skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for your response. I'll point out that I'm in the UK, but I don't know whether it's better in the UK than the US. The UK system is pretty effective, and you get disability 'welfare' (called benefits here) to tide you over until you're better.

So, the hospital is free, the drugs are free, the consultant (who checks up on you perhaps quarterly for 20 minutes) is free, and living expenses free too.

Free meaning National Insurance is paid, but you get that paid too.
It's always wise to put a number out first. As an employer, I try to do that. As an employee, I've also always done that.

It sets the dynamic and expectations. Obviously if it's crazy, it also provides an immediate opportunity to correct an unreasonable expectation.
at (work|home-debian:) (firefox|iceweasel) with firebug, tamper data, greasemonkey and tor button.

at home-powerbook: safari, firefox to test/debug javascript stuff
I can't stand scribd either. I would much rather just have a link to the pdf.
As someone who has lived in both countries for many years at a stretch, I'm very glad that I effectively still have the British safety net because I'm still a citizen and can go back there if I get really sick and lose my job and healthcare here.
A few years ago I worked for a smallish company where the repeated "why?" would consistently release untold nightmares. The turnover rate was high, but there were a few old-timers who would tolerate a historical/political inquiry, and a few more whose reactions revealed things about history and politics in a different sort of way. At a glance, the product designs and manufacturing procedures appeared to have been born from pure ether. (This company made medical devices.) Design decisions were undocumented; what documentation did exist was withheld out of general mistrust.

Problem: Applying the drug to the latest version of the device in the usual way gives a messy coating.

- Why is the coating messy on this design? Because the device's surface can't hold this much drug.

- Why are we applying so much drug? Because the previous products used the same dosage.

- Why was that dosage chosen? Because, in an animal study using sample size N=1-3 for each of three different dosages, this did slightly better than the other two. No further investigation was ever done. EOF

- Why can't this device cleanly carry as much drug as previous designs? Because the surface properties and geometries are different.

- Why did we change the design? What properties did the other design have that resulted in a clean coating?
Because a partner company wanted out of the biz, created a durability test no existing product could pass, and used that to torpedo our product. And, wait, that design had a problem with the coating, too.

- Why didn't we catch these coating problems in previous products? Because quality is fucked in this pilot facility, and our other manufacturing facility is still trying to get up to speed with the first product made with this manufacturing method, and unable to duplicate our allegedly flawless results from two years ago.

- Why are we unable/unwilling to do serious QC work here? Or even basic science? We think the CEO doesn't intend to pass regulatory requirements or even launch most of these newer products, so it doesn't matter. These projects are window-dressing for investors. Yes, of course we're all looking for new jobs on the side.

As it turned out, the real benefit to asking all of these whys was that I was able to abandon ship at just the right time. Shortly before I left for another job, having challenged the CTO about the scientific feasibility of his latest escapade during a meeting, a senior engineer showed me some years-old pictures of a device with exactly the same physical design as our flagship product. This young engineer was enlightened.
Only think of this:

Our personal thinking is never 'Open Source', we always keep some more-or-less decisive part secret (read: protected!), and this for good reasons.

To open-source everything would be very similar to showing yourself naked everywhere...

But I agree that commonly used libraries should be open source (the ones I use are all open source).
You can't "anchor" a corporation. It doesn't have feelings or emotions -- it has a big table of pay ranges for people with X years of experience and/or education.

Your strategy works if you name a "negotiable" number that is higher than what you really want to make, but near the employer's upper bound for the position. Guess right, and you'll be negotiated down to a number that is mutually acceptable. Guess too low, and you'll be under-paid. Guess too high, and you'll be bounced without further negotiation. No matter what you do, the onus is on you to guess correctly the numbers on the employer's sheet. That's why saying the first number is bad when you're negotiating with a more knowledgeable opponent.

If you've had a lot of success with the "anchoring" method, it's likely because you're not coming close to the upper bound of the pay range that your employers had pre-determined for their positions.
How true this is... I love how my girlfriends' never get it... they think I'm just 'doddling.' Little do they know that if I had enough time (and a big enough hot water heater)... I'm sure my thinking in the shower would facilitate my destiny to conquer the world.
A quick peek at user agent strings on a link in a comment shows something like:

50% Firefox ( 50% windows, 25% linux, 20% mac, 5% openbsd)
25% Safari (100% mac)
10% Chrome
10% IE ( 60% IE6, 30% IE7, One brave soul IE8)
5% Opera
1% Minefield
1% iPhone

Sample size is only 177, and it is only people that cared enough to read into one particular comment and then look further, so it may not be representative.
Showers are also relaxing. Exercise isn't too much so. When I'm exercising properly, I can't really think too well or deeply since I'm exerting myself and my energy and focus is towards the exercise. Leisurely walking & bicycling in a quiet neighborhood is a different story.
An "old" method used to be to put individual items on notecards. These could be rearranged repeatedly, with additional cards inserted as ideas were either fleshed out or fit into a larger context.

It's writing, but not (yet) writing a linear, not to mention final, draft.

I understand that these days some people work in a similar fashion, but with Post It notes. The advantage being that you can spread them out over a table or wall or similar (walls are then a convenient source or otherwise unoccupied surface area), and they won't be as easily inadvertently jostled out of order.

If you are worried about losing a card organization scheme, when they are laid out in such fashion you can take picture(s) in order to preserve a record. This can also serve as a backup mechanism against losing the cards.

It also works for handwritten notes. You do not need to spend a lot of time on the pictures if that time is not productive. But the pictures are so easy to take -- one can just snap them at the end of each day or workday. If your 4 year old randomizes your stack, or you forget your notebook while juggling 3 other things, all is not lost. If that never happens, all you've lost is a couple of minutes' clicking and some non-volatile memory capacity.

Behind all these comments, is the fact that for me, writing long hand is still sometimes most productive. If the volume of output is less, the concentration tends to be higher. And it can be accomplished most anywhere, at a moment's notice.
I don't understand why someone would take already-existing text instructions and put them into a 22 minute illegible "screencast".

What's even more confusing is why HN would upvote this over 17 times. Probably only because the title has Clojure in it's name :(

What a useless link.
A Respectful Blend of Old and New
Rails Myth #4: Rails is a monolith
1. Start a company
2. Shower
3. Profit!
Do you not run out of hot water?
don't forget rubber ducky. he'll listen when you try to explain monetization strategies.
I've found long-distance running to be very relaxing, since you don't go at a fast-enough pace to be hurting.
Some thoughts about being there (back on rat race as now):

- You will feel better right away, what you said about being free its excatly right, and you realize how depressing was being trap on a cubicule kissing ass.

- Money is much easier to get, you realize that a salary is peanuts compared with how much you can do on your own if you make it.

- Live like a cockroach, the thing about not knowing where or if my next check will come make me realize I could live (and save money!) with half of what I made with a weekly salary, and in the past I was under credit card debt for going out meals and worthless stuff.

-You will find out that the urgency and strees to find an income will be a great motivation to make it. That is one of the biggest disadvantages in a job you do not have that feeling and that is probably what really makes the difference on the long run.

-Be honest to yourself and decide what you do ASAP, think it thru and once you decide give it all. Be quick on this on 2 things: to see if the field you choose have future and to move to try another thing fast, make sure you go into vocation whatever it may be.

-Dont fool yourself into laziness, have an area free of distractions and give it all. Family can suck all your time if you do not have clear boundaries and scheduale.

Little bit of my story:

- I was lay off in march, decided to sell some products, realized my bussiness model was not possible on the long run (I was not the owner of what I sell, mostly like an employee), but it gave me half of what I used to make on an office, and much better life, lots of free time.

If I had the same opportunity, I will have an "office" and scheduale, decide on a bussiness for the long run, not just to make money fast, be honest on doing what I liked even if took some time.

Good luck making it.
There's also the kinesthetic aspect of long hand, to which I respond strongly. Knowing one's learning and interaction style may be helpful. For me, a physical relationship/interaction drives heightened awareness. Others may be more visual, or acoustic. I wonder whether personal recorders / voice notetaking devices work particularly well for the latter.
Congrats - great idea, well executed. I can't wait to start using this.

Question to you or anyone else on this thread - are there any tools out there that could convert a UI mockup for a webpage (like one created with Dabbleboard or Basalmiq) into standards compliant html/css?
Sure did, though I'm not sure if that's the case anymore -- I have this great chair now...
Then I, for one, welcome our new wrinkly-pink overlords.

Shower ideas are great, but taking long showers to get ideas is criminally wasteful. Try this instead: go into the bedroom, make it really dark, light a candle or something and play one of those 'pink noise' tracks: rainforest, ocean, etc. Or take a walk.
Gave me only the first two paragraphs. jgranby's link, above, gave me the whole thing.
Since Heysan is web-based IM chat, the question is how many page loads each user does per a single session ? I believe it's a couple of thousands, so the overall user-flow is not huge.

The other thing is the article states that most users of Heysan come from US, but Alexa disagrees with that. Here's some data:

India 82.0%
United States 8.4%
United Kingdom 1.3%
Germany 0.6%
Indonesia 0.4%

So, my conclusion is that Heysan is doing good PR with this article, nothing else :-). Kudos to Heysan!
Every day surfing Safari

WebDev using Firefox. Firebug is just too useful to not use.

I've only ever installed 2 plugins for Safari:

http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.php - Search as you type
http://hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html - Enable all types of options in Safari
Some guy went to the Hacker News Coffee Palo Alto (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=285623) a few months back and handed out copies of this.

Does anyone know who this was? He looked strikingly similar to Yudkowsky...
Venture Debt - The "Other" Green Money
Venture Debt can prove to be a viable alternative to Venture Capital, especially in trying economic times.
I didn't vote for Barry mainly because it is clear that we would be subject to one party eule for at least 2 years with him at the helm.

Though I could see the benefits of him as prez otherwise. For all they have done wrong, the republicans, with control of one chamber would keep the dems from doing what they do wrong, which for a fiscal conservative like me is a lot.

Obama can easily reach out to the other half by acting like the person he ran as (a moderate and at times conservative dem - something he is not), however, he doesn't have to be too liberal with the people running the house and senate. He can let them do his dirty work.
I have 'left the fold' of institutional support early and have been battling the devils (and enjoying the fruits) of independence, on-and-off for 5 years.

I think there is an enormous amount of amazing potential for "super-empowered individuals" to make headway whether in business, technology, or science. Tools are cheap, knowledge is easy to spread. I love being able to travel with a laptop etc. But social reality hasn't caught up yet to support these possibilities to their potential. In particular, I find we need much more social interaction and support than one gets by default as an independence (and this becomes painfully obvious especially after a few months of being out of the institution). We live in a society of solitude. Loneliness has never been so rampant. It is crucial to creative thinking, to memory performance, to cognition, to motivation, to everything. How do we create better environments for this, outside of universities/corporations? Social support is absolutely important and difficult to find. The longer you are away, the harder it is to find.

I have more thoughts on this but will have to get to it later.
How To (really) Trust A Mathematical Proof
If you're not actually cleaning yourself--that is to say, if you're already clean, not if you're lazy--then there's no reason to be using any more clean water. There could be set up a switch that, when flipped, moved from a "use/dispose" model to a "use/recycle" (under the literal meaning of the term "re-cycle") one. It would, of course, build a small buffer at the beginning so it wouldn't just be spraying the last of your shampoo all over you, but that would be the last of the new usage for the day, and it could last as long as you want--only as dirty as a bath, but in motion!
Some people see a great deal and some see very little in the same things.
Why stop at SourceForge - they should probably sue Dell, Microsoft and Tim Berners-Lee as well, as I heard a lot of people use PCs, Windows and the internet for activities which potentially infringe record companies' copyright...
Why 2pm? TMI?
Man who lost job at Santa Clara startup killed 3
Anyone need some iPhone appdev inspiration?

You know the iPhone headphones, the ones that have a little microphone built into the side? It acts as a button, as well (I'm not sure if it's a soft button, though.)

I imagine that, if it were a soft button, someone could write, quite simply, a voice recorder program whose recording was toggled by that button. You could leave music running in the background, with the recorder running in the foreground, then press the button (both temporarily pausing the music at starting the recording), dictate your thought, and press the button again, at which point the music would resume.
I have 4, that means nothing when the browser keeps bloating up and taking gigs itself because opening and closing lots of tabs all day long fragments the memory so badly that it can't release ram back to the OS when you close some tabs.
Clojure's first birthday was just a few weeks ago.
Caution: you're not negotiating with a corporation, you're negotiating with an HR person, whose job performance is tied in part to how well he/she negotiates.
Take a look on these "markets":

India 82.0%
United States 8.4%
United Kingdom 1.3%
Germany 0.6%
Indonesia 0.4%

Obtained from Alexa.
I agree with all of the things you've just said in principle, but none of them apply in the real world. A company that loudly embraced just one of those bullet points you just gave would top the "best places to work" lists.

The problem isn't top-down corporate strategy; it's the concept of HR departments. When you:

* establish an entire business unit apart from the real work of a company,

* give it a mandate to meddle in the affairs of every other business unit in the company, and then

* measure its performance in raw numbers,

you get the systemic inefficiency almost every large company sees. It's not the people or their ideas that are messed up, it's the system.

However, apart from all that --- if you think what I'm saying is "jaded", try being a vendor to large companies sometime. Prospective employees deal with HR. Vendors deal with Purchasing. At least HR tries to pretend to be nice to you. Purchasing departments (for consultants, or for products) are overtly intended to screw you.

Finally, this isn't about whether you feel like you're being treated fairly. It's about whether you're best representing your interests during negotiation. The idea is not to lose leverage by conceding an advantage in information to your counterparty.

An HR person would be fired if they revealed the salary history of the last 20 people hired into your group in the company. Under no circumstances would a company ever reveal that kind of information. But you concede it willingly. Why?
SearchStatus for info on site credibility, delicious so I can quickly store the pages, FoxyClocks so I can see what time my China, India and U.S counterparts have, Web Developer, Proxy Switcher.

I used to use greasemonkey for some gmail tweaks, but the gmail labs thing added most of them, so don't need that anymore.
Using psilocybin responsibly once every few months would be a more ideal mode for a creative pause.

The stupid fearful superstitious monkeys who run the stupid government don't want people at an ideal level of creativity and optimism, so you can't legally access the best way to have a creative pause. So, we get the result of people who know how to best foster creativity and optimism being outlaws, and people who study psychology for a living produce bullshit work like this. This kind of thing is aimed at turning you from an uncreative monkey to a slightly less uncreative monkey.

Why not wake up from your programmed modes of thinking and be a free human being instead? I guarantee you, give me 10 people and I could safely induce a better 'creative pause' with a 2 day camping trip where mushrooms were used safely, then this guy could with 100 showers.

We're at a place in human history where we are either going to get serious about fixing the problems on spaceship earth, or we're going to destroy it. Fixing the problems requires huge amounts of optimism and creativity. We don't have time for people (especially entrepreneurs) to be thinking a shower is the best way to safely enhance creativity. We can solve the problems that might destroy our planet if we safely use what the outlaws know in the right way. We can't if we're all taking showers thinking that will be what makes us creative.
You mean you are carrying a small vial of water that says it has rust in it, but doesn't actually (or at least has a very low probability of having a rust molecule).
Same here. If I am stuck on something I hop on my bike and ride for a while. I have a nature path less than 1 mile away. I try deliberately not to commit anything to memory while I think. I find that if I try to remember stuff too hard it stops the flow. Sometime I have problems "recreating" what I came up with but on balance I have found this way of solving problems best.
> Guess too high, and you'll be bounced without further negotiation.

This hasn't been my experience. My experience has been if they want you then they'll find a way to make it work.

If you don't fit in one grid then they'll just bump you up to the next grid.
I think the basic motivation for carrying a concealed weapon in situations like these is what if the guy never plans to stop killing? What if he just carries on hunting people for so long as his ammo lasts? That gives you a possibility of making a difference by putting him down early.

Likewise, why bother wearing body armor, they'll just shoot you in the face! Except... sometimes whether by their aim sucking or not having time to aim properly, and etc., it does matter. Chaotic situations like these have many possible challenges to present you, some of which a concealed weapon can help you with.

I think a lot of people have hate for guns and hence irrationally choose to ignore all the utility of them, in this case by suggesting a situation where it is ridiculous to stop bullets with more bullets, essentially a strawman argument, ignoring all the situations where you can use bullets to prevent someone from firing more.
I would back Huck - I will take a straight forward, clear-thinking entrepreneur over an "intellectual" any and every time!
I agree with pmjordan's answer, but thought I'd add an example: Your company's product log messages of some kind into a database. The developers were lazy, and put everything in one table with the classic "key, value" SQL antipattern. Subsequently, it was discovered that values weren't enough, you sometimes needed arrays of values (or hashes of values, or ...), so a (probably crappy) serialization format was written for the values so they could be arrays.

Suppose now you were hired in to this position and you actually do a lot about databases. Now, your company gets a call one day from your biggest customer that while they've been putting up with your product getting slower and slower over time (without telling you of course), it's finally gotten to the point where "queries take over an hour and we really need them in less than 5 minutes"/"our daily reporting process now requires more than a day to complete" (which means the system clogs up with nothing but reporting processes, eventually)/"we've been sued and the court has mandated that we turn over some data by next week and we compute it'll take two months"/"the CEO just tried a query that took an hour and now he wants to cancel the contract"... or so on, you get the idea.

This critical problem comes back down to you, and you realize that the only way to fix it is to entirely restructure the databases using better practices. Conceptually, this is trivial. However, since every single part of the system is built around this data system (and of course, there's no abstraction, everything uses the key/value store directly), the combination of the amount of time it would take to write the new schema, modify every program file in source control to use this new schema, write the migration script, and potentially even the time to run the migration script for the customer (during which time they will be off-line, which could be days, and which could be anything from unacceptable to impossible), oh, and testing, don't forget testing, could in fact be longer than your company can survive with a pissed-off major customer.

And if one customer is pissy now, it means every single other customer you have is a ticking time bomb.

(Everything in this message comes from things I've seen more than once in my professional career, except the hypothetical about getting sued (thank goodness). I'm not providing details because there are thousands of companies that could fill in the above!)

Your technical debt margin just got called. You couldn't cover it. It wasn't even your technical debt, but who cares? Buh-bye!
Then it's good for you that only the bad folk carry....