skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For my case it was not as bad as data entry. It was a build system job vs. graphics job (I have a grad degree and the equivalent of a few years of work experience), but they had primed me for something specific. Questions like "how do you feel about regularly working until midnight and hounding people you have no authority over who break the build?" did not help.

I assume that they were mostly incompetent rather than evil, but it doesn't matter from the perspective of a company attracting talent.

Many people looking to hire are clueless of this and cannot explain why they have trouble hiring (a guy once simultaneously complained to me that he couldn't find competent programmers and complained that I wouldn't do small, sporadic 3D geometry jobs for $50/hr). I have noticed a common smugness amongst people hiring (despite the fact that many quickly reveal themselves to be of less than stellar technical ability). This is probably a bad attitude in a market where the best talent can quickly get multiple job offers and where not every person hiring is a jerk.

Part of the problem seems to be that many companies get by on hiring cheap workers. In particular they take advantage of students just out of school. That doesn't work very well because it is hard to retain those people, but it appears to be enough to keep many companies afloat.
My hunch is that the main app page would convert better for getting star ratings. Have you tested both?

The potential problem with the reviews page is that it makes it seem to the user like they have to write a review in order to give a star rating. On the main app page, however, they can just provide a star rating.
I think you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

I think you should run your startup wherever you feel comfortable living.

My city is a great city, it has many neighborhoods you can feel "home" in, it has great food, it has a lot of money flowing through various veins. The startup community here is varied, focussing on a variety of business opportunities, and not necessarily totally digital. There’s a certain sense of underdog vs. the world, which reflects a certain reality of startup exits, but also is a bit ridiculous given the scale of opportunities here.

My city has many detractors, who will tell you there's high crime, questionable people riding the subway who will harass you or worse. The money may well be coursing through its veins but it’s difficult to get access to it. Real Estate is expensive. VCs are unrealistic about valuations and business opportunities and exits. It’s incredibly difficult to hire designers and developers who are exploiting the tight market to their benefit and employers’ detriment.

The scenery and lifestyle in my city is fantastic, great vistas, many opportunities to run, hike, bike, swim, kayak. You’re a couple of hours’ drive from various ski & snowboarding areas. And you can just as easily surf if you wanted to.

Now, this comment could apply just as equally to SF as to New York. Each has its drawbacks and its fantastic benefits. Fanboys will argue until there are no more karma points to be awarded over which is the “best” city to be based in.

I think that if you’re really that ambivalent about where to be based, spend a month in either city and a month in some random city (say, Pittsburgh, or Austin, or Boulder). Because it’s clearly neither technology, nor access to customers, nor access to money that’s going to drive your decision, it’s how it feels to live there and whether you will feel at home there.
My philosophy is that I want to give the company/client a good value for their money but I also want to get paid what I'm worth. If I'm a 100K/yr engineer and the company can't see paying that, the fit is probably sub-optimal and it's time to go someplace where I can create value.

For example: An engineer working at a landscaping company cannot deliver enough value to justify a big salary. It's not the landscaping company's fault, it's just a bad fit.

In my experience, pay increases happen when you start a new job or if you're lucky, when someone on your team leaves for more money. :-)

Talk to your boss over lunch and let him know that it's obvious that you aren't able to deliver the value you'd like and perhaps it's time you got out of the way so they can get someone who is a better fit. Reassure him that you don't intend to leave them in the lurch.
Regardless of the motivation, one might expect that iOS developers for example would make more money with SOPA.
Exactly. Keeping it in the family allows for easy trust... once that trust-web is exposed, it only leaves those who have heavily invested in "enforced non-traceable trust" (ie, the mafia, etc).
Just so you know: FB and Twitter auth doesn't work atm.
Otherwise, it's a nice app.
I'm reminded of Julian Assange's essay[1] on the nature of conspiracies, and how leaks serve to impose a 'secrecy tax' upon them, further obfuscating and reducing the power of information-sharing links between nodes. In his view, the additional complexity and reduction of trust among members of a conspiracy that results from leaks reduces its ability to properly react to novel stimuli, eventually leading to its downfall. It's an interesting essay, and I'm somewhat surprised to see such a germane example here.

[1] http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
While the narrative plays well, I just wonder if the data really does support your hypothesis. I say that as a solo founder.

I can definitely think of times where I wish I had a cofounder and how helpful it would be to have someone there, dedicated to working on the company's problems and issues. My mom, while an amazing woman who would go to the end of the earth to help me in any way she could, just can't do many of things I need to do to launch a software company.

And beyond her, nobody else is committed enough to me or the company to go to the length I would expect from a cofounder.
Hey everyone, thanks for the comments. As evidenced below, there are many different ways to negotiate on salary with companies. I've read through several below and they are spot on.

Regards,

Mark
Usabilla: integrate usability tests in your daily work-flow
2011: Launch, Growth and Insanity
Most startups as far as I know don't have much money, but if they do have money then fair enough they can spend it on SEO if they think it would be beneficial. As you say though it's going to be hard to find someone decent and honest.
The comment on the article about all the maps fitting together reminds me of html/css sprites. clever use of 1 file for multiple uses. great article. never knew this stuff...
This sounds like a crazy plan for a startup, I realize, but this is the right sort of crazy. In fact, the way the Hackruiters think about Hacker School is a lot like the way we initially thought about YC: if it doesn't make money, it will at least have been a benevolent thing to do.
Brazilian Startups: Turbulence Ahead?
could you elaborate on that thought a bit?
CI is a good argument for centralised source control, and like you say it is possible to get 90% of the benefits just using git-svn (I have done in the past).

The real power for me is the branching, especially shared branching.

My workflow is like this, each dev has their own github repo which is up to date with whatever is in their local repo.

So even if someone is working on esoteric weird crap, I can see it (ircbot telling you about commits) and I can pull it.

For CI we have a server that is also running a git repo of it's own. Anyone can push branches to it and they'll get put through CI.

So I can now take my branch, pull 3 or 4 peoples feature branches merge them locally then push to CI repo to see if anything is broken. If it is, I can fix some of it and push it back to whoever needs to know if there is something I don't understand.

It's a joy.
How the Unconscious Mind Boosts Creative Output
"It is possible to achieve the feel of non-linear level design by taking a linear path and adding short offshoots."

also called a "maze".

"As with the other levels, there is a minimum amount of re-traversal required to get through this level, as the critical path is extremely linear."

"The flow is generally linear and ramps well, as with Level 1, but the designers stop the player in Room 6 and won't let him continue until he gets the ladder in Room 8."

"One surprise was that the silver arrow is not technically on the critical path even though you can't beat the end boss (Ganon) without it."

So we see that these mazes are linear, except in parts where they have branches, and some branches are required, and there are a few loops.

So, what exactly is the point of this analysis? That this great game has structure, and isn't a completely open world? OK.
Jimmy Colquitt, A Former Vol, Business Card
>Bringing in Kipling into this discussion is hugely ironic >considering how much of a royal prick he was in his attitude towards Indians ( Kipling's transparently racist portrayals of Indian characters in Kim and Gunga Din, among others )

If you consider Rudyard Kipling's characterization as racist then perhaps you are missing a few subtleties and humanizing nature of such character portrayals. I am from India and I do not consider Kipling's characterization as racist but rather a dig at the ills of society that existed during the British rule similar to Mark Twain's characterization of Native Americans and African Americans in the pre-civil war American south.
I wish the US/state governments would do the same thing. I hate how the green left-turn arrow is the first thing to light at a stoplight. This penalizes efficiency and rewards a behavior that costs us all time and energy.

Why is it like this? The only valid reason I can think of is that turn lanes would tend to back up at most lights in busy cities. I would think correcting this behavior would help reduce the number of vehicles turning, to offset the backup.
i leave it on my github. i link the source for my shitty blog from my resume with a note: "solo author. freetime experimental project. my blog is hosted here. don't look too hard at this code, it sucks."
Hey man, no need to get personal. For what it's worth, I live in a rural, very low income area. We all have limits on our world views. I simply object to the casual usage of a neutral but racially-sensitive term as a blanket adjective for criminality and wretchedness.

Ghetto, in its appropriate usage, isn't a slang term. It's been a part of standard English for a long time.
I'm not sure what the "Rules of Sudoku" say but I assumed any single symbol of the solvers choosing would do.
The video is no longer working.
That's one way to look at it, but keep in mind how many other benefits are based off your salary. Raises[1] are often some percentage of your base salary. 401k match? Percentage of your salary. Bonuses? Often a percentage of your salary. Life insurance, AD&D benefits, long- and short-term disability, which you hopefully will never need, but if you do, all pay out according to your base salary.

Keep all that in mind when you are doing the math. With a higher salary you can pay for day-care yourself (and still deduct it from your taxes) and bring a sandwich from home for lunch.

1. If a raise ever comes at all. Do not plan on it when you are negotiating your salary, even if they tell you everyone has gotten a 10% raise every year for the past 10 years.
It looks like a great opportunity, but I imagine it'll be a rare hacker who can find 32 daytime hours per week to do unpaid work. Maybe it's good for a college-aged hacker taking a semester off, or maybe for a self-employed contract dev who plans to pay the bills with off-hours contract work.

I'd love to see a bit of clarification about that part in the FAQ.

As a ten year developer I'd love to be able to participate in this sort of collective though. Maybe coworking + meetups makes a better fit for someone in my shoes.
never used SourceSafe I see
UT Vols Baseball Coaches Business Cards
Once FB auth is working, double check that Facebook proxied email addresses don't break the app. Django's default email field is max_length 75.
Free Indie Games not featured on TIGS or Indiegames: Passifism 2 [Nonsuch Games]
Thank you for mentioning this,it really drove me mad after a couple of tries; I swear that I'll never return to harman kardon website, and won't buy their products, ever. May their webmasters die a slow, painful death. So much anti-usability deserves it.
First, you should not do this, it is very normal that you question your skills for something that has no special area in your brain.

Secound, there is a huge diversity among programmers, don't try to be like everyone else.

3rd, there are forums to find people who code like you, you find out very easily where you stand.

4th, join a site like http://codercharts.com/ or project euler for fun. You can use any language you want.

5th, I'm trying to build up a team for an AI competition where you code a bot for Starcraft 1 http://code.google.com/p/bwapi/ You can learn a lot there, just drop me a line ..
i thought the exercise bike he bought looked excellent, though. i'm tempted to get one so that instead of lying on the couch reading i can sit on the bike and get some exercise without having to devote singletasked time to it.
House Cleaning Service in Stevenage SG1, SG2
With SOPA iOS app developers might be able to more easily target pirate sites that give away their applications and reduce piracy.
if an employee has to threaten to leave to get a raise, someone is doing something wrong. probably the employee.
Luckily, the BBC would not fall under this definition:

the site is primarily designed or
operated for the purpose of, has only lim-
ited purpose or use other than, or is mar-
keted by its operator or another acting in
concert with that operator primarily for
use in, offering goods or services in viola-
tion of— [...some existing laws...]
If you have to announce you are leaving before they acknowledge (or realize) your value to them, you should probably leave no matter how much they offer you. That's hard to do if you really like the place, but it's usually a sign that there are bigger problems. I took a counter offer once, and it worked out OK, but things always felt a little awkward with my manager after it.
I don't understand why lansing's being down-voted here. He's absolutely right. It's pejorative when used as a way to reference a place where black people live now, and it's historically inaccurate. The "modern" usage is all since the late '80s; and it came from a term based on enforced ethnic divisions. The fact that a lot of readers here live in parts of the country or the world that don't enforce ethnic divisions along geographical boundaries does nothing to change the fact that those still exist, even in the US, and they are still enforced by white-on-black violence in many cases. The first question that comes to mind is who puts the boundaries of these ghetto into the database? What's Fairfax south of Olympic? What's 120th and Broadway? And the second question is, would stores and businesses within those areas suffer as a result of decreased traffic; what recourse would they have; and what hope would blighted areas have of economic improvement if everyone followed a GPS that steered them around the zone?

This is a disgusting concept and an insult to human dignity. It will turn "ghettos" in the slang sense into more genuine ghettos in the historical sense. And lansing is right to take issue with the term as it's used now, because it's become a light, casual, racist and derogatory way to talk about a certain area, which is definitely used by the white middle class as a stand in for other racist words they don't feel comfortable saying anymore.

[Edit: The fact this was downvoted in less time than it would take a speed reader to finish what I wrote is pretty much proof that either someone's got it in for lansing, or someone's a fuckin racist dipshit. Either way, fuck you.]

[Re-edit: Not only do I stand by my comment, I think the people who downvoted me are cowards. Respond if you have a response, and you speak enough English to communicate it.]
A lot of the things he hates about OOP are exactly the things I like about it!
I am now curious. Is there ever a "grumble Why is this on HN?" that is upvoted?
The total number of paying customers is what determines your revenue. But even then, it's important to track free->paid conversion percentages, e.g. sudden drop offs.
If I'm a recruiter, I then say: "Oh good...we're close. The salary approved for this position is 0.8Y. But we offer high-cholesterol lunches that have been 'catered' by the local fast-food meta-purveyors, health care, blah blah blah. Did I mention our free massage Fridays, and extensive selection of free, high-sugar, diabetes-inducing soft drinks?"

You then get to choose to counter or walk away. If you're a good negotiator (which you're not, since you've said the first number), we'll probably end up at 0.9Y.

Meanwhile, Joe Bloggs comes in, and doesn't say a number. The recruiter offers 0.8Y, and Joe finally says "I was thinking 1.2Y". Joe, being a savvy negotiator, ends up with at least Y, and maybe 1.1Y.

It doesn't matter what Y is, you always have a chance of doing better than your goal if you speak last. You lose that advantage if you speak first.
We know it's a huge time commitment, but we think it's the best way to really get better. We've found that you get disproportional results when you switch from a "nights and weekends" mentality to a "this is the sole thing I'm focusing on" mentality.

The people who were in the last two batches were a mix of contract programmers, people who worked part time, and students.

EDIT: We have a couple thoughts here on how to make Hacker School work financially/logistically: http://www.hackerschool.com/attending
You think this is about the USD99 Apple TV? No, if Apple is acquiring contents rights, it's not just going to be the "hobby" they have. It's probably related to the rumors of the 50" LCD AppleTV.
You mean kill the civilians nearby the pedestrians? That would be an interesting startup!!

Someone has been beta testing in the Middle East for some years now...this tech can't be far off.
good catch; I would raise an issue so the maintainer can take a look.
speculation: standard trojan login?
They're great for the sites like FB who want to track people, not so great for people who don't like this sort of tracking.

I see most of them as clutter, especially if they're part of some obnoxious floating bar.
"Support costs" refers to the costs of supporting users, not the cost of hosting content. This includes the cost of someone replying to the presumably tens of thousands of emails requesting support and trawling through it harvesting bug reports, feature requests, giving users fixes, telling users politely to press the right button if they want it to work etc.
they had to be removed because the keys have been deauthorized. regular sign up should be working though.
You should lose the logins, it buys you nothing besides user friction which you definitely don't want at this stage in the game.

If you add an api I'll hook it up to impromptudo.
I remember seeing a paper that suggested outlawing all left turns except onto cul de secs or where at least one road is one way would shorten driving times for everyone. Every time I get stuck behind a huge long line of jerks trying to turn left I think of that and seethe.
was that a reference to manbearpig, or you don't think global warming is real?
i've settled on a two-monitor, three desktop setup. one monitor has a maximised terminator window, which i use to manage my xterms (i find it handier than letting xmonad handle individual xterms, because terminator allows for both splits and tabs). the other monitor alternates between office browser and personal browser. i would normally have had an im window too, but i decided to give not signing into personal im at work a try when i started my new job (july), and so far it's actually worked out very well. my friends know that i check email constantly, so if they need to get my attention they can do that, or sms if its urgent.

temporary things (like launching openoffice or reading a pdf in fullscreen) happen in a fourth desktop, and get closed when i'm done with them.
> As for rude: you just demonstrated it. If you think you're giving away 70% of "your money" you don't get it. You're getting a 40% commission of THEIR MONEY.

Absolutely not. Both parties need each other. It collectively belongs to both of them.

> Your money has been made of the backs of creators, and to turn around and call those indie label executives shitheads doesn't endear you to anyone no matter how many concerts you go to.

I didn't see him call anyone a shithead. And you could just as easily say that the labels make money on the backs of artists. If you want to be rude and dismissive of others.
This practice is an interesting play on expectations; namely, that a fire sale implies deep discounts on goods. It is similar to the tactic used at Black Friday at just about every major retailer: have a few major loss-leaders in your ad, and discreetly mark up everything else in the store.

Is this manipulative? I wouldn't call it that, at least not more than any other retail tactic. Consumers have more price information available to them than ever before, yet they are still amazingly susceptible to the idea that they are getting a good deal, nevermind that the widget that they are saving 25% on costs half as much on Amazon. If using psychology as a sales tool is unethical, then the idea of advertisement and "sales" must be as well.
Twitter, Facebook, Google endorse alternate online piracy bill
You act as if the margins via other distribution channels aren't much, much higher. If they're getting 70% back that beats itunes, that beats traditional album sales, that beats pretty much everything.
So it apparently makes their custom flash storage behave like RAM, and provides an API to OS and software developers to make use of it as such, but it's non-volatile, so everything persists in the case of power failure or reboot. Here's an informative quote from Wozniak from the press release:

"Instead of treating flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel subsystems that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory technology offers a platform with new programming primitives that can provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory."

http://www.fusionio.com/press-releases/fusion-io-breaks-one-...

Here's hoping the other company by which he's still nominally employed gets interested in this technology, so that many more can enjoy the benefits of this technology. It seems like storage is the main bottleneck for most computing these days, so this should save us a whole lot of man-years waiting for our computers.
New DoS attack: Are you ready for slow reading?
I've met one of the founders here, Hacker School is a really great thing for NYC! Just wish I had a few spare months so I could attend :(
For me, spending money on SEO doesn't make much sense.

However, spending time does.

Most of the big wins on SEO are a combination of strategy and time. As in : have a strategy to get links, and spend time on that strategy.

Sure, you can pay someone to do this for you, but anyone who is smart enough to develop software is more than smart enough to do SEO.

The big mistake people make is thinking it exists outside of marketing. In fact your SEO strategy and your marketing strategy are just two dishes on the overall meal of gaining customers.
No doubt, but the converse is not necessarily true. There are many high crime areas that are not ghettos, in that they have no particular ethnic make-up. There are even relatively high crime areas that are neither ghettos, nor low-income communities.
IKEA ditches wooden pallets for cardboard
Flame bait? If so, very successful :)
I have no doubt this is a great way to get better. Maybe I need to arrange for a sabbatical of my own!
Just curious, how does internal recruiting usually work?
Senator Ron Wyden has already promised a filibuster for PIPA.
Important Reasons for Women to Start an Internet Business from Home