skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If one's idea of how to deal with personnel issues is to just fire people,

I don't really think that's what I said. People who show time and again that they are ineffective at their jobs should not be there. I'm certainly not advocating firing someone for a single mistake or even for many mistakes as long as it's not the same one over and over again. Hell, making mistakes means the person is actually working and trying to get things done. That's not the kind of worker I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the worker who does little and consistently gets in the way of everyone else who is trying to push the boulder forward.

I also blame management because they need to be proactive in explaining to people that they are not cutting it and need to step up or will eventually be let go. I know if I was not meeting the needs of my job, I hope my manager would tell me.

it often is significantly more cost effective for a large company to keep them than to go through the expenses entailed in the hiring and training processes.

The cost effective you're thinking about is likely only in the short term. If you keep someone who is mediocre and consistently slows down other teams, and burdens other team members to make up their slack, then long term it is cost effective to let them go and get a quality person.

Rockstars may be 10x more productive individually, but anti-rockstars can be a huge minus on the productivity of the entire team. IMHO, it's much more important to not hire (or keep around) mediocrity than it is to hire rockstarts.
Know your ABCDs: Your Most Important Startup Business Processes
Filling demand which doesn't exist? China has an impoverished farmer/rural class to the tune of 600,000,000 - 700,000,000 people, and it is incredibly difficult to transition from a rural pass to a city pass, from what I've read. Difficulty in transition, to me, implies that their is a much greater demand to move into cities than the government is willing to allow currently. Why make it hard if you're begging people to move in?

EDIT: I know little of China, I'm posing this question in earnest to learn more!
This is just a friendly suggestion to edit that second sentence - it threw me for a bit.
These are just for Hudson actually, I haven't had time to upgrade them to Jenkins. Looks like this project is being maintained for Jenkins: https://github.com/fnichol/chef-jenkins
UK Ed Secty Michael Gove: Kids should make software, not just use it
I don't know how the author of this post found consulting gigs, but the way my friends did it and the way I did (before going back to a design/dev agency) was by first and foremost deciding on a the type consulting service we're going to offer and then partnering with other freelancers on projects. Another friend did two "free" gigs to build a portfolio and have references to send prospective clients to, and that got the ball rolling.

If dev, then will you be providing back-end dev? Front-end dev? What language/framework? Any CMS preference? Or blogging tool preference?

If design, are you helping out with everything from UX/strategy to branding/visual design, or are you just taking black and white wireframes (UX design) and turning them into fully baked/designed photoshop files?

If marketing/SEO, then what sub services are you offering? Social media management? Blogging/ghost writing? Pay-per-click management? SEO backlinks?

Two things to remember. 1) Most small business owners aren't going to roll the dice if they are your first client unless you can sell like the best of them. 2) Your reputation is your source for new business/referral business, if you are poor in one or multiple areas (let's just say design and marketing) but are an expert in one area (let's just say back-end Rails dev + front-end HTML/CSS/jQuery), then focus on providing services/consulting where you are the strongest.

The quickest way to start is to either to free work/discounted work for a family/friend or find a designer that doesn't do what you do and figure out way to partner/work together. If they get a client, partner up to do dev component. You could also find a marketing/seo freelancer and help them setup custom Facebook tabs for their clients.

Once you have your initial client or two, then put up a site and list it at sortfolio and other relevant directories. From there, blog often about topics that you are familiar with, topics that are relevant to the community you are trying to help, and make sure you are relevant. Go to meetups, attend local events, be part of the community, and don't be shy. If you are shy, you are not going to be heard. If you aren't heard, you aren't going to be considered for business opportunities.
How to Customize Twitter Bootstrap’s Design in a Rails app
China assembles a 30 story hotel in just 15 days. China builds a 30 story hotel in an unspecified length of time.

edit: Sorry this warranted downvotes. If I were trying to build a prefab home for myself, I wouldn't count the "build" time as time from parts arriving on site. I feel it to be disingenuous. There's a lot more to the process than just assembly of parts. Its definitely interesting that they can assemble things this quickly, but the fact that they can do this is not new. Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911060
Because you will reach their friends too? This is what I take from the article.
I've been thinking about that as well - we do have a place filter against our existing "topics" feature, so you can subscribe to an ical or RSS feed from here:

http://lanyrd.com/topics/hacker-news/in/uk/

(change /in/uk/ to another place for different pages)

We may well add a /in/uk/ filter to guides as well, not sure how we'd expose it in the UI though.
The fact you are waiting 30 seconds is agreeably a poor experience but this should not be the case. Font files on the web range in size from 20kb to 120kb depending on the details in the font - I consider this file size to be nothing more to wait for than say a normal image size. Technically fonts can save on total downloads if you think about the number of images that can be replaced. Fonts from services like WebINK, Typekit, Fontdeck, Fonts.com are all served from global CDN's that have these files located regional servers that should be bring the fonts down to your browser in 500ms to 2 seconds at the most. Of course connection speed matters.
I told Trafton and company about this because I'm working on-site at WPEngine this week and this looked very relevant to their interests. They specifically want to rescue your site (gratis) so that they can use it as an example of "Wordpress hosting is hard to do right. You don't want it to blow up on launch day. We're very experienced with not blowing up on launch day."

i.e. He doesn't want to sell you on WPEngine, he wants to save your bacon and use the bacon-saving to sell other people on WPEngine ;)

Jason Cohen (their CEO) says "We'd handle the migration immediately and give him a year of free hosting to get a case study out of this."
I'm not sure about this one. On the one hand relevant search results and less spam are good things for me. On the other hand, one of the key things I have always enjoyed about the Web is being exposed to new people, new ideas and things that were unexpected but interesting. With the increasing focus on social and relevant it seems like the gap for unexpected and interesting is closing. To some extent aggregation sites like HN and Reddit take this role, but they also tend to be too focused and relevant.

The web used to remind me of the story of Butte, MT. Butte apparently had a mini gold rush that quickly died down when people realized there wasn't much gold. Many of the gold prospectors left, because no gold meant no fortune. For some of those who stayed, however, the hills yielded a larger fortune in Copper, Silver and other metals.

The web used to be like that. You went looking for gold, and occasionally found a fortune in copper and silver instead. As search becomes more and more focused, however, there's no more copper or silver. Just a dead end, and a sign that says "No Gold.".
Facebook ads lead to homophobic parents kicking out teenage son
Actually, I'm not sure Matt already knew about that picture of him. But regardless, not everyone is "looking for answers" when they search. Plenty of people type things into Google like "Christmas" or the name of the university they went to, and the majority of them would be amazed and delighted to see search results with long-forgotten pictures of loved ones opening presents or status updates about their college buddies' get-together at the last homecoming.
Box.net Racing to the Bottom
Vegas Consumer Electronics Show lights up strip clubs
Ubiquity in terms of platform and languages was one consideration, but we're hoping to start with this niche. Certainly, mediums like SMS and perhaps a few regional languages is one for the future.
Also as another explanation is that we don't think people need mobile versions of their websites or a mobile app.

We think business need mobile campaigns and that most content should be more campaign centric for business.

A campaign mobile landing page is different than an app in that your trying funnel users into a transaction (signup/buy/opt-in). If your users want an app you already got them.
First, congratulations!

The site looks good and the product seems interesting and useful.

Unfortunately, you're getting hit hard with HN traffic being number one on the front page currently and thus things are slow.

However I was able to load the index page and watch the introductory video.

One thing that bothers me is I clicked on your Terms of Service link and was prompted to login: you might want to consider making as much available to logged out users as possible and esp things like terms of service which I may want or even need to read before signing up.

Otherwise, best of luck!
Django on AppEngine running HTML5 Boilerplate & Twitter Bootstrap.
It would be truly amazing to see this. Reddit going dark is fantastic, but to an extent it's "preaching to the choir"- Reddit is already the centre of SOPA activism.

Google, Facebook or Twitter going dark would be a huge statement. Is there a movement for other sites to go dark on Jan 18th as well? My startup going dark by itself wouldn't have a huge impact, but if it was part of a national day of activism it could be great.
It's also worth noting that Dan Nguyen (pronounced "win" even) is an awesome dev who works for ProPublica and has written a book on learning ruby (http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ ), amongst other things he's accomplished!
DIY virtual machines: Rigging up at home
I never realized the far reaching economic implications the CES truly has! LOL
Assuming a government is democratic , not corrupt (or a close approximation of) and government by law a government has limits to where it can apply violence and must follow some due process that is deemed to be fair by a majority of democratically elected members.
For that process to be changed said members must vote on changes and these must be published. This means that in theory rules should be made that are reasonable to the majority of the population, they might not be able to vote on all laws but if a representative votes for too many laws that are unfavorable he will be unelected.

The mafia works on the basis of fear since they will play by their own rule book that is likely decided upon in secret and not applied consistently. All rules will be made in favour of the rule makers themselves.

Imagine for a moment that we let private corporations hire goons with sticks and imagine that when you miss a payment instead of a polite but firm letter you came face to face with one of these goons at your doorstep and they have paid off the police to take no notice of what they do.
For once it would be awesome if a few tech companies pulled their funds and bought a company like comcast. Or even tried to make a bid for viacom. You don't need to buy them all but, it would wake up allot of other companies.

However,I feel the homegrown voice your opinion to the SOPA companies and politicians is great too. Allot of SOPA supporters have abandoned their support because of it.

But,I feel tech companies should really flex their muscle for once.
It's a cute trick, and undoubtedly will attract interest. But the interest is as likely to be negative as positive - people think it's creepy. Has Google focus-group tested these changes? Has Google asked focus groups of random people (not Google employees) what they actually want in search? Or is the decision making process basically something like, "This is cool!" (from Google programmers) and "This will help us make money!" (from Google executives)?

Because I think it's the latter.

A search engine's value is in bringing new information to people. Matt Cutts knew that he was playing Werewolf with Brian Fitzpatrick. That photo of Matt Cutts returned to Matt Cutts' search was duplicate information. It's a dupe! Cutts already knew that! It might be new to anyone else in the world, but not Matt Cutts!

Google is busy attaching a tube from our anus back to our mouth to facilitate information consumption. (You can call it an echo chamber or living in a bubble if you like.) This will not end well.
That's an amazing photo and I appreciate what it took to get that captured. But, here's the problem: Everyone who read this article now has a copy of that photograph in their possession, simply because of the way computers work. Does he expect every person with that photo in their browser cache to pay him for it? Of course not. But even if he wanted to - he wouldn't be able to.

And that's the issue. Many of us want the benefits of the Internet without the drawbacks, and that is literally not possible. We want the ease of communication, the low cost, and the instant delivery. But, we don't want everyone to have a copy. And we can't have one without the other.
most of what gets shared on Facebook is fairly innocuous, if not utterly mundane.

It usually is, until it isn't. By then, it's too late.
I did change my standard of living somewhat - I didn't travel this year as I usually do, cut out most useless expenses and took public transit whenever I could. We need surprisingly little to live when you think about it. At the same time, I made sure to take on small paid projects to keep fed.

I don't have any dependants, but I am married and contribute to the household financially. That hasn't stopped, I just had to take it into account when planning my runway.

I'm 28. At this point it's an experiement, If I can turn this into a business I will, if not, I'll dive back into the salaried way of life. It's a great way to live, but I just had to give my dream a shot.
I haven't been here long enough to know what the decorum is so hopefully somebody else will answer you, but you already did a couple of things I probably wouldn't do myself:

1) Plug your business in the comments section of another post (unless it's somehow related). You will likely not get as many people seeing it and also it's kind of rude considering it diverts attention from the OP.

2) Post 2 unrelated links at once. Again, the feedback you get will not be as focused, lowering the quality of the discussion that is generated.

As far as your sites it seems like you might be offering two interesting services, but the presentation is too cluttered and spammy looking in order for me for to follow through in navigating your sites. The design of both sites evokes associations to those ad-filled parked-domains making me immediately think "I probably don't want this". Simplify would be my suggestion.
Actually considering that his computer, camera + lens, etc is basically a sunk cost and that in a free market the price can be expected to go to the marginal cost of producing the next photograph, he should expect to be paid $12 (since the gas isn't a sunk cost).
Kinect for Windows is basically the old Kinect, with hidden features exposed.
I'm not sure if Google gets this, but the interaction between social search and general keyword search is pretty small. As others have noted, I rarely want results for general searches from those in my social network. And when I do, I actually would prefer to specifically invoke it. And if anything, when I do a social search I want the opposite of what they're doing -- I want social info from Twitter/Facebook of public info from people NOT in my network.

I feel Google is so concerned that they may be losing a monetization opportunity that they're screwing over their customer user experience. Google, your next billion dollar business is not Facebook or Twitter.

And BTW, if Matt is reading, WTF is up with GMail using contextual information, even if I turn it off? This to me is a HUGE no no. Maybe I turned it off incorrectly, but if someone like me gets it wrong, the mechanism to turn it off is broken.
Hey - if there was a low-to-no effort way of signing up for something to handle a one day burst in traffic then I'd imagine you'd rake in a pile of cash.
Virtual Sweatshops Work to Defeat CAPTCHA Tests
Ask HN: Following up on GPL violation of my own software?
I'm interested in guidance here based on actual knowledge/experience, rather than just peoples' opinions.

Here's the story:

I am the author and copyright holder of some GPL software. Even though I don't think I'm losing money because of the violation, I feel a duty to stand up for the GPL, so I do want to follow through. I don't see instructions on how to do that here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html

My GPL software's home page is here:
http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html
And a demo here:
http://ifdefined.com/btnet/bugs.aspx

The company that I believe is violating my license is here:
http://ibn-distribution.de/sbhd/

I have zero doubt that their software uses my codebase, but I'm not 100% sure that they are failing to open their source, as mandated by GPL. So, I contacted them directly using two different email addresses I found on their site, but I have not heard back. I wrote that I want to work with them to make sure they comply with GPL OR work with them to license my software under different terms. I don't care which, but as I said, I feel it as a duty to follow up.

What should I do next?
It would be more accurate to say the hotel was assembled in 15 days. Most of the pieces were already built off-site.
Interesting, but no new customers, no signups. Are HN viewers not the signing-up type? The article was of interest but I guess their site isn't as targeted to HN - thus no signups, makes sense.

What to take away? I hope it isn't "game Hacker News to get hits".
Anti-virus firm claims to know the identity of Koobface gang
Second Life involves a lot of per-user message sending. IM, group chats, friend requests, marriage proposals, dialogs with in-game merchant systems, payment notifications, persistent announcements, and a lot that I'm forgetting. They're all roughly the same thing -- messages that need to be delivered to either a specific user or a group of users, with flags for whether they get discarded when the user is offline or whether the user has to explicitly acknowledge them.

It was probably overreaching for us to try to find a system that would handle all this for every user. But even hundreds of thousands of current users, the bare minimum we could expect to be concurrent, were not well supported by the existing solutions.
"""True, but at the same time you shouldn't be hosting your pictures on the internet where anyone can copy it if you want to charge money for it. """

This is "blame the victim". Posting something on the internet does not make it public domain.

"""If I was to place some proprietary code on a public git, or just display it on my public webpage, should I get angry if people take it and don't pay me for it?"""

Yeah, you should.

It's the same if you posted some GPL code on a public git, and someone took it and build a closed system with it.

In both cases, the creator/owner or something did not have his wishes and copyright respected.

The same way we insist on people/companies respecting GPL copyright licenses, we should respect other people's licenses for THEIR stuff.
Google: Android's not fragmented, it's 'differentiated'
Also see http://www.corruptionfight.in
I made a similar analysis over a longer period of time with a larger sample basis. http://thenextcorner.net/hn-users/

Always interesting to see what systems, browsers HN users work on.
"But we have the technology, Google has the technology, we have the brainpower in this country, we certainly can figure it out."

Even if this were true, just because Google has the capability to do this doesn't mean every company does. If it costs Google $X million to prevent online piracy on their sites, is it reasonable to expect every web startup to do the same?
While this would make a statement, somewhere I saw a good point--someone will be googling to see if the snake that bit them was poisonous. Google is now critical infrastructure, like power. If it goes out, people will quite possibly die.
Tremendous! He got his wish re: the use of his photographs respected!

Who told you that "more publicity" (or whatever else snake oil i-want-your-content-for-free types sell), is considered a "gain" by all?
Corel Announces Professional Photoediting Suite for Windows, Mac and Linux
Martin Fowler: The Fallacies and Reprocussions of Diversity Imbalance
Does converting a WP site to a native app really enable more "features" than, say, WP's own mobile styling or something similarly built with HTML5?
Older versions of Chromium work just fine on ARM. For example the ARM port of Ubuntu provides Chromium 10 packages. I remember reading that newer versions don't build, but I don't know why.
How Intel’s Medfield will dismantle ARM
Solar lamps replace toxic kerosene in poorest countries
Man Utd vs Bolton Live Stream 14 January 2012
Groupon launches bizarre new feature: Clicky
NYTimes Columnist Nicholas Kristof building his own humanitarian FarmVille
Software So Good That I Actually Pay For It
I may be in the minority here, but the focus on social search seems like a red herring.

Kudos to the search team for trying things to see what works, but this feels awkward to me. The implementation gives me a "hotel california" feeling -- that your social relationships follow you where you go, no matter what you're doing. Heck, it's much easier to be anonymous offline than online nowadays. This really feels like it's trying to be all things to all people.

The search results page is starting to look like salad. What used to be simple and streamlined is now jumbled together. It honestly looks like an implementation that server-side developers would create as a response to competition from Facebook and Bing. Seriously, the SERP is on a path to jump-the-shark territory.

I made the leap to DuckDuckGo and have basically quit Google (save for my legacy email.) As I said, I may be in the minority here, but this just feels like a slow crawl toward mediocrity.
There were probably a half dozen wars before World War I that involved colonial theatres. The Dutch-Portuguese war, the Seven Years' War, the War of Austrian Succession, and the War of Spanish Succession are some examples. Many of these are considered world wars for that very reason.
Funny, just went from screen to tmux in one hour, and that was the first the exact same thing I felt odd about :)
Banks are only a problem because this opportunity is available to them. Of course, that doesn't absolve them of responsibility for their actions, but it wouldn't even be an issue if users weren't actively encouraging and tempting them with such juicy information that would help their bottom line in risk assessment.

To him, the bank's position is obvious and unworthy of mention. The lack of PERSONAL responsibility is what leads to these kinds of disasters, and that's what people just don't get. Much like people don't want to feel responsible for the greed leading to and maintaining the crazy tort law system in the USA today.
Probably not MMM -- he proposes a "surgical team" for programming which has (I think) nine people, though they aren't all programmers, and some are fractional-jobs which can be shared between teams.