads. If the ad does nothing for people who don't like Microsoft, than arguably, it is a total failure.
Olympus Roamer Binoculars
Binoculars are no more excuses for not bringing your binoculars with you. The 10x21 DPC I models have coated lenses and prisms that will have you seeing things the way they were meant to be seen. Their non-slip rubber grips.
Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
Highly recommend this read. Very interesting and well written.
Im in Peru, so I first have to figure out a way to move to a startup hub and only then can I start. I'm possibly going for a scholarship to do a masters, which would delay me (I must finish it, being a scholarship I can't drop out), but at least would get me there. This is kinda frustrating, because to get a scholarship I must have good grades, but studying steals hacking time...

In the meantime, I'm honing my programming skills. I've been programming for a while now, I'd say that I'm intermediate. I know Pascal, C, Python, and bits of Java, C# and Lisp (I'll look deeper into this one though). My main objective now is to design and code larger apps.
Why do I have to give an email and make an account to run a search?
The same thing could happen with people, someone finds an old story but doesn't realise it's old, tells a few people, starts a rumour and then traders sell off stock. At least with an automated system you can improve the algorithms.
You can always add your users' emails manually & create groups for them. So next time when you want to mass mail them, just send an email to that group.

Tried it. Works fine. Just a hassle to add the users' emails manually
Have you ever made him do something in a specific way, because of "enterprise"-reasons, politics and "that's the way we do it" instead of arguments?

Do you make him run windows, when he'd rather use a Mac or Linux, because he has to use Visual Studio? Did he ever suggest that you do a project in Ruby or Python, to be told that "we're a Java shop"?

Do you have bureaucratic rules? Do you make him punch in and out, and log time down to the minute? Are certain websites blocked because they are not work-related?

Is the working environment pleasant. Are you six developers and two PMs on cheap chairs and small tables, in a 300 sq ft office, with hard floors and no sound dampening?

Is management not only a step up in salary and responsibility, but also access to unrelated perks like a better chair?

But mostly, I think, it was the "talk the talk" about creative minds, and not walk a single step of the road, that made sick of that place.
The streets seem too wide for West Seattle, too. I'm guessing somewhere in old Redmond.
Be the first to fund his startup.

This is one mistake employers do. Do not try to retain him. If he wants it enough (and in this case he does) he will sooner or later find a way to make it happen.

Join him. Give him office space. You can still use his brain while he is around.

EDIT: Entrepreneurs should also not be afraid to share their ambitions with their boss. That is only if your boss started his own business. You may find a new partner in your boss. Remember that those who made it always want to help others make it as well. They will see themselves in you and noone can resist that.
spend $12 at Amazon on a copy of Charles Petzold's book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.

It will all begin to make sense as you will have a thorough understanding of what is going on at the lowest level. You will never regret acquiring that knowledge.
The other extreme is to ship production-quality software and call it beta. (Ahem.. gmail)
At online boutique shopbop.com, traffic doesn't spike after happy hour. In fact, the online research company ComScore says purchases made by women during the evening total only about 22.6 per cent of all online retail sales. But internet sellers know all about consumers who click on a Marc Jacobs dress and slur, "Hey there, frock. I want to take you home tonight."

In other words: after discovering that there is no evidence of this being a signficant phenomenon we decided we were going to write this article anyway and pad it with quotes from some friends of ours who would admit to buying stuff online while plastered.
A great book for a good read - thoroughly recommended on principal but I think this specific request calls for something a bit more fundamental to the task of acquiring that programming language.
I was actually discussing Web awards in general, and included two examples: ONA and the Webbys, but there are certainly a LOT more. There is a great deal of focus on U.S. audiences; how many sites are there that do what Pandora or Hulu does for non-North American audiences? How many awards/recognition programs are there that allegedly cover international audiences and truly do that? It has nothing to do with me speaking only English (which isn't the case, at any rate).
Demo announcement today: http://www.nss.org/news/releases/pr20080909.html
In related news..

""Apple has responded quickly to reports that its initial release of iTunes 8 caused STOP errors on some Windows machines"

Anyone else find that statement gloriously ironic?
I like to create new things; develop new ideas and build them. In most jobs, you are but a cog in the machine, and have relatively little creative allowance. I just churn out code per requirements, or test code per requirements, or write requirements per requirements. Not a whole lot of in-depth thinking seems to occur.

Personal time off, and ability to set my own schedule. In a job, my ability to take time off to travel, do volunteer work, do research, whatever, is not so much limited by a lack of money as it is by a lack of formal vacation time. If I want to take two months off a year, and have the money to do so, then I want to be able to do it. If I want to set my own hours to best suit other things in my life, I don't want to be confined to the general expectation of 8-5 M-F.

And yes, money does play a factor. In most jobs, you and your peers make the same salary plus or minus 5%, regardless of how hard you work or how inventive you are. If I can work harder and/or smarter and produce something worth more money to more people, then why should I not reap the financial benefits of my labor?

There certainly are advantages to working at a regular job, among them fairly reliable income and insurance benefits and what-not. But even so, employment can be fickle. If "the economy" turns sour, your job may not be as stable as it seems.

(Actually, I would advocate spending time running multiple diverse business projects, to help balance out "the economy".)
You can add users in bulk to Gmail Groups in your contact via a csv file. But you can only send 500 e-mails a day from each e-mail address. So its not really a sustainable solution.
very reasonable living costs

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/09/08/report_ra...

Have rental prices collapsed in the past 3 years? When I moved to Boston my apartment cost more than the one I had in NYC and when I left the apartment I moved to in SF cost less.
My favorite is the GMail technique. I use it to read my email every day.
Best line in the article:
"Dejected, Billy sulked away and became a Lisp programmer, living forever in a land where data is code and code is data and everyone eats butterscotches and rides unicorns. He was never seen nor heard from again."

I hope billy recovers from his time spent with java trying to make a silk purse out of a pigs ear.
A strictly less powerful namespacing entity at that... If you used objects for namespaces, then you can create new ones at runtime, pass custom namespaces to different modules, and a lot of other nifty things I haven't even thought of yet.
I tried to do this in the morning, it hung for about 30mins.
The browser is not the world.
Yes, this upgrade is the reason I upgraded iTunes to 8.0, as the installer said I had to in order to get the iPhone upgrade. Sadly, as noted elsewhere, my itunes install is now borked. Thanks, Apple!
I don't think startup people are "quitting their boss" (i.e. running FROM something), but they are rather running TO something that is magical and not entirely rationale. Statistically/financially, it's a dumb decision to start a startup-- but it doesn't matter. You can sit down, run the numbers, make pro/con lists-- but it doesn't matter. You've already lost. Here's what you can't match:

1) The big win. You can heap stock options on him, but your board will block you from giving a dev more than 1% or so, I presume.

2) His baby. His own company. A sense of TRUE ownership.

3) A clean slate. New companies/new products are more fun than existing ones for a lot of people.

4) Having ANY boss. Everyone rolls their eyes at even the best boss SOMETIMES. The irony is that, if he succeeds, he'll be that boss. But it's a great feeling to NO MATTER what, be able to fix something that organizationally broken if you think it's important. To be where the buck stops.

5) Fame/notoriety. Some people are motivated by this. If your startup wins, he'll be an unnamed dev in a winning startup. If his startup wins, he'll be the guy the led it there. Either way, it feels WAY cooler to say "I own my own company" when someone says, "so what do you do?".

Doing a startup isn't a sensible CAREER decision... It's a largely emotional lifestyle decision.
I grew up in the Carolinas and I've never heard of "dope". It was all "soda" or maybe "coke" as the generic term.
Yeah. Now if they would fix my macbook's itunes crash... Off to the "Genius bar", I suppose.
Generally the conversation goes like this:

What kind of coke you want, hon?

Sprite please.
There's two of us and we're paying $1350 per month, total, for a 6 room apartment (3 br, 1 kitchen, 1 family room, 1 "office" room) and we're a 15 minute walk from the Davis Square Redline T stop. Before that we were paying $1450 to live in Somerville.

Yes, it's not living in actual Boston, but we're close to everything we need to be close too (i.e. could get by sans car). In the DC area, a similar place in Fairfax or Arlington would be over 2k per month. In SF, we were looking at 2.5k bare minimum for much less spacious places.
Social Media ABC’s – C is for Chicklet
Because the laws and economic polices of the U.S. promote small business and innovation.
You need to tell us which language you want to learn. Otherwise it's like saying "I want to learn sports" -- amateur curling and professional football are very different sports. Windows programmers, Mac/iPhone programmers, server-side programmers, Javascript programmers, enterprise Java programmers, and Linux kernel hackers need to focus on different things.

In the absence of details, all we can recommend is basic mental conditioning for programmers. A standard piece of advice is "SICP". Another is "K&R". Eric Raymond's essay on "How to Become a Hacker" is a little dated and a little opinionated, but worth reading. "Learn emacs" (or, to be fair to vi and Textmate, "learn a decent text editor") is a piece of advice that I'm glad I followed.

You cannot go wrong by learning the basics of databases and web application architecture. The architecture of web apps is more important than the choice of server-side language. If it weren't so dated I'd recommend Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. For a more up-to-date version of that, you might try the required texts for this MIT course: http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web
I wonder if the name 'Panda' was inspired from the Sneezing Panda.
Yes, Microsoft = Mom's Robots. In the public eye, try to portray yourself as likable. While behind closed doors, the real Microsoft is revealed.

Remember, at Microsoft, all buttons retaliate.
Finally Toyota and EDF Testing Plug-in Prius in UK
The TIS Innovation award has an international category. That being said, one challenge in recognizing international sites is simple user awareness. Our award is user-driven. 85% of our users are from the U.S. Thus, most of their submissions reflect that reality.

For other award programs offered by other companies, unless their judges are incredibly diverse, I imagine that their awards are an obvious reflection of themselves and their attendees.

In terms of conferences, I have to say I was blown away at this week's DEMO by the massive international presence there (Taiwan, Israel, France, Italy, India, etc.). Not sure if that's perceived as a strong suit, or a weakness, when compared to TC50.
Where you put the "pay wall" is a big decision. I think a lot of companies have learned that if you offer a largely functional product, people don't jump the penny gap ( http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html ) for a few slick premium touches.

FWIW, we have tens of thousands of free users at RescueTime who seem pretty enthusiastic. We've got a mess of paying customers, too-- but I've often pondered the idea of crippling the free version a bit more.

If you're looking at selling stuff to consumers, rather than businesses... I think you're in a scary world (unless you're an iphone app and you can offer the 1 click buy). No matter what you sell, there are always a dozen idiots who will give it away and throw adsense on there-- and consumers are well-trained at this point to find the free alternative.
A killer idea.
Wow, that seems crazy, even for Arlington (that is Arlington out there, right?). I was paying $1650/m to live in a (nice) 1BR on Franklin St. in Cambridge... and I thought I was getting a good deal. I moved into a share in Allston for my final year to save more money. I wonder what my old place rents for now.